To all the people flabbergasted by Obama's non-postracial Supreme Court pick

You should buy my book. Then you won't be stunned the next time.

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

Logical priority

As I mentioned, Tyler Cowen of Marginal Review spent some time recently tap dancing around his reader's impassioned question: "Why is Steve Sailer wrong?"

However, wouldn't the more fundamental question be:

"Is Steve Sailer wrong?"

In other words, the reader was asking not for objectivity but for rationalization to quell his Doubts. I suspect Tyler's answer (basically, it's all very complicated, and, besides, Steve Sailer is a bad person) and the pummeling Cowen took in his own Comments section by much better informed people won't serve to drive too many Doubts away.

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

Andrew Gelman on the Hispanic vote in 2008

Voting data wizard Andrew Gelman has a very good post up: "Where does the Hispanic vote really matter?" reviewing the 2008 election. His conclusion: not too many places.

I said much the same things immediately after the 2000 and 2004 election. Hispanics are not a crucial "swing" vote. They're more of a "flow" vote in that they tend to go with the flow of their white neighbors, just consistently farther to the left. (For example, the high point for the GOP in share of Hispanic vote in House elections was Newt Gingrich's 1994.)

We hear much obsessing over the Hispanic vote, but some of that was a smoke screen made up by Karl Rove. Rove's two big successes -- 2002 and 2004 -- stemmed from mobilizing heavy turnout among white voters and winning a high share of whites. But you aren't supposed to talk about appealing to whites, so Rove did a lot of hand-waving about how Republicans were going to win via Hispanics, and a lot of innumerate journalists bought it.

McCain, the chief Republican spokesman for amnesty in 2006, did poorly in motivating whites to show up and vote, and did mediocre in attracting whites votes, so he lost. Having an economic crash right before the election and the pointlessness of his own campaign other than as a celebration of his vanity no doubt doomed him anyway, but one obvious lesson is that being a famous amnesty enthusiast is a net loser for a Republican candidate -- it doesn't motivate Hispanics (who aren't very excited about making illegal immigration easier, and the ones who are are going to vote Democratic anyway) and it depresses non-Hispanic whites.

In the long run, of course, due to immigration and affirmative action, it's hard to see any successful GOP strategy other than a national version of their success in the South, which is based on carrying 75 percent of the white vote. I think the country would be better off with a competitive two party system in which whites were widely distributed among the two parties, but in the long run, that's unlikely to happen due to immigration. We'll either end up with a competitive system with most whites in one party, or we'll end up with non-competitive, corrupt one-party dominance by the Democrats on the model of the Chicago Machine writ large.

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

"Why Steve Sailer is wrong"

One of the odd side effects of the Ricci case is that it continues to inspire a lot of watery commentary about me.

For example, Tyler Cowen blogs on Marginal Revolution:

"Why Steve Sailer is wrong"

That's a request I received and probably the reader is referring to IQ and race.Let me first say that I am not the Steve Sailer oracle. On such a sensitive matter I don't wish to misrepresent anyone, so I'll simply tell you what I think of the issues, without suggesting that he or anyone else necessarily disagrees.

In other words, this post is going to be about a straw man.

If anybody is actually interested in what I have had to say about IQ and race, well, in 2007 I published FAQs on IQ and race.

There is a belief that progress in genetics will resurrect old, now-unpopular claims about race and IQ, namely that some races are intrinsically inferior in terms of IQ. I very much expect that we will instead learn more about the importance of the individual genome and that variations within "groups" (whether defined in terms of race or not) are where the traction lies. So I don't expect "old style eugenics views" to make a comeback as applied to race, quite the contrary. On that point, here is more.

I also think that IQ will be shown to be more multi-dimensional than we now think. If you wish to understand the role of IQ in human affairs, you would do better to study autism and ADHD than race (by the way, I discuss the importance of neurodiversity in much greater detail in my forthcoming book Create Your Own Economy.)

You may know that some nations -- basically the wealthy ones -- have higher IQs than the poor nations. But IQ is endogenous to environment, as evidenced by the Flynn Effect, namely the general rise in IQ scores with each generation. It is sometimes noted that some racial IQ gaps are not closing but I find it more significant that scores can continue to rise. For instance it is quite possible that groups with higher measured IQs simply have been on an "improvement track" for a longer period of time. More generally I think we should consider the Flynn Effect a bit of a mystery and that suggests an overall tone of caution on these issues rather than polemicism.

Most importantly, there is a critical distinction between hypocritical discourse on race and racism itself. Hypocritical discourse on race is harmful and often Sailer does a very good job skewering it. But racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today. It is fine if a given individual, for reasons of division of labor, spends his or her time attacking hypocritical discourse about race rather than attacking racism itself. (For instance we shouldn't all focus on condemning Hitler and Stalin, simply because they were among the most evil men; there are other battles to fight.) But I still wish that specified individual to ardently believe that racism is the far greater problem. Insofar as that individual holds such a belief about racism, I am much happier than if not.

The comments section is for discussion of the issues in a mature way; if you want to attack any particular individual, that is for elsewhere.

Addendum: If you are looking for another perspective, here is William Saletan on Steve Sailer.

Ho-hum.

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

Slate: Well, actually, it isn't a mystery why Sotomayor voted against Ricci

Yesterday's Slate article on Sonia Sotomayor and the Ricci case was so clueless that Slate is back today with a better informed article on the case by a Stanford law prof:

Bad Test
Sonia Sotomayor rejected the New Haven firefighters' claim because it threatened to burn down civil rights law.
By Richard Thompson Ford

New Haven's decision may sound like blatant racial favoritism, but in fact the city rejected the firefighter exam because the test violated Title VII, the federal civil rights law that prevents discrimination in employment. Title VII requires employers to consider the racial impact of their hiring and promotion procedures in order to prevent discrimination that's inadvertent as well as intentional. Ricci's claim is that the city's effort to comply with Title VII is itself race discrimination (under the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution and under Title VII itself).

This argument would undermine an important part of modern civil rights law. Some of Sotomayor's critics argue that, in the era of Obama, we no longer need such proactive policies to promote racial equality. But racism isn't a thing of the past yet. In fact, we haven't corrected the lingering effects of racism that is in the past. It's precisely because overt racism is no longer the main impediment to racial equality that the law against inadvertent discrimination is arguably now the most important part of civil rights law.

Well, that's one way of putting it.

Another way of putting it is that there isn't much actual discrimination going on anymore. What there is a lot of these days, however, is below average performance by non-Asian minorities.

There are two ways an employer can discriminate according to Title VII. He can intentionally discriminate by making race a factor in employment decisions—choosing a black candidate over a white candidate because he is black. Frank Ricci claims the city intentionally discriminated when it threw out the exam results because most of the people who scored high were white. An employer can also discriminate by using a selection process that has a disparate impact—in other words, that screens out a particular group for no good reason.

Yes, but what if there is disparate impact for a good reason that is unmentionable: that blacks, on average, aren't as smart as whites? We are supposed to constantly act as if the racial gaps seen on the New Haven firefighters' written test were surprising when they are exactly the same as those seen on, say, graduate and professional school exams. As I wrote in VDARE.com:

On the Lieutenants’ exam, the mean black score would have fallen at the 20th percentile among whites. (Hispanics scored the same as blacks). On the harder Captain’s exam, the mean black score fell at the 10th percentile for whites, while the average Hispanic scored at the 18th percentile. (You can see the individual test results at Adversity.net.)

