Racism, Schmacism Illustrated, Part 2

My old pal Dave Weigel continues his series on Slate today filling in more examples to illustrate themes in James Edwards' book Racism, Schmacism, which I reviewed for VDARE.com on Sunday. 

On Sunday, I wrote:

But, in general, conservatives fatally remain vulnerable to panic over accusations of racism. Edwards points out a recurrent weakness of conservative organizations:

"In a futile attempt to pander to blacks and get the media to stop calling them ‘racists,’ they elevate just about any black person that shows up to a position of prominence. As soon as they come on board, the white leadership starts promoting them in the vain hopes the movement won’t get called racist, which never works.”

Michael Steele, the inept chairman of the Republican National Committee, is only the most obvious example of this. Edwards writes:

“Then the black ‘conservatives’ start talking about how the Democrats are the real racists who want to keep blacks on the liberal plantation, etc., etc., etc., and before you know it, the whole movement has been derailed, and the focus turns to how the other guys are more racist than we are, and we’re better for blacks than the liberals are, etc.”

In Slate today -- after explaining yesterday about how if Republicans were to cite the concurrent corruption trials in the House of two famous House Democrats, Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters, the first House trials of sitting members since the 1980s, it would be racist -- Weigel writes:

Black Tea
African-American conservatives explain that the only racists are those who worry about race-based prejudice.
By David Weigel

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010, at 7:26 PM ET

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People introduced a resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to "condemn extremist elements," I wondered what possible good it would do. How might it help liberals who felt frustrated, increasingly, that their attacks on "racism" in the new conservative movement were never taken seriously?

The resolution didn't do much for the NAACP, but it did plenty for liberals. Three weeks later, after the Shirley Sherrod mess, and after the implosion of Mark Williams, spokesman for the Sacramento-based Tea Party Express, conservatives are still bristling at the charge of Tea Party "racism." On Wednesday morning, Williams' old organization organized a two-and-a-half-hour event at the National Press Club in order to rebut the charge the best way it knew how—with a chorus line of black conservatives attacking anyone who dared call the Tea Party racist.

Of course, Alan Keyes was there. After all, what's a more proven winning tactic for Republicans than rolling out Alan Keyes? Just ask Illinois state senator Barack Obama (D-Hyde Park) who thought he had the U.S. Senate seat wrapped up in 2004 until the canny GOP unleashed current U.S. Senator Alan Keyes (IL-R) on him.

Back in the Fifties, the GOP slogan was "Unleash Chiang" (referring to that unstoppable military juggernaut Chiang Kai-Shek, by then huddling on Formosa 200 miles offshore behind the U.S. Navy). In this century, the GOP motto is "Unleash Keyes."

(Personally, I liked George H.W. Bush's peptalk to himself while playing tennis: "Unleash Chang!" It was a tribute to 1989 French Open Champ Michael Chang.)

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

South-Central's serial killers

Here's a horrifying story from the Los Angeles Times about South-Central LA in 1984-1994 (recently renamed South LA to shed some memories):

Multiple killers, more than 100 victims
By Scott Gold and Andrew Blankstein
During a 10-year period beginning in 1984, several serial killers operated in South Los Angeles, all of them targeting young, poor, African American women.

... The recent arrest of another man accused of being a serial killer active in that era, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. — allegedly the long-sought Grim Sleeper — prompted jubilation and noisy public pronouncements. The celebrations served to obscure, once again, a terrible truth about South Los Angeles: During a 10-year period beginning in 1984, multiple serial killers operated there, all of them targeting young, poor, African American women.

All told, between 1984 and 1993, more than 100 women, almost all African American, were killed by men targeting more than one victim in South L.A. and the surrounding neighborhoods, police say. So far, police have positively linked 30 of those deaths to five men:

Franklin, 57, has been charged with 10 counts of murder. Turner, 43, is on death row after raping and strangling 10 women, one of whom was six months pregnant. Louis Craine was convicted of strangling four women between 1984 and 1987; he later died in prison, at 31. Michael Hughes, 54, was accused of killing eight, four in South L.A. and nearby Inglewood. And Daniel Lee Seibert confessed to killing 13 across the United States, two of them in South L.A.; he died in prison, at 53, in 2008.

Biological evidence suggests that at least two more men, who have not been apprehended, were each responsible for at least four more deaths, officials said. That would mean at least seven serial killers were preying on women in the same neighborhood at roughly the same time.

During the years in which they were active, the South Los Angeles killers never earned the noir nicknames of the region's other infamous killers — the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler.

Those other crimes were notorious sagas that gained national attention and had parts of the metropolis in a state of panic. By contrast, few people in South L.A., including parents of victims, were even aware of a serial killer operating in their neighborhood — much less five or more. While the more publicized cases had distinctive hallmarks, in South L.A. there were so many people being killed, almost all of them from the margins of society, that it was difficult for neighbors or police to pinpoint any patterns.

The rapes and murders of dozens of young women were, effectively, lost in the crime wave.

"Could you imagine — more than 100 women killed and nobody notices?" said Margaret Prescod, who founded an organization 24 years ago to press for a more aggressive response to the killings and now hosts a radio show. "Could you imagine it in Beverly Hills? Palos Verdes?"

This reminds me of a theory I've been noodling with: that the domino-like impetus for much of the recent Housing Bubble/Bust began, more than anywhere else, in the LA Basin south of the Santa Monica Freeway. A lot of people who were already there were trying hard to get out (for reasons readily understandable from this article) and a lot of people in other countries were trying hard to get in.

In the very long run, the gentrification of South-Central LA will be a huge deal -- the climate is too nice for it not to happen someday. (Financial Warning: Someday may not come until after you are broke.)

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

Pre-Emptive Accusations of Racism

In Slate, Dave Weigel engages in one of the funnier rituals of modern day politics: the pre-emptive accusation of racism:

The Ghost of Willie Horton

Will the GOP play the race card on Rangel and Waters?

By David Weigel

The commercial that keeps Democrats up at night does not exist yet. If or when it does, they expect it to look like this.

Fade-in to black-and-white image of Rep. Whiteguy Bluedog, looking sleazy and pale as he messily eats a sandwich.

NARRATOR: What is your congressman trying to hide?

Images of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., appear behind the congressman, looking just as sleazy, but much less pale.

