June 30, 2007

Dennis Dale is on a tear:

You hopefully know Unthethered's Dennis Dale for his Repo Man meets Nabokov memoirs of growing up in LA's suburban wasteland. Having seen the global projection of American military might up close, he's also a political thinker of some power:

One reason why a democracy cannot survive empire, and why empires are increasingly short-lived things, is that citizens of conquered and occupied nations, and cultures, half a world away, thereby become people to whom the leadership of the imperial power is answerable, in one way or another:

“The Americans know everything, they can do everything, they can repair the space shuttle without touching it, why do they let these things happen here in Iraq?” said Abu Muhammad, 55, one of the custodians of the bombed Khalani Mosque.

Good question, and one for which the man has the right to an answer. Mr., or Mrs., (future) President, meet one of your constituents. He has a few problems he'd like to bring to your attention.

He expands upon the philosophy of invade the world, invite the world here at greater length.


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

12-year-old in U.S. Women's Open golf tournament

Alexis Thompson, the 12-year-old who became the youngest girl ever to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open, shot a respectable 76 in Thursday's opening round. She wasn't as good on Friday and will probably not make the cut (qualify for the last two rounds by being in the better half of the entrants) when the second round of the rain-delayed tournament finishes on Saturday. But it's still a pretty amazing showing for somebody who just finished 6th grade (home-schooled).

On the other hand, prodigies are hardly unknown in women's golf. Morgan Pressel qualified as a (somewhat older) 12-year-old in 2001's Women's Open.

John Paul Newport, the WSJ's golf columnist, points out:

Of the 156 competitors in Southern Pines, N.C., 24 are teenagers, and nearly a third are younger than 22. That compares to only five players under 22 in last month's men's U.S. Open. ...

You can call it the Tiger Woods effect for girls, but the difference is that girls tend to mature physically sooner than boys. Many, by their early or mid teens, have attained their full adult stature and close to their full adult strength. They are ready for prime time earlier.

Michelle Wie was arguably better than Tiger at age 14 and 15 -- she three times came within a stroke of making the cut in men's PGA tournaments, which is better than Tiger did at the same age even though he was already recognized as the greatest male prodigy since Bobby Jones -- but she's struggling at age 17. When the estrogen is fully flowing, athleticism often plateaus.

The elite players who make it into events like the U.S. Open often come from blue-chip athletic backgrounds. Both of Morgan Pressel's parents, for instance, were top college athletes and her uncle, Aaron Krickstein, was once the sixth-ranked tennis player in the world. Among the top players in girls amateur golf these days are two of tennis great Ivan Lendl's daughters.

Ms. Thompson, whose oldest brother, Nicholas, ranks second on the Nationwide Tour money list, is home schooled, along with her middle brother, so they can travel as needed to tournaments around the country and practice when they are home in Coral Gables, Fla., on the golf course outside their back door.

There just aren't that many teenage girls who care much about golf, so athletic families with country club memberships have a good shot at winning a full scholarship for their daughters on a college golf team (due to Title IX) if they can get their daughters to concentrate on the game.

But non-elite girls are also showing more interest in golf these days. In a generally stagnant golf market, the only category that has shown any significant growth in the last few years is under-17 females. A magazine called Golfer Girl has just debuted, with features about top young players and golf fashion. The competitive scene for girls in places like Southern California and Florida rivals that for boys.

I've noticed this trend at the local driving range -- there are more pretty girls than at the beginning of the decade.

In SoCal, Asians dominate high school girls golf much more than high school boys' golf. At the 2007 California high school boys' state tournament at Poppy Hills on the Monterey Peninsula, less than 10% of the qualifiers had Asian surnames versus about 30% at the girl's tournament.

On the women's LPGA tour in 2007, 20 of the top 50 moneywinners have Asian names, including 5 Kims and 4 Lees, as opposed to 4 of the top 50 on the PGA men's tour.


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

June 29, 2007

Biden and Obama as Costanza and Seinfeld

Not that there's anything wrong with that! From the Democratic President's debate last night at Howard U. in DC in front of a mostly black audience:

NPR's Michel Martin: "[W]hat is the plan to stop and to protect these young people from this scourge [AIDS]?" ...

Sen. Joe Biden: "I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack got tested for AIDS. There's no shame in being tested for AIDS. It's an important thing." ...

OBAMA: Tavis, Tavis, Tavis, I just got to make clear -- I got tested with Michelle. (Laughter, applause.)

SMILEY: Ah.

OBAMA: In -- when we were in Kenya in Africa. So I don't want any confusion here about what's going on. (Applause continues.)

SMILEY: All right. ...

OBAMA: I was tested with my wife.

SMILEY: And I'm sure Michelle appreciates you clarifying it.

OBAMA: In public. (Laughter.)


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

Rasmussen Poll:

Hopefully, Scott Rasmussen's polling business will get a lot of new business because he was so much more correct about public opinion on immigration than the established polls. Why was he more accurate? Because he thought through the issue so much more logically.

His company released this wrap-up yesterday:

Scott Rasmussen’s first law of politics is that America’s politicians aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. That law was clearly demonstrated earlier today when the United States Senate finally surrendered to the American people on immigration. Politicians may make things messy for a while, but over the long haul it is the American people who determine the nation’s fundamental policies.

The final Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll before the vote found that just 22% of Americans supported the legislation. No amount of Presidential persuasion, Senate logrolling, and procedural tricks was able to overcome that solid bi-partisan lack of public support (although it’s breathtaking to consider how close a determined leadership could come to passing such an unpopular bill).

The real mystery in all of this is why the Senators and their cheerleaders didn’t anticipate the public response. Perhaps they fell in love with their own rhetoric and forgot how it might sound to others.

Near the end of the debate, supporters of the doomed legislation often stated that the status quo is unacceptable. Most Americans would agree on that point. In fact, they might even hold that feeling more strongly than the Grand Bargainers of the Senate--72% of American voters believe it’s Very Important to reduce illegal immigration and enforce the borders. But controlling the border was never a focal point of the Senate debate. Instead, the Senators spent most of the time debating the fine points of various approaches to legalizing those who are here illegally. For voters, those topics were definitely a second-or-third tier aspect of the issue.