And, as I wrote on VDARE.com earlier, on the five major grad and professional school tests (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and DCAT), blacks score at the 10th to 18th percentile of white scores.

New Haven claims that the test it tossed out had a disparate impact. Eight black, 25 white, and eight Hispanic firefighters took New Haven's test for promotion to captain; three black, 16 white, and three Hispanic candidates passed. Nineteen black, 43 white, and 15 Hispanic firefighters took the test to become lieutenant; six black, 25 white, and three Hispanic candidates passed. This result counts as discriminatory under the rules of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I.e., the EEOC's (should-be, but isn't) notorious Four-Fifths Rule. If the highest scoring group passes at, say, a 50% rate, then the lowest scoring group better pass at a 40% or higher rate or the federal government will want to know the reason why? Since there is a one standard deviation difference on average in cognitive ability, only about one-third of blacks score above the white median, not four-fifths. The Four-Fifths Rule assumes the average black IQ is about 96 (when the average white's IQ is assumed to be 100), when it's more like 85.

By the way, have you noticed how ignorant the Four-Fifths rule is simply in terms of simple statistical numeracy? Personnel selection differences should be measured in standard deviations, not in percentages. Using a simple-minded fraction like Four-Fifths invites catastrophic game-playing. For example, the city of Chicago has recently gotten around the Four-Fifths Rule by setting the pass rate so low that 85% of applicants passed the fireman's entrance exam and policeman's promotion exams. This allows the pass rate for blacks to be Four-Fifths of the white rate, but it means that really stupid whites and blacks get important jobs.

We'd get better firemen and policemen with outright quotas.

New Haven was right to worry about the possibility of a lawsuit from black firefighters if it accepted the results of the tests.

The city was also in a bind because its agreement with the firefighters union required that the [written] exam count for 60 percent of the decision about whether to promote each candidate and because a city charter rule required that every promotion go to one of the three top-scoring candidates.

In other words, collective bargaining agreements and Civil Service laws designed to prevent politicians from rigging the test are such a nuisance when the goal is to rig the test.

These rules magnified the disparate racial impact of the exam—no black candidate and only one Hispanic candidate was eligible for promotion, even though several of them passed the test. More reason for the city to worry about a lawsuit by the African-Americans who were to be passed over. ...

But, properly applied, disparate impact law doesn't excuse poor performance, nor does it require quotas. Instead it smokes out hidden bigotry and requires employers to avoid unnecessary segregation of the work force. Suppose an employer wants to keep women out. Knowing that he can't just put a "women need not apply" sign in his window, he might use a proxy, such as a weightlifting test, knowing that women on average have less upper body strength than men.

In other words, the law says that we should be suspicious of any fire department that looks for upper body strength in firemen, and we should force each and every fire department in America to prove, over and over, that being weak is a genuine detriment in fire fighting.

The law against disparate impact discrimination is designed to reveal such hidden bias. Now, suppose an employer has no desire to discriminate against women but uses a weightlifting test simply because he thinks, all other things equal, stronger employees are better than weaker ones. Disparate impact law also prohibits this: It requires the employer to reconsider job qualifications that favor one race or sex, unjustifiably.

Of course, there might be a good reason to prefer people who are physically stronger—or who score higher on a written exam. The law gives employers a chance to prove that the discriminatory criteria are job-related. The idea, then, isn't to make an employer hire less qualified women or minorities over more qualified men or whites. It's to make sure the employer is testing for job qualifications, not unrelated ones.

The theory is that just as it's better to let a guilty man go than to convict an innocent man (so the burden of proof is on the prosecution), it's better to discriminate against a man than against a women and better to discriminate against a white man than a black man.

That's arguable, but let's accept it for now.

In practice, however, the way it actually works out is to encourage permanent de facto quotas for NAMs. If vast mechanisms exists for searching out and punishing those who unwittingly discriminate against NAMs but the punishment for discriminating against whites is haphazard and rare then, well, what do you know!, lots of employers will wittingly (if surreptitiously) discriminate for NAMs and against whites.

But Ricci isn't attacking the timing of New Haven's decision; he's attacking the city for considering the racial impact of the exam. And that's exactly what disparate impact requires an employer to consider. Ricci's position threatens to burn down one of the nation's most important civil rights laws. Even in the improved racial climate of the Obama era, that should set off alarms.

Perhaps in the unimproved economic climate of the Obama era, the fact that one of the nation's most important civil rights laws promotes the hiring of less competent employees should set off alarms.

My prediction for Ricci is that Anthony Kennedy will uphold Disparate Impact in general, but send the Ricci case back to the district court for retrial on the facts on the grounds that the city refused its testing company's offer to perform the validation study included in its $100k contract. Frank Ricci will get the promotion he earned in 2003 around 2012, but the overall system across America will continue more or less the same.

Also, Sonia Sotomayor isn't going to go down over the Ricci case. But it just shows how intentionally ignorant the press is about the realities of civil rights law that Slate could blunder into this like it has.

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

Sonia Sotomayor v. Frank Ricci

Emily Bazelon writes in Slate:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is smart and sharp, and her formidable track record on the bench should put to rest any lingering doubts that she isn't. (Speaking of which: Why was the left, or at least the center, criticizing one of its own?) But there is a mystery in Sotomayor's recent history: a brief, unsigned opinion in the difficult race case now before the Supreme Court, Ricci v. DeStefano. Sotomayor punted when Ricci came before her, to such a degree that she raised more questions than she answered.

Ricci is a hard case with bad facts—a case that could do serious damage to Title VII, one of Congress' landmark civil rights laws.

Actually, Ricci is a easy race case with simple facts -- a representative example of how Title VII routinely works. It's only a hard case if your goal is to somehow, someway, preserve the dominant "disparate impact" concept.

In 2003, the city of New Haven, Conn., decided to base future promotions in its firefighting force—there were seven for captain and eight for lieutenant—primarily on a written test. The city paid an outside consultant to design the test so that it would be job-related. Firefighters studied for months. Of the 41 applicants who took the captain exam, eight were black; of the 77 who took the lieutenant exam, 19 were black. None of the African-American candidates scored high enough to be promoted. For both positions, only two of 29 Hispanics qualified for promotion.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that the the liberal complaints about the 2003 test stem from innumeracy about the effects of a small sample size. In the 1999 New Haven firefighter's promotion exam, which didn't cause major protests by the black minister who is the white mayor of New Haven's chief vote-gatherer in the black community, the racial gap in average scores was the same as on the 2003 test. However, in 1999, two blacks scored far enough out toward the right edge of the distribution that they were promoted. In 2003, however, although the average distribution of scores by race was the same, there didn't happen to be any blacks who scored particularly highly relative to the black average. The difference in whether 2 blacks passed in 1999 or 0 in 2003 is just a matter of small sample sizes.

The politicians didn't raise a stink in 1999, but did in 2003, because their statistical sophistication is at the black and white level.

In other situations like this, minority candidates have successfully sued based on the long-recognized legal theory that a test that has a disparate impact—it affects one racial group more than others—must truly be job-related in order to be legal. You can see why New Haven's black firefighters might have done just that. Why promote firefighters based on a written test rather than their performance in the field? Why favor multiple-choice questions over evaluations of leadership and execution? It's like granting a driver's license based solely on the written test, only with much higher stakes. ...

First, the promotional exam wasn't "solely" written. Forty percent of the score was based on oral exam. And the city had attempted to rig the oral results by stacking the panels of out-of-state senior firefighters brought in to judge the oral results by putting two minorities to one white on almost every three man scoring panel.