NARRATOR: Why hasn't he returned the $1,000 he took from Harlem Democrat Charlie Rangel, who's facing a trial for cheating on his taxes? Why did he oppose investigating Democrat Maxine Waters, who got a tax break for her husband's business and says that American spies invented crack cocaine?

The images of Waters and Rangel fade and are replaced by slow-motion footage of two members of the New Black Panther Party, stalking outside of a polling place in 2008.

NARRATOR: Why did he support Barack Obama's lawyers when they dropped a case against the racist New Black Panther Party, a hate group that threatened voters in the last election?

The image of the Panthers fade, and the congressman morphs into Barack Obama.

NARRATOR: What is he trying to hide? Is there something about him we should know?

Since last week's double shot of rotten ethics news—the investigations into Rangel and Waters, both of whom refuse so far to settle—Democrats have contemplated two potential nightmares. The first is that Republicans will use the troubles of Rangel and Waters to try to depress the Democrats' African-American base, making them less likely to come to the rescue of endangered incumbents. The second is that Republicans will use the embattled committee chairs the way that they once used Willie Horton, as Halloween masks in TV ads.

"In 2006, the Democrats could have put out ads about Mark Foley, and it wouldn't have made a difference whether they used pictures of him or not," says Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist for multiple presidential campaigns who now teaches at New York University and warns of Republican race-baiting in the weeks ahead. "In 2010, if Republicans put up photos of Rangel or Waters, they're putting them there to elicit another kind of response. That would be fear among white voters."

The Democratic angst comes, in part, because they know they're facing a whiter, older electorate this year than they faced in 2008. The electorate that put Obama into office and pulled in new, vulnerable Democrats was 74 percent white, and 53 percent were older than 45. In 2006, the last midterm election and a fine year for Democrats overall, the electorate was 79 percent white, and 63 percent were 45 or older. Will an older, whiter electorate in Nov. 2010 be susceptible to a racially-tinged message from the GOP?

Uh, oh, say well-trained Republican "strategists" as they read this, We'd better not criticize two of the most famous Democrats in the House ... because they're black. Also, we'd better not criticize the most famous Democrat in the country, because he's black, too. We wouldn't want to be like George H.W. Bush in 1988 and win. Heavens, no. It's so much nicer to be like John McCain in 2008 not mentioning Rev. Wright and lose.

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

"Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the “R” Word to Push the Obama Agenda"

From my column in VDARE.com:

In  George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth was hard at work on the creation of  Newspeak, a new language to intended replace English by 2050. Orwell explained:

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Fortunately, Orwell’s novel was not itself written in Newspeak, because it would be hideously boring: “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all”.

Newspeak was carefully designed to make its speakers stupider:

“A heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

And, of course, thought—at least thought of any complexity—is indeed highly dependent upon words, especially published words.

Words are central to political battles, not only because they are necessary for rational thought, but also because they can obliterate rational thought. They can take on emotional associations from past victories and defeats, developing magical, incantatory powers.

For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the term “un-American” was highly useful to politicians who wielded it.

Yet, today, it is seldom used by conservatives. Now, “un-American” is mostly a term used by liberals, who brandish it less as a logical contention than as a symbol of their triumph in the culture war over what is remembered about Communists in the U.S.

Here are some recent examples from Google News:

“Not only would removing birthright citizenship be cruel, it would also be fundamentally un-American” -- Ezra Klein of the Washington Post

“Most Democrats hailed the decision, saying Arizona's SB 1070 was ‘un-American and unconstitutional…’” -- Politico

“New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says it would be un-American to investigate a mosque that is planned for construction near where the World Trade Center once stood” -- AP

“Rangel: Resigning now would be un-American” -- The Hill

But in the Newspeak reigning in America today, no word has more totemic power to suppress rigorous thinking than “racism.”

The intellectual sophistication of today’s conventional thinking about race is at the Newspeak level. To label your opponent a racist is to declare him, in Newspeak's useful term, a “doubleplusungoodthinker.” And what more needs to be said? As Orwell put it:

“But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. … In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.”

To accuse someone of “racism” is no longer to express any particular conception, but instead merely to declare your victim a loser and yourself a winner.

Contemporary uses of the word “racism” are explored in the crisply-written new book Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the “R” Word to Push the Obama Agenda by James Edwards, the young host of the weekly radio talk show The Political Cesspool. 

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

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

"Get Low"

From my column in Taki's Magazine:

Get Low, a dramedy starring venerable elders Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Cissy Spacek, is promisingly based on a prime slab of Old, Weird Americana: the true 1938 story of an elderly hillbilly (played by Duvall) who hired an undertaker (Murray) to throw him a huge funeral before he died. The Southern period setting is reminiscent of two of the most imaginative films of the last decade: the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Tim Burton’s Big Fish. Not surprisingly, Get Low has garnered 100 percent positive ratings among Top Critics on RottenTomatoes.com.

Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice said of her spotlight-loving father, “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.” In this same spirit, the illiterate Tennessee codger Felix Bushaloo Breazeale decided to enjoy hearing his own eulogy.

Breazeale’s whim captured the fancy of the nation. Soon, he had a publicity agent and newspapers were treating the faux funeral like the biggest news in Tennessee since the Scopes Monkey Trial. About ten thousand people from 14 states swarmed the festivities. A two-mile long traffic jam left Uncle Bush late for his own funeral.

The “living corpse” savored every moment of the “doin’s and goin’s on,” chuckling “Folks, I’m tellin’ ya, this business of having your funeral before you die beats sparkin’ in a buggy.” Afterwards, he autographed fans’ programs with his “X.” The 74-year-old backwoodsman then went to New York and appeared on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Radio Show, but reported back that big city “victuals weren’t worth a dern.” He lived on another half decade, entertaining his numerous visitors by having his mule (named “Mule”) perform tricks....

The 79-year-old Duvall is being talked up for a second Oscar, based, apparently, on the Commutative Property of Film Appreciation. See, last year Jeff Bridges got his first Oscar fpr Crazy Heart, another ornery coot movie in which Duvall played the best friend. So, this must be Duvall’s turn, right? He might indeed win for Get Low, because Duvall here delivers Acting for the Sake of Acting in the Oscar-grabbing tradition of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.

To find out whether Get Low is as good as it's cracked up to be, read the whole thing at Taki's and comment below.

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

Obama: African-Americans a "mongrel people"

From The Hill:

President Obama waded into the national race debate in an unlikely setting and with an unusual choice of words: telling daytime talk show hosts that African-Americans are “sort of a mongrel people.”

