August 31, 2005

"The Constant Gardener"

Everybody else is giving this adaptation of John Le Carre's bestseller about corporate conspiracies in Kenya dutifully rapturous reviews. From my review in the Sept. 28th issue of The American Conservative

"Hotel Rwanda," despite its catering to white liberal self-obsession, at least was about some closely observed Africans. "The Constant Gardener," in contrast, exemplifies how cinematic political correctness, the fear of showing human differences, strips Africans of their distinctiveness, rendering them ciphers who merely suffer nobly at the hands of fascinating white villains.

"The Constant Gardener" of the title is a handsome but passive British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes of "The English Patient") married to a feisty but gorgeous activist wife (Rachel Weisz of "The Mummy"). Her anti-racist dedication is so saintly that she refuses to have their baby delivered at a white-run hospital. (If Weisz's character were real, she'd be appalling, but, fortunately, even the most radically chic put their own babies' survival above their ideological fashion statements.)

When she loses the child in a hellhole slum clinic, she barely notices because she can tell that the European scientists examining the dying tribeswoman in the next bed are up to no good. She discovers that the nefarious multinational pharmaceutical firm is testing a new tuberculosis drug in Kenya on patients dying of both AIDS and TB without obtaining -- you'll be shocked to learn -- their fully informed consent. (Although Le Carré's Cold War spy stories were endlessly praised for the moral ambiguity he discerned within the KGB, he portrays "Big Pharma" as the epitome of evil.)

Objectively speaking, overly aggressive clinical trials must rank about 312th on the list of Africa's most pressing problems, in-between overcrowded buses and hostile hippopotamuses. (Ludicrously, the screenplay claims that the evil corporation is cutting corners to rush the pill to market because of the obscene profits it will make preventing an epidemic of a new antibiotic-resistant form of TB that threatens to kill two billion people. In that case, the drug company would deserve a tickertape parade.) But, unlike Africa's major tribulations -- many of which stem from its traditional polygamous and matrilocal family structures that are profoundly dysfunctional in the modern world because they lead to low paternal investment in children -- slipshod drug testing is one that can be rightfully blamed on white people.

Don't assume, though, that Le Carré and the American critics who revere him are consumed by White Guilt. They're not blaming themselves, just white people they already hated. White culturati use black victims as props in their endless competition to win superior moral status over other whites, especially ones who make more money than they do.


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

August 29, 2005

David Rieff on Muslim immigrants in Europe

In an essay entitled "An Islamic Alientation" (echoing Peter Brimelow's book) in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Sontag's son echoes many of my themes.

Even if they produced no other positive result, the attacks on the London Underground have compelled Europeans of all faiths to think with new urgency about the Continent's Muslim minority. Such a reckoning was long overdue. Some left-wing politicians, like London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, have chosen to emphasize the proximate causes of Muslim anger, focusing on the outrage widely felt in Islamic immigrant communities over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the harsh reality is that the crisis in relations between the European mainstream and the Islamic diaspora has far deeper roots, consoling as it might be to pretend otherwise.

Indeed, the news could scarcely be worse. What Europeans are waking up to is a difficult truth: the immigrants who perform the Continent's menial jobs, and, as is often forgotten, began coming to Europe in the 1950's because European governments and businesses encouraged their mass migration, are profoundly alienated from European society for reasons that have little to do with the Middle East and everything to do with Europe. This alienation is cultural, historical and above all religious, as much if not more than it is political. Immigrants who were drawn to Europe because of the Continent's economic success are in rebellion against the cultural, social and even psychological sources of that success...

In January 2004, I wrote in "Four Failed Immigration Approaches,"

But look at Europe. Its experience proves that the different immigrant-treatment approaches of the host countries matters less than what the immigrants bring with them.

Likewise, Rieff explains that none of the European's states' latest responses are likely to prove terribly effective.

Strikingly, Rieff notes:


In a sense, Europe's bad fortune is that Islam is in crisis. Imagine that Mexican Catholicism was in a similar state, and that a powerful, well-financed minority of anti-modern purists was doing its most successful proselytizing among Mexican immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago, above all among the discontented, underemployed youth of the barrios. The predictable, perhaps even the inevitable, result would be the same sort of estrangement between Hispanics and the American mainstream.

Yet, it's crucial to keep in mind that when this vast social experiment of importing millions of poor Muslims "to do the jobs Europeans just won't do" began, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Islam looked like a beaten and broken faith, and Muslims appeared to be dutiful and submissive laborers, just the way the American elite conceives of Latin American immigrants: as cheerful replacements for those uppity blacks whom you can't trust as servants anymore.

The future remains unwritten. Still, history suggests prudence, something that has been in short supply among the ruling classes of both Europe and American in recent decades.

Of course, I've also been pointing out in VDARE.com essays like "The Wind from the South" that much of Latin America south of Mexico is increasingly in crisis due to the growth of anti-white populism in reaction to the still-unresolved racial problems growing out of the Conquest of 500 years ago. This movement is likely to become vocal in Mexico during the Presidential election of 2006.

Will indigenous anti-white populism become a major problem in the U.S. as the Hispanic population becomes increasingly less white as the poorer, more brown and black sources of immigrants are progressively tapped? I don't know, I'd guess the chance of Latinos in the U.S. someday becoming a massive problem on the order of Muslims in Europe is less than 50% but more than 10%.

But why do we continue to exacerbate the odds? When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.


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

Wedding Crashers & Mark Wahlberg

"The Wedding Crashers" -- I finally saw the sex comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn about a couple of likable sleaze-dogs who attend wedding receptions uninvited to meet bridesmaids who are in the mood for love.

Well, it's not a sequel, remake, or old TV show, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. (Otherwise, it's mildly funny, but it's making a lot of money because even mildly funny is unusual these days.)

It is, however, roughly the 300th comedy about weddings. It's a hit because Americans love comedies with "wedding" in the title. Our culture has become so casual that nuptials provide one of the few remaining formal occasions that can make indignities and embarrassments so much funnier.

Vaughn is an oddity, a comic actor with no apparent sense of timing. He simply spits out great bursts of semi-funny dialogue at high speed, with none of the rhythmic variation that comedians use to set up punch lines. (To see how it's normally done, watch for old pro Christopher Walken delivering a one-liner about his daughter's sweet 16 party late in the movie using his trademark off-kilter rhythm). Vaughn's shtick sort of works because we are used to movie motormouths being little Steve Buscemi-types, instead of an enormous 6'-5" 46 extra-long suitcoat galoot like Vaughn.