However, the city's collective bargaining contract with the fireman's union mandated a 60% weighting for the written test? Why? Well, one reason is that the firemen wanted to be evaluated partly objectively. They didn't trust the politicians to be objective in whom they favored to give them orders in life or death situations, so they wanted at least a majority of the score on the promotional exam to be unbiased by racial prejudice.

The district court judge who heard Ricci's case ruled against him and his fellow plaintiffs. They appealed to the 2^nd Circuit, the court on which Judge Sotomayor sits. In an unusual short and unsigned opinion, a panel of three judges, including Sotomayor, adopted the district court judge's ruling without adding their own analysis. As Judge Jose Cabranes put it, in protesting this ruling later in the appeals process, "Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case. … This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal."

If Sotomayor and her colleagues were trying to shield the case from Supreme Court review, her punt had the opposite effect. It drew Cabranes' ire, and he hung a big red flag on the case, which the Supreme Court grabbed. The court heard argument in Ricci in April. New Haven didn't fare well.

The high court's decision in the case will come in June, before Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. The problem for her will not be why she sided with New Haven over Frank Ricci. The four liberal-moderate justices currently on the court are likely to agree with her, in the name of preserving Title VII as a tool for fair hiring. There's even an outside chance that Justice Anthony Kennedy will follow along. The problem for Sotomayor, instead, is why she didn't grapple with the difficult constitutional issues, the ones Cabranes pointed to. Did she really have nothing to add to the district court opinion? In a case of this magnitude and intricacy, why would that be?

Well, Ms. Bazelon, I think you may find that you just answered your own question! Judge Sotomayor no doubt shares your goals on policy (preserve Disparate Impact) but is much more aware of the facts. If trying to hush up the Ricci case was the best she could come up with, then that's the best anybody on the left could come up with.

Very similarly, the Obama Administration doesn't want to make Ricci the Waterloo of Disparate Impact. The case is both so representative and so well prepared in details (e.g., notice choosing Ricci over his fellow plaintiffs as the lead plaintiff -- you know how the left loves to dig up personal scandal on sympathetic-sounding conservatives these days, so I suspect the firemen's lawyers carefully chose a guy with the few skeletons in the closet), that they would be happy if Anthony Kennedy just tersely sent it back to district court for retrial on the facts. (Years later, Frank Ricci would probably get his promotion, but the system would continue.) What Obama is terriffied of is the Supreme Court using Ricci as a precedent-setting case.

Hence, Sotomayor's attempt to bury the case is exactly in line with the Obama Administration's desires. Which is hardly surprising, since they nominated her for the Supreme Court.

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

Sorry

I likely won't be posting new material or moderating comments on Monday evening or Tuesday. Please check back later in the week.

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

"Obama's Nixon-Goes-to-China" Opportunity

My new VDARE.com column reviews Charles Murray's recent book Real Education.

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

Questions

Conor Friedersdorf quotes John McPhee:

In the First World War, General Ulrich Wille led the Swiss to victory. Victory consisted of successfully avoiding the conflict. As someone put it, “We won by having no war.” In the Second World War, the victorious Swiss general was Henri Guisan, of the Canton de Vaud. There is a General Guisan Quai in Zurich, a Quai General Guisan in Geneva. In every part of Switzerland, there are streets and plazas and equestrian statues—there are busts on plinths overhung with banners and flags—doing honor to the general of an army that did not fight.

Is Switzerland the only country that puts up statues of leaders esteemed for staying out of wars?

I've never heard much about the leaders who kept Turkey out of WWII (until declaring war on Germany toward the end) -- a remarkably sensible decision in a bellicose era (consider highly civilized and non-martial Italy's pointless participation in both World Wars). Turkey was, like Germany, a loser from the Versailles Treaty, but, unlike Germany, it kept its head.

Belarus still hasn't fully recovered from Nazi and Soviet tank armies fighting back and forth across its land. If Turkey had come in on either side early on, it might have been similarly afflicted. But I've never heard who deserves credit for Turkey being both strong enough and sensible enough to avoid war. Occasionally, somebody (e.g., Paul Johnson in Modern Times) gives Franco some credit for Spain sitting out WWII, but I never hear about the Turks who decided to give war a pass.

Presumably, this is partly due to Turkey's continuing Ataturk cult of personality (who died in 1937), which serves to tie together perhaps the oldest (and thus most innately fractious) agricultural civilizations in the world.

So, what's the story behind this dog that didn't bark fact?

UPDATE: By the way, the Turks fought hard on the U.S. side in the Korean War. Turkish troops, for example, rescued a U.S. Army unit including a 19-year-old artillery officer named Jerry Pournelle.

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

NYT reporter / deadbeat's Argentine firecracker wife

Ever since the New York Times Magazine ran that sob story by NYT Federal Reserve reporter Edmund Andrews about how he had been lured by lenders into taking on too big a mortgage to pay back, what with his $4k per month alimon payments, anonymous posts have been showing up in various blog's comment sections saying that a missing part of the story involved the reporter's new wife, Patricia Barreiro, an Argentine immigrant with a passion for fashion.

Megan McArdle has now tracked down the facts that Andrews left out of his book. She paid eight cents per page to look at court documents:

In September 1998, California bankruptcy court records indicate that Patty and her first husband declared bankruptcy. The financial statement they filed with the court indicated family income of $174,000 in 1996, $87,000 in 1997, and $126,000 in the first nine months of 1998. The income fluctuations are not surprising, given that her husband was in the film production industry. By the time of the filing, the couple owed about $30,000 on 8 credit cards, over $200,000 in back taxes, and almost $15,000 in private school tuition, as well as substantial car and mortgage payments.

In 2007, nearly as soon as she was eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again in Montgomery Country. When called for comment yesterday, Andrews was unavailable, but there is no question that it is his wife: his income and occupation are prominently featured in the docket.

This is really highly unusual. For starters, the overwhelming majority of people who file bankruptcy do not make anything close to $100,000 a year--the standard estimate when the 2005 bankruptcy reform was passed was that about 80% of filers had household incomes below the median income in their state. The number of affluent people who file twice is even smaller, and has presumably gone down since the 2005 filing largely eliminated abusive serial Chapter 13 filings, which used to be used, often by quite wealthy people, to forestall evictions or foreclosure.

The bankruptcy code requires filers to wait 8 years after a previous Chapter 7 discharge. Barely four months after she became eligible, Patty Barreiro filed again. And the filing shows some suggestion of strategic debt management.

Ms. Barreiro filed separately from Andrews, and had to amend the filing to include Andrews' income after a complaint from a creditor who wanted to force her into a Chapter 13 repayment plan. She filed when her income was at rock bottom, consisting only of unemployment; the timing may have just excluded having to declare $5,000 in freelance editing income Andrews mentions in the book. And she shed what appear to be jointly incurred debts, such as a Comcast account. Comcast does not service the address listed on the 1998 filing, but as I can attest (to my sorrow), it is the main cable provider in Silver Spring, where she moved to live with Andrews in 2004.

Serial bankruptcies can, of course, happen to anyone with enough bad luck. But they usually don't. And when they do, they usually hit people with marginal incomes that leave no margin for error in the budget. Most people, even in LA, are able to build a sustainable budget out of an income in the low six figures.

Moreover, pesky bad luck isn't really the picture painted by either filing. Rather, Ms. Barreiro seems to have spent most of the last two decades living right up to the edge of her income, and beyond, and then massively defaulting. If you structure your finances so that absolutely everything has to go right, it's hard to blame the mortgage company when you don't quite make it.