Because the Senators and the White House never showed much enthusiasm for reducing illegal immigration, only 16% believed the Senate bill would accomplish that goal. Forty-one percent (41%) thought passage of the legislation would actually lead to more illegal immigration. In other words, even though voters consider the status quo unacceptable, they had every confidence that Congress could make a bad situation worse.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of this basic fact. Outside of 46 Senators, hardly anybody thought the legislation would work. That’s why it was defeated. It wasn’t amnesty or guest-worker programs or paths to citizenship that doomed the bill. Each of those provisions made it more difficult for some segments of the population to accept. However, a majority would have accepted them as part of a true compromise that actually gained control of the border.

In that environment, the only way for political leaders to prove they are serious about enforcing the border and reducing illegal immigration will be to do it. That’s the next logical step in the immigration debate.


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

June 28, 2007

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy

From the Washington Post:

NEWPORT, R.I., June 28 -- He looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached the lectern, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often makes with reporters. And then President Bush did something he almost never does: He admitted defeat.

"A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn't find a common ground," he said an hour after his immigration plan died on Capitol Hill. "It didn't work."

It was, in the end, simply a statement of reality after the Senate buried his proposal to overhaul immigration laws. ..

In March, he told an audience in Guatemala that he had to get an immigration bill to his desk by August to have a chance of success. After that, he reasoned, the congressional budget calendar and the presidential election campaign would make it impossible. But he and Rove remained supremely confident that they would prevail. Just 17 days ago, while in Bulgaria, Bush brushed off pessimism about the legislation. "I'll see you at the bill-signing," he predicted.

By Thursday, his tone had changed. He made no pretense that the immigration initiative might still be revived before he leaves office. Instead, he indicated that he is moving on to other issues. He would probably not admit to being humbled, but he appeared at least chagrined.

At one point during his Iraq speech, Bush pleaded for patience with Iraqis trying to pass reconciliation legislation. "In a democracy," he said, "the head of government just can't decree the outcome."

The audience laughed. Bush smiled wanly and joked: "I'm not saying that's what I'd like to do."

It's just not fair. If only those Guatemalans could vote in American elections already, then poor Mr. Bush wouldn't be so sad. But that nasty Constitution has some technicality in it about only American citizens getting to vote, so the President's fondest dream couldn't come true.

Seriously, let's stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this.


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

It doesn't take a genius

I've been explaining for over a half dozen years that the Bush-Rove immigration offensive was politically nuts for the Republican Party. Of course, I'm not a genius like Karl Rove, but, I do feel in the mood today, June 28, 2007 to get something off my chest:

I told you so.

Thank you. I feel a lot better now.


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

We Win, They Lose (Redux)

Cloture fails to get 60 votes, in fact it fails to get a majority, and loses 46-53

Senator Ted Kennedy showed true class in defeat, saying opponents of his bill were in favor of a "gestapo."

Now all we need, as the Turks say, is three more horseshoes, and a horse

So, who should be punished? How about Senator Lindsey Lohan Graham (R-SC) for demonizing his fellow Republicans as racists? Suggestions, please.


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

Thursday's the day:

From the WaPo:

"The [immigration] legislation faces a make-or-break vote this morning when senators will decide whether to cut off debate and move to a final vote tomorrow. If it does not get the 60 votes necessary, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has said he will pull the bill, all but dashing hopes for any meaningful legislation this year."

The LA Times reported:

But the most ambitious attempt to overhaul immigration laws in two decades suffered a major setback late Wednesday when lawmakers approved an amendment that the bill's backers and the administration said would undermine its effectiveness. The measure targeted the bill's work-site enforcement section, removing all provisions that required so-called "Real ID" driver's licenses — tamper-proof, secure identification that does not yet exist, but that the bill's backers consider essential to cracking down on illegal hiring.


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

June 27, 2007

Do you do voodoo?

Confirming that the 1989 comedy "Major League," with Dennis Haysbert as Pedro Cerrano, the slugger who keeps a Santeria shrine in his locker, was ahead of its time, the LA Times reports:

Religion under wraps
Santeria finds a following among baseball's Latin American players, who'd rather not discuss it for fear of misperceptions.
By Kevin Baxter Times Staff Writer

CHICAGO — On a shelf in the office of Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, mixed in among the family photos, the Roberto Clemente bobblehead and the Napoleon Dynamite figurine, are four small but intimidating religious icons.

"If you see my saints, you'll be like 'Golly, they're ugly,' " Guillen had said before inviting a visitor to come in. "They've got blood. They've got feathers. You go to the Catholic church, the [saints] have got real nice clothes.

"My religion, you see a lot of different things you never see."

Guillen's religion is Santeria, a largely misunderstood Afro-Cuba spiritual tradition that incorporates the worship of orisha — multidimensional beings who represent the forces of nature — with beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people of Africa and elements of Roman Catholicism. And Guillen, born in Venezuela, is one of a growing number of Latin American players, managers and coaches who are followers of the faith.

How many major leaguers have converted to Santeria is impossible to say because most, aware of the stigma the religion has in the United States, refuse to talk about their faith.

"It's like the forbidden fruit," said one player. "It's something personal. It's something you don't talk about."

But among those who have acknowledged their devotion are Angels pitcher Francisco Rodriguez and Florida Marlins third baseman Miguel Cabrera — both Venezuelan — and the White Sox's Cuban-born pitcher Jose Contreras, all of whom have been All-Stars and won World Series rings. Others, such as Cincinnati Reds shortstop Alex Gonzalez and Chicago Cubs infielder Ronny Cedeno, have experimented with it.

With all that spiritual power on his side, you'd think Ozzie Guillen could have gotten a few more walks during his playing career. (Guillen's name has become a by-word for a player who will not take a base-on-balls no matter how much the team needs it.)

Anyway, it's all just part of the vibrant future we Americans have to look forward to.