***

Mark Wahlberg: Heir to The Movie Gods -- Mark Wahlberg is a likable actor in a low-expectations sort of way, but why does Hollywood keep casting him in roles pioneered by famous stars? Reviewing "The Italian Job" remake of a couple of years ago, in which Mark Wahlberg took what was Michael Caine's role in the 1969 original, I noted:

For inexplicable reasons, Wahlberg has recently become the go-to guy to remake parts originated by screen legends. He has also recently redone Charlton Heston's role in "Planet of the Apes" and Cary Grant's in "Charade" (renamed "The Truth about Charlie"). Perhaps Wahlberg will next star in new versions of "Modern Times," "Citizen Kane," and "The King and I?"

This August brings us "Four Brothers," a remake of "The Sons of Katie Elder," in which Wahlberg will take on a role originated by ... John Wayne.

A reader replies

I feel like there's something cypher-y about Wahlberg. Maybe that has something to do with it. Like, rather than trying to match Heston/Grant/Wayne with a non-existent contemporary equal, the filmmakers just give us an unprepossessing semi-everyman into which we can channel our memories of the necessary charisma.

Another says:

When I see Mark Wahlberg playing roles originated by Grant, Heston, Caine, and now Wayne, I can't help thinking that they've brought in a boy to do a man's job. And I expect that's part of the appeal of casting Wahlberg: he can help a movie skew towards a younger audience.

One of my big pet peeves about Hollywood movies is that there really are no longer any old-fashioned male stars like John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, i.e. guys who were tough and manly and not cute and pretty. Even today's action stars tend to be "pretty boys" like Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise.

I think that helped sink "Kingdom of Heaven" -- the presence in the early scenes of the formidable Liam Neeson, who is built on John Wayne's scale, made Orlando Bloom look too insubstantial for his subsequent role as a military leader. In contrast, Bloom had done fine as the hero in "Pirates of the Caribbean," where he was contrasted mostly with the fey Johnny Depp.


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

Bitter Asian Men

Bitter Asian Men: Here's a website that's amusing, sensible, and, I hope, empathy-building:

"Welcome to Bitter Asian Men, the site made by bitter asian men, for bitter asian men... and also for all of you out there who might be curious as to why we, as asian men, are so bitter. Are you a BAM looking for the right way to express his rage at the world? You've come to the right place. Are you [an Asian woman] looking for insight as to why your Asian ex-boyfriend isn't talking to you after you dumped him and started dating some frat boy? Again, you've come to the right place. Wonder why that Asian guy glares at you every time you ask him what brand of egg rolls he likes best? You're definitely in the right place!

I've long pointed out -- beginning with "Is Love Colorblind?" -- that much of the bitterness felt by many Asian-American males toward whites is perfectly understandable if you look at the gender gap in white-Asian interracial marriages. Of course, that has led to quite a lot of Asian male bitterness being directed at me and my family personally, on the principle of kill-the-bearer-of-bad-news. As Enoch Powell said in his much denounced 1968 speech:

"Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.' Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical."

And I wasn't even making a prediction, just committing the sin of documenting on paper what everybody who lives in a cosmopolitan American city has seen with his own lying eyes.


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

Iraq Constitution or Peace Treaty?

Over at ParaPundit, Randall Parker quotes professor Karol Soltan that the "constitutional convention" in Baghdad is actually more like a peace treaty negotiation:

"It's not like Philadelphia. They're not 13 relatively homogeneous states at little risk of fighting a civil war. They're trying to prevent an early-stage civil war from exploding. They've spent a lot of time trying to settle borders and generally diminish the potential for violent conflict. In effect, they're working out key provisions of a peace treaty. Constitution-making is much more difficult."

In some ways, that's an encouraging perspective. The Iraqis don't have to work out rules for governing that they'll all abide by. For purposes of the U.S. getting out of there, theyl just have to work out how to stay out of each other's hair.

The problem, as always, is oil. It's relatively easy for the Swiss to get along with each other because individuals are highly productive and the country has few natural resources to squabble over. In contrast, Iraqis aren't very good at producing good and services, but the territory is loaded with oil.

On the other hand, Iraq has so much oil that it might be possible to divvy up the pie in such a way that everybody gets at least a moderate sized slice. A reader writes:

Your item about Ahmad the Thief set off an epiphany: with the rise in oil prices, Iraq’s oil wealth is now worth over $8 trillion. (If the price hits $100/barrel, that # goes to $10 trillion). Since there are roughly 27 million Iraqis, that amounts to a per capita wealth of about 300 grand. So the potential for a happy ending is there.

Two questions remain:

1) Will the new leadership be honest and wise enough to distribute this wealth fairly (or will it end up in the Chalabi family Swiss Bank Account?). Will they invest in their future?

2) Can the grassroots realize that they have a potential windfall coming and refrain from killing each other?

There two questions are the whole shooting match (perhaps not the best cliché to use here!). I’d only give it a 10% chance of working. But six months ago, I would have said it’s less than 1%. So perhaps Wolfie’s idea of (to borrow Pat Buchanan’s term) “starting a fire in the world’s gas station” had some wisdom after all. Let’s see: the rest of the world has to undergo a recession and energy crisis to fulfill Wolfie’s vision. Talk about sacrifice!


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

Isn't it time to retire the phrase "white-bread" as a term of ethnic abuse?

In Slate.com, an article by Neal Pollack begins:

A full-page ad for Monster.com in this week's Sports Illustrated shows a clean-cut, white, college-graduate type in an empty baseball stadium... Hovering above our white-bread college grad are these words: "You are the General Manager of you."

Don't you think it's about time to retire the phrase "white-bread" as a put-down of white Protestants (or of white gentiles in general)? I'm not Protestant myself, but as a former marketing researcher, it strikes me as an embarrassingly out-of-date ethnic slur. These days, white bread appears from my observations to be eaten most heavily by inner city blacks, while the kind of person Pollack disparages as "white-bread" would barely touch the stuff.


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

Mickey Kaus on Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell was a fairly original thinker for a journalist back in the 1990s (here's his rather brave 1997 article on racial differences in sports), but the opportunity to get rich has not been good for his soul. As his popularity as a corporate speaker has skyrocketed, his insight and honesty have fallen (see my review of his bestseller Blink). Mickey lashes out at a Gladwell piece on health care, then steps back to generalize perceptively about the upscale liberal reading public:

Like many New Yorker policy articles, Gladwell's reads like a lecture to an isolated, ill-informed and somewhat gullible group of highly literate children. They are cheap dates. They won't think of the obvious objections. They won't demand that you "play Notre Dame," as my boss Charles Peters used to say, and take on the best arguments for the other side. They just need to be given a bit of intellectual entertainment and pointed off in a comforting anti-Bush direction. [Like highbrow sheep?-- ed You said that.]...

