May 31, 2011
College football
A reader sends along stats on graduation rates for football players at various colleges. Notre Dame is #1 at 96%, followed by Duke, Northwestern, and Rice and most of the rest of the top ten are private colleges or military academies, with Rutgers the highest ranking public university. (Northwestern recently had a quarterback named Kafka, and it's good to know that at probably at least some of his teammates were amused by that.)
The bottom ten tend to be obscure public schools like San Jose St., along with football-crazed powerhouses Oklahoma and Texas.
The biggest gap between football players graduation rates and all students is at UCLA (52% v. 89%) -- and UCLA isn't even getting very good football players. (UCLA used to have a low graduation rate for regular students because it could take 5 or 6 years to get all the classed you needed to graduate. But I think the spread of Advanced Placement tests in high school, among other reasons, has made it easier to graduate in 4 years.)
The biggest gap between the graduation rates of white football players and black football players was at Auburn. The third biggest race gap was at Oregon. Auburn and Oregon played for the national championship in January, so maybe that's a clever strategy: recruit smart white kids and lower your standards for black athletes.
Bibi and Barack
A reader sends photos of Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama as young men, with the implication that these might shed light on why the head of a country of 6 million treated the head of a country of 300 million like his personal dogwalker.
The teeming masses
If you've ever been to Chinatown in lower Manhattan, you'll recall the unbelievable population density, which might be the highest in the U.S. Yet, there is a new set of teeming masses arriving in neighborhoods near Chinatown in such numbers that the newcomers' children have filled all the other local schools and are now being assigned to the less densely packed elementary school in Chinatown: namely, affluent white families.
From the Tribeca Trib in downtown Manhattan:
Waitlisted Tribeca Parents Angry over Assignment Chinatown School Assignment
More than two dozen Tribeca parents were shocked to learn last week that their children likely won’t be going to kindergarten in the neighborhood. Parents of the 28 children on the wait list for P.S. 234 received letters telling them that their kindergartners will instead be offered seats in Chinatown’s P.S. 130, at Baxter and Hester streets, just north of Canal Street.
“We’re very concerned,” said Marc Siden, whose daughter, Riley, received wating list number 34 in the lottery for admission in September. “We got blindsided by this and we don’t have a lot of time to make a decision. We don’t know enough about this school. It came out of left field.” ...
“We’re just so disappointed,” she said. “We didn’t pursue private schools or gifted and talented programs because it’s very important to us to go to a school in the neighborhood.”
Some desperate Tribeca parents have even talked of renting apartments east of Broadway to qualify their children for the Spruce Street school.
According to the website insideschools.com, 89 percent of the students at P.S. 130 are Asian-Americans, 5 percent are of Hispanic heritage, 3 percent are white and 2 percent are African American. Like P.S. 234, it is academically one of the highest ranked schools in the city.
If you ever wonder why NYC and DC elites don't take immigration seriously, you have to realize that from their personal perspective, the big demographic trend is the ever increasing number of white people with J.D./M.B.A. dual degrees who are crowding into their neighborhoods and forcing their kids to go to school in less fast-growing neighborhoods, like Chinatown.
Monarchism Vindicated
Queen Elizabeth's husband Prince Philip has a job that consists solely of socializing, and he's had Elderly Tourette's Syndrome since he was young. Fortunately, being Prince Consort is one of the few jobs that that won't get you fired from. From the U.K. Independent:
Ninety gaffes in ninety years
From Papua New Guinea to Stoke-on-Trent, Prince Philip has left his mark around the world. As his 90th birthday looms, Hannah Ewan recalls the soundbites that could only have come from one man
1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.
2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.
7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.
8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.
11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.
13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.
15. "What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."
16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.
18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.
22. "I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.
24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.
25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.
28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.
30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.
31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.
34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.
39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.
49. Philip: "Who are you?"
Simon Kelner: "I'm the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Sir."
Philip: "What are you doing here?"
Kelner: "You invited me."
Philip: "Well, you didn't have to come!"
An exchange at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002.
51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.
52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.
58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.
59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.
71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.
73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.
84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.
86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.
May 30, 2011
Hispanics grow by 15 million in 10 years
According to the Census, as reported in the WSJ, the Hispanic population grew by over 15 million from 2000 to 2010: from 35.3 to 50.5 million. That's 43% in ten years. The Mexican-American population alone grew by 11 million.
How much is the Hispanic population going to go up in this decade? 20 million? 25 million?
According to the conventional media wisdom, this growth in population is hugely relevant to elections, but were utterly irrelevant to the house price bubble in the middle of the last decade or to increases in carbon emissions.
Why do Republicans hate thinking about race and IQ, too?
Here's my new VDARE essay.
It's no surprise why Democrats tend to be so angry at anybody who mentions the race-IQ link, but why do so many Republicans now feel the same way? There are a number of reasons, but one is often overlooked. I explore an aspect of the sociology and psychology of Republican voters.
