The victimism sweepstakes

I don't have cable TV, and, since the exciting switch-over to digital broadcast television last year, I barely have broadcast TV anymore. The channel that comes in best most days is the This Channel, which shows obscure 1970-1980s movies, apparently broadcasting them directly from used VHS (or perhaps BetaMax) cassettes. So, I have no idea who is Rick Sanchez (shown here), but this is a funny story from the New York Times that illustrates a lot about the confusing struggle to be an official victim in 21st Century America.

Rick Sanchez, a daytime anchor at CNN, was fired on Friday, a day after telling a radio interviewer that Jon Stewart was a bigot and that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”

The latter comment was made shortly after Mr. Stewart’s faith, Judaism, was invoked.

Jon Stewart has a "faith?" Who knew?

CNN said in a statement Friday evening, “Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.”

Mr. Sanchez’s comments came Thursday during a contentious conversation with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio. By Friday afternoon, a recording of the conversation had circulated widely on the Internet. He had appeared on the radio show as part of a tour to promote his book, “Conventional Idiocy.”

In the conversation, Mr. Sanchez, who is Cuban American, repeatedly suggested that he had experienced subtle forms of racism in his television career.

Oh, wait, sorry, that top picture above is Danny Trejo of Machete. Here's the real Rick Sanchez.

Oops, excuse me, that blue-eyed fair-haired boy above is Jorge Ramos, mega-anchorman for the Spanish-language network Univision.

Here's the real Rick Sanchez!

... At first, Mr. Sanchez called Mr. Stewart a “bigot,” but later took the word back, calling the comedian “prejudicial” instead.

Prejudicial “against who?” Mr. Dominick asked.

Mr. Sanchez said, “Against anybody who doesn’t agree to his point of view, which is very much a white liberal establishment point of view.”

One of the co-hosts of the radio show brought up the fact that Mr. Stewart is a Jew, saying to Mr. Sanchez, he is a minority “as much as you are."

Indeed.

I would say that from a technical anthropological point of view, Sanchez deserves not just his own race, but his own subspecies: Homo dentistry cosmetica. You don't dig a set of pearly white choppers like those up out of the Olduvai Gorge everyday!

Mr. Sanchez answered sarcastically, “Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people.” He let out a high-pitched laugh.

“Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart,” Mr. Sanchez said. “And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

Oops. Big Mistake. Ask Gregg Easterbrook.

Sanchez should have spoken of generic white males. You can't get in trouble blaming them.

Sanchez was fired even faster than Easterbrook, thus, conclusively proving Jews are a powerless minority.

Mr. Stewart was far from the only person known to mock Mr. Sanchez, who was once tasered on camera for a segment.

Really? Tasering an anchorman on camera sounds like a great idea. Every anchorman should have to hold his own charity auction with the highest bidder getting to sneak up and taser him in the neck on live TV. This would do wonders for CNN's ratings.

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

College Admissions

Here's a paper by Thomas J. Espenshade et al based on 125,000 applications for freshman admission at three highly selective private research universities in the 1980s and a couple of classes in the 1990s. The usual suspects really help your chances at getting in: being smart, being black, being Hispanic (to a lesser extent than black), being a legacy, and being an athlete. 

Being an athlete grew in value over this time period, perhaps due to the growth in female sports. The authors didn't look into this specifically. (In general, college athletics for women has been a very nice boon to the upper middle class, since a huge proportion of female athletes come from intact two parent families where Dad pushes his daughter into sports: e.g., women's golf teams are not made up of the daughters of single moms.)

Or maybe colleges just found that athletes are bigger donors later in life? Maybe it's the bonding experience of competing for your college? If so, colleges should look into more non-athletic competitions for nerdier students to strengthen their emotional ties to their college. For example, I represented Rice at various College Bowl tournaments around the country.

Being a legacy is a nice boost, but the problem with being a legacy is that it's not portable across all universities like being a black or a jock. If you are like Obama's kids and are legacies at four different Ivy League schools, well, that's nice, but if you are a legacy at only one college and you don't particularly want to go there or you don't get in there, well, that's not as nice.