Indeed, there's a huge market in this country for people who will flatter liberals about how they are culturally and ethically superior to conservatives. Just as there is plenty of money to be made telling conservatives why they are more patriotic, practical, and moral (conservatives are "moral," liberals are "ethical"). Over the years, Gladwell has been perfecting a spiel that might eventually prove the most profitable of all: he tries to appeal to his readers' capitalist greed and progressive snobbery simultaneously.

Mickey goes on:

Late hit: This is the second Gladwell article I've read that enthusiastically promotes the ideas in a book without grappling with even the obvious possible criticisms. (The other author given similar treatment was Judith Rich Harris). He's becoming the Cousin Brucie of the bien pensants! 9:59 P.M. link

In contrast, here's my essay on Harris's book The Nurture Assumption from National Review. In general, the quality of book reviewing in prestige dailies is atrocious, as the initial reviews of Freakonomics by Gladwell's buddies Levitt and Dubner displayed.

By the way, I've wondered whether Gladwell really makes $40,000 per speech for the 25 speeches he gives a year. So, a reader sent me what it cost to get P.J. O'Rourke to give a speech at a corporate shindig in the middle of the country: $32,500.

Now, P.J. was, and perhaps still is, a heck of a writer, but these days it would be hard to say he's any better than the War Nerd. So, you can see the restraining effect that being able to make $32,500 for a day's work could have on you: a single publicized "gaffe" where you tell the truth about some taboo topic and your annual corporate speaking engagement income suddenly drops to the same level as the War Nerd's: zero.


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

August 28, 2005

The WSJ's Ahmed Chalabi Fan Club is back in high gear:

The Wall Street Journal runs a loooong article called "The Chalabi Comeback: Iraq's 'indispensable' man returns to center stage" about the ultra-wonderfulness of Dr. Chalabi, who fed us so much of the phony info on Saddam's non-existent WMDs in order to get us into this war. I particularly like how WSJ editorialist Robert L. Pollock praises "Ahmad the Thief" (as he is known because of his defrauding so many average Jordanians) because "Mr. Chalabi has assumed special responsibility for oil and infrastructure security." In other words, Chalabi has wormed his way into control of the armed men who are supposed to control Iraq's oil industry.

As I wrote in 2004 in The American Conservative, "

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

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


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

My new VDARE.com column on Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo:"

My new VDARE.com column on Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo:"

One of the most newsworthy aspects of "The Inequality Taboo" is Murray's view that the white-black IQ gap may have narrowed slightly in recent years. According to Murray's article, the three most recent re-normings of major IQ tests came up with a mean white-black gap of 0.92 standard deviations, or 14 points.

That doesn't sound like much of a change from the one standard deviation (15 points) racial gap that IQ realists have been talking about for decades. But, in reality, they've been intentionally understating the traditional size of the difference. A 2001 meta-analysis of eight decades of data suggested a 1.1 standard deviation gap (16.5) points. So, if this new 14 point gap found in the three recent re-normings holds up as more data comes in, we may have seen some significant progress on this massive social problem.

Currently, though, the evidence remains far from clear. Murray writes in a footnote:

"Forced to make a bet, I would guess that the black-white difference in IQ has dropped by somewhere in the range of .10–.20 standard deviations over the last few decades. I must admit, however, that I am influenced by a gut-level conviction that the radical improvement in the political, legal, and economic environment for blacks in the last half of the 20th century must have had an effect on IQ."

Murray is too honest, however, to skip over the other, more disturbing, possibility: that the greater fertility of lower IQ women has had a dysgenic and/or "dyscultural" effect. Murray has calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100.

I hope that the improved nutrition, health care, and other environmental enhancements that have allowed African-Americans to come to dominate basketball, football, and sprinting in recent decades have also driven up black IQ scores more than the tendency of intelligent black women to remain childless has driven them down.

But the overall situation remains murky. It needs more research than is currently being funded.

Does part of the white-black IQ gap have a genetic basis? Murray suggests an experiment that might prove conclusive:

"To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy. The recent advances in using genetic markers solve that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as 'white' or 'black,' but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive."

I bet, however, that Murray's critics won't rush to fund this study and put their money where their mouths are. [More]


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

Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: Ranking with William D. Hamilton as one of the great creative geniuses of sociobiology, Trivers's roller-coaster career has been buffetted about by his manic-depression. He now appears to be on another upswing, and is getting a lot of media attention, although most of it so far has gingerly avoided touching upon his mental illnesses. A new article in The Guardian [via GNXP], fortunately, gives us more of his personality:

Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would...

During the second world war, Howard Trivers worked for the army, and produced the regulations for denazification: he was rewarded with a post in the state department, so Robert Trivers grew up in a diplomatic household, a handicap he has triumphantly overcome: his opponents at Harvard are described as fools, and he says Richard Lewontin, the intellectual leader of the campaigns against sociobiology, grossly underestimated the role that selection plays in the makeup of the genome, while sanctioning all sorts of slanders against his opponents. Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould's theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect ..."

In order to become a lawyer, he had to have a humanities degree, so his first studies at Harvard were in American history. They were interrupted by the first, and worst, of his breakdowns, which took the form of spiralling mania - staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and then collapsing. He was hospitalised, and treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs.

[Trivers's] mentor was an ornithologist called Bill Drury, whose memory he venerates... Drury became very close to his pupil and his trust was reciprocated: "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day, and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of 10 people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said 'Can I add three names to that list?'. That was his only comment." [More]


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

August 27, 2005

Krauthammer's Digit Span

Repeating digits backward: Common subtests on oral IQ tests include having test-takers repeat a string of digits forwards and backwards. The latter requires more mental musculature and is much better correlated with IQ. Charles Murray reports in a footnote to his new Commentary article "The Inequality Taboo:"

The average adult gets a digits-backward score of 5 (Jensen 1998: 263). You may compare your own score with the highest I have observed, 13 and 12, achieved respectively by José Zalaquett, former chairman of Amnesty International, and the political analyst Charles Krauthammer. Zalaquett’s score might have been higher if he had not been in a car weaving through traffic at 70 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike. Krauthammer’s score might have been higher if he hadn’t been driving.