Read it there.
Panhandling 9
It was another really nice day. I asked for money last night, and money rolled in today. I'm thankful for how generous you all are. And now I'm going to ask again for more readers to send me money.
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Or, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Thanks.
May 29, 2011
Calvinball
The history of most sports is quite woozy before the 19th Century. It's obvious, such as from 17th Century Dutch paintings of daily life, that males played a lot of sports, but most of the rules we are familiar with go back to English-speakers of the 19th Century, or a little earlier. (The oldest evidence of the rules of golf being written down, for example, are from Edinburgh in 1744.)
What were sports like before the Victorian institutionalization?
What were sports like before the Victorian institutionalization?
My guess from watching little boys play, is that they had traditional rules that varied across time and place, with lots of Calvinball improvisations, followed by lots of arguments over whether that was fair or not. For example, legend has it that in 1823 at Rugby School, schoolboy William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran toward the goal, breaking traditional rules and inventing rugby.
Maybe that story is not exactly true, but it's likely that countless incidents like that have happened over the thousands of years -- somebody would do something new, then everybody would argue over it, and it would either become precedent or disallowed. But, then after awhile, something else would happen, and the rules would change some more, endlessly.
But there was a new spirit abroad in the English-speaking world over the last couple of hundred years or so that said rules should be standardized.
The coming of the railroad encouraged sportsmen to compete more around the country, which led to conflicts between local traditions. The railway also allowed older sportsmen to get together and standardize rules. The history of the evolution of American football in the 19th Century, for example, is largely a history of guys getting together in hotels next to train stations during the off season to argue about rules changes.
In contrast, little girls tend to change the rules to make people feel less bad.
How many sports have women invented? I looked up rhythmic gymnastics, and most of the names cited in the history section were men, but the first person cited in America was Catharine Beecher (of the exhaustingly energetic Beechers -- Harriet Beecher Stowe was her sister).
Maybe that story is not exactly true, but it's likely that countless incidents like that have happened over the thousands of years -- somebody would do something new, then everybody would argue over it, and it would either become precedent or disallowed. But, then after awhile, something else would happen, and the rules would change some more, endlessly.
But there was a new spirit abroad in the English-speaking world over the last couple of hundred years or so that said rules should be standardized.
The coming of the railroad encouraged sportsmen to compete more around the country, which led to conflicts between local traditions. The railway also allowed older sportsmen to get together and standardize rules. The history of the evolution of American football in the 19th Century, for example, is largely a history of guys getting together in hotels next to train stations during the off season to argue about rules changes.
In contrast, little girls tend to change the rules to make people feel less bad.
How many sports have women invented? I looked up rhythmic gymnastics, and most of the names cited in the history section were men, but the first person cited in America was Catharine Beecher (of the exhaustingly energetic Beechers -- Harriet Beecher Stowe was her sister).
The institutionalization of sports is a major human accomplishment. But are standardized rules for sports good in the long run, or is it better for young males to get more experience making up, debating, and agreeing upon their own rules ad hoc?
Norman Angell was premature, but right
From Haaretz:
Israel apparently doing nothing to enforce international sanctions on Iran
Benjamin Netanyahu, who endlessly preaches the need for firm action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear arms, is not lifting a finger to stop Israeli companies and individuals indirectly trading with Iran.
By Yossi Melman
The Ofer Brothers Group [Israeli shipping billionaires] may be scurrying into damage control in Israel, Singapore, London and Washington, after the United States blacklisted it for trading with Iran, but Israel seems to be doing nothing to enforce international sanctions on Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who endlessly preaches the need for firm action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear arms, is not lifting a finger to stop Israeli companies and individuals indirectly trading with Iran.
Nor is he acting against international companies and corporations that operate in Iran, while maintaining huge contracts with Israeli companies - including state bodies like the Electric Corporation and Airport Authority.
This incompetence, bordering on grave deficiency, is causing severe damage to the image of both Israel and its prime minister.
Or, maybe not. Maybe the 21st Century world just isn't really as exciting a life-or-death place teetering on the edge of the precipice as it seems to be on the 24-hour news channels.
Panhandling 8
I skipped a day of asking, and donations quickly dropped off. So, I'm back to imploring.
Please, would you consider giving me money so I can keep on writing?
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
If you already asked, please allow me to request that you follow up and put a check in the mail.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Or, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Thanks.
Nobody knows nothing
Karl Smith and Kevin Drum point to a new Gallup Poll asking "Just your best guess, what percentage of Americans today are gay or lesbian?" The mean guess was a ridiculous 24.6%. Only 4% said less than 5%, which is probably the best guess.
Polling companies seldom ask questions on which people can make obvious fools of themselves, since those can raise questions about the value of opinion polls.