Also, the study doesn't answer the big question everybody has about legacies -- is it good enough just to be a legacy even if your cheapskate parent hasn't donated anything since you were born or does your parent have to have donated substantial amounts to the college to be a Real Legacy? If the latter, how much?

Also, being Asian hurts your chances, even when being an athlete and a legacy are controlled for. It would be worth knowing more about this. Do colleges figure Asians won't donate as much as alumni? Do colleges figure Asian test scores are inflated by test prep? Do colleges figure Asians make the campus experience less fun or less interesting and thus the college less attractive? And, are any of these presuppositions true? It would seem like an important and interesting topic to find out more about.

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

California

A few days ago, David Brooks wrote about the good old days in mid-20th Century California when Statal Greatness governors did Big Things. 

Yet, the actual politicians are of minor importance. Of course it was easier to be a leader of California in 1950 when the population of California was under 11 million than in 2010 when it's around 37 million.

As the state gets more crowded, the cost and slowness of infrastructure projects goes through the roof. For example, the only new University of California campus to open in a generation and a half, UC Merced, took from 1985 to 2002 to construct. The whole campus had to be moved when an endangered minnow was discovered on its site. And that’s way out in godforsaken Merced. If they’d tried to build the new UC campus where students would actually want to go, such as in the wine country, they’d still be in the permitting stage.

This kind of thing is inevitable as population density goes up.

It was totally obvious to everybody in 1950 that California was the best deal in the whole world, so people flooded in. That kind of deal can't go on forever, however, and now California isn't such a good deal. 

The big problem with California today is that an awful lot of the population of California can't afford to live in California.

The one big change that could have been made would have been to cut way down on immigration after 1965 so that American citizens, rather than random foreigners, got most of the subsequent benefit of populating California, as they had gotten most of the huge benefits from moving to California in 1848-1965, That would have slowed down overpopulation and fulfilled the Preamble to the Constitution that explains that the purpose of the federal government is to promote the general welfare of “ourselves and our posterity.”

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

The white kid in "Waiting for 'Superman'"

The most curious segment of David Guggenheim's celebrated school reform documentary, Waiting for "Superman," is devoted to the one white out of the five kids trying to get picked to attend a charter high school. E. is an 8th grader in posh San Mateo County in Silicon Valley. Her neighborhood high school is Woodside H.S., which is a few miles north of Stanford U. 

But her English-accented mother is desperate to keep her out of Woodside and get her into Summit Prep, a charter. How come?

Because, according to Guggenheim's documentation, if E. attended her neighborhood school, Woodside, she'd be placed in the lower track. But Summit Prep has only one track. 

I looked up some facts on these two schools.

Yes, admission to Summit Prep is by lottery, but you can't pick up an application without the student attending a six hour session and the parent attending a 90 minute session. You cannot get your hands on an application to be in the lottery any other way. There are various other devices as well to make sure that parents who enter the lottery are dedicated.

Woodside, the neighborhood school, is about 33 percent white and 54 percent Hispanic (the school district covers East Palo Alto). Not many Asians go to Woodside, and it has "only" three national merit scholars in the most recent year, compared to 30 to 60 at some heavily Asian Silicon Valley schools.

So, reading between the lines, we can infer that E.'s mom wants to keep her out of the Hispanic-dominated track in high school.

Keep in mind, though, that there aren't too many gangbangers in the lower track at Woodside. Their 2009 California Academic Performance Index scores aren't bad:

Woodside 2009: 
White 839
Hispanic 702
Difference 137

For the whole state, 9-12 API's in 2009 for Hispanics were 653, so the Hispanics at Woodside are above average. For whites, the state average was 790.

But, just as the Guggenheim-Shue children are sent to a Westside private school to develop a peer group of the kind of children who go to Westside private schools, so does E.'s mom want to keep her away from a mostly Hispanic peer group.

At the Summit Prep charter school, the APIs are somewhat better for both groups:

Summit Prep 2009
White 889
Hispanic 744
Difference 145

But, do you notice something? Summit is, I believe, the only one of the five charter schools celebrated in the documentary to have enough white students to measure the size of the ethnic achievement gap. And, it turns out, the ethnicity gap is slightly larger at the celebrated charter school than at the neighborhood school. 