Krauthammer is a paraplegic, so presumably he was operating the gas and brake pedals with one hand while steering with the other while taking the test orally.

Considering all the cleverness Krauthammer devoted to getting America stuck in Iraq, I'm reminded of something Maxwell Smart said after triumphing over a supervillain: "If only he had used his genius for niceness instead of evil."


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

August 26, 2005

Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo"

Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo" is now up on the Commentary Magazine website. I am writing about it for late Sunday's VDARE.com column.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

CHARLES ON LARRY: A must-read from Charles Murray. One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from "The Bell Curve" in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) - but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade. The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human - gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian - is a subject worth exploring, period. Liberalism's commitment to political and moral equality for all citizens and human beings is not and should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality. And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence ... well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I'm still proud to claim that label - classical liberal. And I'm proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did. Pity Summers hasn't been able to match their courage. But recalling the tidal wave of intolerance, scorn and ignorance that hit me at the time, I understand why.


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

Paul Krugman punts on the I-Word again

Paul Krugman punts on the I-Word again: Many despise Paul Krugman, the famous economist-turned-NYT-op-edster, for his fanatical hatred of George W. Bush, but I feel that it's generally useful for America if the President, with all his powers to mold opinion, is relentlessly confronted by an individual as smart and hostile as Krugman. I certainly wouldn't want every pundit to imitate Krugman, but his intense specialization in figuring out every possible way Bush has blundered plays a valuable role in the media food chain.

Yet, there's one set of people that Krugman hates even more than Bush, and that's us immigration realists. So, we've recently been treated to the bizarre sight of Krugman intentionally pulling his punches against Bush on Krugman's own topic of expertise, the economy, because Krugman refuses to mention the I Word: Immigration. In "Summer of Our Discontent," Krugman writes:

For the last few months there has been a running debate about the U.S. economy, more or less like this:

American families: "We're not doing very well."

Washington officials: "You're wrong - you're doing great. Here, look at these statistics!"

The administration and some political commentators seem genuinely puzzled by polls showing that Americans are unhappy about the economy. After all, they point out, numbers like the growth rate of G.D.P. look pretty good. So why aren't people cheering?

Some blame the negative halo effect of the Iraq debacle. Others complain that the news media aren't properly reporting good economic news. But when your numbers tell you that people should be feeling good, but they aren't, that means you're looking at the wrong numbers.

So far, so good. Now, you'd think that at this point Krugman would bring out the Big Gun in punching a hole in Bush spin about economic growth: the fact that, as Edwin S. Rubenstein has relentlessly documented for years at VDARE.com: jobs, indeed, are not going to "American families." Instead, they are going to immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. Rubenstein wrote:

As usual, the government makes no serious effort to measure immigration’s impact. Hispanic employment is the best proxy we have for the month to month increases in the immigrant workforce, since about 40 percent of all Hispanic workers—and an even larger share of new Hispanic workers—are immigrants...

Since the start of the Bush Administration (January 2001), Hispanic employment has risen by 2.585 million, or 16.0 percent. Non-Hispanic employment is up by 1.720 million, or 1.41 percent.

But, for anybody familiar with Krugman's prejudices against immigration skeptics, it's no surprise that he instead lets his latest column dribble off into anti-climax. He'd rather let the Bush Administration off the hook than admit that immigration realists have a point.

For an example of Krugman's smug anti-rationality on immigration, here's one of his columns "My Beautiful Mansionette" from 2001. It's a follow-up to an earlier column complaining about suburban sprawl:

You see, a few columns back I wrote a piece about urban sprawl and its attendant traffic congestion, which is becoming a very serious issue — a lot more important to the lives of most people than the dollar or two per day they might eventually get from George W. Bush's tax cut. And a surprising number of the letters I received in response insisted, vehemently, that the real culprit behind urban sprawl was population growth, and that therefore it was all because of immigration.

A quick search of the Internet reveals that my correspondents are not isolated individuals; they are part of a still small but growing movement. On casual observation I would say that the anti-immigration movement today is where the anti-globalization movement was a couple of years before Seattle: not yet large enough to be a political force to be reckoned with, but quite possibly on its way to achieving critical mass. And complaints about the alleged linkage between immigration and urban sprawl is a popular theme.

Like so much of what the anti- globalization activists say, these complaints are mostly but not entirely off base. The grain of truth in the argument is that other things being the same, a growing population means more houses, more cars and hence more sprawl. But population growth is only a secondary contributing factor to a disastrous pattern of land use driven by skewed incentives that encourage people to spread out in a low-density sprawl that in turn forces them to spend more and more of their time in cars. What's really impressive to me is the way that medium-size metropolitan areas, like Atlanta or Houston, have managed to mismanage their development so completely that they have worse traffic congestion than metropolitan New York, which has five times their population. (I know, I know, I sound like the kind of person Dick Cheney loves to hate. But as it happens I do own an S.U.V.)

In reality, the best study of sprawl found that:

Our calculations show that about half the loss of rural land in recent decades is attributable to increases in the U.S. population, while changes in land use account for the other half. New immigration and births to immigrants now account for more than three-fourths of U.S. population growth. Therefore, population growth and the immigration policies that drive it must be an integral focus of efforts to preserve rural land. [Roy Beck, Leon Kolankiewicz, and Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies, 2003]

But that actually underestimates the impact of immigration, since immigration-driven white flight is often the impetus for people trading up from an 1800 square foot house on a fifth of an acre in an inner suburb whose public schools are becoming overwhelmed by Hispanic immigrants to a 3600 square foot house on half an acre in a distant, mostly white exurb with "good" public schools [i.e., schools full of good students]. Without immigration-driven demographic change in their old neighborhoods, lots of people wouldn't have gone through the stress of moving to the exurbs. But, once they do decide to move, then they feel they might as well go for the contemporary style of a huge house. (Big houses on big lots in new exurban offer a secondary, more subtle economic benefit in that they are so expensive that they make it unlikely that poor people will ever take over the neighborhood and drive down home prices.]

Krugman rolled on:

So why the vehemence? Psychoanalyzing a political movement guarantees a fresh wave of hate mail, but my best guess is that the passion of my correspondents is ultimately fueled by cultural unease. The changes one sees in central New Jersey are the same as what one sees everywhere in this country: farms and traditional towns submerged by a rising tide of malls, highways and McMansions. And since some of the faces behind the wheel or the fake Palladian window are brown, it's all too natural to blame them for the trend.