Looking at the demographic crosstabs, it's evident that low intelligence people were most likely to wildly overestimate the percentage of homosexuals: 53% of people making under $30,000 annually said that at least 25% of the population was gay, and 47% of those with no more than a high school education. 43% of Democrats versus 24% of Republicans got the question wildly wrong.
Looking at the demographic crosstabs, it's evident that low intelligence people were most likely to wildly overestimate the percentage of homosexuals: 53% of people making under $30,000 annually said that at least 25% of the population was gay, and 47% of those with no more than a high school education. 43% of Democrats versus 24% of Republicans got the question wildly wrong.
In general, people are terrible at estimating or remembering demographic statistics. A 2001 Gallup survey, right after the release of 2000 Census results, found that the average American estimated that 33% of the population was black and 29% were Hispanic. That adds up to 62%, but who's counting? Not most people.
In that 2001 survey, nonwhites estimated that 40% of the population was black and 35% was Hispanic (adding up to 75%). In contrast, people claiming postgraduate degrees estimated that 25% were black and 24% Hispanic (only about double the Census numbers), which proves the value of advanced education.
Here, roughly, is how people think: You ask somebody how many Americans are Hispanic and they think of that guy on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s saying "Beisbol been berry berry good to me." And what's more American than baseball? And there are a lot of Latin ballplayers. But the guy on SNL who said that was black. So that means there are a lot of guys who are black comedians and also a lot of guys who are Hispanic baseball players.
Something that people almost never do is think about fields in which the group they are being asked about is rarely represented. If you ask people about gays, they think about fashion designers, musical actors, Republican politicians, interior decorators, and the like. They don't think about, say, oil company engineers or baseball players.
Four years ago on iSteve, I asked "Where are the famous old gay baseball players?"
Baseball players are extremely famous. I have a book by Bill James that lists his picks of the top 900 baseball players of all time, and I'd heard of the large majority of them, plus most of his picks for the next 225 best players. I could tell you facts about well over 500 baseball players.
I pointed out that while I had heard of two minor major league players were gay, I had never heard of a famous player who turned out to be gay. I said I'm sure I'm not aware of some, but I would suspect that no more than 1.0% of famous baseball players were homosexual.
I pointed out that while I had heard of two minor major league players were gay, I had never heard of a famous player who turned out to be gay. I said I'm sure I'm not aware of some, but I would suspect that no more than 1.0% of famous baseball players were homosexual.
This is not to say that baseball players are representative of the general population. I'm just saying that famous baseball players are one intensely studied group, of which very few turn out have been gay.
I'd heard lots of rumors over the years, but most of them were obvious gay fantasies about handsome, manly athletes like Mike Piazza and Sandy Koufax (The elegant and taciturn Koufax, who grew up the son of a rabbi in Brooklyn, has lived most of his post-retirement life in conservative small rural towns with his various wives and girlfriends, which would be an extremely improbable choice of locales for a gay Jewish celebrity.)
However, a number of commenters pointed to one famous old baseball player as not being publicly out of the closet, but his homosexuality being open knowledge. He's not a Hall of Famer but he's definitely one of the top 500 players of all time. I won't put his name here, but if you are interested, you can make your guess, then go look at the comments to my 2007 post and see if your guess matches up.
During his long career, this baseball player was fairly famous for being famous. That's because he'd do the kind of socially gracious, media-friendly things that ballplayers almost never do. For example, when traded to Montreal, he learned French, which made him hugely popular with local fans.
But his name doesn't come up much because he doesn't Shatter Stereotypes.
The funny thing is that I'd never heard rumors about him, probably because he's not the kind of individual to excite gay fantasies: not a great athlete but instead a highly skilled craftsman. He's a best-case scenario for a stereotypical gay athlete: famously charming, cultivated, fastidious, sociable, does lots of charity work: a gentleman.
He went straight from high school to the majors, but seems like a college-educated player. I once wrote a spec screenplay for an HBO sports comedy show and modeled a basketball player on this baseball player (I hadn't heard the gay rumors yet). In my little plot, this center from Tulane had dined his way out of the NBA, packing on 20 pounds of solid fat, but was now looking forward to winding up his playing career in the Italian basketball league because of the opportunity to sample Italy's regional cuisines on road trips.
During his long career, this baseball player was fairly famous for being famous. That's because he'd do the kind of socially gracious, media-friendly things that ballplayers almost never do. For example, when traded to Montreal, he learned French, which made him hugely popular with local fans.
But his name doesn't come up much because he doesn't Shatter Stereotypes.
