Andrew Sullivan fights the good fight

Andrew Sullivan, who published a symposium on The Bell Curve when he edited The New Republic in 1994, has bravely returned to the fray of defending Herrnstein and Murray, exciting many lowbrow denunciations from the likes of Gawker.

Yet, clearly, stunning new developments in the real world over the last 17 years have proven Herrnstein and Murray wrong. For example, there are all those countless black Silicon Valley start-up founders who have made so much money in high-tech. And, we constantly read articles in the newspaper these days about how the Test Score Gap has vanished in one school district after another, which is why the No Child Left Behind act is right on schedule to make everybody proficient within 2.5 years. 

Today, everything is completely different than when I started following social science statistics in 1972 (see here for my first letter to the editor back in 1973 when I was 14, which was on sociologist Christopher Jencks' book Inequality, a re-analysis of the data in the 1966 Coleman Report).

In 1972, it looked like the rank order of average intelligence was Oriental, Caucasian, Chicano, and black. But, in 2011, of course, we now see from endless studies and real world examples that the actual rank ordering appears to be Asian, non-Hispanic white, Latino, and African-American. So, everything has changed!

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

Why Clinton's book is worse than Bush's: Bill wrote it himself

At the VDARE blog, I write:

Central to contemporary Democrats' self-image is their conviction that they are more intelligent and refined than Republicans. Thus, millions of Democrats fell hard after their 2000 and 2004 Presidential defeats for an absurd hoax claiming that Blue States like Connecticut have average IQs as much as 26 points higher than Red States like Utah. 

This may help explain why Bill Clinton is insistent that he personally “wrote and rewrote” his lumpish new book, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy. Since, as the subtitle implies, Democrats are smart, a super-successful Democrat like Bill Clinton must be a natural prose stylist in little need of a competent ghostwriter. In reality, however, Clinton’s verbiage is embarrassingly amateurish, especially when compared to George W. Bush's 2010 bestseller Decision Points. 

Clinton seems to believe that being able to extrude long sentences demonstrates intelligence. Thus, on p. 6 of Back to Work, I tripped over a sentence of 85 words. Forewarned, I began to track Clinton's XXXL-size sentences. By page 20, I had found additional leviathans of 91, 105, 110, 98, 118, and a full 200 words. On pp. 23-24, Clinton discharged a blue whale of a sentence lasting 346 words, after which I gave up looking.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Democrats abandon white working class

From the NYT, a lengthy explication of the high-low versus middle coalition:

The Future of the Obama Coalition 

By THOMAS B. EDSALL 

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. 

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

The obvious question is whether Republicans will, in response, do anything to motivate working class whites to go to the polls other than to promise to cut taxes on billionaires?

We know what one successful campaign that mobilizes the less intellectual white voters to get off the couch and vote looks like: George H.W. Bush in 1988: Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance, and other small but evocative issues that succeeded in defining, crudely but not inaccurately, Dukakis. We also know the fear and loathing this successful effort to engage mass interest in the election inspired in media elites, who have demonized that strategy ever since. We also know what an impotent Republican strategy respectful of media taboos looks likes: John McCain in 2008.

Perhaps someday, we might even see a substantive campaign to offer positive policy solutions to benefit the broad middle of the American public.

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

Bill Clinton's "Back to Work"

My new VDARE column is a review of the ex-President's new book Back to Work. 

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

Shocking News

From the NYT comes one of those Local News articles about The Gap that are always breathlessly reported as if local disparities reflect some unique problem:

In New York, Mexicans Lag in Education 

By KIRK SEMPLE 

In the past two decades, the Mexican population in New York City has grown more than fivefold, with immigrants settling across the five boroughs. Many adults have demonstrated remarkable success at finding work, filling restaurant kitchens and construction sites, and opening hundreds of businesses. 

But their children, in one crucial respect, have fared far differently. 

About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data. 

No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.

I find "9 percent" implausibly low, but, whatever.

This crisis endures at the college level.

How exactly is it a "crisis" if it "endures?" There's very little evidence that Mexican-Americans en masse consider their children's or grand-children's or great-grandchildren's relative lack of education to be a crisis. 

Much of the punditry on immigration coming out of the dominant NY-DC Axis of Obliviousness assumes that immigration from Mexico is a brand new phenomenon, so the future is wide open. Anything could happen! To New York journalists, the most plausible model would be Mexicans as not the new Jews, but at least as the new Italians. After all, their names sometimes end in vowels, so they must be pretty similar. Thus, we should be seeing tons of Mexican-American Scalias, Mondavis, Gianninis, Scorseses, Giamattis, Coppolas, and Paglias any day now.

From a Southwestern U.S. perspective, however, as amply documented by social science research, none of this looks like a crisis, a crossroads where something has to change. Instead, a relative lack of education among Mexican-Americans just looks like Situation Normal for at least four or five generations at a stretch. 