The president appeared on ABC’s morning talk show “The View” Thursday, where he talked about the forced resignation of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, his experience with race and his roots.

When asked about his background, which includes a black father and white mother, Obama said of African-Americans: "We are sort of a mongrel people."

"I mean we're all kinds of mixed up," Obama said. "That's actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it." The president's remarks were directed at the roots of all Americans. The definition of mongrel as an adjective is defined as "of mixed breed, nature, or origin," according to dictionary.com.

Obama did not appear to be making an inflammatory remark with his statement and the audience appeared to receive it in the light-hearted manner that often accompanies interviews on morning talk shows. 

This continues a theme that is central to Obama's self-conception, one emphasized as the Final Lesson in Dreams from My Father when Obama takes it to the point of absurdity by arguing that Africans in Africa aren't really 100% authentically African, so why can't he, who was brought up sequestered out in the Pacific Oceans thousands of miles from any black community, become a successful African-American leader through sheer desire to be a successful African-American leader? From my reader's guide to the President's memoir:

The Epilogue to Dreams from My Father begins after that graveside soliloquy with a less soggy but equally obtuse summing up that a novelist would have blue-penciled out of his first draft. The Epilogue features a scene where, just before he leaves Kenya, Obama visits a wise old woman historian named Rukia Odera, who had known his father. Here is the Other Big Lesson of Obama’s Kenyan sojourn: 

I asked her why she thought black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa. … “Because they come here looking for the authentic,” she said. “That is bound to disappoint a person. Look at this meal we are eating. Many people will tell you that the Luo are a fish-eating people. But that was not true for all Luo. Only those who lived by the lake. And even for those Luo, it was not always true. Before they settled around the lake, they were pastoralists, like the Masai. … Kenyans are very boastful about the quality of their tea, you notice. But of course we got this habit from the English. … Then there’s the spices we used to cook this fish. They originally came from India, or Indonesia. So even in this simple meal, you will find it very difficult to be authentic—although the meal is certainly African.” ... I licked my fingers and washed my hands.

“But isn’t there anything left that is truly African?” “Ah, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Rukia said. “There does seem to be something different about this place. I don’t know what it is. … Or maybe it is that we have known more suffering than most. Maybe it’s just the land. I don’t know. ...My daughter, ... her first language is not Luo. Not even Swahili. It is English. When I listen to her talk with her friends, it sounds like gibberish to me. They take bits and pieces of everything—English, Swahili, German, Luo. Sometimes, I get fed up with this. Learn to speak one language properly, I tell them.” Rukia laughed to herself. “But I am beginning to resign myself—there’s nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I‘m less interested in a daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.” [pp. 433-434]

Obviously, the main reason “black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa” is not because Africa isn’t “authentic.” That’s just laughable. Granted, it’s too much to expect Obama to admit that the main reason African American tourists like him are prone to disappointment with Africa is because it is disappointing. They go hoping to see what the black man has accomplished without the white man holding him down, and, well ... (For an honest discussion, see the 1998 book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg, who was the Washington Post’s Nairobi-based chief African correspondent from 1991-1994.)

Yet, why did Obama feel compelled to bring this question up and feature Rukia’s nonsensical answer so prominently as the Climactic Insight of His Life? Because her answer, ridiculous as it is, at least validates the central concern of Obama’s existence: to prove he’s black enough. If even Africans in Africa aren't authentic, as this learned African scholar says, then his being half-white and brought up in a wholly non-black environment doesn’t disqualify him from being a black leader.

He’s finally exorcizing the Black Muslim challenge he’s fretted over ever since reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X: that he lacks sufficient black-enoughness. So, take that, black nationalists! According to this African scholar, even Africans aren’t authentically African; therefore, Obama can be a leader of African-Americans!

With Obama, it’s always about Obama.

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

Projection

The Freudian concept of projection is pretty useful. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center is constantly enraged about "hate" among white people. Yet the highest paid hate-stokers of the SPLC (whose initials, probably not coincidentally for purposes of fundraising, are easily confused with Martin Luther King's SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) are about as white as their counterparts in the Ku Klux Klan, just much more lucratively compensated.

For pictures of the SPLC's highest paid employees, see Watching the Watchdogs.

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

W.E.I.R.D.

Jonathan Haidt is one of the more interesting thinkers around. Here's the transcript of a general talk he gave on his work at an Edge conference called The New Science of Morality. He talks about two other articles that have helped instill some caution and humility in him:

So, the first article is called "The Weirdest People in the World," by Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan, and it was published last month in BBS. And the authors begin by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being the most American of all the scientific fields. Seventy percent of all citations in major psych journals refer to articles published by Americans. In chemistry, by contrast, the figure is just 37 percent. This is a serious problem, because psychology varies across cultures, and chemistry doesn't.

So, in the article, they start by reviewing all the studies they can find that contrast people in industrial societies with small-scale societies. And they show that industrialized people are different, even at some fairly low-level perceptual processing, spatial cognition. Industrialized societies think differently.

The next contrast is Western versus non-Western, within large-scale societies. And there, too, they find that Westerners are different from non-Westerners, in particular on some issues that are relevant for moral psychology, such as individualism and the sense of self.

Their third contrast is America versus the rest of the West. And there, too, Americans are the outliers, the most individualistic, the most analytical in their thinking styles.

And the final contrast is, within the United States, they compare highly educated Americans to those who are not. Same pattern.

All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I've put here on your handout. I'll just read it. "Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies."  The acronym there being WEIRD. "Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity."

An awful lot of theories in evolutionary psychology, for instance, are tested by giving questionnaires to UC Santa Barbara students.

As I read through the article, in terms of summarizing the content, in what way are WEIRD people different, my summary is this: The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts. ...

Computer programmers call this "object orientation."

Well, let's turn to the second article. It's called, "Why Do Humans Reason?  Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The article is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?  ...

Why is the confirmation bias, in particular— this is the most damaging one of all—why is the confirmation bias so ineradicable?  That is, why do people automatically search for evidence to support whatever they start off believing, and why is it impossible to train them to undo that?  It's almost impossible. Nobody's found a way to teach critical thinking that gets people to automatically reflect on, well, what's wrong with my position?

And finally, why is reasoning so biased and motivated whenever self-interest or self-presentation are at stake?  Wouldn't it be adaptive to know the truth in social situations, before you then try to manipulate?