Obviously I don't feel the same way; I am one of those people who feel that immigration is a good thing — most of all for the immigrants, but good for America too. To some extent this position rests on mundane economic arguments. Foreign-born talent has been crucial in this country's technology boom, and plays a large role in many less glamorous industries too. (For some reason all the gas stations around here seem to be run by Sikhs.) And one can make a good case that demography — the perils of a low birth rate — is a key factor in the economic malaise of Japan and some European countries; America's openness to immigration is one of the things protecting us from that fate.

The total fertility per native-born American women is up around 1.9 babies, and without the stresses on Affordable Family Formation exacerbated by immigration, such as high housing prices and the need for expensive private schooling, might well be over the 2.1 replacement level. So, native-born Americans are hardly facing a fertility crisis that requires mass replacement of the current population with an imported one.

And I have my own cultural prejudices. Isn't the immigrant experience part of what this country is all about? Without immigrant families climbing the social ladder, what would become of the American dream?

This is sentimental cant of the kind that economists routinely scoff at, except when it comes to immigration.

But never mind the rational arguments.

Huh? What rational arguments?

Over the horizon new and possibly quite nasty political storms are brewing. If you think people get angry and irrational when arguing about taxes, wait till you see them argue about immigration.

Oh, see, according to Krugman, anything he says about immigration is, by definition, rational, while anything the immigration realists says is, a priori, irrational.

Amusingly, the extremely low interest rates that are propping up the economy today are causing a boom in home construction in the exurbs (i.e., creating more of the exurban sprawl that Krugman derides). While the home construction boom is doing nothing to help us compete better economically with the Chinese, it is sucking in more illegal immigrants to work in construction. In turn, the rapidly rising populations of unassimilated Hispanic immigrants is triggering more white flight out to the exurbs and raising demand for new McMansions.

You might think that this process would interest economist Krugman, but you'd be wrong. Since 2001, Krugman has barely mentioned immigration at all, despite writing 100 columns per year for the New York Times. The problem he faces is that he and his bete noire George W. Bush hold almost identical, visceral, non-rational views on the goodness of immigration, so Krugman is just not going to mention the entire subject.

You might think this merely reflects Krugman's personal idiosyncrasies, yet it's also representative of how almost the entire economics profession in the U.S. has been AWOL on this enormous issue, one with obvious and profound economic implications. Economists have largely ignored immigration in recent years, and when they do discuss it, often spew self-evident nonsense that they would flunk an Econ 101 student for writing on a test on any other subject. In his recent column "Immigration Taboos," Thomas Sowell had to remind his fellow economists that the Law of Supply and Demand applies to the effect of immigrants on wages, just as it applies to everything else in economics.

Immigration has joined the long list of subjects on which it is taboo to talk sense in plain English. At the heart of much confusion about immigration is the notion that we "need" immigrants -- legal or illegal -- to do work that Americans won't do.

What we "need" depends on what it costs and what we are willing to pay...

Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception. At current wages for low-level jobs and current levels of welfare, there are indeed many jobs that Americans will not take.

The fact that immigrants -- and especially illegal immigrants -- will take those jobs is the very reason the wage levels will not rise enough to attract Americans.

This is not rocket science. It is elementary supply and demand. Yet we continue to hear about the "need" for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do -- even though these are all jobs that Americans have done for generations before mass illegal immigration became a way of life.


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

1491 by Charles C. Mann

In the Los Angeles Times, Jim Rossi reviews the new book claiming that the Americas were hugely populated before Columbus arrived with Afro-Eurasian diseases:

THINK back to high school history class: Remember the part about buffalo in the New World? It probably went something like this: When Europeans began settling the interior of North America in the 17th century, they encountered pristine forests and a vast prairie crowded with millions of the giant horned mammals along with countless other animals and birds. Over the next three centuries, desperate colonists, industrious frontiersmen and heedless sportsmen upset the natural balance, hunting the bison to the brink of extinction.

But like much of what we learned in school, that's not the whole story, Charles C. Mann tells us in his book "1491." "The Americas seen by the first colonists were teeming with game … [but] the continents had not been that way for long," Mann writes.

Many archeologists and anthropologists now believe, Mann says, that more people inhabited the Americas than lived in Europe at the time Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492...

Hepatitis, measles, cholera and smallpox preceded colonists into the interior of the New World, as native traders and messengers inadvertently transmitted a holocaust back to their homelands.

Genetically speaking, American Indians are believed to be descendants of relatively small groups that arrived from Asia, probably more than 20,000 years ago. They were less genetically diverse and suffered from fewer infectious diseases than Europeans. The conquistadors had immunities to Old World infectious diseases, but not to New World germs, such as syphilis; still, many more Europeans survived the encounter than did Indians.

These first explorers saw a continent in convulsive change. "Hernando De Soto's expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people" lining the Mississippi River, Mann writes. A century later, Sieur Robert Cavelier de La Salle canoed down the same stretch of river and found "solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man," according to 19th century historian Francis Parkman. De Soto didn't see buffalo, but La Salle found them everywhere, filling the ecological void left by the missing people. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," UCLA anthropologist Russell Thornton tells Mann. "Everything else — all the heavily populated urbanized societies — was wiped out."

Mann makes the important point that Indians used techniques such as setting brush fires to revamp the landscape to their own specifications.

I'm skeptical, though, about just how many people ever lived in North America north of Mexico before Columbus. Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru feature Indian ruins of colossal scale, which are almost wholly lacking in the larger expanse of the U.S. Sure, there are the cliffdwellers of the Southwest and there are a bunch of dirt mounds in the Midwest, but many of the cultures that created the interesting bits of ruins in the U.S. collapsed before Columbus. For example, Cahokia near St. Louis had 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants at one point, but was gone by 1300. I suspect that North American Indians lacked the agricultural technology to support large populations without eventual ecological collapse. Where are the Indian cities in the U.S. that collapsed after 1492?


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

Ross Douthat on my "Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" essay

Ross Douthat on my "Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" essay: On his American Scene blog, Ross responds:

Hollywood has two tracks: their big-money movies, which are calculated to be as politically inoffensive as possible, and their Oscar-bait movies, which are pitched to a narrower, more elite and more liberal audience, and thus are free to express the values of the community that produces them.

Consider the last year's slate of movies. On the first track, you have the high-grossing crowd pleasers, which are largely apolitical. Some slant right (The Incredibles, for instance, with its pro-family, pro-competition message) and some left (Shrek 2, with its snide and occasionally lewd deconstruction of fairy tales), but never in particularly polarizing ways. Sure, sometimes blockbusters come swaddled in liberal pieties - i.e., the soft-headed environmentalism of The Day After Tomorrow. But for the most part, the bigger movies are determinedly centrist, balancing Red and Blue sensibilities and rarely lapsing into preachiness, or politics of any kind. (The Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are perfect examples of this difference-splitting, swaddling Austenesque marriage plots in wacky sexual permissiveness - a combination that corresponds pretty well to the mainstream American attitude toward sex and romance.)