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

Ron Rosenbaum

Ron Rosenbaum is a mainstream, respected, nearly ubiquitous social commentator who frequently appears to be in the throes of hydrophobia. Here's one of his earlier contributions. Here's another. 

From the Washington Post's Slate yesterday:

The Unbearable Whiteness of White Meat 

Dark meat is better. Why don't we love it more? 

By Ron Rosenbaum 

Posted Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011, at 7:21 AM ET 

Not being a postmodernist I wouldn't call the overwhelming American preference for white-meat turkey a form of cultural hegemony. More like a mass hallucination. Why, for instance, hasn't white meat shared the same fate, the same cultural disenfranchisement, as packaged white bread? 

Some of you may remember white bread. Not the white bread of crusty baguettes and the like, but the white bread of sliced, standardized loaves of cotton wool, the stuff people ate before everyone switched to baguettes and focaccia and brioche, which are, yes, often "white" but not "white bread" in the old-fashioned, mass-produced sense. I'm talking about Wonderbread bread.

This is what I can't understand: Why does most of America want its turkey meat white? ... 

Why have we broken the chains of the whiteness that bound us to fatally tasteless white bread while still remaining imprisoned in the white-meat turkey ghetto? 

... Do they still associate white meat with refinement? It was enough to make me wonder whether there could be a racial, if not racist, subtext here. Perhaps there is a clue in the shifting fate of the "other white meat"—pork. I'll never forget the moment when I learned the antebellum racial origin of the phrase "living high on the hog." I had driven down the I-5 "grapevine," that fog-shrouded mountainous interior route from San Francisco to L.A. with a couple of Communist Party women who were mothers of death row prisoners (long story). When dawn broke and we arrived in Watts, they guided me to a place called Ray's Redwood City, an all-night, almost all-black joint where the ladies of Saturday night dined with the ministers of Sunday morning (not at the same tables), and my fellow travelers ordered me a dish called "high on the hog," a mountain of scrambled eggs topped by a fried pork chop. 

It was then I learned the etymology of the phrase in America. It hails from the plantation days, when the white slave owners dined on choice pork chops cut from "high on the hog" while the slaves made do with the lower parts of the pig—the ham hocks, the pigs feet, the pork bellies, and the innards. White meat was high on the hog, but not higher on flavor than other (often darker) cuts. Indeed the "other white meat" now available most frequently in lean and tasteless pork chops and cutlets has little more taste than white meat turkey. 

Despite its superior taste, dark meat has dark undertones for some. Dark meat evokes the color of earth, soil. Dark meat seems to summon up ancient fears of contamination and miscegenation as opposed to the supposed superior purity of white meat. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that white meat remains the choice of a holiday that celebrates Puritans. 

Indeed, the connotations of the pale and darker parts of the turkey constitute a meaty metaphor for the Thanksgiving feast itself. The allegedly more refined and daintier white parts, the wings and breast, have never touched the ground the way the earthier darker legs have done. And you know how dirty dirt is. 

By the way, if you want to read a brilliant poetic embodiment of the real story of our "Pilgrim fathers," a chilling antidote to white bread, white meat, and Thanksgiving treacle, I recommend you take a look at Robert Lowell's amazing, chilling poem "Children of Light" (which could have been called ("Children of White"). 

Its opening lines represent the best unsentimental epitaph for the myth of Thanksgiving: 

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones. 

Maybe that's why I have a prejudice against the white-meat sacrament of the holiday that covers up the white man's crimes. 

It's Lowell writing about his pilgrim ancestors who began the rolling genocidal slaughter of those nice Native Americans who made the first Thanksgiving possible. 

The real Thanksgiving story is extremely dark, far darker than any leg and thigh meat. 

Could fear of facing our dark history be behind the prejudice against dark meat? 

No comment.

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

Notice anything missing?

An op-ed in the NYT:

The Age of the Superfluous Worker 

By HERBERT J. GANS 

AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it. 

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again. 

The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count. ... 

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. 

Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

Good points! But, could there possibly be a fifth reason for the increase in surplus labor? I realize that adding roughly 50,000,000 people to the population through immigration policies is totally trivial compared to the four reasons Gans mentions, but I just wanted to toss it out there for completeness sake.

When the jobless recovery ends and the economy is restored to good health, today’s surplus will be reduced. New technology and the products and services that accompany it will create new jobs. But unless the economy itself changes, eventually many of these innovations may be turned over to machines or the jobs may be sent to lower-wage economies.

Not to mention bringing tens of millions of low wage workers to our economy, but it's considered in poor taste to mention that, so forget I ever said it.

In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones. 

What could be done to prevent such a future? America will have to finally get serious about preserving and creating jobs — and on a larger, and more lasting, scale than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Private enterprise and government will have to think in terms of industrial policy, and one that emphasizes labor-intensive economic growth and innovation. Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers even as it would raise the quality of education. 