May 28, 2011
Selecting for Conformity
Bryan (Selfish Reasons for Having More Children) Caplan writes:
I had an interesting argument with Charles Murray at yesterday's Cato Book Forum. While he expressed fundamental agreement with my views on nature and nurture, he thought parental marital status was an important exception. Children of divorce do worse than children whose parents remain married; children of never-married parents do worse than children of divorce. At least at first, Murray seemed to see these disparities as entirely causal: getting married causes your kids to do better in life; getting divorce causes some (but not all) of that benefit to go away.
I objected that divorce and single parenthood are not random. People who divorce are on average more impulsive and quarrelsome. Single parents are on average more impulsive and less achievement-oriented. Since these traits are heritable, we'd expect children of divorce and children of single parents to have worse outcomes - even if they were adopted at birth by Ozzie and Harriet.
You can read the whole thing there.
I want to note a social trend, that's reflective of a general theme: that in contemporary society, a lot of the rules for successful living aren't spelled out for people the way they used to be. This means that people who are smarter and/or raised in better social settings and/or naturally inclined toward successful life choices will still pick up the messages, but lots of other people won't.
This isn't a universal trend -- for example, since the 1980s, the rules about not committing felonies have been made clearer after a disastrous experiment in the 1960s with blurring the message. Prison terms have been lengthened, and a huge fraction of popular entertainment is devoted to sending the message that criminals will get caught.
In contrast, consider single motherhood and the term "bastard." A century ago, single motherhood was deterred, among other ways, by heaping opprobrium on the children of single mothers. That was cruel, but also pretty effective. Today, the term "bastard" has lost almost all connection with its original meaning. Nice people today would be shocked by the notion that society should discriminate against a child just because his parents weren't married. That's hardly the child's fault, now is it?
In fact, society is now deeply uncomfortable with the notion that we should be impolite to single mothers themselves. Thus, the term "single mother" has expanded strikingly to comprise not just never-married mothers, but also divorced mothers, and even widowed mothers. In most human civilizations, widowed mothers were always given higher regard than never-married mothers, but I see little of that in modern America. I was struck by learning that a Korean immigrant co-worker of my wife's, who was raising two daughters after her husband was killed in a car crash, always referred to herself as a "single mother" rather than as a "widow." Having come to English later than me, she was more aware of au courant Oprah Age terminology.
Not surprisingly, this decline in "preemptive discrimination" to deter single motherhood means we now have far more bastards. On the other hand, we don't see many bastards in the upper reaches of society, outside of celebrity bohemian circles. In fact, upper middle class life is evolving in directions that quietly but effectively discriminate against not just bastards, but also against the children of divorce.
The extraordinary complication of the modern college admissions game, for example, are best navigated by happy two parent families where mom and dad work together seamlessly to polish Junior's resume. Consider Amy Chua: she seems like a handful, yet she and her husband get along well-enough to stay married, which allows them to bring their huge joint resources of money, energy, education, and connections to bear on getting their amenable oldest daughter into Harvard.
This trend has disparate impact on the children of broken families, but what are a combination of single moms, deadbeat dads, men with demanding new girlfriends, and widows going to do about it? Form the Losers and Screw-Ups Rights League?
This may have something to do with the vague social trend that many people have noted: that the young people at the top of society today seem pretty happy, well-adjusted, cooperative, and much more conformist than in the recent turbulent past. I suspect that people of ornery and/or impulsive dispositions inherited from their screw-up parents are less likely to make it to the upper reaches of society than in the past. In older times, parents with screw-up inclinations were more likely to be deterred by explicit social pressures against bastardy and divorces.
The niceness of today's SWPLs probably sets a good (if vague) example for the lower orders, which might have some impact on the decline in crime. On the other hand, this social selection for the children of nice, cooperative couples probably means that the upper middle class is becoming nicer and more cooperative, but also more conformist and more politically correct.
But are we losing any good things that go along with ornery nonconformity, such as creativity and insight?
By the way, if you like either of today's two posts, or are anticipating my upcoming VDARE column on an overlooked reason why Republicans are almost as hostile as Democrats toward noticing the race-IQ nexus, please consider donating using the Paypal button at the top of the the righthand column above.
By the way, if you like either of today's two posts, or are anticipating my upcoming VDARE column on an overlooked reason why Republicans are almost as hostile as Democrats toward noticing the race-IQ nexus, please consider donating using the Paypal button at the top of the the righthand column above.
May 27, 2011
James Q. Wilson on fall in crime
J.Q. Wilson reviews arguments for explaining the decline in crime in the WSJ. He gives some credence to the lead theory. It would be nice to see the lead theory both more fleshed out and more critiqued.
What about popular culture? Are there movies today that portray criminals as sympathetic characters? The heist film -- The Town, Fast Five, Oceans 11, or Inception -- remains alive. But the heists in contemporary films are so complicated, require so much planning, training, and teamwork to pull off, that they send the message that you might as well become a second unit movie director. A lot of heist movies these days are actually metaphors about making movies -- Inception, most obviously -- and movies these days are ridiculously complicated to make.