I suspect this is generally true: improving schools raises everybody's performance, but it doesn't Close the Gap. 

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

How much it costs to be Bill Gates

A reader writes that

I met Bill and Melinda Gates a couple times after they bought a house in Fairbanks Ranch [a gated community in northern San Diego County next to Rancho Santa Fe]: 5K square feet, $5.1M, on a postage stamp lot. ... We used the same bank.

His clothes were just a little better with never a sign of wear, eye-glasses just a little better with not the least sign of corrosion, etc., suggesting he replaced them every few months.  They went to the local cinema which had just a touch of the artsy to it.  They patronized the best coffee shop and  consistently tipped the barristas a buck.  But the small noticeable visual differences in quality represent a lot of money difference in the prices he paid. The glasses he wore were the $350+ titanium ones, not the 2 for $100 ones most people where I live now get.  The shirts were priced $200 apiece in the window of the local shop 

In general, super rich people today like to live, on an hour by hour basis, rather like the upper middle class lives, comfortably and casually. They like to drop in at the local coffee shop rather than have the butler make a huge to-do out of "Tea is served, sir." They don't dress for dinner, the way rich people used to put on tuxedos each evening at home. They like to drive themselves instead of having a chauffeur, except when commuting through heavy traffic.

But they do like to have lots of beautiful homes in beautiful places (Gates' primary home in the Seattle region supposedly cost $44 million) and get from one to another in private jets, and have personal assistants make sure everything goes smoothly for them when they get there. It all sounds much less of a hassle than being rich in the Robber Baron days.

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

The missing piece of the inequality puzzle

Excerpts from my new VDARE.com column:

Economic inequality has been much in the press lately. ...

But, generally, the discussion about inequality has been missing half of the puzzle.

On the one hand, it’s safe to say that over recent decades, the very rich have gotten very much richer. ...

On the other hand, for most American and above all the poor, incomes have stagnated in inflation-adjusted terms—and for significant numbers, actually fallen. The influx of poor, unskilled immigrants from abroad has certainly swelled the number of people at the bottom of society and exacerbated competition for jobs and housing among them.

The rise of the rich is felt in their growing political power. It’s notable that the rich have learned how to use the poor as symbols to rationalize whatever they want to get away with.

An example well-worth savoring: the 2003 Harvard lecture, The American Dream of Homeownership, by Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial, announcing that he would lend $600 billion to minority and lower income borrowers, in return for which he wanted mortgage regulators to lift those racially discriminatory demands for down payments and documents—thus helping precipitate the Minority Mortgage Meltdown.

Most public discussions of inequality have been of limited utility because the fundamental measure is not income or wealth, but long-term standard of living. And that has two halves: how much you can spend and how much whatever you spend it on costs.

Few commentators have thought systematically about the second half of the equation—the cost of living—even though we all obsess over it in our own lives. ...

In this article, I will focus on the impact of the growing inequality at the top and bottom of society on the cost of middle class life.

Let’s look at three major cost components of middle class life: medical care, housing, and education.

What is the impact of increasing economic inequality on the cost of medicine? Are the ultrarich rapaciously bidding up the price of, say, chemotherapy the same way they have bid up the price of  Gustav Klimt paintings?

Read the whole thing here.

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

"Waiting for 'Superman'"

Excerpts from my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Davis Guggenheim’s much-publicized documentary with the meaningless title of Waiting for “Superman” makes the (by now familiar) liberal centrist case for school reform: the cause of the achievement gap is bad schools, which are the fault of bad teachers, who are protected from termination by bad teachers’ unions.

Why do so many liberals swear by what the Chinese might call the Three Bads Theory?

Guggenheim recounts how he made a 2001 PBS documentary, First Year, about the heroism of public school teachers. Why did he change his mind? Because, he explains, his children grew old enough for school, and he found himself driving from his home in Venice, California past three public schools to a private school, thus “betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.”

How come? Evidently, he could tell that these three public schools were bad schools infested by bad teachers.