In the long run, reducing working time — perhaps to as low as 30 hours a week, with the lost income made up by unemployment compensation — would lead to a modest increase in jobs, through work sharing. New taxes on income and wealth are unavoidable, as are special taxes on the capital-intensive part of the economy. Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well, and today’s polarized and increasingly corporate-run democracy will have to be turned into a truly representative one.

Maybe this sounds crazy, but we might even try the popular anti-corporatist policy of restricting immigration!

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

More great moments in 21st Century hyphenated names

A reader sends me a couple of examples from his local newspaper further helping explain why hyphenated surnames are receding from fashion among the educated classes in America:

"Jose Torrez-Gonzales, 28, and Marcos Gomez-Perez, 21, both illegal immigrants from Mexico" were arrested for stabbing a woman to death in a Walmart parking lot.

Buffalo News 

"A man charged with fatally stabbing a New York woman during an apparent carjacking attempt in a Walmart parking lot has pleaded not guilty.  Luis Rodriguez-Flamenco was arraigned Wednesday in Albion Town Court on a charge of second-degree murder in the death of 45-year-old Kathleen Byham."

Buffalo News

The use of a hyphen would appear to be an attempt at assimilation to American norms, since the Spanish tradition is to not use one. For example, actress Helena Bonham Carter, whose maternal grandfather was a Spanish diplomat, doesn't use a hyphen while her distant cousin actor Crispin Bonham-Carter does.

On a more philosophical level than Walmart parking lot stabbings, I would argue that all surname traditions will be inherently unsatisfactory in some sense or another because the reality of sexual reproduction is incompatible with our feelings of individualism and desire to be remembered as an individual. From two-to-the-nth your genes have come, and, if you are lucky, to two-to-the-nth your genes shall return. 

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

Bulldogs

Here's a lengthy article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis on problems with the faddishly-popular English bulldogs (the #1 breed in L.A., a factoid that is cited in the article as a self-evidently alarming statistic). 

Back since bull-baiting was outlawed in 1835, English bulldogs have been bred to look like a cartoon of a human baby, with all sorts of unfortunate effects on their health. Back in the bull-baiting days, English bulldogs were vicious beasts, but Victorians quickly bred them for winning personalities. But modern Americans have taken that too far and turned English bulldogs into caricatures of Winston Churchill in senility. 

In general, the 19th Century British were just more effectual at dog breeding than are moderns. I strongly doubt that they had better techniques. They just had better goals. For example, the reporter goes to visit a man who has been breeding a healthier English bulldog for 40 years, but nobody much cares. 

That reminds me that you occasionally read, although less often now than a decade ago, of somebody claiming that genetic engineering of humans will, Real Soon Now, change everything. I pretty much asserted that back in the 1990s. 

Well, maybe, but leaving aside all the technical questions and consider this: humans have near-complete control over dog breeding today, and yet we are lousier at it than a century ago.

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

The return of patriarchy

I'm reading Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, about the growth of class divides in America and I think it sheds some light on this NYT article [link fixed] by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow on the failure of that post-1968 project to have women not take their husbands' names at marriage:

WHEN my parents married in 1977, women’s liberation was in full swing and my mother was a consciousness-raiser. She was about as likely to take my father’s name as she was to sport a veil at the wedding. She would remain Ms. Tuhus. Nine months later, the surname for their new baby (me) was self-evident. My parents yoked their names into a new one: Tuhus-Dubrow....

But this Wave of the Future has washed out to sea:

According to a 2009 study analyzing data from 2004, only 6 percent of native-born American married women had unconventional surnames (meaning they kept their birth names, hyphenated with their husbands’ names, or pulled a Hillary Rodham Clinton). 

I know lots of women, including myself, who kept their birth names at marriage. But according to my anecdotal observations, which others seconded, rates of hyphenation seem to have fallen since my brother and I were born. 

As Ms. Segal-Reichlin said, “At the time I think they thought they were going to be the wave of the future,” but it has not panned out that way. Still, hyphenated names are not entirely a relic of the ’70s, like sideburns and lava lamps: witness the Jolie-Pitts.
Based on my conversations, the verdict on hyphenation was mixed. 

“When I was young I hated it,” said Sarah Schindler-Williams, a 32-year-old lawyer in Philadelphia. “It was long, it never fit in anything. I was always Sarah Schindler-Willi.” 

But most, including Ms. Schindler-Williams, eventually grew to appreciate their cumbersome monikers. Names frequently convey information about their bearers: Weinberg or O’Malley gives you a hint about the person attached to it. But conjoined names, several people mentioned, also say something extra about your parents’ egalitarian values. (Unless you are British; then it means you’re posh.)

Of course, the point of wanting to advertise your parents' egalitarian values is to demonstrate your own hereditary poshness. 

The problem, though, is that egalitarian values, such as a lack of disdain for bastardy, got taken up, in practice, by all the wrong people. 