Moreover, movies promote themselves with "The Making of" documentaries about how complicated they are to make. How many young people have watched The Making of Inception documentary about how many hundreds of experts had to work together to make a movie about expert criminals?
It must be quite daunting for young would-be criminals to be told over and over again by their favorite movies that only by organizing superbly can they become successful criminals.
It's like the flip side of the CIS crime shows on TV that have taught a generation that cops have giant computer monitors that will instantly display the faintest clue that will prove the perp guilty. Heist movies teach the lesson that if you want to outsmart all that CIS technology, you'd better belong to a gang of genius criminals, each of whom is the master of some arcane field of knowhow.
I can imagine that a lot of 13-year-olds would think it cool to join a gang like that, but they don't know any gangs like that. They look around at the gang members they know, like their cousin Jesus, and most of them seem like doomed idiots.
I can imagine that a lot of 13-year-olds would think it cool to join a gang like that, but they don't know any gangs like that. They look around at the gang members they know, like their cousin Jesus, and most of them seem like doomed idiots.
My impression is that popular culture today has gotten rather authoritarian or militaristic. Cops used to be portrayed as big dumb Irishmen, easy to outwit. But now, they're portrayed as practically Seal Team 6, with lots of cool weapons and training. Authority has most of the glamor these days, while criminals seem like losers.
IMF after DSK: Afro-Asian boss to break Euro monopoly?
Here's a story in the Washington Post about a groundswell of support in NY-DC for a particular non-European candidate to head the IMF that is pretty funny if you Get The Joke. (But who does, these days?)
See, since the post-WWII era, America and Europe have had a deal: the head of the World Bank is always an American and the head of the International Monetary Fund is always a European. For example, the current head of the World Bank is Robert Zoellick, and the previous one was Paul Wolfowitz. The only possible exception to this rule was the World bank leader before Wolfowitz, Sir James Wolfensohn. He became an American citizen in 1980 to be eligible for the job, but went back to Australian citizenship in 2010.
Not surprisingly, American interests have been hinting that what with the European IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn getting caught raping Third Worlders not just metaphorically, but literally, it's time to break this outdated European monopoly on the IMF. This doesn't have anything to do with America trying to take power away from Europe. It's all about diversity and social justice!
In fact, Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have come up with the perfect diversity candidate. He's African by birth (in what's now Zambia, although it was called something very different then), Asian by current employment, and he apparently holds citizenships in both the New World (well, to be precise, the U.S.) and the Old World (you'll never, ever guess where).
In fact, Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have come up with the perfect diversity candidate. He's African by birth (in what's now Zambia, although it was called something very different then), Asian by current employment, and he apparently holds citizenships in both the New World (well, to be precise, the U.S.) and the Old World (you'll never, ever guess where).
You can read all about the New York financial press's diversity fusion candidate here.
Where would colleges find underexploited talent?
David Leonhardt writes in the NYT about how wonderful it is that Amherst, a super small liberal arts college, has increased its share of Pell Grant winners (bottom half of income distribution) from 13% to 22%.
Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.
My impression is that the thumb on the scale to get students from the South Bronx and to a somewhat lesser extent from a coal mining district of West Virginia is bigger normally than 50 points. A 1300 isn't likely to get you into Amherst. The reality is that there are very very few South Bronx kids with what it takes to be competitive at Amherst, so schools like Amherst get into bidding wars with each other over them already. The more Amherst tries to drive up its share of Pell Grant winners from the South Bronx, the more Swarthmore's goes does.
About a decade ago, the press got worked up over how Caltech had only zero or one black student in its freshman class. "Look how many blacks MIT has!" It never occurred to the pundits that if Caltech were harangued into getting more black students, they'd just wind up spending a fortune to take some away from MIT. Nobody ever gets that. The assumption is that Caltech should merely create more Caltech-type black high school seniors.
About a decade ago, the press got worked up over how Caltech had only zero or one black student in its freshman class. "Look how many blacks MIT has!" It never occurred to the pundits that if Caltech were harangued into getting more black students, they'd just wind up spending a fortune to take some away from MIT. Nobody ever gets that. The assumption is that Caltech should merely create more Caltech-type black high school seniors.
In contrast, I think the most underexploited center of potential talent are kids from broken families, especially boys, who don't have two parents to prod them to jump through all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires.
Panhandling 7
Yet another day pleasing to my ego and bank account. Thanks.
Granted, returns are slowly diminishing, but not all that fast, so here I am asking for your help again.
So, please, would you consider giving me money so I can keep on writing?
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
If you already asked, please allow me to request that you follow up and put a check in the mail.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Or, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Thanks.