Yet, how could he divine that from driving by? Guggenheim doesn’t mention the names of these bad schools, but here’s a picture of one school in Venice: Broadway Elementary. It looks okay, but if you drove by at recess, you’d notice the student body is about 80 percent Hispanic and 15 percent black. (Interestingly, Broadway is switching to a “Mandarin immersion” program, perhaps in pursuit of higher-scoring students.)

The Three Bads Theory lets liberal parents rationalize their white flight by publicly blaming teachers while they privately shun black and Latino students.

Read the whole thing here.

Let me add a few notes: Davis Guggenheim, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for directing Al Gore's global warming movie An Inconvenient Truth, has three children with his wife, actress Elizabeth Shue, who was Oscar-nominated for Leaving Las Vegas and is the daughter of a Fortune 500 CEO. (Here she is in a 1984 Burger King commercial.)

Davis Guggenheim is the son of Charles Guggenheim, who won two Best Documentary Oscars. The Hollywood Guggenheims are only "distant relations" of the New York Guggenheims of Guggenheim Museum fame, but in any case "Guggenheim" is perhaps the grandest name in American German-Jewish culture, the American equivalent of "Rothschild." 

So, of course the Guggenheim-Shue children are going to private school. Lots of affluent parents in LA send their kids to LAUSD elementary schools. But these are the Guggenheim-Shue kids, not some set dresser's kids.

It's like when Barack Obama was asked yesterday why he sends his kids to Sidwell Friends instead of to the neighborhood public school for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and he implied that he would send them to public school if only they were good schools. 

Sure, Barack. Nobody ever replies, "Hey, I'm rich from book sales. (Don't forget to pick up a few copies of my upcoming children's book, which will be on store shelves for the Christmas rush!) My wife and I have three Ivy League degrees. What do you think we should spend my money on instead of on our children?"

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

Modern Thought = Thoughtlessness

From 97 years ago:

CONCERNING THOSE WHO CANNOT SEE THE DIFFERENCE
G.K Chesterton, 1913

Why do people think it intelligent to say, "I can see no difference!" It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted. Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.

... modern thought means modern thoughtlessness.

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

Not getting the joke

From the American Prospect on how it's practically impossible to profile homegrown terrorists:

Another study found only broad trends among domestic jihadist terrorists, specifically that they are overwhelmingly male and about two-thirds of them are younger than 30 years old. As the above discussion may suggest, generalizing about the individuals involved is problematic. Indeed, there does not appear to be a common thread connecting the U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan with the Caucasian convert, Daniel Patrick Boyd; the Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi with Carlos Bledsoe, an African American of a happy childhood who converted to Islam and renamed himself Abdulhakim Muhammed; David Headley, who was born Daood Gilani to a successful Pakistani immigrant father and American mother, with Talib Islam, who was born Michael Finton and raised in multiple foster homes; or the educated pharmacist Tarek Mehanna, with the Somali American from Minneapolis Shirwa Ahmed, who traveled to the land of his birth and became the first U.S. citizen suicide bomber. 

Yup, not much in common there ... So, let's keep on giving the third degree at the airport to the 86-year-old retired general who tried to sneak his Medal of Honor on his trip to address cadets at West Point.

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

Is "The President Is Losing It" fiction?

You may have seen the anonymous interview floating around that begins

"A longtime Washington D.C. insider, and former advisor to the Obama election campaign and transition team, speaks out on an administration in crisis, and a president increasingly withdrawn from the job of President."

Most of the copies tend to be on obscure websites with a huge amount of advertising, so here's a link to it on Israpundit, which has mostly text.

Is this for real? 

Probably not. It's very easy to make stuff up and post it on the Internet.

But, if it were real, who is your guess who it would actually be?

I'll put my guess in the comments.

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

"Dreams from My Aunt: A Story of Race and Immigration"

As suggested by a commenter, here's Jonathan Elias of WBZTV.com in Boston:

Aunt Zeituni: 'The System Took Advantage Of Me'
President Obama's Aunt Speaks Exclusively With WBZ-TV

"If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen." Those are the words from 58-year-old Zeituni Onyango of Kenya in a recent exclusive interview with WBZ-TV.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.....

In 2004 a judge ordered Zeituni Onyango out of the country, but she never left. She stayed, hiding in plain sight. In 2005 she attended her nephew's swearing in as the junior Senator of Illinois. In 2008 she was invited to, and traveled to D.C. for President Obama's inauguration.