But then there are the prestige movies - with their low budgets, artful cinematography, art-house runs and dreams of Oscar glory. It's this Hollywood track - movies for "our kind of people," they might say if they were being honest about it - that produces films like last year's Kinsey and Million Dollar Baby, and that gave us American Beauty and The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and The People vs. Larry Flynt, Quills and The Crying Game, Traffic and The Quiet American and . . . well, you get the idea. Not all of these are bad movies by any stretch, but they all reflect, and promote, the particular kind of liberalism shared by most Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and movie moguls. And they have no conservative counterparts.


Right. The fact that "Chocolat" (which was the Weinstein Brothers' very long condemnation of the Catholic Church for encouraging the faithful to give up chocolate for Lent, I kid you not) got a Best Picture nomination while "The Passion of the Christ," which Quentin Tarantino said was as impressive a piece of visual storytelling as anything since the talkies came in, well, that pretty much proves Ross's point.


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

August 25, 2005

The Niger famine and the African Penguin Pop shortage

I've been writing for a long time about one of the main reasons why Africa is like it is: the lack of Penguin Pops (as in the ultra-high paternal investment Emperor penguin dads featured in the "March of the Penguins" documentary). Now, the BBC reports:

Niger women 'banned from grain stores'
By Martin Plaut, BBC Africa analyst

Polygamy is common in Niger - and men control the food

The UN, aid agencies and the government of Niger have all been blamed for their slow response to aid some 2.5m people in the country who are facing severe food shortages.

But the story may be more complex, as evidence is now emerging that some problems spring from the country's social structures.

Journalists who have visited Niger are reporting finding a strange phenomenon: villages in which women and children are going hungry, while there is still food in their households.

Kim Sengupta of the UK's Independent newspaper found that men had left their families, locking the grain store, while they were away. "They've gone away to look for work or look for money and sometimes across the border in Nigeria. And you have this strange situation where there were women in the villages with stocks of sorghum and millet with hungry children, but no access to the food," he says. There are reports that women are not even allowed to look in the family grain store - that it is taboo.

There is widespread polygamy in Niger, and with men taking more than one wife, each woman is given a small plot to support herself and her own children.

"There is a tradition that women are more or less supposed to cater for themselves and their children with the produce that they manage to get out of the tiny plots they are given when they are married," says Moira Eknes of Care aid agency, who has just returned from Niger. "They also have to work on the larger family fields but the production from these large fields they have no control over and no access to," she says.

If only the men control the family reserve, individual women and their children can be left to fend for themselves. This may be a way of keeping back stocks of food until the worst times: the hungry season when the next harvest is being planted, but there is nothing yet on the table.

And men may be calculating - correctly - that if they don't provide for their families, aid agencies will step in to fill the gap


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

The Real Story of the Scopes Monkey Trial

Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate:

This moment was not to be staged in America for several more decades, but the courtroom battle between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tenn., did eventually come. And old man Bryan blew himself out of the water by repeating Bishop Ussher's claims. We have an excellent firsthand account of this from H.L. Mencken, and at least two movie versions of Inherit the Wind, which give a fair summary of the dispute between "Rock of Ages and age of rocks," as Bryan so happily phrased it.

C'mon, Hitch, I realize you are under contract to churn out copy so fast for so many outlets that you don't have time to do anything other than regurgitate conventional wisdom in service of your obsessive prejudices, but this is a ridiculous summation of what actually happened.

As history, Stanley Kramer's corny "message" film "Inherit the Wind" is a joke.

What's most important to understand is that Bryan was highly concerned about the popular misuses of Darwinism, such as Social Darwinism and eugenics, especially by self-proclaimed Nietzscheites like Darrow, Mencken and Leopold & Loeb. Bryan was deeply worried about the spread of vulgarized Nietzscheism, with its Darwinian gloss, especially in the German-speaking world. See the chapter "Neroism Is In the Air" in Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" for the alarming impact of popularized Nietzscheism on German culture in the years leading up to WWI. Bryan wasn't anti-German -- he'd resigned as Secretary of State because he saw that Wilson was leading up to war with Germany -- but he was disturbed that the German military had issued condensed booklets of Nietzsche excerpts to inspire the troops.

In America, Nietzscheist Superman-worship had inspired Leopold and Loeb to commit a thrill-kill murder to prove their superiority. Darrow had gotten Leopold and Loeb off from hanging the previous year with some absurdly deterministic arguments, including pointing out that L&L hadn't asked to be born into luxury, the poor darlings! Mencken, who was a German chauvinist and whose first book was about Nietzsche, was Nietzsche's biggest promoter in the America.

All this, of course, is unfair to Nietzsche, as well, who would have been appalled by the misuse of his philosophy. But that's no reason to ignore the fact that the Scopes monkey trial was about far more than pure science.


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

August 23, 2005

"Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism"

"Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" -- My cover story from the June 11th American Conservative (subscribe here) is finally online. An excerpt:

The Federal Election Commission's online database of political donors amusingly confirms that the movie industry is as one-sidedly Democratic as the stereotypes claim.

Oscar-winning actors and directors give about 40 times as much to Democrats as Republicans. Hollywood's Republican donors turn out to be mostly aged actors to whom the threat "You'll never work in this town again" long ago lost its terror. Over the last decade, stalwart Republican campaign contributors have included Jane Russell, who starred in Howard Hughes' 1943 Western "The Outlaw;" Yvette Mimieux, who played Weena the Eloi in the 1960 "Time Machine;" and sword-and-sandal star Victor Mature, who got so mature he's now dead.

(Yet, almost all elected actors, such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been in the GOP, which suggests voters appreciate that just being a Republican in Hollywood demonstrates strength of character.)

The right wing of the chorus of the perpetually indignant have repeatedly gone on the warpath against Hollywood for political crimes real and imagined, excoriating actress Maggie Gyllenhaal ("Secretary") for her brief criticism of American foreign policy, and denouncing George Lucas for perhaps alluding unadmiringly to George W. Bush in "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith." (I'd go over this crushingly boring brouhaha with you, but I'm all Sithed-out.)