"Holistic" college admissions
Mickey Kaus writes at the Daily Caller:
But when you think about it, a non-college world in which high school graduates acquired the skills they wanted on the web or in ad hoc classes and proved their worth by performing well in actual jobs might be a preferable form of meritocracy. a) There would be no “signaling” of status for life, the way an Ivy League degree now signals status for life. The elite wouldn’t necessarily be getting Ivy League degrees; b) post-high school life would become a mad scramble for skills in which luck would inevitably play a greater role. That’s a good thing if it prevents people from concluding that richer = better. More than ever, richer might just = luckier; c) A skill-by-skill scramble would value a multiplicity of discrete talents–are you a good computer programmer? a painter? a musician? writer?–instead of one general talent (“smarts”). You wouldn’t need to be well-rounded to join the elite. You’d just have to be good at something. It’s harder to insinuate that a programmer is better than a musician or writer the way it’s currently possible to insinuate that a high-SAT Yale grad is better than someone whose scores could only get him into a state school. …
This is an interesting point: that the kind of "holistic" college admissions that the Supreme Court endorsed in its 2003 pro-affirmative action ruling in Grutter claims to evaluate everybody in some overall "holistic" sense that, in effect, says some people are better overall than other people. The purpose of the Supreme Courts' call for holistic admissions was to fuzz up the margin so nobody could be certain than affirmative action was being practiced. But holistic admissions, by their stated goal of analyzing all aspects of the applicants, suggest that people can be ranked holistically (i.e. overall).
In contrast, consider Caltech, which doesn't do much affirmative action and doesn't really care that much about qualifications outside of test scores, grades, and evidence of extreme science or engineering talent / desire. I went to high school with one kid who got into Caltech and my younger son went to school with one kid who got into Caltech. Both of these Caltech-bound kids were extremely Aspergery to the point of autism. The reaction of other kids to these guys getting into Caltech was: "Hey, that's cool! You must have really high test scores! (I'm still glad I'm not you.")
On the other hand, Harvard trumpets that it has holistic admissions, and most students take away the implied lesson that those who get into Harvard are just overall better than you are.
Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is, but every high school student I talked to about the movie was of the opinion that they wished they were as awesome as Mark Zuckerberg.
May 26, 2011
Choose your parents wisely
Here's the abstract of an academic article by Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow and jimi adams that shows that, as usual, family helps:
The popular image of the African American National Basketball Association (NBA) player as rising from the ‘ghetto’ to international fame and fortune misleads academics and publics alike. This false image is fueled, in part, by critical shortcomings in empirical research on the relationship between race, sport, and occupational mobility: these studies have not adequately examined differences in social class and family structure backgrounds across, and especially within, racial groups. To address this problem, we empirically investigate how the intersection of race, social class and family structure background influences entry into the NBA. Information on social class and family structure background for a subpopulation of NBA players (N = 155) comes from 245 articles published in local, regional and national newspapers between 1994 and 2004. We find that, after accounting for methodological problems common in newspaper data, most NBA players come from relatively advantaged social origins and African Americans from disadvantaged social origins have lower odds of being in the NBA than African American and white players from relatively advantaged origins.
I was nodding my head until that last bit. Watching Dirk Nowitzki dominate on the sports highlights gets me to wondering once again: how come there are more top white basketball players from foreign countries (e.g., Nowitzki, Nash, the Gasols, Ginobili, etc.) than from the U.S.? Sure, there are more tall white guys abroad, but Germany isn't exactly hoops crazy.
Top white American basketball players do seem to come from wealthy basketball families fairly often: Kevin Love's dad was in the NBA and Kiki Vandeweghe's dad was an NBA player who became the Lakers' team doctor. But, it seems as if white fathers today who aren't ex-basketball stars are more likely to groom their tall, athletic sons to be quarterbacks rather than basketball players. I remember back in the late 1960s how amazed NFL fans were that Roman Gabriel, at 6'5" had become a quarterback rather than a basketball player. Times have changed. (By the way, Gabriel's father was from the Philippines. His mother was Irish.)
Clearly, one reason for this finding about blacks is that jail wrecks the careers of a fair number of athletic blacks from underclass backgrounds. It would be interesting to look at arrest and prison statistics on height and race to see if being very tall helps a black guy be less likely to stay out of jail because he's being helped along toward a basketball career. My prediction would be that a lower percentage of very tall black men are in prison than in the total black population.
A few years ago, I made up a list of the top 10 centers in NBA history, and most seemed pretty smart. Center is the position where sheer height matters most, yet having something on the ball must also help. Of the top 10 centers, only Moses Malone, with his almost incomprehensible rural Southern accent, was clearly from the least advantaged part of society. Patrick Ewing was pretty taciturn too, but a lot of other top centers, such as Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, were famously good interviews. David Robinson scored 1320 on the SAT (old style) and Kareem 1130.
Also, I suspect that having an outstandingly athletic son can sometimes keep fathers from straying too far, thus keeping the kid at a higher social level because his family is intact.