However her nephew, she says, never pulled any strings for her.

"Listen. Obama did not know my whereabouts."

Onyango hired a top immigration lawyer from Cleveland to help fight her case. We asked how she afforded that lawyer, when she claimed poverty.

"When you believe in Jesus Christ and almighty God, my help comes from heaven," she responded.

When asked about cutting in line ahead of those who have paid into the system she answered plainly, "I don't mind. You can take that house. I will be on the street with the homeless."

"To me America's dream became America's worst nightmare," she said adamantly. "I have been treated like public enemy number one."

She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says. And now, Zeituni Onlyango is in this country legally.

In May 2010, Onyango's case went back before the same judge who ordered her out of the country in 2004. This time she was granted asylum in the United States. The ruling said a return to Kenya might put Onyango in danger. 

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

Crime victims = "They"

Timothy Egan writes at NY Times.com:

Beware, they told us in the train stations of northern Italy, of the Gypsy baby trick — an old ruse by Europe’s most reviled underclass. A woman will suddenly ask you to hold her child, and then just as you fumble to respond another Gypsy will grab your wallet. 

Watch out, they cautioned us in the lovely Turkish port city of Kusadasi, for the Gypsies who prey on tourists along the waterfront. And old lady will bump you, while a teenage hooligan grabs your bag. The Gypsy old-lady trick.

Those Gypsies, known by the less pejorative term of Roma, are getting kicked around the continent again, hardy perennials of European scapegoats. Unspoken characterizations based on ancient stereotypes — they are shiftless, clannish, prone to petty thievery and to begging, prostitution and dark motives — are now out in the open.

In the early days of a Mediterranean fall, one finds open hostility toward the Roma, encouraged by governments in a Europe that likes to think of itself as enlightened. France, following the lead of the Italians, Danes, Austrians and Swedes, is trying to expel the Roma in their midst.

"They" told me the same things about Gypsies when I backpacked around Europe in 1980. So, therefore, what "they" said can't be true because so many people have noticed the same pattern that it is a stereotype.

But, unlike Egan, I actually think "they" don't deserve to be dehumanized by anonymity. In my case, "they" were typically genial Australians backpacking around Europe for a gap year, who, coming from a country with very few Gypsies, had naively fallen for venerable Gypsy scams. "They" amiably passed on their hard-earned new knowledge to naive American travelers like myself.

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

The Roots of D'Souza's Ransom

From my VDARE.com column on Dinesh D'Souza's infinitely denounced upcoming book:

The Roots of Obama’s Rage is a silly title for a book about a man whose emotional tonality ranges from gracious condescension to wounded amour propre. More accurate, yet equally alliterative, would have been The Roots of Obama’s Resentment.

D’Souza churns out books frequently. (This is his 12th). And in his haste, he’s developed a bit of a reputation for sometimes …  neglecting to give full credit to his inspirations.

D’Souza’s most substantial book, 1995’s The End of Racism, owes much to Jared Taylor’s groundbreaking 1992 book Paved with Good Intentions—as Peter Brimelow politely pointed out in National Review (He Flinched, November  27, 1995).

But D’Souza was not merely unforthcoming about how intellectually indebted he was to Taylor—he even smeared Taylor in The End of Racism as a bad guy, the kind of dangerous white extremist from whom D’Souza’s moderate realism would protect everyone. (Just so his readers would know how to think about Taylor, D’Souza helpfully described him as "gaunt," even though Taylor may well be the most conventionally handsome of all American public intellectuals.)

In his latest book, D’Souza hasn’t actually attacked his most important sources. He’s just avoided mentioning them. 

Most notably, the central piece of evidence in The Roots of Obama’s Rage for D’Souza’s theory about Obama Sr.’s influence is the elder Obama's 1965 article, Problems Facing Our Socialism. This essay criticized the influential Sessional Paper No. 10 by Tom Mboya, a Kenayn labor leader who was financed by the anticommunist AFL-CIO (which, in turn, was financed by the CIA). Mboya had called for capitalism (under regulation) and colorblind treatment of white and Indian-owned businesses in Kenya.