Andrews has been admirably open about many of the poor decisions and the wishful thinking that led him deep into debt. Nonetheless, he has laid much of the blame onto irresponsible bankers and mortgage brokers. The missing bankruptcies substantially undermine this basic narrative arc of Andrews' story. Particularly in his book, the bankers are the villains, America's current troubles are the inevitable denouement of their maniacal greed, and the Andrews household stands in for an American public led, by their own greed and longing and hopeful trust, into the money pit.

Sure, the two married couples had seven children between them, but what's that to stand in the way of Love? And a "stately" home in Maryland?

By the way, an unwritten part of the story of the mortgage meltdown has to do with quiet importation of Fiesta Culture attitudes toward saving and spending.

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

Global Warming: the obvious implications

The single largest problem posed by global warming would be if the seas rose and increasingly inundated Bangladesh, an extremely densely populated (current population 156 million) and low-lying region long vulnerable to typhoons (e.g., George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh). One obvious way to mitigate this vulnerability would be to increasingly encourage Bangladeshis to use birth control.

Similarly, one of the most obvious causes of increased carbon emissions is mass immigration from the Third World to the First World (e.g., from Mexico to America). So, more stringent restrictions on immigration would be an obvious policy implication.

Somehow, though, I don't think Al Gore has ever gotten around to mentioning either of these bits of logic.

If Global Warming is such an all important topic, then surely these simple steps for mitigating it should be on the table, surely. And yet, they just never seem to come up. It's not so much as that they've been rejected as that they simply are, literally, unthinkable.

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

Games: the black hole of art

So much creative talent goes into video games these days, but the downside is that games are something you either do or you don't, so there's little in the way of reverberations in the rest of society.

This isn't just an old fogey picking on young folks' video games either. This is also true of my favorite minor art form, golf course architecture, another game-based art. It has been practiced on an aesthetically high level in the U.S. for a century now, since Charles Blair MacDonald's National Golf Links of America emerged on Long Island in 1909. But, what does any non-golfer know or care about golf course architecture?

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

The Mortgage Meltdown in Sum

For decades, everybody who was anybody demanded more mortgage lending to minorities. Skeptics were marginalized and vilified. So, in this decade, we got what we'd been asking for, and we got it good and hard.

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

Review of Nisbett's IQ book

Here's J. Philippe Rushton's and Arthur R. Jensen's new paper:

Race and IQ: A Theory-Based Review of the Research in Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It

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

How to make your SAT prep business look good

Give the kids a really hard practice test when they walk in the door. Measure progress against that. From the WSJ:

SAT Coaching Found to Boost Scores--Barely

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

R. J. Stove's "A Student's Guide to Music History"

This handsome 135 page paperback by R.J. Stove, A Student's Guide to Music History, listing on Amazon for only $8.00, is a near perfect introduction or brush-up for anyone interested in Western classical music. Performing miracles of concision, it provides sprightly portraits of several score of the top composers. You can read the book straight through in about four hours. Or you can read it sitting at your computer and call up on Youtube just about any piece mentioned in the book.

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

"Reflections on the Revolution in Europe"

From "Fear Masquerading as Tolerance" by Christopher Caldwell in Prospect, presumably from his upcoming book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West:

The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was ‘‘ethnic pride’’ a virtue and ‘‘nationalism’’ a sickness? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it was considered a citizen’s duty to ask ten years ago? Erudite philosophers of tolerance such as Jürgen Habermas might have been able to untangle such questions and draw the proper distinctions. Political elites could resolve them by fiat. But they left the person of average intellect and social status feeling confused and disempowered. A democracy cannot long tolerate a system that makes an advanced degree in sociology or a high government position a prerequisite for expressing the slightest worry about the way one’s country is going.

The virtues of the multicultural era were elite virtues. The British sociologist Geoff Dench suspected, with good reason, that favouring elites was a large part of the point of multiculturalism. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy, he noted “can probably be managed more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities.”

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

John McWhorter on how archaeology is racist

In the New Republic, John McWhorter has a column up, including vague swipes at me, resenting the fact that most evidence of a Stone Age great leap forward in culture comes from Europe. Because (follow me closely here), we know that everybody is the same, the fact that most of the prehistorical evidence for sudden progress comes from Stone Age Europe is "socially unsavory" (i.e., racist).

Personally, I don't care much about paleoanthropology, but this is just another example of how political correctness is anti-science. Here are hardworking scientists carefully digging up stuff, but some Broadway musical expert implies that they are racist for finding it and publicizing it.

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

Tierney on Miller's "Spent"

"Message in What We Buy, but Nobody's Listening"

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

Mozilo Mania

Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock is reading up on one of the central figures in predatory securitizing, Angelo Mozilo of Countrwide, the country's largest mortgage originator during the Housing Bubble. His take on it is that Mozilo wasn't a cynic, he was a believer in the profitability of lending money to traditionally underserved borrowers:

Mozilo viewed himself as something of a populist, fighting for the little guy -- as did the editors of La Opinion.

So in addition to learning that Mozilo was incredibly insecure, the article also offers a gem about Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) and their role in Countrywide's success:

NYT: While he is sanguine about the stock price, Mr. Mozilo remains volatile about so much else. Particularly irksome are calls by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, to shrink Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government institutions that buy huge numbers of mortgages from financial institutions, notably from Countrywide.

"Fannie and Freddie are a threat to his banks," Mr. Mozilo said of Mr. Greenspan, whose agency regulates big bank holding companies. By buying his mortgages and thus freeing up his capital to solicit even more business, Fannie and Freddie are a big reason Mr. Mozilo has driven Countrywide past the Citigroups and the Wells Fargos to the top of the mortgage heap. "If it wasn't for them," he said of Fannie and Freddie, "Wells knows they'd have us."

Wow.

Now this is damning on a couple of levels, one simple, one a bit more complex. The obvious phenomenon was that Countrywide made a gigantic business, winning market share by turning itself into an organ of the government. Courtesy of Fannie and Freddie it had an extremely low cost of capital (even Wells Fargo could barely compete, and as Warren Buffett will tell you, Wells' cost of capital is very low), and a toilet down which to flush all the loans it wanted to make.

That alone is bad.

But it's not quite true that Countrywide just saw Fannie and Freddie as trash receptacles. Countrywide was a big believe in aggressive lending, and it thought that it was engaging in good, profitable lending to people that other banks wouldn't go touch. Remember, Mozilo was a populist. He had a chip on his shoulder. And he obviously was extremely proud of the fact that he, along with some other lending pioneers, had discovered that lending to poor people with marginal credit -- people that bankers had tradtionally turned their noses up -- were profitable. Mozilo didn't see himself as just a salesman and packager of trash.

Fannie and Freddie allowed Countrywide to get big, but Mozilo thought that the core business was inherently profitable, which is why, Countrywide held onto some of its loans in order to "smooth" (read: goose) its earnings. If Mozilo just thought he was selling garbage, he wouldn't have held onto a penny of it;.

That's an empirical point that deserves more looking into -- how much did Mozilo hang onto his loans versus how much did be securitize them. But it's clear his business model was dependent upon Fannie and Freddie keeping the firehose of government-backed cheap credit flowing to him.

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

California

California's top political columnist, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, writes:

Memo to Californians from everyone else in the world: You folks out there in sunshine land caused this historic global recession, and it's time for you to mend your ways.

Farfetched? Not really.