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

Brothers and IQ, again

Something that's important to keep in mind in all the hoopla over the Norwegian study of conscripts showing a few point higher IQs for oldest brothers, with the New York Times running three articles on the subject over the last week, is that small differences in IQ scores like this can be influenced by methodological issues of specific tests.

Now, big differences in average IQ, such as 15 points (one standard deviation), are test-independent. For decades, the Holy Grail of cognitive test designers has been to invent a test on which blacks and whites would average the same, without losing most real world predictive power. The first psychometrician to accomplish this would be rich and celebrated. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be the equivalent of the perpetual motion machine for engineers and cold fusion for physicists.

But small differences are sensitive to test design trade-offs. For example, the U.S. military's 1979 version of its very heavily g-loaded entrance exam for enlistment applicants, the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, found an anomalously large 18.6 point gap between whites and blacks when it was standardized on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1980 (this is the study that provides much of the new data in The Bell Curve). The average study has found a 16.5 point difference, so this 18.6 point gap was strange because the AFQT is a test the military has spent a fortune developing, and the NLSY sample, with about 13,000 participants including an oversampling of minorities, was the gold standard for a nationally representative data set..

The 1979 AFQT was designed to be highly accurate around IQs of 100. For instance, from 1992-2004, the military took very few applicants with IQs of 90, but would take quite a few 95s.

So, the 1979 AFQT was designed to be extremely thorough for the average person: it was 105 pages long! As Charles Murray pointed out recently, in the 1990s it was finally realized by studying results on a question-by-question basis that the length of the test had a downside that explained the unusually large 18.6 point white-black gap. Low IQ applicants, especially black males, often got discouraged by all the questions they couldn't answer and would give up, either not filling in the rest or bubbling in the rest of the way.

In 1997, the 105 page paper and pencil AFQT was replaced with a computerized test that dynamically changed the test to reflect performance so far. For instance, if you missed a lot of early questions, the computer would serve up easier questions. The white-black gap turned out to be 14.7 points on the 1997 normalization of the computerized AFQT.

Unfortunately, we don't know enough to be able to divvy up this 3.9 point narrowing of the white-black gap from one version of the AFQT to the next between the test methodology change and actual change in the size of the gap.

Somewhat similarly, Half Sigma hypothesizes that the brother result on the Norwegian equivalent of the AFQT is caused by older brothers being more conscientious. Perhaps they study harder in school and thus do better on the parts of the test that are less g-weighted. Or perhaps they just don't give up as easily.

Or this could be a real result.

The point is, however, that it's exactly backward for the media to get all worked up over one study reporting a 3 point difference between demographic groups (older and younger siblings) while ignoring the dozens of studies reporting much larger differences between demographic groups, such as between whites and Hispanics -- especially because the Senate is voting on an immigration bill right now!

The best estimate I've yet seen of Hispanic-American IQs is the 2001 meta-analysis by Roth of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above). It came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the "general factor" in cognitive ability) between "Anglo" whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there's not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.

One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that's a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions.

In contrast, 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals found an overall average white-black gap of 1.10 standard deviations, or 16.5 points. (I typically round this down to 1.0 standard deviation and 15 points). So, the white-Hispanic gap appears to be about 65% as large as the notoriously depressing white-black gap.

So, the white-Hispanic IQ gap is about what you'd guess from observing life around you with your lying eyes: not as big and deleterious as the white-black gap, but not trivial either.

If a 3 point IQ difference between brothers is worth three articles in the New York Times, you might think that an eleven point gap between whites and Hispanics would be worth, oh, say, eleven articles, especially when the immigration bill is up for debate in the Senate. But almost nobody has ever mentioned Roth's finding in the press.

"A Mighty Heart"

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:


Thirty seconds into Angelina Jolie's explanatory voice-over that opens "A Mighty Heart," the critically-acclaimed film about the pregnant wife of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, the dozen corn-rowed young men sitting near me got up, put on their gang-colors jackets, and filed out of the theatre to go find something more entertaining to watch.

Who was right about "A Mighty Heart" -- the Critics or the Crips?

After Angelina Jolie first surfaced playing a lesbian junkie supermodel who dies of AIDS in 1998's "Gia," she stood out from Hollywood's fungible ranks of blonde and bland starlets by being dark and demented. After lurid years of soul-kissing her brother and wearing around her neck a vial of then-husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood, however, Jolie has been trying to recast herself as a globe-trotting humanitarian, a sexy Albert Schweitzer. Not surprisingly, she has brought the same demonic energy she once devoted to playing with knives to adopting orphaned children from different countries, resembling an obsessive Pokemon player who's gotta catch 'em all.


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

June 26, 2007

First cloture vote passes 64-35

This was the cloture vote to consider the Kennedy-Bush-McCain amnesty bill without holding public hearings like a normal piece of legislation would have. Back on May 21, this same cloture vote passed 69-23. Then, the second cloture vote (to limit debate -- i.e., prevent a filibuster) failed 45-60.

So, it's not over yet. But, don't be optimistic. The powers-that-be have all sorts of carrots and sticks to whip Senators in line. The White House and the Senate can hand out or withhold an enormous amount of pork. The press won't tell us about the backroom deals because corruption in the the higher cause of immigration has always been okay with them (as the remarkable lack of publicity about the corruption that undermined the employer sanctions in the "Grand Bargain" of 1986 shows).

So, the crucial second cloture vote, which will come up very shortly while the public's attention has drifted toward getting ready for the Fourth of July weekend, is going to be close and decisive.


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

Graduation season

A reader reflects upon his child's elementary school graduation ceremony:


And the hall was awash with estrogen. **Every one** of the 6 class teachers was female. (Though one was joined at the lectern by a "class assistant"--male, but plainly as gay as a bag of macadamia nuts.) Two of them cried while delivering the encomium to their class. One boasted that there was no horrid competition in her class, only cooperation. Another that she had helped her kids "express themselves ... manage their feelings."