D’Souza writes in Forbes:

“Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called ‘Problems Facing Our Socialism.’ … Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.”

This important historical document from 1965 wasn’t online until April 2008, when libertarian blogger Greg Ransom obtained a copy of Obama Sr.’s article from the dusty stacks of the UCLA library. Ransom’s April 7, 2008 blog post for the Ludwig von Mises Institute introducing his discovery, Obama Hid His Father’s Socialism from Readers, reads like a first draft for D’Souza book pitch:

"There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio-political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of ‘the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialism,’ in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?"

Ransom noted:

"… one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, ‘All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I ... tried to take as my own.’ (p. 220) And what was that image? It was ‘the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals.’ (p. 278) …

“So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals."

But as far as I can tell from searching on Amazon’s online copy of The Roots of Obama’s Rage, the name “Ransom” doesn’t appear in D’Souza’s book.

It’s perfectly fine for D’Souza to profit off Ransom’s enterprise. But it would have been only polite to mention him.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

The GOP's "Pledge to America"

Commenter Wilson gives a quick intro to the House Republicans' "Pledge to America," a 2010 version of Newt Gingrich's winning 1994 "Contract with America."

It's basically a George W Bush Redux. It advocates no useful policy on enforcing the borders. It merely advocates (buried way down on page 20) to reaffirm the right of states to enforce immigration laws - a right they already have.

And I'm gunna go out on a limb and wager that it says nothing about eliminating racial preferences or CRA.

But it's opening lines are the best. "America is more than a country. America is an idea...America is an inspiration to those [immigrants] who yearn to be free..."

Aunt Zeituni couldn't have said it better.

Republicans have learned nothing from the Bush years. It's not a question of whether or not GOP policies will win votes, it's a question of whether they will actually make America better. We already know the answer to that.

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

Is the SAT getting easier?

It's interesting to look at California SAT scores over time. The farthest back data on the College Board site for the state of California is 1998, so I'll contrast 1998 to 2010. Overall, the mean score in California has dropped 3 points from 1520 to 1517 on a 600 to 2400 point scale. (Because the 1998 test was reported on a 400 to 1600 scale, I'm multiplying 1998 scores by 1.5 to match them up with 2010 scores).

A three point drop doesn't sound like much but that stability masks all sorts of things going on beneath the surface. For example, mean test scores have gone up for most ethnic groups: whites up 33 points, Asians up 57, blacks up 29, Mexican Americans up 14. (The total score went down because lower-scoring groups grew so fast.)

And that pattern of rising scores within groups is especially noteworthy because the number of high school seniors taking the test has gone up. (This data looks at each senior in the class of 1998 or 2000 and counts only the last time he or she took the SAT, so taking the test multiple times isn't a factor in these numbers.)

California SAT 1998 v. 2010
College Bound seniors	1998 #	2010 #	Chg	1998 Mean	2010 Mean	Chg	1998 v NHW	2010 v. NHW
Total	142,139	210,926	48%	1520	1517	-3	-89	-124
White	56,217	69,969	24%	1608	1641	33	0	0
Asian, As-Am, or Pac Isl	29,889	44,932	50%	1557	1614	57	-51	-27
Black or Af Am	8,868	14,476	63%	1292	1320	29	-317	-321
Mex or MA	18,494	42,380	129%	1341	1355	14	-267	-286
Other Hispanic	6,606	20,735	214%	1359	1325	-34	-249	-316
Puerto Rican	489	699	43%	1434	1489	55	-174	-152
American Indian	1,415	1,256	-11%	1479	1488	9	-129	-153
Other	7,863	8,498	8%	1566	1561	-5	-42	-80
No Response	12,298	7,981	-35%	1520	1566	47	-89	-75

For example, 24 percent more whites in the class of 2010 took the SAT than whites in the class of 1998, although I would guess that there were fewer white 17-year-olds in California in 2010 than in 1998. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Black SAT-takers went up by 63 percent, even though lots of black families left California between 1998 and 2010. Clearly, there is a big push to get more marginal kids to take the SAT. (It's a great era to be in the testing racket!)