For example, when reading lists of arrestees in last summer's English riots, I was struck by the many double-barreled surnames. Were Old Etonians running amok, like on Boat Race Night in a Wodehouse novel?

My English readers pointed out, however, that doubled-barreled surnnames in England today are less the mark of friends of Bertie Wooster (e.g., Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt-fancier from deepest Lincolnshire) and more the mark of blacks whose parents didn't marry.

As Murray documents in his new book, the key class divide today centers around marriage and legitimacy. Thus, it's hardly surprising that this innovation has faded out of fashion.

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

Illegitimacy rate fell in 2010

The federal government's National Vital Statistics Report on Births: Preliminary Data for 2010 shows the first decline in the percentage of children born illegitimately in many years. In 2010, 40.8 % of all births in America were to unmarried mothers, down marginally from 41.0% in 2009. 

This is in part due to the sharp fall in total births to Hispanics. The Latino illegitimacy rate still grew from 53.2% to 53.3%, but the Hispanic share of total births declined from 24.2% to 23.6%. The non-Hispanic white illegitimacy rate was stable at 29.0%, while the black rate fell from 72.8% to 72.5% and the Asian rate from 17.2% to 17.0%.

The most penetrating insight into how different classes responded to the impact of the Housing Bubble comes from the opening scene of 2006's Idiocracy, where the married yuppie couple with 138 and 141 IQs explain that they couldn't have a child now, "not with the market the way it is." In contrast, Keynes's animal spirits are running strong in Clevon's trailer park. 

High home prices tended to discourage the prudent from marrying and reproducing, while the the availability of subprime mortgages with short term teaser monthly payments, and the accompany construction boom, encouraged the imprudent to reproduce (if not marry). Further, Bush's artificial boom sucked in large numbers of fertility-minded but not marriage-minded people from south of the border. And as recent research shows, nobody has children faster than newly arrived illegal immigrants. 

The economic downturn has discouraged fertility in general, but most severely among the imprudent. 

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

Hispanic fertility plummeting

Corvinus comments:

The 2010 prelimiary birth rate statistics are now available from the CDC.

They revised the birth rates according to the 2010 Census results. Yet again, 2010 continues a trend of the recent recession and poor economy throwing White America into a briar patch. White Americans recorded 1.80 children/woman in 2010; the rates earlier in the decade were revised UP slightly because the Census found fewer non-Hispanic whites than they expected. 

The formerly high-flying Hispanic birth rate continues to tank, down about 0.5 child/woman since 2007, and is now down to 2.35. The absolute number of births to Hispanic women fell from 1,062,779 in 2007 to 946,000 in 2010; the drop in fertility is therefore real. 

Demographer Emilio A. Parrado argues that Hispanic fertility tends to be concentrated in recent immigrants. I interpret his data as showing that foreigners who can't afford to have as many children as they want in their own countries move to U.S. to have lots of children, which they quickly do.

You often hear these days in discussions of the Coming Hispanic Tsunami that immigration doesn't matter any more, it's the high Hispanic fertility that means that the cake is already baked. But, that's not quite as sophisticated a view as its proponents think. A more subtle insight is that high Hispanic fertility is driven in sizable part by new immigration. The current decline in illegal immigration that appears to have begun with the popping of the subprime bubble in 2007 is significantly lowering overall Hispanic fertility.

Without significant immigration restrictions, however, Hispanic fertility will boom again the next time the economy does well because so many of the births are concentrated among recent illegal immigrants.

The rate for blacks has been tracking whites pretty consistently at about 0.2 child/woman higher since 2002. The recession seems to have hit them marginally in 2008, but quite a bit more in 2010, closely paralleling the loss in government jobs (which started later than those in the private sector, and which is continuing). 

Asian rates have been revised to below whites since 1997 by about 0.1 child/woman, except for 2000 (due to the Chinese calendar, I guess; there was a similar spike in 1988). The recent economic troubles have also hurt their rate more than whites'. 

For American Indians, it's down to 1.4 child/woman, although I don't believe this, since births in Indian-heavy states like the Dakotas and Montana suggest a rate of about 2.1.

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

Alexander Payne's "The Descendants"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The Descendants, with George Clooney as a Hawaiian land dynasty’s 1/32nd-Polynesian scion, has fans asking where writer-director Alexander Payne has been since 2004’s Sideways, which dispatched Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on one last trip to the Santa Ynez wine country. ... In Payne’s new dramedy The Descendants, Clooney plays Matt King, the great-great-great-grandson of a 19th-century Hawaiian princess who, rather than marry her brother in the incestuous royal Hawaiian way, eloped with a Yankee businessman. Her numerous, largely blue-eyed progeny hold in trust 40 undeveloped square miles of lovely Kauai. 