I longed for one of the gruff old bullies who managed my own education to show up and tell the hall how he had kept the class in line with threats, contempt, & a heavy ruler across the palm as necessary, how he'd driven the best kids to excel far above the others, to declare that most of his class were slackers and no-hopers, but that he had done what he could, against formidable odds, to increase the probability that none of us would come upon the town, or be hanged.

If such a one HAD shown up, someone would have called the police.


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

June 25, 2007

New York Times: Race is real

From the 6/26/07 NYT:

Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally
By NICHOLAS WADE

Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes. ...

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.

Variants of two genes involved in hearing have become universal, one in Chinese, the other in Europeans.

The emerging lists of selected human genes may open new insights into the interactions between history and genetics. “If we ask what are the most important evolutionary events of the last 5,000 years, they are cultural, like the spread of agriculture, or extinctions of populations through war or disease,” said Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford. These cultural events are likely to have left deep marks in the human genome.

A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect “serial founder effects,” Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from.

The new scans for selection show so far that the populations on each continent have evolved independently in some ways as they responded to local climates, diseases and, perhaps, behavioral situations.

The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups.

“There are difficulties in where you put boundaries on the globe, but we know now there are enough genetic differences between people from different parts of the world that you can classify people in groups that correspond to popular notions of race,” Dr. Pritchard said.

David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said that the term “race” was scientifically inexact and that he preferred “ancestry.” Genetic tests of ancestry are now so precise, he said, that they can identify not just Europeans but can distinguish between northern and southern Europeans. Ancestry tests are used in trying to identify genes for disease risk by comparing patients with healthy people. People of different races are excluded in such studies. Their genetic differences would obscure the genetic difference between patients and unaffected people. [More]



For almost a decade, I've been pointing out that we know with tautological certainty that extended families exist, extended families of whatever size you wish from the tiny to the vast. And we know with as close to absolute certainty as anything can be in the human empirical world that some big extended families have a certain degree of coherence and endurance because their ancestors were not randomly outbreeding but tended to inbreed so some degree -- if you go back 1,000 years, there are 1 trillion openings in your family tree but there weren't 1 trillion people alive. So a lot of your ancestors did double duty, to say the least. So, nobody is randomly descended from the entire human race. Even if you are Tiger Woods' daughter, you can still divvy up your ancestry into Thai, Swedish, etc.

Now, what you want to call these partly inbred extended families is a subjective semantic issue. "Racial groups" strikes me as the most obvious, but if Dr. Reich wants to call them "ancestral groups," well, swell, that's a useful term too.

The point is that partly inbred extended families exist and they are important.



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

New York Times: IQ is important and fascinating!

NYT readers put a couple of articles on the recent Norwegian study showing a small average advantage in IQ for elder brothers at the top of the Most Emailed articles list for much of last week. So, the Times responded to public interest by publishing a third article on IQ: "Study on I.Q. Prompts Debate on Family Dynamics." And now the new article is the most emailed of the day!

Hey, wait a minute, I thought that IQ was a discredited, obsolete, fraudulent, racist concept yada yada yada ... This reminds me of 2002 when the NYT editorial board thought IQ tests were great when the Supreme Court mandated their use to save low IQ murderers from the death penalty.


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

June 24, 2007

Ted Kennedy's New Iron Law of Wages

An excerpt from my new VDARE.com column "The Axis of Amnesty’s Ideology of Cheap Labor:"

Senator Kennedy is echoing, oddly enough, the fatalistic conventional wisdom of Dickensian England—the doctrinaire assumption that cheap labor is essential, and that the inexorable grinding of the dismal laws of economic science determine wages as immutably as the orbit of Mercury is fixed by Newton's Law of Gravity.

The main difference: while Sen. Kennedy assumes the need for unskilled immigrant workers, the early Victorians were convinced of the necessity of uneducated child laborers.

We don't think of the British as being terribly ideological. But during the second quarter of the 19th Century, their justifiable national pride in developing economics for once overwhelmed the vaunted British common sense. A dogma based on a crude interpretation of the works of Malthus and Ricardo presumed that low wages were crucial to profits, much like the sophomoric economics of today's open borders crowd.

Back then, the ruling class didn't fulminate over plucking chickens but over sweeping chimneys.

Consider the fates of the little boys, from age four on up, who were widely employed by master chimney sweeps to clamber up inside long flues and knock down the soot, at horrific cost to their health. Paul Johnson writes in A History of the English People (p.285), "often they were forced up by the use of long pricks, and by applying wisps of flaming straw to their feet. They suffered from a variety of occupational diseases and many died from suffocation."

The ruling ideology of the age assumed that, as regrettable as this might be, the laws of economics required it.

After all, how else would chimneys ever get swept?

The first bill banning the employment of children under eight from chimney sweeping passed Parliament in 1788. But, like many immigration laws in America today, it was ignored. So was the 1834 act.

Then, the greatest reformer of the Victorian Era, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, began his almost endless crusade to abolish child labor inside chimneys. Like William Wilberforce, the victor over the slave trade, Shaftesbury was a Tory, an evangelical Anglican, and a relentless parliamentarian.

In 1840, Shaftesbury carried a bill to regulate child chimney sweeps over “ resistance that can only be called fanatical", in Johnson's words.

It also was not enforced.

Three more of Shaftesbury's bills failed in Parliament in the 1850s. He succeeded in 1864, but the legislation proved ineffective "due to a general conspiracy of local authorities, magistrates, police, judges, juries, and the public to frustrate the law. Boys continued to die…" including a seven-year-old who suffocated in a flue in 1873.

Shaftesbury finally succeeded in passing effective legislation in 1875.

And, of course, that winter everyone in Britain froze to death due to clogged chimneys.

Oh, wait … sorry, that was in Bizarro Britain, where the reigning interpretations of economics actually applied. Rather like in Senator Kennedy's Abnormal America, where nobody will be able to afford to eat chicken without the Liberal Lion’s amnesty and guest worker programs.