All else being equal, the higher the percentage of a group who takes the SAT, the lower the expected mean score (the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel effect). But, except for the "Other Hispanic" category, where test takers exploded by 214%, we don't see that in the big groups here.

So, what's really going on with mean SAT scores in California? A few possibilities:

- Scoring is getting easier. 

- People are getting smarter.
- People in California are getting smarter relative to the rest of the country.

- Students are more familiar with test-taking because of all the other tests they take now.

- Students are better test-prepped for the SAT in 2010.

Considering the rank order of the size of the effect -- biggest gain among Asians, next biggest among whites, then blacks, then Mexicans, finally a bad dropoff among Central Americans, most of whom have recently arrived and don't know about SATs -- that would be about what I'd expect from average enthusiasm among parents for test prepping, so I don't think we can rule out the last possibility.

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

IQ genes

Robert Plomin of King's College London has been plugging away at the genetics of IQ for decades. It's been frustrating, but now he thinks he's getting somewhere. The London Sunday Times reports:

Scientists have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.

Those schoolchildren possessing the "right" combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.

The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence.

One of its main conclusions is that intelligence is controlled by a network of thousands of genes with each making just a small contribution to overall intelligence, rather than the handful of powerful genes that scientists once predicted.

... There are potentially many millions of these variations, but the team restricted their search to looking at the million or so of the most common, to find out which gene variants were most frequently found in children with either a high or low level of academic achievement.

"Out of the gene variants we looked at, a couple of hundred are emerging which seem to have a small but significant relationship with ability in maths and English," said Professor Plomin.

... Research into height, for example, has picked out 300 genes that affect how tall people will grow, but even these genes can only explain 15 per cent of the total variations in human height. It implies that hundreds more genes must also play a part.

John Hawks points out a recent Nicholas Wade article in the NYT making a similar point the lessons of an experiment on fruit flies to breed for earlier hatching:

One well-known path to change is a heavily favorable mutation in a single gene. But it may be well known only because it is easy to study. Another path is exploitation of mildly favorable differences that already exist in many genes. 

The question has considerable practical importance because if complex traits, including susceptibility to disease, are influenced by just a few genes, then it should be easy to develop treatments that target the few genes’ products. But if tens or hundreds of genes are involved in each trait, the task may be close to impossible....

The conventional view is that evolutionary change is generally mediated by a favorable mutation in a gene that then washes through the whole population, a process called a hard sweep because all other versions of the gene are brushed away. The alternative, called a soft sweep, is that many genes influence a trait, in this case the rate of maturation, and that the growth-accelerating versions of each of these genes become just a little more common. Each fly has a greater chance of inheriting these growth-promoting versions and so will mature faster.

In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common.

The debate about whether evolution proceeds by altering one or many genes started 90 years ago among the three founders of population genetics, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane. Haldane favored the single mutation mechanism, but Fisher and Wright backed multiple gene change. The fruit fly experiment “is a total vindication of Wright and Fisher and a major defeat for Haldane and a lot of conventional geneticists who have sided with him,” Dr. Rose said.

The demise of the Haldane view “is very bad news for the pharmaceutical industry in general,” Dr. Rose said. If disease and other traits are controlled by many genes, it will be hard to find effective drugs; a single target would have been much simpler.

So, it's not surprising that intelligence is dependent upon a lot of genes. That's generally true for a lot of complicated traits.

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

SAT scores in California

With all the interest (264 comments and counting) generated by the huge number of Chinese and Korean names among the national merit semifinalists (top 0.5%) on the PSAT in California, here are the latest SAT scores from California. Interestingly, in California, whites average slightly higher than Asians / Pacific Islanders, both on the traditional M+V and the new three part total including Writing: whites 1641 to Asians 1614. (Nationally, however, Asians outscore whites 1636 to 1580.)