The small number of top players from Africa are mostly from the top of their societies: Olajuwon's dad was rich, Mutumbo's dad was a high school principal, and Luol Deng's dad was a cabinet minister in the Sudan. The late Manute Bol was a herdsman, however.
Also, I suspect that having an outstandingly athletic son can sometimes keep fathers from straying too far, thus keeping the kid at a higher social level because his family is intact.
The small number of top players from Africa are mostly from the top of their societies: Olajuwon's dad was rich, Mutumbo's dad was a high school principal, and Luol Deng's dad was a cabinet minister in the Sudan. The late Manute Bol was a herdsman, however.
Bloomberg View versus iSteve
Michael Bloomberg, ninth richest man in America and mayor of New York, has debuted his expensive new online opinion magazine: Bloomberg View. For example, here are its five latest op-eds
JUST ADDED…
I haven't actually read any of these, so maybe Bloomberg View will turn out to be more fun than it looks. Still, here's my question:
Which is more interesting: Bloomberg View or iSteve?
Francis Fukuyama’s History of the World: Part I
My long review of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order is now in the July 2011 print edition of The American Conservative. Subscribers can read it online. (You can subscribe here.) Here's the opening:
Whenever prominent national security intellectual Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama publishes another book (which is often), it’s always amusing to wisecrack about how current events show that history has not, indeed, ended. For example, the first half of what Fukuyama intends to be his magnum opus, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, landed with a thump on my doorstep the week America plunged into war with Libya. As I write, Americans are astounded by Osama bin Laden being found in the heart of Pakistan’s deep state.
It’s hard to resist making jokes at Fukuyama’s expense, even ones as tired as the non-end of history, because of his self-promoting egotism. For example, this doorstop book is, we are informed: first, an extension both forward and backward in time of his late mentor Samuel P. Huntington’s 1968 landmark, Political Order in Changing Societies; second, Fukuyama’s version of Jared Diamond’s 1997 bestselling History and Theory of Everything, Guns, Germs, and Steel; and, third, a revolutionary work that introduces to political science the cutting edge Darwinian insights of 1960s-1970s sociobiologists. (While Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I began with cavemen, Fukuyama’s starts with chimpanzees.)
This is not to imply that The Origins of Political Order is a bad book. It’s a very good one, just not as boggling as Fukuyama imagines. Instead, Origins is quite sensible: it traces the historic evolution of what he defines as a good state: one that is strong, accountable, and under the rule of law. Unfortunately, it’s also shallow.
A clue to Fukuyama’s astonishing productivity—Who can type that fast?—might be found in his Wikipedia photograph, which shows him wearing a headset microphone. The less-than-magisterial prose style of Origins sometimes sounds as if Fukuyama had dictated it at some haste into Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. For instance, p. 10 of Origins reads like Jane Austen on crack:
"It concerns the difficulties of creating and maintaining effective political institutions, governments that are simultaneously powerful, rule bound, and accountable. This might seem like an obvious point that any fourth grader would acknowledge, and yet on further reflection it is a truth that many intelligent people fail to understand."
Good grief, more Twitter
Five days ago I announced I finaly had a Twitter account where you could sign up to be a follower (subscriber?) of me at
and receive twits (tweets?) of the title and link to my latest blog post. It occurs to me, now, that some of you might not want to be publicly identified as a follower of Steve_Sailer. So, I've started a second Twitter account that will provide the exact same content, but the name is anodyne. Just click here:
http://tinyurl.com/3gdjxw3
When you get there, click on the Orange button on the right that reads "Sign up and follow ..."
When you get there, click on the Orange button on the right that reads "Sign up and follow ..."
By the way, is "follower" the right word with Twitter? "Acolyte?" "Cultist?" I can never remember. You know, when I think back on it, I'm quite amazed that I was a professional, full-time PC guy in 1986-87, with three PC technicians working for me. Not only was I fairly good at it, I liked new technology back then. In 1986, I would have known exactly whether I was sending out twits or tweets. Today, that past life seems as bizarre to me as if I had once been a world-class knitter.
I had a dream one night in the 1990s that I had once won an Olympic gold medal. When somebody challenged me in the dream, I explained that I had won my gold medal at the 1984 L.A. Summer Games in the Plunge for Distance, an obscure but still extant Olympic swimming / diving event in which the eight finalists stand on the edge of the pool and dive in and the one who goes farthest before having to take a breath wins. "You haven't heard about it," I explained persuasively, "because they don't put it on TV. And, yeah, maybe since it's not on TV it doesn't get the very best athletes, so that's how I stood a chance. But it's still a real Olympic event and I won it!"