The Descendants had me wondering: Where has Hawaii been since the 1960s? It’s hard to explain to somebody who wasn’t a kid back then just how large the Fiftieth State loomed. For instance, 1966’s top-grossing movie was an adaptation of James Michener’s Hawaii, with Julie Andrews as a New England Congregationalist missionary disembarking in 1820s Honolulu. ... 

Famously, the Protestant preachers came to Hawaii to do good but wound up doing well. They married into the native nobility, then formed an endogamous ruling caste that still controls much of Hawaii’s acreage. 

Read the whole thing there.

Hawaii's social structure is one of the more interesting in America, as Payne noted in an interview. In particular, it's interesting that the ancestry of the old landed gentry tend to be roughly 1/32nd Native Hawaiian aristocrat, 30/32nd Yankee WASP, and 1/32nd miscellaneous. I hadn't realized that Punahou prep school's earliest generations of elites tended to be WASP-Polynesian hybrids. For some reason, that never came up in Dreams from My Father.

Something similar happened in California under Spanish and Mexican rule. Yankee sailors would jump ship in Santa Barbara and Monterey, start businesses, then marry the daughters of Californio landowners. Rich Californios, however, liked to claim to be pure Castilian, which is different from Hawaii.

Similarly, lots of Southern whites claim to be descended from Princess Pocohontas.

Speaking of part-Hawaiian WASP landowners in a Hawaii, the biggest private holding, Parker Ranch on the Big Island, was left to six year old Richard Smart by his 3/4th Hawaiian great-grandfather who had been the last foreign minister of the Queen of Hawaii. He must have been a charming lad to have gotten his great-grandfather to cut most of his uncles and aunts out of the will. Dick Smart grew up to be a charming man, starring in Broadway musicals with Carol Channing and Nanette Fabray. But the gay toast of the great white way was an excellent ranch manager back home in Hawaii, too. He leased his worst agricultural land to Laurance Rockefeller for the landmark Mauna Kea resort on the volcanic Kona Coast.

There are a lot of strange stories like this from Hawaiian history. The Descendants opens a window into this world, but stays a little bland.

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

Democrat pundit tries to save GOP from terrible fate of winning

In the NYT, liberal commentator Thomas Edsall worries that Republicans aren't following the advice of their wisest and bestest leaders into defeat and irrelevance:

The White Party
By THOMAS B. EDSALL 

In the wake of the 2008 election, conservative Republican strategists like Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and William Kristol warned that their party faced even worse defeats if it continued in its anti-immigrant posturing. 

“An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal,” Rove wrote. The decision to “demagogue” the immigration issue was a “totally self-inflicted wound by House Republicans,” Kristol declared. Beating up on immigrants,” Grover Norquist said, “loses you votes.” 

Their advice was rejected. Republicans running for the House and the Senate defiantly calculated that they could win in 2010 with a surge of white voters, affirming the Republican role as the default party of white America. Initially, this approach appeared quixotic. A demographic tidal wave of African-American and Hispanic voters threatened to wash the Republicans out to sea. 

But many Republican candidates — incumbents and challengers — did not budge. They not only held firm in their adamant opposition to immigration reform (despite its crucial importance to many Hispanic voters),

"Crucial" according to various self-proclaimed Hispanic ethnic leaders who, while they may not be very well known to Hispanic voters, always promptly return Thomas B. Edsall's request for a quote validating whatever Thomas B. Edsall wants them to say.

but they also became even more hard-nosed. Former apostates on the issue, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who had proudly backed immigration reform in 2004 and 2005, saw the light — in other words, read poll data on Republican voters — and moved to the right. 

To use just one particularly egregious example, Senator David Vitter — who admitted that he had “let down and disappointed” family, friends and supporters but refused to answer questions about his connections to prostitutes — used an outspoken anti-immigration ad to win re-election easily in Louisiana.

It's almost as if Rove, Norquist, and Kristol could be wrong!

The decision to carry the banner for conservative white America paid off in the midterm elections — helped enormously, of course, by a dismal economy under a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, as well as conservative hostility to the administration’s health care program and economic stimulus legislation. 

In 2010, the Republican white strategy was boosted by the fact that minority turnout traditionally drops in non-presidential years, perhaps especially so without Obama on the ballot. But the scope of success went far beyond expectations. 

The percentage of non-Hispanic whites voting for Republican House candidates in 2010, 62 percent, set a record for off-year contests, beating even the 1994 Republican rout when Republicans got 58 percent of the white vote. In presidential elections, you have to go back to the landslide Republican victories of 1972 (Richard Nixon versus George McGovern) and 1984 (Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale) to get white Republican margins similar to those of 2010. McGovern and Mondale carried just one state each, Massachusetts and Minnesota respectively. 

Another way of looking at it is this: fully 88.8 percent of all ballots cast in 2010 for House Republicans were cast by whites, compared to 63.9 percent for Democrats. 

The white share of Republican votes is actually slightly lower than in the past. The Big Change is that it's the Democrats that are slowly turning into the Nonwhite Party.