However, Asians / Pacific Islanders have higher standard deviations. (To view this tiny type more easily, you can hit "CTRL +")

California 2010 SAT			Total	Crit Read		Math		Writing
College Bound seniors	#	Share	Mean	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Total	210,926	100%	1517	501	113	516	119	500	113
White	69,969	33%	1641	546	100	553	102	542	100
Asian, As-Am, or Pac Isl	44,932	21%	1614	518	116	571	121	525	122
Black or Af Am	14,476	7%	1320	444	101	436	102	440	97
Mex or MA	42,380	20%	1355	449	95	458	96	448	90
Other Hispanic	20,735	10%	1325	440	102	444	102	441	95
Puerto Rican	699	0%	1489	501	101	495	105	493	100
American Indian	1,256	1%	1488	499	102	504	101	485	98
Other	8,498	4%	1561	517	113	525	118	519	115
No Response	7,981	4%	1566	523	121	526	123	517	121

Commenter Mitch, a Bay Area testing tutor, has argued that because the PSAT is a low stakes test, which whites tend to treat as the beginning of thinking about studying for the SAT, while Asian parents tend to treat it as an important milestone in the years-long process of boning up for the SAT, the high number of Asian semifinalists in California on the PSAT is exaggerated relative to the high stakes SAT.

Being lazy, I'll leave it up to interested readers to do the work to evaluate this hypothesis and post their findings in the comments.

For example, questions to consider are: What exactly are the racial percentages of National Merit semifinalists in California? Do a higher percentage of Asian 17-year-olds take the SAT in California than do white 17-year-olds? (One thing not to worry about much in California is the SAT v. ACT divide that confuses things when thinking about SAT scores in, say, Iowa: California is traditionally an SAT state.) What is the nationality makeup of Asian / Pacific Islander 17-year-olds in California? What about taking the SAT multiple times -- how does that affect the numbers? (Okay, I found the answer to this last question: "Students are counted only once, no matter how often they tested, and only their latest scores and most recent SAT Questionnaire responses are summarized.) And so forth and so on.

Good luck!

By the way, this is the first bit of quantitative evidence I can recall to support the common-sense notion that California has smarter than the national average white people. Considering how damnably expensive it is and all the high end industries and all the Nobel Prizes, you would think it would have smart white people. But on the NAEP, California non-Hispanic whites always lag badly behind, say, Texan whites. And that was true way back on the big 1960 federal Project Talent test of 15-year-olds, where Texans beat Californians. So, numbers like that got me assuming that most white Californians are less Hewletts and Packards and more Bodines and Spicolis. But, maybe, white people in California just can't be bothered with trying on low stakes tests?

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

"The Town"

From my Taki Magazine column:

The Town, set amidst the fading (but increasingly fashionable) Irish-American underclass of Boston’s gentrifying Charlestown neighborhood, is a model of crime genre filmmaking, perhaps the best-executed film since July’s Inception. Ten minutes into the first bank robbery in this heist movie, it’s evident that movie audiences are back in capable hands again.

There’s nothing particularly new about The Town. Ben Affleck directs himself as an ace bandit looking to make one last big score so he can get out of the game. Affleck, who helped write this adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s 2005 novel Prince of Thieves, emphasizes his strengths as an actor by playing an older, sadder, and soberer version of the Boston Irish lout in his breakthrough, Good Will Hunting.

In his gang of robbers as competent as a film crew, his right hand man is yet another fearless psycho played by Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker. As a boy, Affleck’s character was adopted by Renner’s family when his dad got life without parole. The townie accent employed by Renner, who is from Modesto, California, is so authenticious (as one of the crew explains) that I have no idea what he says. Except that he wants to permanently silence the pretty witness (Rebecca Hall of Vicky Cristina Barcelona) who might be able to identify them to the cocky FBI detective (handsome Jon Hamm of Mad Men). But this damsel in distress brings forth Affleck’s long buried white knight. 

We’ve seen it all before, but seldom this finely done.

One of the odder rituals of pop culture commentary is expressing amazement whenever another leading man competently directs a movie: Who could have imagined that Ben Affleck would establish himself as a capable director? After all, Affleck is only the umpty-umpth male movie star to take to directing. Whoever heard of Eastwood, Redford, Costner, Gibson, or Clooney?

Much of directing is acting like you know what you are doing. That’s how you hire the behind-the-scenes wizards who will actually make most of your movie for you, and that’s how you keep them happy on the set. And who is better at acting than an actor?

Granted, Affleck is not better at acting than a lot of actors.

 Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.

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