Yet, the actual relationship between Hollywood and politics turns out to be convoluted and often surprising. Hollywood wasn't always so ideologically homogenous. Consider one of the best films of the industry's best year, 1939: "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Its leading man Jimmy Stewart, director Frank Capra, and studio head Harry Cohn were all Republicans, while its screenwriter Sidney Buchman was a card-carrying Stalinist. Today, though, acceptable views run the gamut all the way from Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats like Barbra Streisand on the left to Harry Truman Democrats like Tom Hanks (who named a son "Truman") on the right...

In the wake of Mel Gibson's vast profits from "The Passion of the Christ," the movie industry finally senses that it's out of touch with much of its potential audience. Yet, it can hardly be relied upon to figure out what it is doing wrong. If conservative want to watch conservative movies, we'll have to make them ourselves.

Yet, too much of what passes for "conservatism" during the Bush era is stridently prosaic, dogmatic, and anti-artistic. The "primarily political people" (as culture blogger Michael Blowhard calls them) who now dominate the public voice of the Right deplore the imagination and empathy required to make good films.

Indeed, the movies are far less obsessed with politics than the rightwing media is, in part due to the years it takes modern free agent Hollywood to put deals together. If Hanks would suggest to Steven Spielberg, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats, that they undermine the Republican campaign against the filibuster by remaking "Mr. Smith," which famously climaxes with the haggard Jefferson Smith trying to keep speaking against a corrupt bill, by the time they got their movie finished, the Democrats might have regained control of the Senate and be busy quashing Republican filibusters.

To those of us who care about more than partisan politics, however, the Hollywood of 2005 in some ways confirms historian Robert Conquest's First Law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." The mainstream audience restrains Hollywood's leftist affectations, and the vicissitudes of making movies teach filmmakers hard-headed lessons in how the world actually works, making the actual politics in the movies closer to Tom Hanks's than Michael Moore's.

Contemporary Hollywood movies approve of manly men and womanly women, guns, violence in self-defense, anti-drug laws, true love, marriage, big weddings, big houses, and moms and dads spending time with their kids. The worst sin is parental adultery, because Hollywood's target audience of teens dreads anything that could break up their homes. And no film's heroine ever has an abortion.

Many of the rightwing attacks on Hollywood stem from it not toeing the pseudo-conservative line of worshipping some of the less conservative forces in history, such as war, laissez-faire, and George W. Bush.

Movies such as Oliver Stone's "Platoon," Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," and Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers" have done America a service by taking war films to a new level of bloody realism. While neoconservative jingoes have worried that revealing the effects of combat too honestly will induce second thoughts about World War IV, veterans have typically been pleased that moviegoers can now get a better sense of the sacrifices they made in the service of their country. Nor is it Hollywood's fault that the Bush Administration didn't learn anything about the dangers of occupying a Muslim country from "Black Hawk Down," the minutely detailed 2001 depiction of our Special Forces' desperate battle in Somalia.

As lavishly paid members of the private sector, filmmakers admire public sector workers, such as soldiers, cops, and firemen, who risk their lives for the kind of annual pay that a Beverly Hills matron might spend on feng shui consultations. For example, Hanks passed up tens of millions in movie salaries to produce patriotic miniseries about the G.I.'s of WWII and the astronauts and engineers of the Space Race.

There are few conservatives in Hollywood, but at least there aren't many neoconservatives either. When the GOP wanted to feature a movie star at the 2004 convention in New York, the best they could come up with was Ron Silver, who once played, uh … c'mon, Google … Alan Dershowitz in "Reversal of Fortune."

And if movies tend to be skeptical that unbridled capitalism automatically produces the utopia foreseen by U. of Chicago economists, well, filmmakers have all had some first-hand experience with just how far human beings will go to get rich. In Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey rages at the subterfuges of the banker, Mr. Potter, not because Capra was a pinko, but because the director had similarly raged at his own boss Harry Cohn's nefariousness.

Cinema, a medium of the visible, is innately ill-suited for explaining the wonders of the invisible hand. But the movie's basic message about business -- that the magic of the market is no substitute for individuals making moral choices -- isn't necessarily anti-conservative. Capitalism is a terrific system, but it doesn't absolve capitalists from the need for ethics.

Nor is it anti-conservative for film people to believe that they should occasionally make a quality film that might not be as profitable as most of the drek they churn out. If the market was the measure of all things, three studios wouldn't have gotten together and invested close to $200 million in "Master and Commander," 2003's splendid, but not terribly lucrative, realization of Patrick O'Brian's superb (and deeply conservative) seafaring novels.

As the deplorable quality of 2005 releases underscores, this resistance to pure profit-maximizing behavior is disappearing in Hollywood, but if conservatism means more than just the worship of the free market, that's not a good thing. [More]


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

A license to print money

John Tierney has bet an investment banker who claims oil will cost an average of $200 per barrel in 2010 (in 2005 dollars), or triple the current price, $5,000 that it will cost less. I don't know anything about the oil business, but I imagine Colby Cosh could tell us just how much oil Alberta, Canada could supply at any given three digit price from its nearly unlimited expanse of oil sands.

How come Tierney finds these suckers and I don't? I tried to bet Michael Barone $1,000 last year that Hispanic turnout would be closer to my estimate of 6.1% of the total vote than his 9% speculation (according to the Census Bureau, it was 6.0%), but Barone prudently shied away.

One point of clarification in Tierney's piece. He writes:

After collecting his winnings [from ecologist Paul Ehrlich], Julian [Simon] expanded his challenge, offering to bet anyone on any other resource price or measure of human welfare. Julian, who died in 1998, never managed to persuade Mr. Ehrlich or other prominent doomsayers to take his bets again.

Actually, Ehrlich offered Simon a detailed 15 issue bet in 1995 that Simon didn't accept before his death a few years later. Ehrlich is kind of a bozo, who became famous mostly because he has this incredibly impressive speaking voice (Johnny Carson had him on the Tonight Show dozens of times). Still, Ehrlich learned a lot from his previous loss, and thus stuck to problems where the market economy doesn't work well at solving problems, such as fish harvests. Beef harvests don't go down because every cow is owned by somebody, but nobody owns the ocean's fish, so they have been badly overfished in a standard tragedy of the commons problem.


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

Why women bloggers have been a bust

Awhile back, the topic du jour was how come so few women bloggers have become hits in the marketplace. It's kind of hard to blame the Old Boys Network, when blogging didn't exist until very recently. I suggested then that one obvious reason is that most women are too concerned about their own lives and those of the people they care about to bother broadcasting their opinions on events of only marginal relationship to themselves to the world.