The degree to which the Republican Party has become a white party is also reflected in the composition of primary voters. For example, on March 4, 2008, in Ohio — where non-Hispanic whites are 81.1 percent of the population, blacks 12.2 percent, and Hispanics 3.1 percent — the Republican primary turnout was 97 percent white. Hispanics were 2 percent and the black turnout was so low it was zero percent, statistically speaking. One percent was described as “other.” 

In the Jan. 19, 2008, South Carolina primary, 96 percent of the Republican turnout was white, 2 percent black, 1 percent Latino and 1 percent other. The population of the state is 64.1 percent white, 27.9 percent black and 5.1 percent Hispanic. 

Now, moving toward what has all the markings of a historic ideological and demographic collision on Nov. 6, 2012, Republicans are doubling down on this racially fraught strategy. 

While the subject of race and of the overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate are never explicitly discussed by Republican candidates, the issue is subsumed in blatant anti-immigration rhetoric. As Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, learned the hard way, voicing sympathy for the plight of the undocumented is a sure way to lose ground.

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

Jordy Nelson

It's in Wikipedia so it's got to be true:

2011 

Jordy Nelson is freakin' awesome.

Everybody is amazed that a white guy is tied for the NFL lead in yards per reception. But Jordy Nelson ran a 4.37 40-yard dash at the NFL combine. In contrast, Jerry Rice, the greatest NFL receiver ever, ran a 4.71.

If I had to guess, I would bet that on average whites peak in speed later and then slow up earlier (the latter was Bill James's finding in the 1980s about white vs. black baseball players who appeared to be equally fast as rookies in terms of triples hit, not grounding into double plays, stolen bases and so forth).

I would also guess that with whites, sprinting speed correlates more with a slender build than it does with blacks. On the playground as a kid, the fast white kids tended to be whippets. But then watching sports on TV, there seemed to be less correlation with shape among blacks. Fast blacks could come in unexpected shapes, like 1964 Olympic sprint star Bob Hayes, who went on to a pretty good NFL career as a wide receiver.

But Nelson was always documentably a terrific athlete -- a multi-event state sprint champion in high school track who is tall and strong. He's also the third string quarterback for Green Bay in case Aaron Rogers and his backup get hurt. 

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

Coals to Newcastle

In VDARE this week, I explore some implications of a recent Washington Post article about how public schools in these difficult economic times are responding to the influx of Hispanic students: by paying a lot to hire teachers who can't speak English to teach the kids from Spanish-speaking families how to speak Spanish.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Earning vs. owning your way on the Forbes 400

I was flipping through the Forbes 400 list of American billionaires recently, and I got to thinking about the relative balance of people who are the list because they own valuable things and people who are on the list because they've earned a lot of money. The Walton children are in the top 10 because they chose their dad wisely, so they are good examples of somebody who are on the list due to ownership. Consider Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who retired from Microsoft in the first half of the 1980s when he got Hodgkins Lymphoma. I remember press comments that nobody ever beats that cancer, but he was among the first to get the modern, highly effective treatment. So, he earned some of Microsoft's early success, but wasn't around for his powerhouse days, from which he benefited by ownership. 

Michael Dell would be an example of somebody who started a huge company out of a dorm room and has run it, on and off, since. But, still, if he retired today, how much money would he have in 10 years? Assuming he's hired good second tier managers, probably almost as much as if he worked another 10 years. So, most of his billions come from ownership.

Another way to look at this is in terms of being irreplaceable. We had this discussion with Steve Jobs and Apple. My guess is that he was pretty irreplaceable during it's ascent, but, hopefully for Apple stockholders, will be reasonably replaceable in the long run. But, the majority of Jobs's wealth came from owning Pixar, where he wasn't hugely valuable except in negotiating with Hollywood sharks. Jobs did an outstanding job of keeping John Lasseter and Company free to do their thing, but the Pixar people weren't sorry when Jobs got his job back at Apple and didn't have time anymore to drive them crazy.

Which billionaire is at the the extreme of a person who earned just about every penny by getting out there day after day and doing the job? Which one was utterly irreplaceable? Which Forbesian's future cash flow is most dependent upon not retiring, upon personal effort from now on? My guess would be a pretty famous name, so I'll vamp while you try to guess.

Whose earning power among billionaires is least dependent upon owning corporate entities where others do the work and most dependent upon doing the work herself?

Is that enough of a clue to who has personally earned the largest fraction of her billions?

Yup, that's right, Oprah. She made her $2.7 billion less by founding or inheriting a valuable company or making successful leveraged bets and more by getting out there everyday and doing her job. She is the brand and the brand is her. 

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

Hungry football players

From the L.A. Times:

College football seemed so easy for Robert Woods. 

The bigger players and harder hits, the roaring crowds, he sailed through all of that to become an instant star at USC, catching passes by the dozen as a freshman. 