The answer, according to Mercier and Sperber, is that reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, and it's here on your handout, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

That why I love the documentary on Sir Andrew Wiles proving Fermat's Last Theorem so much. I particularly like how in 1994 the publication referee Nick Katz devoted two months to reviewing, line by line, Wiles' first manuscript, finally finding a single error that threatened the whole edifice. And Wiles eventually agrees with Katz that his life's work is ruined. (Then, he spends a year before solving the problem, providing a happy ending.)

That ain't natural. Mathematics isn't exactly a social construction, but the culture of mathematicians is, and it's an impressive accomplishment of the human race.

Where did this culture of objective argument begin? The Greeks? The Babylonians before them? How did it get started?

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

Jim Manzi's new article

Jim Manzi, the marketing researcher turned social commentator (not the Jim Manzi who headed Lotus Development Corporation), has a book coming out. Here's a chapter  summarized in his City Journal article:

What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know
Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.

Just like me, Jim is a marketing researcher turned pundit, so our thinking runs along the similar lines. As a test marketer, he wants to promote more rigorous experimentation in the social sciences, which is fine. 

However, being older, lazier, and stupider than Manzi, I've perhaps gotten a little farther toward grasping some simple underlying principles, since I'm not smart enough to get by without figuring them out. He writes:

Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs ...

Another way of putting the problem is that we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

The missing ingredient is controlled experimentation, which is what allows science positively to settle certain kinds of debates. How do we know that our physical theories concerning the wing are true? In the end, not because of equations on blackboards or compelling speeches by famous physicists but because airplanes stay up. Social scientists may make claims as fascinating and counterintuitive as the proposition that a heavy piece of machinery can fly, but these claims are frequently untested by experiment ...

That all sounds plausible, but I've been a social science stats geek since 1972, when the high school debate topic that year was education, so I'm aware that Manzi's implications are misleading.

First, while experiments are great, correlation studies of naturally occurring data can be extremely useful. Second, a huge number of experiments have been done in the social sciences.

Third, the social sciences have come up with a vast amount of knowledge that is useful, reliable, and nonobvious, at least to our elites.

For example, a few years, Mayor Bloomberg and NYC schools supremo Joel Klein decided to fix the ramshackle admissions process to the gifted schools by imposing a standardized test on all applicants. Blogger Half Sigma immediately predicted that the percentage of Asians and whites admitted would rise at the expense of blacks and Hispanics, which would cause a sizable unexpected political problem for Bloomberg and Klein. All that has come to pass.

This inevitable outcome should have been obvious to Bloomberg and Klein from a century of social science data accumulation, but it clearly was not obvious to them.

No, the biggest problem with social science research is not methodological; it’s that we just don’t like the findings. The elites of America don’t like what the social sciences have uncovered about, say, crime, education, discrimination, immigration, and so forth.

What we’ve learned are things like:

- IQ matters
- Race matters
– Sex matters
– Class matters
– Heredity matters
– Character matters
– Discipline matters

And, judging by what I read every day, the attitude of the dominant people in America toward this knowledge is mostly fear and loathing. Those who explain how to use the knowledge uncovered by the social sciences are routinely vilified. Men of outstanding character, heroes of the human sciences such as Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen are subjected to massive campaigns of demonization.

In reality, after a century of experimentation and analysis, we know an awful lot about several major human conditions, such as IQ. What we don’t know about IQ is how to intervene to reliably narrow racial gaps in average educational achievement (other than hitting Asian and white kids on the head with a ballpeen hammer).

Much the same is true regarding many other topics. Manzi's article gets better as he gets toward his conclusion:

First, few programs can be shown to work in properly randomized and replicated trials. …

Second, within this universe of programs that are far more likely to fail than succeed, programs that try to change people are even more likely to fail than those that try to change incentives.

And third, there is no magic. Those rare programs that do work usually lead to improvements that are quite modest, compared with the size of the problems they are meant to address or the dreams of advocates.

Given all that, you can readily arrive at my oft-repeated point of view, which is that the one potential government policy that is likely to have reliable major long term effects on social problems, for good or for bad, is immigration. Since government policies can seldom change people, government policy should select immigrants who will likely benefit the current citizens of the nation and keep out those who likely won’t. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

This has been the philosophy of Canada’s immigration system for decades, and it has worked fairly well for them. Yet, advocates of a Canadian-style immigration policy philosophy for America are routinely subjected to Two-Minutes Hates in this country. Thus, social policy discourse in the U.S. makes much less progress than social science research.

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

Why movies are better than TV

You hear often these days about how continuous plotline television dramas, such as Mad Men, are better than movies. Their endless length allows for novelistic detailing, etc etc.

But one great thing about movies can be that they begin and then they end. Take The Hurt Locker. You meet some soldiers in Iraq who dismantle bombs for a living. That's pretty  interesting. But, after a couple of hours, even dismantling bombs is starting to get a little old. Suddenly, in five memorable minutes, it's over. Sgt. Will James comes home from Iraq, gets lost in the supermarket, talks to his baby son about why he loves his jack-in-the-box, and makes a decision about how he wants to live his life. Cue the Arab heavy metal and it's a wrap. 

Granted, Hollywood hates making movies that end, stand-alone movies that aren't origins stories for trilogies. But they still do make stand-alone movies. And even the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about an order of magnitude shorter than Mad Men will turn out to be.

Stand-alone movies are especially suited for romances: boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy wins girl. They live, presumably, happily ever after. That's awfully appealing.

At the end of North by Northwest, for example, which, like Mad Men, is about a tall, dark, and handsome Madison Avenue advertising man with a confused identity, Cary Grant is about to fall from Abraham Lincoln's nose on Mt. Rushmore. Thirty seconds later, all plotlines are resolved and he's on his honeymoon with Eva Marie Saint. Now, that's an ending!

But, television series like Mad Men just go on and on, turning into soap operas. So, mostly what happens in a series like Mad Men as it gets long in the tooth is that, to keep up interest and please enthusiasts, everybody sleeps with everybody, which is yucky.

Now, I'm sure Mad Men's creator Matthew Weiner would respond by citing detailed research he's done into the growth of STD rates in the 1960s, but, still ... yuck.

By the way, I suspect the obsessiveness about not revealing in reviews any "spoilers," which seems to have became dogma around the time of The Sixth Sense, has hurt the relative status of movies versus longform TV shows in elite discourse. Longform TV dramas such as Mad Men are discussed at vast length online the day after each episode, but movie reviews are stilted by the spoiler taboo.