An even more more impolite corollary to that is that women tend to be more emotional than men, so a disembodied text-only medium that puts a high emphasis on rationality is not one in which women will tend to equal men in performance.

Apparently trying to prove my point about women writers caring more about emotion than reason, Slate.com's legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick has published "John Roberts' Woman Problem," a denunciation of the Supreme Court nominee's scattered witticisms at the expense of feminism and feminist sacred cows like "comparable worth" that have been found in his voluminous memos from the 1980s. In a classic example of why women tend to be lousier at opinion journalism than men, she writes:

"A patently bad defense, however, offered by one of Roberts' staunchest supporters, Prof. Douglas Kmiec, is that most of the proposed policies Roberts disparaged eventually "were largely rejected as unwise by policymakers." So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone. Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum similarly believes that proving these policies were dumb is enough to turn Roberts [into] a sensitive new-age guy. I'm not buying."

Let me repeat that:

" So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone."

I guess it's just the testosterone talking in me, but I'd rather have a Supreme Court justice who was right than one who was wrong but possessed sensitive tone. I like a man who calls dumb ideas dumb.


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

August 22, 2005

Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo"

Message from Charles Murray:

Just a heads up that the September Commentary, mailing imminently, has an article by me entitled "The Inequality Taboo." An annotated web version will go up at www.commentarymagazine.com and www.aei.org by this Friday.

Here's the first 5% of this major essay:

The Inequality Taboo
Charles Murray

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.

The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank.

The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected. It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve’s scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience.

At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience. The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders’ assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.

One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.

Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites.


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

One Cheer for Michael Moore

With "My Big Freezing Penguin Wedding" (a.k.a., "March of the Penguins") now at $49 million in domestic box office and showing virtually no drop-off from week to week, it's time to salute Michael Moore for demonstrating that documentaries could be mass market phenomena. Much like Rush Limbaugh, Moore took a moribund media form and showed it could make big money. All three of Moore's documentaries broke the record for highest grossing box office. (For Moore's less admirable side, see my review of his "Fahrenheit 9/11.")

By the way, the producers of "March of the Penguin" must be blessing their lucky stars that Smell-o-Vision didn't catch on in movie theatres when it was introduced in the Fifties. If you've ever been in the Penguin House at the zoo, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, go see "March of the Penguins." It's terrific.

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

My new VDARE.com column

"Good News: American Media Waking Up To Immigration." Here's an excerpt:

An article by Marc Cooper in the August 12th LA Weekly called Sour Grapes| California’s farm workers’ endless struggle 40 years later shows vividly the impact of an unlimited supply of illegal aliens upon California farm workers. Cooper writes:

"There’s a prevailing popular assumption that superexploitation of the state’s farm workers is a closed chapter in some deep, dark past… But exactly 40 years after Chavez’s UFW exploded into the national consciousness by leading the great 1965 Delano grape workers’ strike and forced America to recognize the plight of those who put our food on the table, nothing could be further from the truth. The golden years of California farm workers lasted barely a decade and then sharply began to fade… Wages among California’s 700,000 farm workers, 96 percent of whom are Mexican or Central American, more than half of whom are undocumented, are at best stagnant, and by most reckonings are in decline.

"With almost all workers stuck at the minimum wage of $6.75 an hour, it’s rare to find a farm worker whose annual income breaks $10,000 a year.’Twenty-five years ago, a worker made 12, 13, 14 cents for a bin of oranges,' says economist Rick Mines, until recently research director at the Davis-based California Institute for Rural Studies. 'Today that same bin pays maybe 15 or 16 cents—in spite of 250 percent inflation.' Virtually no workers have health insurance or paid vacations. The cyclical nature of the crops throws most out of work for two or more months per year."

Why do California growers constantly need to recruit more illegal aliens from south of the border? They aren't putting more land under cultivation. In fact, more of the Central Valley is paved over each year to accommodate the booming population.

The answer is twofold. Because wages are so low, there's little need to mechanize farm work in California. And because the state's farm work jobs are so poorly paid for the brutal conditions (three workers died of heat stroke this summer), nobody makes a career out of it if they can. So, the growers constantly suck in to this country more (and ever less educated) illegal aliens. Cooper notes:

"In a pattern that one academic calls “ethnic replacement,” succeeding waves of ever poorer, more marginal Mexicans, many of them from indigenous communities where Spanish is a foreign language, increasingly constitute the field labor force. The downward-spiraling Mexican economy feverishly churns those waves to the degree that, at any moment, as many as 20 percent of California’s agricultural workers have been in the U.S. for less than a year."

The neocon open border cheerleaders contend that these newcomers will "assimilate" into American culture. Real Soon Now. Yet, these Mixtec-speaking Indians who increasingly make up California's farm workers haven't even assimilated into Hispanic culture in the 484 years since the Spaniards conquered Mexico.

A reader writes:

I remember watching a documentary on PBS ten years or so ago about Cesar Chavez. This woman, I forget who she was, said basically Chavez died of a broken heart. That he saw his life's work unravel before his eyes and lost the will to live.

That's what she said anyway. I don't know what the coroner said.

Another reader writes:

Amazing. That Marc Cooper piece in the LA Weekly that you linked in your VDARE article includes statements near the end such as

"UFW leader Rodriguez also reversed the union’s anachronistic position on immigration [got rid of Chavez's anti-immigration stance]"

and

"And, with some luck, if comprehensive immigration reform now being considered is enacted and significant numbers of agricultural workers are legalized, the balance of forces on the ground might shift. Some observers argue that the UFW’s most significant role at present is, precisely, to continue its lobbying for immigration reform."

Cooper publishes similar nitwittery in The Nation. And since he's on the staff at USC --- so I can probably get his email address --- I've been thinking for awhile of emailing him this basic question: "Why should we permit any immigration at all?"

Do you think he'll grasp the concept?

No.

Lots of people hold views on immigration simply as fashion statements: "I'm a nice person. I'm not a nasty person like those horrible racists." [Like Cesar Chavez?]

Something else I'm struck by is that the coalition of left wing and right wing interests and ideologues who back amnesty and guest workers programs must assume they are putting one over on those idiots who belong to their coalition for the opposite reasons. Cooper favors legalization because he believes that will force the growers to pay more to their workers. The growers favor legalization because they believe it will let them pay even less to their workers. Somebody has got to be wrong here. (Of course, don't rule out the possibility that the interested parties will dream up a "solution" that sticks you and me with the costs.)


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