In the real Britain, however, the master chimney sweeps quickly found other ways to clean chimneys. [More]


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

June 22, 2007

Immigration bill update

First cloture vote likely Friday evening: This is the one to consider the immigration bill without holding hearings, while the second would be to shut off debate / amendments / filibuster. The Axis of Amnesty needs 60 votes to get past the cloture votes, but no more than 50 to win the final vote, so cloture is it.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Update: The Senate instead decided to go home for a four day weekend, with the first cloture vote rescheduled for Tuesday. I imagine that means they need to do more arm-twisting to shove it through, which I'm sure they are quite capable of doing without a public outcry.


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

Birth order is back

Lots of people are excited by the Norwegian study showing 2 or 3 point higher IQs for first-born than latter-born sons in the Norwegian army conscription test.

According to the paper "Explaining the Relation Between Birth Order and Intelligence" by Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal, the first scientist to notice the higher-level of accomplishment among first-born sons was ... you guessed it, Sir Francis Galton.

The Norwegians have a huge sample size to work with, so their result sounds pretty reliable (although the effect isn't that big, so it might not be generalizable to other countries). They appear to be comparing brothers to brothers within families, so that eliminates hereditary average genetic differences (assuming they are only looking at full, not half, brothers).

They also try to answer the Why question: is it because of social effects (e.g., first-borns get more alone time with Mom and Dad) or because of those obscure gestational effects such as the development of male hormone antibodies. So, they look at conscripts whose older brothers died as infants and find their IQs are almost as high as first-borns, arguing against the gestational wear and tear on mom argument.

I suspect there is a subtle problem with this that reduces the confidence level, besides the much smaller sample size. For the primary How Much question, they should be able to compare living brothers' IQ scores directly to each other. For the secondary Why question, however, they can't compare a younger brother's IQ scores to those of his older brother who died in infancy. They have to estimate what the dead brother's IQ would be based on various demographic factors. And that adds another level of uncertainty to their secondary finding that social factors are more important than biological ones.

Anyway, birth order is an interesting topic. It's kind of odd how it has been out of fashion to talk about it for some years, even though it doesn't seem to be all that politically incorrect. Here is my 1996 review for National Review of the last major book on the subject, Frank Sulloway's Born to Rebel.


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

June 21, 2007

Not related. Do you hear me? Not related!

From Fox News:

Police, Officials Insist Attacks on Drivers Not Related to Juneteenth Celebrations

Police and organizers of Juneteenth events in two cities are insisting that attacks against drivers — one of which left an Austin, Texas, man dead — have nothing to do with the crowds attending the celebrations.

On Tuesday, 40-year-old Austin resident David Rivas Morales was beaten to death in an attack near a Juneteenth celebration after the driver of the car he was riding in struck and injured a little girl.

In Milwaukee, police responded in riot gear to disperse the crowd at that city's celebration on Tuesday after a man was pulled from a car and beaten and an officer was injured trying to break up a fight.

"It doesn't seem to be a hate crime. It really seems to be a spontaneous act resulting from that collision with that child," said Austin Police Department Commander Harold Piatt. "We don't know if there were any words exchanged between the driver and the men to start with that escalated this to the assault."

"You just had a group of individuals that decided that they wanted to do something entirely different," said McArthur Weddle, president of Milwaukee's Juneteenth Day. "It's just sad that you have a few fools that got out of hand."

Video from a local news chopper, however, showed dozens of people immediately moving from the event to an attack on a car that left a 33-year-old man beaten.

[More]

To decode this lengthy article, which doesn't mention the words "black" or "African-American," you need to know that "Juneteenth" is a black pride celebration of June 19th, 1865 when the victorious Union Army declared Emancipation in Texas.


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

Birth order and IQ

A large Norwegian study finds a small effect.


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

Mayor Bloomberg for President?

Over on the VDARE.com blog, I try to help him out by suggesting a TV commercial he could run:

“This Message Paid For By Billionaire Golfers For Open Borders”


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

Diversity-speak as "happy talk"

A U. of Minnesota press release:


U of M study finds that Americans couch feelings about race in the 'happy talk' of diversity-speak

According to a new study by researchers in the University of Minnesota's sociology department, Americans are generally positive -- even optimistic -- about the word 'diversity,' but when asked, even those working in the field of race relations have trouble describing diversity's value and stumble when giving real life examples.

The desire to appear color-blind leads most Americans to prefer the standardized language of diversity-speak when addressing issues of race, rather than the other way around. The researchers conclude that American diversity-speak is a sort of 'happy talk,' an upbeat language in which everyone has a place, everyone is welcome and even celebrated.

The study takes its conclusions from a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households across the country and nearly 150 hour-long interviews with adults from a wide range of backgrounds living in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The study found a majority of Americans -- cutting across race, class and gender lines -- value diversity, but their upbeat responses to the term contradict tensions between individual values and fears that cultural disunity could threaten the stability of American society. Also regardless of race, Americans' definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.

"The public debates and talk-show lamentations about immigration and political correctness leave many Americans to assume there's a big divide in the country between those who value diversity and those who reject it," said Doug Hartmann, associate sociology professor, who coauthored the study with graduate student Joyce Bell. "The fact is, most Americans value diversity - but they see it as a benefit with the potential cost of cultural disunity and social instability."

The study also found that most Americans use platitudes when describing diversity. "The topic of race lies outside the realm of polite conversation," said Bell. "Everyone in the study -- regardless of race, political affiliation and even level of rhetorical ability -- had real trouble talking about the inequities and injustices that typically accompany diversity in the United States."

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of American Sociological Review and is part of the sociology department's American Mosaic Project, an ongoing project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the contemporary United States.


Judging from how audiences laugh like mad at stand-up comedians who eschew diversity happy talk, everybody knows this is just hypocritical cant. Now, hypocrisy can be a useful social lubricant. When somebody asks you "How are you?" they want to hear you say "Fine, and you?" not "I don't know what's acting up more, my prostate or my hemorrhoids."