The Hurt Locker is, once again, a good example: the power of the film depends upon the last five minutes, in which the adage that Character Is Destiny is illustrated with extraordinary economy. But reviewers aren't supposed to "spoil" the end of a film, so practically no reader could puzzle out from all the published verbiage about The Hurt Locker why it was a very good movie, or why he should even see it, which led to mass bafflement when it won the Best Picture at the Academy Awards ceremony.

To explain why The Hurt Locker may well have deserved its Best Picture Oscar, you really have to recount the contrast between the bulk of the movie in Baghdad and the few scenes close to the end back stateside (oops, I just revealed a spoiler). The Baghdad street scenes are shot through telephoto lenses that both illustrate the tunnel vision focus the bomb techs need to do their job, while simultaneously compressing the apparent distance between the near and the far into a disorientating, flat, and cluttered pictorial space that keeps the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, which is, of course, the same question the heroes are constantly wondering about.

Then, near the end there's [SPOILER ALERT! AHHHHOOOGGGAAA! SPOILER ALERT!] a great fisheye lens shot in an endless breakfast cereal aisle of ex-Sgt. James befuddled by his new civilian duty of having to choose one box of cereal out of hundreds of offerings. (I spent an hour searching online last winter during the Academy Awards season for a still of that scene to illustrate the key to the movie, but none were available -- No Spoilers!)

A few minutes later, Sgt. James is shown back in The Suit in another super-telephoto shot of Baghdad, likely doomed, yet also fulfilled by choosing the fate his personality craves.

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

The dogma of globalism

"Skeptical Economist" emails:

I think a useful question is how 'free trade' became such a cult in the U.S. Clearly, it wasn't the dominant ideology until quite recently. Notably the Reagan administration did all sorts of things (trade barriers, domestic content, devaluation) that the current crop of Republicans (and Democrats) regard as 'Unthinkable'. A few conjectures.

1. The current elite cohort took enough economics in school to understand comparative advantage and production possibility frontiers. As a consequence they think they know enough about trade to have a settled opinion. Of course, they don't have a clue what the current account is or the definition of purchasing power parity. But a little bit of knowledge that supports one's prejudices is a powerful thing.

2. The 'Smoot Hawley' caused the Great Depression meme somehow became the accepted wisdom of American society. Stated differently, 'protectionism' became the ultimate no-no with SH and the Great Depression as the justification. The funny thing is that very few people (even the opponents of SH) saw it that way back in 1929/1930. Nor did Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday) writing in the 1930s. Nor did Galbraith a generation later. Nor did later economists such as Friedman or Bernanke all of whom devoted a large fraction of their careers to studying the Great Depression. Yet by the early 1990s, Al Gore felt he could refute Ross Perot by holding up a picture of Smoot and Hawley.

Clearly, Jude Wanniski's 'discovery' that the stock market crash was caused by Smoot-Hawley was enormously influential. The subsequent refutations got lost in the noise. Since the substance of Wanniski's argument wasn't great, his vast influence must be derived from something else. I would argue that elite society was looking a rationale for its policy preferences.

3. The ideology of globalization has become dominant in much of U.S. society. Arguably, it is THE ideology / religion of the elite. The vast and favorable response to Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat tells us far more about prevailing ideas than the content of the book. One economist noted that in a book of 672 pages, the phrase 'trade deficit' never appears. The phrase 'free trade' shows up 30 times. The word 'trade' doesn't even appear in the index, 'free trade' does though.

4. The cosmopolitan idea/ideal has made considerable inroads in recent years. Clearly this is not unrelated to the ideology of globalization. What is different is that influential figures now boast about being 'cosmopolitans'. For example, see "Cosmopolitanism" by Matthew Yglesias. In the past, cosmopolitan was an avoided label and definitely used as an insult. Robert Shiller (Irrational Exuberance) wrote a good essay on "The New Cosmopolitans". He understands that he is one, but his interpretation is somewhat critical. It can be argued that Obama is our first truly cosmopolitan president. Famously, he showed his disdain for ordinary Americans with his line about bitter people in small towns.

"and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Obama offered these candid words in private with no expectation that they would ever be disclosed. ...  What isn't so well know is where these notorious words were spoken. That part of the scandal never gained any notice. It turns out that it was on Billionaires Row in San Francisco. 

Conversely, his speech in Berlin on July 24th, 2008 was overtly public. It was also deeply cosmopolitan at many levels. My favorite lines are

"That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

5. Samuel Huntington wrote about the denationalization of U.S. elites in "Who Are We." A major theme of his book was declining elite loyalty in the United States. Of course, this enables elites to espouse ideas that are bad for the U.S, but good for them.

6. A critical difference between this period and earlier eras of trade conflict (notably the 1980s with Japan) is the shift in corporate sentiment. In the 1980s, corporations and workers viewed the Japanese as essentially a threat. Rightfully so. Japan never made any material effort to co-opt the business elite and make U.S. economic decline privately profitable, even if publically disastrous. As a consequence, they were quite willing to support trade restrictions that protected both them and the U.S. from the foreign onslaught. Now we have a large segment of the corporate sector (Wal*Mart, Apple, etc.) dependent on policies that are highly detrimental to the U.S. I quote from Stephen Roach:

"In my view, this underscores a key element of tension in America’s current backlash against globalization that was not evident in the late 1980s.  Today, the pressures are being borne disproportionately by labor, whereas 20 years ago, capital and labor were in the struggle together.  In the late 1980s, many of the once proud icons of Corporate America were fighting for competitive survival at the same time that US workers were feeling the heat of global competition.  The pain was, in effect, balanced.  Today, US companies, as seen through the lens of corporate profitability, are thriving as never before while the American workforce is increasingly isolated in its competitive squeeze.  In essence, capital and labor are working very much at cross purposes in the current climate, whereas back in the late 1980s they were both in the same boat."

7. Somewhere from the 1990s onward, U.S. elites became convinced that they are so 'good' (superior, competitive,etc.) that they will come out on top in a globalized world, even if ordinary Americans and America as a whole suffers. For some of them, this is probably true. However, the class that worships Alice in Wonderland goes far beyond the infinitesimal number of hedge fund traders who can float back and forth from London to Greenwich, CT as tax rates and opportunities dictate.