A very good case can be made that California's developers, mortgage lenders and house-hungry but income- deficient residents, with state and local officials as enablers, created an unsustainable housing bubble. And when that bubble burst, leaving holders of mortgage bundles – many of them overseas banks – with little more than toilet paper, it created a banking crisis that spread to virtually every other segment of the global economy.

No, it was not confined to California. It happened in a few other high-growth states such as Florida, Arizona and Nevada. But nine of the 10 top issuers of subprime and no-documentation mortgages were headquartered in California, and the state has been ground zero for the collapse of those mortgages as adjustable interest rates "reset" upward, having recorded more than a half-million foreclosures and other symbols of distress.

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

California foreclosure rates and mortgages by race

In response to my new VDARE.com article on what the data show about the origin of the mortgage meltdown in California -- i.e., that there's a very close correlation in California's top 20 metro areas between minority lending (especially minority subprime lending) in 2006 and foreclosure filing rates in 2009 -- I was asked about other correlations.

I'm happy to oblige below, but I would recommend that you read my VDARE.com column first to see the highlights graphed, then come back here to wallow in the correlation coefficients in tabular form.

So, here are the correlation coefficients between RealtyTrac's Q1-2009 foreclosure rates for the top 20 metro areas in California and the federal government's Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database records of racial groups' prime and subprime shares of total mortgage dollars in 2006.

"r" is the correlation coefficient, which runs from -1.00 (perfect inverse correlation) to 1.00 (perfect correlation). In the social sciences, 0.2 is typically considered low, 0.4 moderate, and 0.6 high.

Race	Type	Share	r
Total	Total	100%
Total	Prime	73%	-0.90
Total	Subprime	27%	0.90
NH White	Total	44%	-0.78
NH White	Prime	38%	-0.83
NH White	Subprime	6%	0.21
Not NH White	Total	56%	0.78
Not NH White	Prime	35%	0.50
Not NH White	Subprime	21%	0.89
Asian	Total	15%	0.18
Asian	Prime	12%	0.06
Asian	Subprime	3%	0.48
Black	Total	5%	0.48
Black	Prime	2%	0.42
Black	Subprime	3%	0.51
Hispanic	Total	31%	0.67
Hispanic	Prime	16%	0.51
Hispanic	Subprime	15%	0.78
Other	Total	5%	0.02
Other	Prime	4%	-0.36
Other	Subprime	1%	0.62
Hisp & Blacks	Total	36%	0.79
Hisp & Blacks	Prime	19%	0.62
Hisp & Blacks	Subprime	17%	0.87
NAMs	Total	41%	0.81
NAMs	Prime	23%	0.62
NAMs	Subprime	18%	0.88

You can call up the HMDA data here. (Table 11-3: Conventional Home Purchase First Lien Loans, with "Reported Pricing Data" (subprime) vs. "Not Reported Pricing Data" (Prime)).

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

r = 0.89

Here are a couple of the graphs from my new VDARE.com article on the causes of the default crisis, focusing on the Big One: California.


And here's a scatterplot of foreclosure filing rate (vertical axis) v. share of total home purchase lending in 2006 that went to minorities by way of subprime mortgages:

r = 0.89.

It's important to note that you won't get the same insanely high correlation coefficient across the whole country. There's no where to go but down from r = 0.89. There are heavily Hispanic areas like the Rio Grande Valley where the economy is so dull and the cultural level so low that there was never a Housing Bubble. Same for black areas in Mississippi and the like.

Still, California is absolutely the central thread to understanding what went wrong with the economy, and the pattern is absolutely clear in California.

Read the article here.

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

NYC graph of foreclosure rates v. minority share of census tract

The New York Times offers a cool interactive map showing that foreclosure rates at level of census tract for New York City. And, whattaya know? The high foreclosure rate neighborhoods aren't the ones where New York Times economics reporters tend to live. The common denominator in the heavily defaulting neighborhoods is a high percentage of minority residents.

It must be the fault of that "reverse redlining" that the NAACP is suing about.

I've got some new data nobody has seen yet on California, the epicenter of the crash, which I'll display in graphs in VDARE.com tonight.

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

Public high school legacy admissions in the People's Republic of Santa Monica

From the LA Times:

Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have adopted legacy admissions policies for children of former students who live outside their enrollment boundaries. The policies appear to be the first in the nation at public schools, education experts said.

The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there.

What's particularly striking is that this legal privilege is more or less hereditary, being passed down to the child from grandparents who currently live in Beverly Hills and from parents who used to live there:

Beverly Hills adopted its legacy policy on a 3-2 vote last spring, allowing the children of anyone who attended city schools at least four years and whose grandparents have lived in the city for at least a decade to apply for permits. Eleven students, among 5,100 enrolled in district schools, attend school under the program.

Fenton said he proposed the idea to reconnect the district with grandparents who live within its borders and no longer have a direct stake in the city's schools yet are asked to vote on school measures, such as a $334-million facilities bond passed in November.

Fenton also said the district needed to forge closer ties with its alumni and pointed to an example of the benefits such connections can bring: The Beverly Hills Athletic Alumni Assn. in recent years has raised more than $1 million for uniforms, scoreboards and other purchases, he said.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought.

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

NYT: "World Ends, Women and Minorities Hit Hardest"

Evidently, the New York Times just doesn't get New York Times jokes. Here's today's actual NYT headline:

"Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York"

See, minority defaults are the fault of "reverse redlining."

One Occam's Butterknife to rule them all.

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

"My Personal Credit Crisis"

The New York Times Magazine features a long article, My Personal Credit Crisis, by Edmund L. Andrews about America's least sympathetic-sounding deadbeat, himself:

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds. We all had our reasons. The brokers and dealmakers were scoring huge commissions. Ordinary homebuyers were stretching to get into first houses, or bigger houses, or better neighborhoods. Some were greedy, some were desperate and some were deceived.

Divorce, second marriage, a passel of kids, $4k per month alimony/child support, a big brick house in upscale Silver Spring, MD (conveniently located right on the northern border of DC, next to Chevy Chase), Alt-A mortgage, $50k in credit card debt, beach house rental, new wife loses her silly job as an editor for a foundation, subprime refi, default.

There's no mention of them even thinking about, as an alternative to refinancing, selling the fancy house after it goes up 10% and moving some place less Silver Springy.

One detail caught my eye: Andrews' says his base salary is $120k, but also "I was earning extra money working overtime at The Times." You get paid overtime for reporting on the Fed for the New York Times? Like if you work 50 hours per week instead of 40, you make, what, $174k annually? Sweet!

The last time I got paid overtime was when I was an 18-year-old fry cook at Burger King. That made perfect sense because the boss could tell exactly when I was working: when I was standing over the vat of boiling oil. Since the age of 20, however, I've had jobs where I mostly tap on keyboards (starting with my HP calculator when I got a summer job in college as a research assistant to a CFO), so nobody can tell when I'm really working versus when I'm just amusing myself. It's not worth your while to try to figure out what part of the 70 hours per week I'm tapping on a keyboard is work or fun. That's the reason you hire me: because what amuses me often turns out to be what you need to know.

So, how does the New York Times tell what part of Edmunds' daily routine of surfing the Internet and talking on the phone is work and what part is fun? I guess they just take his word for it, which, having read about his financial probity, doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

The article ends:

I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Chase. It seemed to be so flooded with defaulting borrowers that it didn’t have time to foreclose on my house. Eight months after my last payment to the bank, I am still waiting for the ax to fall.