In the past, typically, happy talk was the style of the insecure middle of the social scale. Those who wished to be seen as above status concerns espoused frankness. In the 1920s, for example, H.L. Mencken made himself hugely popular with the cultural elite by waging erudite war on middle America's addiction to hypocritical happy talk. Sir Richard Burton was knighted by Queen Victoria three years after he translated the Kama Sutra.

A really odd thing about American culture today, however, is that as you go up the educational and social ladder, the more sanctimoniously hypocritical they tend to be about enforcing the code of diversity happy talk. It's quite curious.


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

Where are the famous old gay baseball players?

One of those dog-that-didn't-bark questions is why, despite the vast number of books written about baseball players, I have never heard of a single prominent player in history who sounded like he probably was homosexual. There are currently 750 major league baseball players. There must have been at least 10,000 major league ballplayers over the last 130 years

Two really obscure players -- Glenn Burke (who died of AIDS in 1995) and Billy Bean (not the celebrated "Moneyball" general manager of Oakland -- that's Billy Beane) -- came out of the closest, but that's it for admitted homosexuals in the history of big league baseball. (In contrast, AIDS claimed the lives of numerous male figure skaters).

But what about famous players? Maybe 1,000 ballplayers in history would be more or less "famous" and thus would be subject to constant reminiscences and research.

The only rumor I've heard about about a prominent player of the past being gay reflected desperation more than evidence. A New York gossip columnist claimed Sandy Koufax was gay, which would be a surprise to his live-in girlfriend (who is First Lady Laura Bush's old college roommate), his two ex-wives, and his neighbors in all the small, conservative rural towns the Jewish, Brooklyn-bred Koufax has chosen to live in in Idaho, Maine, North Carolina, and Oregon since he retired from the LA Dodgers in 1966. Koufax denounced the rumor, then had to put up with a lot of tsk-tsking about how backward baseball players are not to come out of the closet.

What about famous players who displayed traits that correlate to some degree with homosexuality? There aren't many.

For example, I looked up the life story of Earl Averill, one of the lesser Hall of Famers, who played centerfield for the 1930s Cleveland Indians. Why? Because he hadn't played baseball professionally until he was 24. Instead, among other jobs, he'd worked as a florist, a job with an above-average concentration of gay men. Maybe flower-arranging was his true passion and hitting a ball with a stick was just something he did to make money?

But, it appears that he'd been a florist mostly because he'd married young and he needed a sure paycheck. He and his wife were married for half a century and after he retired together they long ran the Earl Averill Motel in his hometown of Snohomish, Washington. His son Earl Jr. played in the majors, too. I can say with a high degree of certainty that Earl Averill wasn't gay.

Now, you are probably saying, "Okay, but what do we really know about individual ballplayers of long ago?" Actually, we know quite a lot. At least since Jim Bouton's 1971 bestseller Ball Four, there's been a big market for tell-all baseball books. Reporters constantly interview cranky old retired baseball players, who often love to gossip maliciously about their contemporaries.

Compare baseball to a more obscure sport, tennis.

In contrast, we know that the greatest tennis player of the 1920s, Bill Tilden, was a homosexual pedophile. He was arrested twice in the 1940s for corrupting minors and served a prison term, so it was in all the papers at the time. He is a minor character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita, where Bill Tilden is called "Ned Litam:"


"I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer, with a harem of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power made me recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert!"

Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated's top writer, wrote a frank biography of Tilden back in 1976 precisely because, as he wrote in SI at the time, so few famous male athletes are gay.

Also, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, the leading German tennis player of the 1930s, who played a famous match against American Don Budge in the 1937 Davis Cup, was so publicly flaming in manner that Hitler couldn't make up his mind whether to promote the tall blond von Cramm as the perfect Aryan hero or arrest him for his affair with a Jewish male actor.

I'm not saying there have not been any famous gay baseball players, but I am estimating that less than 1.0% of the top 1000 players of the past were homosexual.

Update: Commenters suggest a fairly prominent name in baseball history who sounds plausible, so if you are interested, check the comments.

June 20, 2007

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg leaves GOP, perhaps preparation for 3rd Party White House run?

Can somebody explain to me why this guy is still a billionaire? I used to read many years ago about his business of renting computer terminals for the same price for which you could buy equivalent generic hardware outright. The big selling point (or renting point) of this 1970s-sounding business model was that was the only way you could get Bloomberg's proprietary content. I figured his business might last a couple of years longer than all the comparable ones out there before being wiped out by open standards approaches because his market was Wall Street traders, who have more money than God, so they weren't in a hurry to give up a system they were familiar with just to save their employers $10,000 each per year or so. But, I gather, he's not only still in business, he's still raking in the billions. What's the deal?


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

"Sicko"

Anybody know how I can see the new Michael Moore health care documentary by this weekend (without being in NYC, where it's playing in one theatre)?

Here's my 2004 AmCon review of his "Fahrenheit 9/11."


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

"Why the elite press won’t think seriously about immigration"

My American Conservative article is now up:


La Raza’s Lapdogs
By Steve Sailer
Straight talk about immigration: another job Americans won’t do.


Here are some more excerpts:


1. An aversion to working with numbers is common among intellectuals and media types. For instance, it’s of some relevance to crafting immigration policy to know that 5 billion people live in countries with lower average per capita GDPs than Mexico. About a fifth of the 135 million people in the world of Mexican descent now reside in America, and another 40 million Mexicans tell pollsters they’d like to immigrate here. That suggests that if the Wall Street Journal editorial board had its way, and there were a constitutional amendment declaring, “There shall be open borders,” at least a billion foreigners would try to move here. At a minimum, this quick estimate suggests that the WSJ’s immigration views are mad. Yet these numbers are not at all well-known because few in public life have bothered to do the simple calculations required.

2. Views on illegal immigration may be the surest status symbol. A blithe attitude toward illegal immigration conveys your self-confidence that you don’t have to worry about competition from Latin American peasants and that you can afford to insulate your children from their children. Moreover, your desire to keep down the wages of nannies, housekeepers, and pool boys by importing more cheap labor advertises that you are a member of the servant-employing upper-middle class.