Part of this is reasonable of course. Globalization (presumably) inflates the value of scarce skills while making unskilled or semi-skilled labor less valuable. However, the elite embrace of this mindset goes far beyond any rational calculation of interest. It is ultimately part of the bubble of American supremacy. 

A few years ago, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley asked one of Bush's Treasury Secretaries (not Henry Paulson) how America would earn its way in the world after our productive sector collapsed. The answer was that we (the U.S.) would act as 'capital allocator to the world.' Of course, this insane dialog attracted zero attention at the time or subsequently. The only good news is that U.S. credibility as a 'capital allocator' is within rounding error of zero.

In the same period the U.S. trade deficit reached its zenith (breaking every record for such things, by far), the standard explanation was that 'this was proof how of attractive the U.S. is to invest in'. Completely delusional but the received wisdom of the time. ...

A few years ago, a very good guy, Brad Setser wrote that U.S. policy towards China appeared to incorporate tradeoffs that reflected a subjugation of the general interest for narrow elite interests. At the time, the U.S. was pressing China quite hard to open its financial markets to U.S. investment bankers. The quid pro quo was continued, unconstrained Chinese access to U.S. consumer markets. This was a dismal tradeoff back in the Zeros. Of course, China won't give U.S. I-bankers the time of day at this point. Nor should they. 

"A cynic might interpret the huge windfall gains that China has provided Goldman (and others) as the danegeld that China pays Goldman (and others) to use their political clout to fend of the protectionist hoards in the industrial Midwest.   So far, that strategy has worked."

8. To a degree, elites have embraced 'free trade' as a way of weakening labor interests in the U.S. Some of this is very explicit and tangible. Factories moving abroad chasing cheaper labor. However, at a deeper level 'free trade' can be seen as both a way of making labor dispensable and a rationale for doing so.

9. The current generation of elites are largely divorced from the actual production of anything. They may have come from families that worked in the productive sector. However, they typically advanced via academic skills, not entrepreneurship or corporate careers. Many, if not most, have spent their entire careers in government, academia, think tanks, etc. Perhaps the only private sector activity they embrace / esteem is predatory finance. Predictably, finance is staffed by the 'best and brightest' from the same Ivy League skills and faces no serious competition from outside of the Anglosphere, at least so far. That finance is fantastically lucrative, urban, smokestack free and devoid of blue collar workers are just additional charms.

This looks like correlation of forces. A combination of economic interest, social preference, and ideology have made 'free trade' the mantra of our times. The good news is that this alignment is relatively new and deeply contrary to U.S. history. By contrast, 'free trade' has been the dominant ideology of the UK for 150+ years. The UK has deviated from 'free trade' occasionally (and successfully), but the ideology has remained dominant all the way to the present. For example, in the 19th century Dickens supported free trade for essentially liberal (in the modern sense) reasons. Free trade was supposedly good for workers and represented 'progress'.

As mentioned above, the U.S. adopted and relentlessly pursued 'protectionist' policies as recently as the 1980s. Clinton was able to avoid confronting these issues (and passing NAFTA) because the U.S. was enjoying  a vast boom / bubble. Bush conjured up the housing bubble to create the illusion that 'free trade' and prosperity might be compatible. Obama is in a tighter box. His only bubble is Federal debt. A few off-the-deep-end Democrats are trying sell the notion that trillions of dollars in deficit spending are (almost) "free". I quote from Krugman:

"Let me start with the budget arithmetic, borrowing an approach from Brad DeLong. Consider the long-run budget implications for the United States of spending $1 trillion on stimulus at a time when the economy is suffering from severe unemployment.

That sounds like a lot of money. But the US Treasury can currently issue long-term inflation-protected securities at an interest rate of 1.75%. So the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is $17.5 billion, or around 0.13 percent of GDP. "

Will Obama break from 'free' trade? More broadly which party will turn against trade first? My guess is that it will be the Democrats because of their labor ties. However, it won't be easy for the Dems. The Dems are dominated by cosmopolitans who regard any hint of protectionism as an anathema. Obama did run against NAFTA in the primaries. However, that was clearly just a pretext for bashing Hillary (ironically, Hillary apparently opposed NAFTA when Bill was in office). Indeed, his economic advisers actually told the Canadians that this was all for show (a memo that was meant to remain secret leaked). Of course, Obama is the ultimate cosmopolitan at many levels.

The administration has promised to "double exports" and focus on manufacturing. So far, this is just mindless lip service devoid of any actual policies. Andy Grove advocates the kinds of things that might actually work. However, an administration comfortable with Timothy Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury isn't going to cause any hard feelings in Beijing.

This could be a great opportunity for the Reps. However, a combination of corporate connivance, free market idolatry, and anti-government animus makes it almost impossible for the Reps to exploit this political opportunity. A related point it that a focus on domestic manufacturing (and production generally) would be a great opportunity for the Reps to broaden their base. The notion that Republicans can out-La Raza the Democrats is crazy. However, aggressive trade policies have vast potential for appealing to minorities as Americans. Notably, it worked 100 years ago in the era of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt.

My guess is that the U.S. will languish for some number of years until 'something' forces a real shift in policy. What 'something' will be I do not know.

P.S. An associate sent me a copy of an essay asserting that Obama is a Marxist. I replied that describing Obama as a Marxist is factually wrong and likely to detract from any critique of Obama's policies. I pointed out that technically, Obama is a neoliberal. However, 'neoliberal' doesn't set off any alarm bells in the U.S. By contrast, 'cosmopolitan elitist' is a stab wound that hits home.

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

The Jobs of the Future

The Financial Times has a nearly-4000 word article on "The Crisis of the American Middle Class" that manages never to mention any words beginning with the letters "immigra." The closest reference is:

Much as they disagree on what has caused the Great Stagnation, economists also differ on the remedies. Most agree that better education improves people’s earnings potential, even if it does not solve the underlying problem. Others point out that not everybody can be a bond trader, a software entrepreneur or a Harvard professor.

Many of the jobs of the future will be in “inter-personal” roles that cannot be easily replaced by computers or ­foreigners – janitors, beauty technicians, home carers and landscape gardeners, for whom college is often superfluous."

Huh? "Janitors, beauty technicians, home carers and landscape gardeners" "cannot be easily replaced by ... foreigners." 

Thank God we don't have to worry about that happening in the future in America. Thank God America leads the world in jobs for economists.

What country is this article about again?