Edmund L. Andrews is an economics reporter for The Times and the author of “Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,” which will be published next month by W.W. Norton and from which this article is adapted.

So, this guy has been living in Silver Spring rent-free for the last eight months and he's turned his rent-free life into a book (which I have a suspicion he wrote on a paid book leave sabbatical from the Times), which he's gotten the New York Times Magazine to promote? No wonder the Times had him covering the Fed. He's financial freaking genius.

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

Are real estate prices declining at the seashore due to global warming?

In Southern California, the closer somebody's house is to the ocean, the more likely they are to passionately believe that global warming will cause the polar ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. The less affluent folk who live in the high desert don't seem to pay global warming much mind. They've got other troubles to worry about.

Now, you could argue that this is purely rational, but here's the catch: I see no evidence of people behaving as if they believed their beliefs about rising seas. For example, are real estate prices falling faster next to the beach than in the high desert, which you would predict if you believed that people believed their beliefs?

No, very much the opposite. While high desert home prices were dropping by half, Malibu's average home sale price rose from 2007 to 2008. The LA Times recently made a big deal out of the fact that quarterback Carson Palmer had sold his Manhattan Beach place for somewhat less than he paid for it around 2006, as an indicator that the Great Crash was finally hitting the beach, which mostly shows how it hasn't hit beachfront land much yet, even though the conventional wisdom implies that that property won't be there anymore not too far off in the future.

Consider the expensive homes on either side of beautiful El Matador beach out beyond Zuma Beach in far Malibu. The homes to the left of the state park are built on the sand, while the homes on the right are on top of a 100 foot sandstone bluff -- i.e., if the seas really rise ten feet like yesterday's article says, they're coming down. Ka-boom. That clifftop property won't be there anymore. And if the government builds a dyke like in Holland, then you aren't living next to a beach with beautiful crashing waves anymore, you're just living inland.

Something does not compute.

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

Cousin Marriage v. Democracy

Here's the opening of an interesting new paper that will be presented at this year's Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting at Cal State Fullerton from May 27-31. "Consanguinity" means cousin marriage (typically, second cousins or closer relations):

Consanguinity as a major predictor of levels of democratization in a study of 55 countries.

Michael A. Woodley

Institution: School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Abstract: This study reports the existence of a significant and robust correlation at the national data scale between consanguinity (as measured by the coefficient of inbreeding), and levels of democratization (as measured by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index) for a sample of 55 countries (r=-.77, P<.05). Comparative correlative analysis found that democracy exhibits a higher magnitude correlation with consanguinity than with measures of nine other factors believed to influence levels of democracy (economic freedom; education; GDP per capita; history of foreign occupation in last 100 years; human development; inequality; IQ; media age; and percentage exports in non-renewable resources). Multiple regression analysis further revealed that consanguinity was the strongest predictor of differences in levels of democracy, although three factors (history of foreign occupation in last 100 years; inequality; and percentage exports in non-renewable resources) also produced statistically significant β coefficients. These results are interpreted in light of the theory that democracy only seems to be an optimal political system for countries in which consanguinity has not allowed for the extensive perpetuation of genetically closed kinship groupings (clans or tribes), as these will tend to maximize both their collective utility and inclusive fitness through securing resources at the expense of other kinship groupings.

It has been speculated that high levels of consanguinity within countries (mating between second cousins or closer, F<0.0156), prevents democratic nation building. High degrees of consanguinity within ethnic kinship groupings (traditional tribal groups and clans) are thought to generate mistrust between those groups through the reinforcement of endogamous social and biological arrangements, with non-democratic regimes emerging as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable kinship groupings for support rather than the market or the state (Kurtz, 2002; Sailer, 2004).

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

Italian politics

A reader who enjoyed my review in The American Conservative of "Il Divo," the complex Italian movie about Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister of Italy in 1972-1992, writes:

I had a number of encounters with Andreotti when he was Prime Minister, and also met frequently with some of the Democristiani conservatives who despised him. They used to refer to him as "Il Gobbo" the hunchback due to his peculiar posture, which you describe in the review. A gobbo in vernacular Italian also implies treacherous and sly. Andreotti ignored the US Ambassador in Rome and insisted on regular meetings with the CIA Chief of Station whenever he had questions or something to convey. I would go along to carry the Chief hat's. The Chief was old school and the conversations in Italian were elliptical to say the least, making it possible to leave the room without any idea of what had just taken place. As the Agency had the prime minister's office bugged anyway, I frequently had this vision of my boss returning to the station to review the tape to try to figure out what Andreotti had been talking about.

Andreotti was always playing multiple games. He milked the U.S. desire to keep the Communists out of power in Italy, but he also cozied up to Libya. When he was foreign minister in 1986, the Italian government tipped off Col. Gadaffi that of the U.S. airstrike the day before it happened.

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

Pew Hispanic Center on minority mortgage meltdown

In "Through Boom and Bust: Minorities, Immigration, and Homeownership," The Pew Hispanic Center has run an interesting (but not terribly well specified) multiple regression analysis of foreclosure rates by county. The reports says, "foreclosure statistics by race, ethnicity or nativity are currently not available. However, the relationship between demography and foreclosure activity at the county level is discerned in this report through the marriage of different sources of data."

Here are the last two paragraphs of the Pew report:

Of the several demographic attributes included in the analysis, the immigrant share of the county population is the one that emerges as the most important correlate with the foreclosure rate. And within the immigrant population, the share of foreign-born Latinos stands out as a more notable influence than the share of non-Hispanic immigrants (Appendix Table A5). This may mean exactly what it appears to be—the foreclosure rate among the immigrant population, especially immigrant Latinos, is higher than average.

However, it is also possible that the presence of immigrants serves merely as a stand-in for underlying circumstances not otherwise captured in the data. In recent years, the construction boom attracted immigrants in large numbers into new settlements in the U.S. (Kochhar, Suro and Tafoya, 2005; Frey, Berube, Singer and Wilson, 2009) Many of these areas, such as those surrounding Las Vegas and Atlanta are now witnessing sharp reversals in construction and high rates of foreclosures. The increased presence of immigrants in an area may simply signal the effects of a boom-and-bust cycle that has raised foreclosure rates for all residents there. Thus, it is not possible to affirm that immigration levels in and of themselves raise foreclosure rates.

But, it sure isn't possible from their data to disprove it!

Focusing purely on immigrants (rather than on, say, minorities) is a bit of a red herring. And there is no reason to use some of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database on lending by ethnicity without using the meat of it -- the mortgage dollars going to different ethnic groups.

I'm working with a sociologist on a more sophisticated analysis of the data. But, Pew has given us a decent first try.

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

The Obama Family's Personal Financial Strategy

A NY Daily News article by Richard Henry Lee looks over the Obama family's tax returns. In brief, the First Family's personal financial master plan in the 1996-2004 era resembles the business plan of the Underwear Gnomes on South Park. The Obama thinking appears to have been:

1. Borrow against home equity and consume.
2.
3. Get rich!

But, hey, it worked.

Lee writes:

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama's book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate.

During the presidential primary campaign, Michelle Obama complained how tough it was to make ends meet. During a stop in Ohio, she said, "I know we're spending - I added it up for the first time - we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we're spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth."

Let's examine how tough things were for this couple using various public records.

In April 1999, they purchased a Chicago condo and obtained a mortgage for $159,250. In May 1999, they took out a line of credit for $20,750. Then, in 2002, they refinanced the condo with a $210,000 mortgage, which means they took out about $50,000 in equity. Finally, in 2004, they took out another line of credit for $100,000 on top of the mortgage.