3. While libertarians enjoy displaying their feelings of economic superiority— their Randian confidence that they can claw their way to the top of the heap no matter how overcrowded it gets—liberals feel that laxity on illegal immigration shows off their moral superiority. Celebrating diversity has been promoted for a generation now as the highest imaginable ethical value, so the ambitious compete to be seen espousing most fervently the reigning civic religion and damning most loudly any heretics who dare to speak up. [More]


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

Tamar Jacoby's late ex-husband / heroin junkie / neocon extraordinaire

A reader points out that Tamar Jacoby, the leading spokesperson for the Cheap Labor lobby, married the legendary Eric Breindel in 1988, although the marriage famously didn't last long. (Here's the NYT's article "Miss Jacoby Is Affianced" and here's the wedding notice.)

Due to his personal magnetism, energy, and ambition, Breindel is an extremely important figure in the development of the neocon stranglehold on public debate in America, even though he's little known today outside of the NYC-DC axis. His funeral after his death in 1998 at age 42 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma was attended by all the Great and Good of the New York media and political elites of all political persuasions.

A 1998 New York magazine article called "The Connection Man" by Craig Horowitz explains:


'As a writer, Breindel was unexceptional, producing mostly the joyless prose of an ideologue. And as an ideologue, he was more effective working the back channels than he was at publicly taking issues and ideas into new territory. But Breindel understood power in a way few people do. He recognized early in his life that personality is more important than ideology. It's all about proximity and access. If you have someone's ear, you can make things happen."


Breindel, among much else, was crucial to the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor of NYC in 1993 by persuading Rupert Murdoch to have the New York Post back Rudy in its attack-dog style rather than the Conservative Party candidate.


Despite his soaring New York success, however, the last thing Breindel would have expected -- given his unmistakable early promise -- was that he'd have to settle for a career as an editorial writer for a tabloid newspaper. The defining moment of his life, the episode that gives his story its tragic-heroic arc, occurred when he was 27. In the early months of 1983, after receiving a high-level security clearance from the FBI, Breindel went to work as Senator Moynihan's aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee. For someone interested in a career in government, it was a dream job. But on May 16, only eight weeks after he started, Breindel was arrested in the parking lot of a Washington, D.C., motel for buying five bags of heroin from an undercover cop. Two and a half grams for $150. The arrest report said he had tracks on his arms. He was a junkie.

It was, of course, a big story at the time. The coverage portrayed him as a "golden youth" -- Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard Law School graduate, doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics -- who had squandered his promise.


As Moynihan was vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Breindel had a heavyweight security clearance, so the revelation that he was consorting with heroin dealers was a much bigger deal than if he was an aide to the vice-chairman of Ways & Means. Breindel's Harvard roommate was Bobby Kennedy's son David, another druggie.


Breindel's life was the sum of his obsessions, and chief among them -- quite naturally, given his background [as the son of wealthy Holocaust survivors] -- was the fate of the Jews. It was the locus from which all of his other political positions flowed. He believed that most of the world's evil took place under totalitarian regimes, and from this came his obsession with communism. ...

But there was also an upside, a positive view provided by this prism through which he saw the world: his lack of cynicism about America. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was the child of immigrants. America was the country that saved his parents. "In a strange way, he was a throwback," says the Observer's Peter Kaplan. "In his politics, in the quality of his thought, in the intensity of his passions and his delight in America. It was our parents' experience, not ours. We were dulled by the success of America and everything that came along with it. But he was experiencing this country the way people who are now in their seventies did 40 or 50 years ago." ...

When Breindel got to Harvard, his obsessions served him well. They were the foundation on which he built what would turn out to be the seminal relationships of his adult life -- those with Moynihan, Peretz, and Podhoretz.


After his arrest shattered his ambitions for high government office,


He continued to write the occasional piece, and he asked his friend Christopher Buckley to make contact for him at the New York Times. He'd written a piece about Whittaker Chambers that he wanted to get placed on the op-ed page.


Buckley hooked Breindel up with Tamar Jacoby, who was then the deputy editor of the Times's op-ed page. "As soon as we met, we knew there was something there," says Jacoby, whose most recent book is Someone Else's House, a look at race and the struggle to achieve integration in America. "He was smart, he was funny, and he cared about the same things I cared about. I knew he'd been through a lot, but that often makes someone stronger and more interesting. I fell in love with him, and his problems certainly didn't get in the way." ...


With her help, and recommendations from Podhoretz, Peretz, and Moynihan, Breindel landed a job writing for the editorial page of the New York Daily News...

Breindel and Jacoby decided to marry at the beginning of 1988, four years into their relationship. The wedding was at the Harvard Club, and the guest list was, of course, eye-opening. "We both knew a lot of people, and we took some mischievous pleasure in Elliot Abrams having to shake hands with Anthony Lewis and Norman Podhoretz having to shake hands with Bob Silvers," Jacoby says, laughing at the memory. "Eric and I joked about having to have different rooms to accommodate the various ideologies."

The relationship, which had always been combative, deteriorated not long after the wedding, and their split yielded one of the most often told and heavily embellished breakup stories in the history of New York's chattering class. The tale begins when Breindel and Jacoby embark on a two-week trip to Europe with Breindel's parents to visit the concentration camps. ... They were, in fact, in Europe with his parents when they decided to split up. They were in Hungary, not Poland, and she had always planned to stay on in Europe -- without Breindel -- to visit her sister in London. When she got home, the apartment was not empty, and Breindel was staying with his parents. Jacoby was, according to people who know her, extremely bitter and angry after their split. Still, the funeral was difficult for her. "When I married Eric, I had all kinds of expectations and hopes about life. I'm a different person now, but at the funeral I spent a lot of time thinking about those two people."

Even without the apocryphal rendering of the breakup, the cynical view is that Breindel chose women the same way he chose his friends -- based on who could help him the most. Tamar Jacoby was the right woman for him at the right time, and when times changed, he found Lally Weymouth, [Washington Post owner] Katharine Graham's daughter, far more useful.