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

"Is Italy Too Italian?"

"Is Italy Too Italian?" asks David Segal in the NYT, as he, in part, lays out the usual chatter from economists about how Italy is doomed because it hasn't embraced globalization fully enough, chatter I've been reading for the last 35 years about how Italy is going to collapse because it's not getting with the program. Segal's article contrasts an Italian mill owner who is crusading for a truth-in-labeling law that would require that garments labeled "Made in Italy" be actually, you know, made in Italy versus the advice of global economists:

Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a patient with Stage 3 cancer. They see a country with a service sector dominated by guilds, which don’t just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis.

They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer.

If economists were running things in Italy, all those "millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs" would already have had to "otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers." And the rest could have gotten jobs at fast food restaurants.

Why won't Italians get with the program and outsource their entire manufacturing base to China and their Italian restaurant industry to Taco Bell?

Subversively, however, Segal stops to note that, no matter how badly Italy violates Contemporary Economic Theory 101 by refusing to go down the cheap labor route, his lying eyes tell him the place looks pretty good. He describes Signor Barbera's mill, which produces the world's finest wool fabric for men's suits, in loving detail. And, Italy hasn't blown up the world economy, at least not yet:

Since the economic crisis began, this country has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. ... Study the numbers and you will find symptoms of distress that look a lot like those of Greece. Public sector debt amounts to roughly 118 percent of the gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of G.D.P., by 2012.

But dig a little deeper and the similarities end. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.

“I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together,” says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. “But Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”  ...

A sclerotic job market is a major reason that the Italian economy has been all but dormant for the past decade, growing far more slowly than its European peers. And this is a country that never had a housing bust or a major bank crisis.

They've haven't? That's downright un-American of them.

So how does Italy keep going? Given the numbers, you expect it to be flat on its back. But when you visit, there are hardly any signs of despair ...

One answer is the black economy, say economists. Roughly one-quarter of Italy’s G.D.P. is off the books. When you inquire about the cause and persistence of this longstanding fact of life, people here say that most Italians have little sense of national identity, an obstacle to a system of national taxation. The country didn’t really begin to transcend its clannish roots and regional dialects until after World War II; even today, displays of national pride are reserved for World Cup victories and little else....

The suspicion of Italians when it comes to extra-familial institutions explains why many here care more about protecting what they have than enhancing their wealth. Most Italians live less than a mile or two from their parents and stay there, often for financial benefits like cash and in-kind services like day care.

Something needs to be done about this!

It’s an insularity that runs all the way up to the corporate suites. The first goal of many entrepreneurs here isn’t growth, so much as keeping the business in the family. For a company to really expand, it needs capital, but that means giving up at least some control. So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game. 

Those damn Italians, always refusing to play the global domination game. We ought to shoot some cruise missiles at them, just on general principles.

You know, I'm starting to rethink this whole High Trust = Good / Low Trust = Bad paradigm, which I've been guilty of pushing. Maybe we Americans could learn a little from the wisdom of the Italians. They've been an advanced, urbanized civilization for thousands of years, and maybe they've learned a thing or two about whom you can trust in the long run.

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

The Typhoid Mary of Steroids

Back in 1993, a friend from high school who had become a baseball player's agent told me that Jose Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of steroids: you could see the effect of Canseco's proselytizing steroids on his teammates in Oakland and then in Texas (co-managing director: George W. Bush. Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on Canseco, the Bush dynasty, Andrew Sullivan, and steroids, which came out the year before Canseco's tell-all autobiography). 

Ray Fisman in Slate points to a 2007 study by two labor economists confirming Canseco's role spreading steroids around those two teams, plus his later clubs.

Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker:The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco
Eric D. Gould and Todd R. Kaplan

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his autobiography, Canseco claims that he improved the productivity of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data on baseball players, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Clearly, Jose Canseco had an unusual influence on the productivity of his peers. These results are consistent with Canseco’s controversial claims, and suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits.

Canseco's outgoing personality contrasted with the more furtive and even anti-social personality of later steroid users, such as Barry Bonds, who introduced Gary Sheffield to his training methods, but who basically didn't like his teammates. 

A couple of years ago I wrote, "You'll notice that the topic of art forgery is more interesting to philosophers than to art historians, who would prefer not to think about it. Philosophers like to ask questions like, 'If this small sketch was so beautiful it was worth a million dollars when it was a Raphael, why isn't it worth anything now that it's a Hebborn?'"

The basic motivation of art historians and of baseball historians, such as Bill James, is hero worship. Thus, art historians don't like to think about how many famous paintings are, in whole or in part, forgeries, while Bill James did everything he could to avoid thinking about the impact of steroids on his beloved baseball statistics.

Of course, there's also the crass financial conflict of interest: James finally got himself a nice job with the Boston Red Sox, whose two best hitters, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were juicers. If he'd been sounding the alarm about steroids for years, would he have gotten that job? The same questions can be asked about museum curators.

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

Global Warming and Immigration

The population of the U.S. in 1980 was 227 million. In 2050, the Census Bureau forecasts it will be 439 million, with most of that growth due to immigration. By 2050, immigration will have made the U.S. about 150 million people more populous, or about 55% more. Thus, to reduce U.S. carbon emissions to any particular level, per capita emissions will have to be reduced about 35% more than if there had been no immigration. 

And it's not as if global emissions would be the same. People move to the U.S. from the Third World so they can afford a car, air conditioning, and the like. One plausible estimate is that Mexican immigrants emit four times as much carbon in the U.S. than if they had stayed home. 

You could argue that, well, these immigrants won't earn enough money to buy cars and air conditioning, but do you really want to go there? Logically, either an immigrant will prosper in America and emit a huge amount of carbon or will fail to prosper. Neither prospect looks good for America. My best guess is that the median illegal immigrant will do well enough to buy a big vehicle with spinning rims on credit, without ever making enough to pay enough taxes to make himself a net benefit.

Moreover, as we saw during the Housing Bubble, immigration drives people into distant exurbs, leading them to commute more and (in California) to run their air conditioners more.

What's interesting is that relationship between immigration and carbon emissions goes almost totally unspoken. Judging from Google searches, almost nobody every mentions it. I don't think many even think about it. The level of intellectual sophistication is about this:

Carbon emissions are Bad.

Immigration is Good.

Therefore, anybody who says that immigration leads to more carbon emissions is Bad.