Tax returns for 2004 reveal $14,395 in mortgage deductions. If we assume an effective interest rate of 6%, then they owed about $240,000 on a home they purchased for about $159,250.

This means they spent perhaps $80,000 beyond their income from 1999 to 2004.

The Obamas' adjusted gross income averaged $257,000 from 2000 to 2004. This is above the threshold of $250,000 which Obama initially used as the definition of being "rich" for taxation purposes during last year's election campaign.

The Obama family apparently had little or no savings during this period since there was virtually no taxable interest shown on their tax returns.

In 2003, they reported almost $24,000 in child care expenses and, in 2004, about $23,000. They also paid about $3,400 in household employment taxes each year. And as Michelle stated, they spent $10,000 a year on "extracurriculars" for the children.

For example, even though the Book Money and Senator's Wife Money began pouring in in 2005 (about $3 million in 2005-2006), the Obamas didn't put any money into a tax sheltered SEP account until 2007. Their tax returns are bizarrely minimalistic-looking. Mine are littered with flotsam and jetsam from various investments: capital gains, capital losses dragged out over four years, interest from this or that. The Obamas' tax returns don't look very lived in.

For the sake of his political career, Obama had to live in the city, so they spent a fortune on private schools, private tutoring, etc. In contrast, most Chicago professional couples with small children move to an upscale suburb like Wilmette. There, you have to pay a fortune in property taxes, but you get outstanding public schools and the city park system takes care of all the dance lessons and so forth for nominal sums. Wilmette offers the Welfare State for people who can't afford the Welfare State, whereas Chicago is kind of an Ayn Rand region for upper middle class families where you are on your own to provide for yourselves.

Also, Mrs. Obama appears to have been higher maintenance than the typical wife -- for example, she worked out with personal trainer four times per week (was that at the extra-expensive East Bank Club?).

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

An outer space border fence?

The Bush-Obama Administration has pledged billions of dollars to build a "virtual fence" of sensors on the Mexican border to notify the Border Patrol when and where illegal aliens cross it. As a commenter suggested, if the ungrateful public turns out to be unmollified by that, the Bush-Obama Administration would no doubt be willing to consider making the invisible fence twice as tall.

Seriously, why not use satellites with infrared cameras? Sure, they don't work in cloudy weather, but how much cloudy weather do you see on the Arizona-Mexico border?

A reader writes:

I was looking at a globe today as I dusted. If a satellite orbits over 32 to 35 degrees latitude, it flies over the Mexican border and also Iran, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. . . Do you suppose we have any satellites flying there?

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

Yeah, But I'm Huge in Finland

In the 1970s, there was an LA rock band called Sparks who played local clubs and only got on the radio on Rodney Bingenheimer's show on KROQ. They'd tell their LA friends, however, that they were big in Europe, but nobody in LA would believe them. So, they finally started dragging their friends to places frequented by tour buses full of German tourists, like the Farmer's Market or Graumann's Chinese, where they'd be swarmed over by European autograph seekers.

Now, Google Trends has a page where you can look up how often and from where your name is searched.

All I can say is: I'm a blog god in Finland.

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

Alex, Manny, and ... Tiger, too?

Over at Taki's Mag, I try to figure out why the world's highest paid athlete, Tiger Woods, suddenly developed fairly massive muscles midway through his golf career.

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

Charles Murray on David Brooks's "The Harlem Miracle"

On the blog of AEI's magazine The American, Charles Murray writes a brief response to David Brooks' "Harlem Miracle" column about the Harlem Children's Zone charter school "eliminating" the white-black gap:

It will be wonderful if the results are as good as they sound, but hold the champagne.

I’m not being mindlessly pessimistic. The problem is that we have had 40 years of “Miracle in X”—the early Head Start results, the Milwaukee Project, Perry Preschool, the Abecedarian Project, Marva Collins’s schools, and the Infant Health Development Project, to name some of the most widely known stories—and the history is depressingly consistent: an initial research report gets ecstatic attention in the press, then a couple of years later it turns out that the miracle is, at best, a marginal success that is not close to the initial claims.

I haven’t seen the study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie that was the basis for Brooks’s column, but if I’m going to be such a grinch I might as well lay out the kinds of things I will be looking for (these are generic issues, not things that I necessarily think are problems with this particular study) when I get hold of a copy:

1. Selection factors among the students. Did the program deal with a representative sample? Was random assignment used?
2. Comparison group. Who’s in it? Are they comparable to the students in the experimental group?
3. Attrition. What about the students who started the program but dropped out? How many were there? How were they doing when they dropped out?
4. Teaching to the test. After seven years of No Child Left Behind, everybody knows about this one. Worse, there are the school officials who have rigged attendance on the day the test was taken or simply faked the scores—that’s been happening too with high stakes testing.
5. Cherry-picking. Do the reported test scores include all of the tests that the students took, or just the ones that make the program look good?
6. The tests. Do they meet ordinary standards for statistical reliability, predictive validity, etc.
7. Fade-out. Large short-term test score improvements have, without exception to date, faded to modest ones within a few years.

Murray points to this pointed response on Gotham Schools, which cites data in this report:

Just How Gullible is David Brooks?
by Aaron Pallas

Check out Pallas's graph of the NY State results here.

It’s true that eighth-graders in 2008 scored .20 standard deviations above the citywide average for white students. But it may also be apparent that this is a very unusual pattern relative to the other data represented in this figure, all of which show continuing and sizeable advantages for white students in New York City over HCZ students. The fact that HCZ seventh-graders in 2008 were only .3 standard deviations behind white students citywide in math is a real accomplishment, and represents a shrinkage of the gap of .42 standard deviations for these students in the preceding year. However, Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point — the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE’s) range from 1 to 99, and are scaled to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 21.06. An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33^rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33^rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics.

Teaching to the test gets a bad rap, but it's only partially deserved. At least they're teaching something!

Also, scoring at the 33rd percentile nationwide in math on the national Iowa test isn't that bad (although it's not as good as scoring at the 33rd percentile of the white distribution of scores -- increasingly, NAM children are competing against other NAMs in the percentile rankings, so that makes the national grading increasingly easy relative to the white grading).

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

The real American Dream

I don't know why people speak so highly of dreams all the time: e.g., the American Dream, "I have a dream," Dreams from My Father, etc.

If my dreams are representative, then the real American Dream is that you're in the classroom for your final exam but you haven't attended a class or opened the book all semester, and for some reason you're wearing your pajamas, and you really have to go to the bathroom.

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

Obama's Universal Preschool Push

One of the signature fads of the Obama Era is "Universal Preschool." A new book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut, by veteran education pundit Chester E. Finn Jr., explains the political sleight of hand involved:

Most have opted to pursue the “universal” model—prekindergarten for every four-year-old is their campaign slogan— rather than seeking more intensive intervention services targeted on a far smaller group of acutely disadvantaged children. Although the moral energy of the “universalists” derives from the claim that such a program will close educational gaps between America’s haves and have-nots, their political strategy rests on the belief that enacting and funding any such program depends on mobilizing the self-interest of middle-class families who would welcome government-financed day care and an early educational advantage for their own kids. (The flaws in this approach reverberate through the following pages.) ...