A general lesson for our era is that cyberspace is far overrated as a way to influence events compared to personal contacts and behind the scenes machinations.


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

Speak of the Devil

The day after I accused sainted baseball statistics maven Bill James of intentionally ignoring the steroids outbreak of the 1990s in his 1,000 page 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, the WSJ interviews James in his Fenway Park office (he's been a paid insider since 2002):


His theory on baseball and steroids may or may not be odd, but it is certainly not in vogue. "I don't know," he says, when asked if steroids account for the surge in home runs in the late 1990s. "Speaking globally . . . the reality is that there are many changes in the game which could cause batting numbers to jump. And no one really knows to what extent the increase is a consequence of steroids. I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public." Other factors include ballpark dimensions and bat design. "I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago," Mr. James says, with different woods and finishes. "[Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's," he notes.


He's being disingenuous. Of course lots of factors contributed to the home run surge, including all the recent retro-design parks that are built like old hitters parks such as Ebbetts Field. And everybody took up weightlifting, which is perfectly admirable as long as they don't use performance-enhancing drugs. (Honus Wagner was the greatest player of the first decade of the 20th Century because he was just about the only player of his era to lift weights.)

But we now know that many of the historic seasons of the the last two decades were drug-tainted, starting with Jose Canseco's 1988, when he became the first player to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases, and including the late Ken Caminiti's MVP surge in the second half of 1996, McGwire's (and likely Sosa's) famous 1998 homer binge, Jason Giambi's monster MVP season in 2000, and Barry Bonds' surrealistic seasons in this decade. (Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on steroids.)

This wasn't a surprise. Thomas Boswell accused Canseco in a Washington Post column in October 1988 of taking steroids. A baseball agent told me in the early 1990s that Canseco was the "Typhoid Mary of steroids."

How can we be sure if any recent MVPs and Cy Young award winners were clean? Okay, skinny guys like Ichiro Suzuki and Jack McDowell, sure, and unimposing guys like Greg Maddux, and guys who didn't lift weights, like Ken Griffey Jr.. But for lots of the other guys, who knows?

James had to know that, say, Barry Bonds suddenly having in 2001 the greatest season (according to James' own Win Shares metric) since Babe Ruth his .393 in 1923 was ridiculous, new bat or not. But, making a stink about steroids wouldn't have done James' chances of getting hired by a big league team like the Red Sox much good.

I suspect that James was able to kid himself that using steroids was just like pitchers (such as Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry) throwing the spitball (which had been outlawed in 1920, a couple of decades before Perry's birth). Everybody knew Perry was throwing the spitter, but the baseball ethos is the opposite of golf, where players call penalties on themselves. In baseball, it's the umpires' job, not yours, to catch you cheating.

But steroids aren't spitballs. They have serious side effects on the players' health, and on their mood, which affects people around them. When, say, the Canseco twins beat up people in a nightclub in the throes of 'roid rage, that's not at all like the spitter.

By the way, I discovered in James' Historical Abstract a new explanation for Stephen Jay Gould's famous observation that in the early decades of baseball there was more disparity between the best players and the average player (although there have been a lot of super-spectacular seasons since 1993). Gould, being an intellectual, attributed it to intellectual disparities -- Wagner, Cobb, Ruth, etc. knew how to do things that other players didn't yet know how to do.

There's some truth to that. Ruth, for example, taught himself how to take a huge uppercut swing to hit home runs, which gave him a big lead over the rest of the league. Cobb pointed out that Ruth was allowed to get away with this because he was a pitcher -- if he'd been a hitter, his manager would have forced him to swing level to hit line drives like everybody else. But nobody cared what a pitcher did when fooling around in batting practice.

A few years earlier during the heart of the dead ball era, right-handed slugger Gavvy Cravath figured out how to hit opposite field home runs over the short right field fence in Philadelphia, hitting a record 62 in three seasons. Almost everybody knows how to hit opposite field homers today, but Cravath's breakthrough wasn't followed up on for decades.

Another reason for the disparity is that until Branch Rickey built the farm system, the proportion of the top players in the major leagues wasn't as high so the quality of the average player was lower. Cravath spent two of his peak years in the minors. Lefty Grove, maybe the greatest pitcher ever, spent five years playing for an independent minor league team in Baltimore. West Coast athletes often spent years in the Pacific Coast League -- for example, Joe DiMaggio spent three seasons from age 19-21 with his hometown San Francisco Seals when he was no doubt perfectly ready for the majors, as Ken Griffey Jr. was at the same age. But the Seals were an independent team, not a farm team, and thus didn't sell DiMaggio until they got a fair price.

But, a new reason I hadn't thought about before was that in the old days only superstars could afford to devote their offseasons to staying in shape (or just relaxing and getting recharged for the coming season). The average player had to get a job. When Ruth had a lousy 1925 season at age 30 due to hedonism, many observers assumed he was washed up. Instead, he hired a personal trainer and spent his winters tossing medicine balls around in a gym (or whatever it was they did back then for exercise). He came back to enjoy nine more spectacular seasons, including hitting 60 homers in 1927. If you spent October through February working in a mill or lifting crates on a loading dock, it was hard to compete in the summer with a superstar.


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

Good title, good article

In New York:

The Science of Gaydar
If sexual orientation is biological, are the traits that make people seem gay innate, too? The new research on everything from voice pitch to hair whorl.
By David France

My 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which lists three dozen traits where statistical differences among the sexual orientations are found, appears to have held up well over the years.


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

June 19, 2007

Abortion and wantedness

In the WSJ:

It's Not Enough to Be 'Wanted'
Illegitimacy has risen despite--indeed, because of--legal abortion.
BY JOHN R. LOTT JR.

And here's a graph I made up a few years ago during the Freakonomics controversy. Hard to see much evidence that legalizing abortion increased the "wantedness" of babies like Steven D. Levitt claims these days, now that he figured out he'd get in trouble if he mentioned that he originally attributed 39% of his theorized crime-fighting effect to the much higher abortion rate seen among blacks.


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