Here's a recent LA Times article on global warming and immigration. Of course, it's not about how immigration causes global warming, it's a reverse bankshot about how global warming could cause immigration:

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change – mass migration to the United States.

As many as 7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces agricultural production in Mexico, according to a new study being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

OMG! "As many as 7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080." 

Seven million!

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

Gypsies: Then or Now

Here's The Fortune-Teller by Georges de la Tour from about 1630. A suspicious but stupid young toff is having his fortune told by the old crone while the three young confederates pick his pockets. The girl in profile on the left looks particularly Roma-ish, although the girl who is cutting off the mark's medal (watch?) looks Dutch.

Or then, again, as a 60 Minutes episode in 1982 argued, this picture that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC bought at great expense in 1960 could be, appropriately enough, a 1920s forgery.

It does look rather like a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, although Rockwell would have changed the color schemes of the dresses to make the old lady's hands stand out better against the background. The odd thing about this painting from about 1630 is that it's kind of funny (granted, it's not that funny), and few things stay funny for more than a century or so.

De La Tour had been virtually forgotten until the 20th Century, so, like Vermeer, he would be a logical target for forgers: the provenance of even the most authentic De La Tour would be less certain than, say, a Leonardo, because Leonardo has been hugely famous ever since the later 1400s.

Then again, as the Met has strenuously argued, it might be authentic.

In any case, it's a fun painting.

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

A triumph of assimilation

From the Associated Press, we witness a triumph of assimilation: Hispanics have learned to tell pollsters what they are supposed to say as good Americans about the all-important value of a 4-year college diploma. They don't, actually, do all that much toward earning 4-year degrees, but they talk a good assimilated game, and that's what's really important, now isn't it?

More than 10 years have passed since she gave up her pursuit of a degree in computer science, but Yajahira Deaza still has regrets.

"I feel incomplete," says the 33-year-old, a customer service representative for a major New York bank. Her experience reflects the findings of an Associated Press-Univision poll that examined the attitudes of Latino adults toward higher education.

Despite strong belief in the value of a college diploma, Hispanics more often than not fall short of that goal.

The poll's findings have broad implications not only for educators and parents, but also for the U.S. economy.

In the next decade, U.S. companies will have to fill millions of jobs to replace well-trained baby boomers going into retirement. As the nation's largest minority group, Latinos account for a growing share of the pool of workers, yet their skills may not be up to par. ...

"Aspirations for higher education are very strong among Hispanics, but there is a yawning discrepancy between aspirations and actual attainment," said Richard Fry, an education researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Indeed, the poll, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University, found that Hispanics value higher education more than do Americans as a whole. Eighty-seven percent said a college education is extremely or very important, compared with 78% of the overall U.S. population.

Ninety-four percent of Latinos say they expect their own children to go to college, a desire that's slightly stronger for girls. Seventy-four percent said the most important goal for a girl right after high school is to attend a four-year college, compared with 71% for boys.

Enthusiasm about higher education hasn't been matched by results.

Census figures show that only 13% of Hispanics have a college degree or higher, compared with 30% among Americans overall.

The poll revealed some of the roadblocks: Latinos do not have enough money, yet many are reluctant to borrow.

Buying an expensive California house with a zero-down subprime mortgage isn't really "borrowing." It's investing in the American Dream!

In the poll, just 29% cited poor grades in high school as an extremely or very important reason for not going to college.

Dropping out of high school can be an extremely important reason for not going to college, and a larger percentage than that of U.S.-raised Hispanics drop out of high school. Also, having a child out of wedlock can put a damper on your college plans, and 51% of Hispanic babies are born out of wedlock.

... Deaza, the New York bank employee, said that is why she had to leave her computer studies back in the late 1990s. A single mom-to-be, she was expecting her first child, a daughter who's now 11.

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

The final word on Oliver Stone

I have a nostalgic interest in Oliver Stone, going back to 1986, the Year of the Three Olivers (Oliver Stone's Salvador and Platoon, Oliver North's Iran-Contra Scandal, and Oliver Sachs's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). Clearly, Stone is over the hill and burnt out now, but for somebody of my generation, he's an interesting figure who burned brightly for a few years before everybody decided to hate him. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but he was hugely influential from, say, the screenplay for Scarface onward for a decade, so it might be worth trying to understand him.

In the comments, asfsdsdas says:

Oliver Stone's Jewish problem...

I think because Oliver Stone was born half-Jewish/half gentile, began on the Right and then moved to the Left, craves fame & fortune but believes in 'social justice', and blabbity and blibbity, there's a one-man civil war raging inside his soul. Even his leftist movies tend to be politically incorrect. Born on the 4th of July has a typical lefty ending, but there is much that defiles PC notions. Blacks at the VA hospital were hideous. And some blacks in Platoon were also pretty brutal and nasty. Any Give Sunday is both sympathetic to black athletes and angrily frustrated with their bulljive.

Anyway, Stone is like John Milius crossed with Gillo Pontecorvo. He grew up a Goldwater all-American conservative, went to Vietnam, got disillusioned and got caught up in 60s upheaval, and he's one messed up guy. But he probably likes being messed up because that's where the action is(as with Woods character in Salvador), creatively speaking. In a way, he probably identified with Nixon and even Dubya cuz they too were conflicted characters. Nixon didn't rise as an establishment conservative and Dubya wanted to reject the whole thing before being dragged back into it.

As a sports and war-and-guns maniac, Stone loves the man of power, the man's man. But he's also an intellectual and avid reader, so he loves ideas too. But the world of ideas is often at odds with world of action. Action often follows ideas, but action also often follows instincts, which are often non- or anti-idealistic. Stone wrote the script for the Scarface remake and it's clear that Stone admires Tony. He's a man of instinct than ideas but he's a man of action. He has big balls. He topples the half-Jewish/half-Cuban car dealer druglord. The Jew may be smarter but Tony has more guts. And though Wall Street is anti-greed, it's obvious Stone admires Gekko as a man of instict and will to power. And Jim Morrison was portrayed the same way in The Doors. He may have been crazy but he compromised nothing for his art and brand of crazy living. Stone may feel that Jews are too cunning, calculating, shrewd, and manipulative to be REAL MEN. Those are good qualities to gain power and keep it, but they lack the excitement of raw honest power that arises from the gut level. A Jew is more like Hyman Roth. A real man is like Tony Montana. Stone has both Roth and Montana inside of him, and so he struggles but he has fun with it.

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