Although it serves enormous numbers of small children, today’s ragged armada of day care and preschool operators and programs, with their variegated eligibility requirements, uneven quality standards, and twisted funding streams, dismays advocates whose strategy hinges on propagating identical, universal programs designed to appeal to millions of parents and voters. That strategy relies on gaining the political boost that comes from offering John Q. and Sally Z. Public, both of them now working, the prospect that somebody else will pay for their child care, creating a new middle-class entitlement to government-financed services for their four- (and maybe three-) year-olds, wrapped in much hype about school readiness and social justice for the poor.

Okay, now I get it!

The Obamanauts' have a multilayered set of reasons for pushing Universal Preschool.

On the high-minded surface, the idea is that since No Child Left Behind has failed to close the racial gaps by pushing K-12 education, then the problem must stem (must) with pre-K years. All other possibilities are unthinkable! Therefore, having logically proven that the racial gaps are caused by disparate treatment before outside of the K-12 experience, the only solution is to spend a lot of government money taking poor black children away from their crack-addict mothers and their moms' knucklehead ex-con boyfriends and have them raised by nice white ladies for as much of each 24 hour cycle as possible.

Oops, did I say that out loud? You are only supposed to think that last part! You are supposed to say something about "offering society's most vulnerable children an enriched learning experience," and everybody will automatically get the message about taking the poor black children away from crack and abusive step-babydaddies and the rest.

But the next layer is that the Obamanauts know that although no alternative points of view are expressible in polite society, most voters still aren't all that excited about paying higher taxes for welfare moms' children. And more Head Start for poor children isn't expensive and expansive enough for what they want to accomplish.

So, one of the real goals is to change the work v. stay-at-home-with-the-kids economic calculus for married women with children. See, from the Democrats' point of view, stay at home married moms are The Enemy. They identify strongly with their husbands' economic interests.

Consider two couples. In one, both spouses earn $50k, while in the other, the husband earns $100k while the wife stays at home to raise their small children. In the United States, both couples pay the same federal income tax because they "file jointly." The couple with the working wife is typically worse off because they have to pay for child care. So, in the U.S., the wife's incentives are to support her husband's career and share his views opposing high taxes, government regulation, and the like.

The long range goal is the Swedenification of America, although that will require a much more radical step than is currently feasible -- reducing or eliminating the joint filing privilege. See, in Sweden, the couple where both spouses make $50k is much better off than the couple where the husband makes $100k, because, in a land of high and steeply progressive marginal tax rates, people are more or less taxed on their individual incomes. (That's a simplification, but that gets the gist of it -- see this Encyclopedia Britannica article). And daycare is free.

That's why you see in Sweden lots of ladies who drop their kids off at the government daycare center X each morning, then drive to government daycare center Y to take care of other ladies' kids who are working at a government daycare center Z taking care of the kids of the workers at government daycare center X.

Moreover, private daycare centers are The Enemy, too. Many have religious affiliations. And there is too large a supply of women who like to work with children for pay to be high under free market conditions of supply and demand. They must be replaced by government employees who pay dues into politically powerful unions who will negotiate with Democratic politicians elected by government employee union muscle.

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

Fannie and Freddie: The Government Sponsored Thingamabobs that Are Eating Your Retirement

Zachary A. Goldfarb reports in the Washington Post:

Fannie Loses $23 Billion, Prompting Even Bigger Bailout

Fannie Mae reported yesterday that it lost $23.2 billion in the first three months of the year as mortgage defaults increasingly spread from risky loans to the far-larger portfolio of loans to borrowers who have been considered safe. ...

The sobering earnings report was a reminder of the far-reaching implications of the government's takeover in September of Fannie Mae and the smaller Freddie Mac. Losses have proved unrelenting; the firms' appetite for tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer aid hasn't subsided; and taxpayer money invested in the companies, analysts said, is probably lost forever because the prospects for repayment are slim.

But the government remains committed to keeping the companies afloat, because it is relying on them to help reverse the continuing slide in the housing market and keep mortgage rates low.

Even as the government bailout of banks appears to be leveling off, the federal rescue of Fannie and Freddie is rapidly growing more expensive. Fannie Mae said that the losses will continue through at least much of the year and that it "therefore will be required to obtain additional funding from the Treasury." Analysts are estimating that the company could need at least $110 billion.

Freddie Mac, which has been in worse financial shape than Fannie Mae and has obtained $45 billion in taxpayer funding, will report earnings in coming days....

Fannie Mae, of the District, and Freddie Mac, of McLean, have been growing ever more dependent on federal largesse. The Federal Reserve has bought $366 billion of their mortgage investments and $70 billion of their debt, and has pledged to buy hundreds of billions of dollars more of both. The Treasury has pledged $200 billion to each company to keep them solvent and already bought $124 billion of their mortgage investments.

In total, the government has committed about $2 trillion to supporting Fannie and Freddie and buying the securities they issue.

Over the next 10 years, the government's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is expected to cost $389 billion, exceeding the cost of investments in banks and other financial firms by the government's Troubled Assets Relief Program, according to a recent study by Subsidyscope, a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The group based its calculations on Congressional Budget Office figures.

The federal government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last September out of concern that they would collapse and threaten the entire financial system. Since then, the companies have been called on to carry out large parts of the government's plan to spur a housing recovery by modifying mortgages and taking anti-foreclosure steps.

Fannie Mae said these programs are likely to have "a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial condition, including our net worth." But, it said, the program could yield long-term benefits. "If, however, the program is successful in reducing foreclosures and keeping borrowers in their homes, it may benefit the overall housing market and help in reducing our long-term credit losses."

But in a filing, Fannie Mae said, "We expect that we will not operate profitably for the foreseeable future." The plight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contrasts with the findings of federal "stress tests" done on the country's largest banks. The government announced Thursday that the tests showed that only one bank, GMAC, required additional public aid, with the tab at $9.1 billion. Fannie Mae's earnings results also contrast with reports in recent weeks by the biggest banks that they are returning to profitability.

Even the ailing insurer American International Group said Thursday that it may not need more taxpayer dollars.

Many banks that have received bailout funds said they will try to pay the government back. But that doesn't hold true for Fannie and Freddie. Their financial situation is so weak that they may have to borrow government money to pay dividends due to the government on money borrowed previously.

Don't you get the feeling that some well-connected Wall Street personage is going to pocket a commission on this purely nominal accounting transaction?

Yet even if the companies were profitable, they might not be able to pay back the money because the dividend payments are so onerous.

"The scenario where these guys can earn money to pay that back is remote," said Bose George, an analyst a New York investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

Jim Vogel, an analyst at FTN Financial, said the amount of taxpayer money that must flow to Fannie and Freddie will be clear in the coming months. He said it will depend on whether government efforts to keep people in their homes can make significant headway even as rising unemployment makes it more difficult for many to afford their loans.

"We need more to pass to see how people react to all the different plans to help people with mortgages and how people react to a prolonged period of unemployment," Vogel said.

According to analysts, Fannie Mae's financial assumptions aren't as bleak as those embodied in the government's stress tests of major banks. For the tests, the government assumed that the percentage of loans going bad in a portfolio would range from 1.5 percent to 4 percent. Fannie Mae assumes that only 1.45 percent of loans will be bad, suggesting that the company would have to come up with much more money to cover losses if a worse scenario comes to pass.

Well, that sounds swell.

A major reason for concern about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the size of their exposure to the mortgage market, analysts said. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own $5.4 trillion in assets, and all of those are mortgages, the worst-performing kind of loan. By comparison, the total assets -- from mortgages to credit card loans -- held by the 19 big banks that underwent stress tests was $7.8 trillion.

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