It was another part of the game — a part fans don't see — that took him by surprise. It was the peanut butter and jelly. 

"You think, coming to USC, they'll have food whenever you want but it's really not like that," he said. "I've gone four days straight of just sandwiches." 

Now a sophomore, Woods has learned that bills — rent, utilities, and phone — devour most of his monthly scholarship check, leaving only dollars a day to eat. The team feeds him dinner during the season, but the rest of the time, he says, "you're on your own." 

This dilemma affects student-athletes nationwide. According to a 2010 study, the maximum financial aid allowed under NCAA rules can fall short of covering school and living expenses by anywhere from $200 to $10,000 a year, depending on the campus. 

At USC, Athletic Director Pat Haden estimates that his athletes need another $3,300 to meet basic needs. "It doesn't seem right," he said. "And I think it's a public relations nightmare." 

With the Pac-12 Conference and other major conferences set to reap billions from new television contracts, the NCAA board of directors recently announced that members will have the option of boosting aid by as much as $2,000 a year.

It's very hard for an outsider to get a realistic picture of how well star college football players like Woods, who was the #1 ranked receiver in his recruiting class two years ago, live. For example, during a heat wave a few years ago when USC was the king of college football, I read quotes from USC players were complaining that the football players' dorm wasn't air-conditioned. Traditionally, a lot of dorms at USC weren't air-conditioned because the school is in the relatively cool LA Basin that benefits from ocean breezes. But football players have to move in during August, when it's not infrequently over 100, and those kind of temperatures can recur well into October during Santa Ana winds. I'd always assumed that USC football players had air conditioning, but apparently that wasn't true. 

Perhaps boosters put a lot of money into doing flashy things for superstar recruits but not that much for the average player? 

Head football coaches, however, live very well.

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

How do you find surgeons' batting averages?

Surgeon Atul Gawande writes frequently in The New Yorker about how he uses statistics on national norms for various surgeries to monitor his own performance.

After eight years, I’ve performed more than two thousand operations. Three-quarters have involved my specialty, endocrine surgery—surgery for endocrine organs such as the thyroid, the parathyroid, and the adrenal glands. The rest have involved everything from simple biopsies to colon cancer. For my specialized cases, I’ve come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solutions. For the others, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary. 

As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one. 

Maybe this is what happens when you turn forty-five. Surgery is, at least, a relatively late-peaking career. It’s not like mathematics or baseball or pop music, where your best work is often behind you by the time you’re thirty. Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which S. & P. 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four. Surgeons apparently fall somewhere between the extremes, requiring both physical stamina and the judgment that comes with experience. Apparently, I’d arrived at that middle point.

A reader wonders whether those statistics are available to the general public. In particular, can you find out whether a surgeon you are considering having slice you open is above or below average? Anybody know?

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

$1.6 million paid to historian: Nice work if you can get it

From the NYT:

The report from Bloomberg News, which said Mr. Gingrich received at least $1.6 million [from Freddie Mac], is signifcantly higher than previous estimates of Mr. Gingrich’s compensation for what he has described as his work as “a historian” for the troubled mortgage lender.

Gingrich was out of power at the time, so this wasn't a direct bribe, it was more an attempt to mold opinion to keep Freddie respectable by buying the friendship of a voluble famous guy, with maybe some big payoff down the road if Gingrich made a political comeback. Moreover, paying Gingrich a lot after he was out of office serves to encourage the others in office to be nice to Freddie now in the hopes that they too can get what's coming to them down the road. 

In modern America, it's crucial for rich institutions like Fannie and Freddie to control what ideas are respectable and thus thinkable. 

For example, after Bill Gates got in trouble over anti-trust, he started the vastly wealthy Gates Foundation, which then, in Bill's own disillusioned 2009 words, wasted $2 billion on the New Left concept of turning high schools into "small learning communities." Why didn't anybody make clear to him at the time that this was a boondoggle? Because Bill gave $57 million to education think tanks, so that practically every "expert" that reporters called was on the Bill Dole or hoped to be. To thinktankers, $57 million is huge money, but to Bill Gates it's about as important as the change lost in his sofa cushions. So, Bill's dopey Ayers Brothers-inspired brainstorm was the height of respectability, until Bill himself got sick of it.

In contrast, one obvious way to help America's public schools over the next generation -- don't let in so many unintelligent foreigners with high fertility rates -- is simply unmentionable. There are lots of highly respectable ideas about school reform backed by huge amounts of money, but the single most sure-fire way to help the schools never even registers on the mental map of respectable opinion. Where's the money in it?

Similarly, being alarmed about carbon emissions causing global warming is extremely respectable. Not being alarmed about carbon emissions causing global warming is semi-respectable because the energy companies put a lot of money into keeping doubt alive. But to point out the tautologically obvious lesson that mass immigration from poor countries to rich countries causes increased carbon emissions isn't even not respectable, it's just unheard of. There's practically no money backing skepticism about immigration, so it's not respectable, and very little at all on the immigration leads to increased carbon emissions idea, so it's just unthinkable. 