(In reality, the Plunge for Distance was last part of the Olympics at the 1904 St. Louis Games. Here's a 1917 New York Times article that begins, "Several attempts have been made to induce the A.A.U. and college authorities to abolish the plunge for distance as a standard or championship event in water sports, on the plea that it is a type of contest requiring neither athletic ability, nor especial skill of any kind," which is what I like about it.)
(In reality, the Plunge for Distance was last part of the Olympics at the 1904 St. Louis Games. Here's a 1917 New York Times article that begins, "Several attempts have been made to induce the A.A.U. and college authorities to abolish the plunge for distance as a standard or championship event in water sports, on the plea that it is a type of contest requiring neither athletic ability, nor especial skill of any kind," which is what I like about it.)
Anyway, my point is that if you look at how incompetent I am with computers now, my dream about me having once been an Olympic gold medalist makes more sense than the reality that I was once a pretty handy computer guy.
Life is pretty short, I suppose, like everybody says it is. But, sometimes, when I look back at all the weird twists in my life, it can seem enjoyably long.
Anyway, you can make sure to never miss having these kind of rambling reminiscences twooted to you by going to one of the above links and signing up to be my Tweeter disciple.
Also, don't forget you can share my posts via Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. using those five grayish buttons below.
Also, don't forget you can share my posts via Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. using those five grayish buttons below.
May 25, 2011
Panhandling 6
It turns out that the way to get people to give you money is to ask them to give you money. I asked again last night, and my readers were once again very generous. That really makes my day.
So, please, would you consider giving me money so I can keep on writing?
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Or, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Thanks.
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding"
From the NYT:
Parties See Obama’s Israel Policy as Wedge for 2012
By JACKIE CALMES and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — Few issues in American politics are as bipartisan as support for Israel. Yet the question of whether President Obama is supportive enough is behind some of the most partisan maneuvering since the Middle East ally was born six decades ago, and that angling has potential ramifications for the 2012 elections.
The visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the past week captured just how aggressively Republicans are stoking doubts about Mr. Obama. Republican Congressional leaders and presidential aspirants lavished praise on Mr. Netanyahu as quickly as they had condemned Mr. Obama for proposing that Israel’s 1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps, should be a basis for negotiating peace with the Palestinians.
Republicans do not suggest that they can soon break the Democratic Party’s long hold on the loyalty of Jewish-American voters; Mr. Obama got nearly 8 of 10 such voters in 2008. But what Republicans do see is the potential in 2012 to diminish the millions of dollars, volunteer activism and ultimately the votes that Mr. Obama and his party typically get from American Jews — support that is disproportionate to their numbers.
And that's not counting unpaid media: of the traditional big 4 newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and LA Times, are all Jewish-owned. Jews make up about half of the Atlantic 50 list of most influential pundits.
While Jewish Americans are just 2 percent of the electorate nationally, they are “strategically concentrated,” as Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, put it, in several swing states that are critical in presidential elections. Those states include Florida — which in 2000 illustrated the potentially decisive power of one state — Ohio and Nevada.
A test of Mr. Obama’s support will come June 20, when he will hold a fund-raiser for about 80 Jewish donors at a private dinner.
John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a possible Republican presidential candidate, argues that because of administration proposals, Republicans will be able to make gains not only among American Jews but also among evangelicals who are supportive of Israel on biblical grounds, and other voters.
Mr. Bolton said that he was on a cruise sponsored by the conservative magazine Weekly Standard last week in the Mediterranean, and that most of the people on the ship “reacted very strongly against” Mr. Obama’s speech outlining his Mideast vision. “As a Republican,” he said, “you can use this to show how radical the president’s policies are on a whole range of issues.”
The depth of Democrats’ worries was evident from the competition to out-applaud Republicans on Tuesday during Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress
How many standing ovations did Netanyahu get from Congress? 20? 29? That reminds me of a story in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago:
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. ...
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! ... They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! ...
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
... That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding."
It has been widely noted that VP and President of the Senate Joe Biden merely rubbed his knuckles pensively after Netanyahu's statement that Jerusalem must be the united capital of Israel, while everyone else in the room cheered as if Beyonce had just finished singing "Single Ladies."
Yet it is the Republican Party’s close identification with evangelical Christians in recent years that is perhaps its biggest hurdle to winning over significant numbers of Jewish voters and donors. On issues that are crucial to the conservative Republican base — like opposition to abortion, gay rights, liberalized immigration and much government spending — most American Jews are on the other side, and strongly so. ...
Indeed.
Mr. Netanyahu on Monday experienced first-hand the tension arising from that complaint among Democrats, and Republicans’ rejection of it, in a private meeting he held with representatives of the National Jewish Democratic Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition to underscore American Jews’ bipartisan consensus on Israel.
A partisan argument ensued after Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whom Mr. Obama recently named as chairman of the Democratic Party, suggested they agree not to make support for Israel an election issue. Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican group, objected, accusing her of proposing a “gag order.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