This is just my self-interested bias, but my counter-intuitive take is that rather than go all blue in the face trying to crack down on Newt Gingrich and Michelle Obama getting paid off by rich institutions, the more valuable service to America would be to develop larger alternative sources of funding for ideas that aren't respectable at present. As you so often hear, there are a lot of rich guys in America. What's the point of being a rich guy, however, if not occasionally spending money on something that you find fun but that respectable opinion finds baffling or shocking?

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

Ed West on Equality v. Diversity

In the London Telegraph, columnist Ed West reflects on the slowly growing awareness among intellectuals that Diversity != Equality. He cites as a locus classicus of the genre a VDARE column of mine from way back in 2000, Inequality, the Immigration Dimension, comparing, among the Four Corners states, the more diverse and less equal New Mexico and Arizona versus the less diverse and more equal Colorado and Utah. West concludes:

Sailer is a popular blogger, rather like an eccentric but brilliant professor possessed of a vast breadth of knowledge, and would probably be a big thing in American commentary, producing those American polemics With Those Absurdly Long Subtitles that Explain the Entire Subject of the Book, but his views on the biology of race put him beyond the pale for mainstream conservative publications. 

That's above my GCSE double award science-level knowledge of the subject, but on the growing inequality in American life he is almost certainly right, and the untrammelled globalism of George W Bush-style conservatism, described by Sailer as “invade the world, invite the world, in hoc to the world”, has been a dismal failure. Sailer’s own state, California, with its high rate of illegal immigration and legal out-migration, has already become Latin Americanised, with ever higher levels of inequality and a shrinking middle class (not to mention bankrupt cities and rotting public services). This has been allowed to happen because diversity makes important Right-wing people rich and important Left-wing people feel good about themselves. 

The Spirit Level was popular because it touched on a truth – that inequality is a bad thing – but with all its countless measures of prison rates, child mortality, obesity and even aid, it almost completely ignored the elephant in the room. Where equality campaigners even dare to mention diversity, they argue that this handicap can be solved with a chequebook, ignoring the unfortunate facts that you can’t buy social capital, and that ethnically diverse populations are unwilling to support Scandinavian-style wealth redistribution (as suggested by various studies). 

Protesters can camp outside St Paul’s from now until the Second Coming for all the good it will do, but until they start to question the diversity delusion, then Britain, like the United States, will continue down its road to Latin Americanisation.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Was "J. Edgar" Gay or Mulatto?

The young Hoover

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the Washington bureaucrat who ran the FBI and its predecessor from 1924 to his death in early 1972, provides an intriguing data point for tracking the 21st-century struggle between blacks and gays for the upper hand in the Victim Sweepstakes.  

Hoover was widely rumored to be either a self-hating gay passing for straight, a self-hating mulatto passing for all-white, or both. So did Clint, a presumably neutral bystander, wind up blaming racism or homophobia for warping Hoover?

Read the whole thing there.

[P.S., the technical glitch that kept you from reading the last half of the review is fixed.]

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

Energy and IQ

Inductivist and Jason Malloy check out the General Social Survey to look at people self-reporting to have "energy all the time" over the last month. Jason writes:

wordsum IQ 

0-2: 11.6% 

3-4: 14.8% 

5-6: 10.2% 

7-8: 8.7% 

9-10: 5.0% 

Intelligence and energy have an inverse relationship! Smarter people feel a lot more drained.

Maybe smart people get worked harder. Or maybe it's just wider knowledge among smart people of how incredibly energetic some people are. Like I once spent five minutes talking to financier Michael Milken. He had a lot of energy! And he has a lot energy all the time. My favorite Milken story is about the nobody who had been trying to get a meeting with Milken for months to pitch his idea for a junk bond leveraged buy out. Finally, Milken's secretary calls to say Mr. Milken can meet with him next Sunday at 5:30 am. He says, "Great, I'll be there!" 

Then, late than night he gets a call from the great man himself. Milken apologizes for not noticing that this Sunday is going to be the first day of Standard Time, and since the clocks will Fall Back at 2 am, he'd like to change the meeting to 4:30 AM Sunday. "So, 4:30 am okay?"

Yeah, sure, Mike, no problem, I was just wondering myself what I was going to do with that extra hour!

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

Nature v. Nurture solved!

From The New Republic:

The Two Year Window
The new science of babies and brains—and how it could revolutionize the fight against poverty.
Jonathan Cohn

The End of Nature v. Nurture?
The New Science of Babies and Brains

A decade ago, a neuroscientist named Charles Nelson traveled to Bucharest to visit Romania’s infamous orphanages. There, he saw a child whose brain had swelled to the size of a basketball because of an untreated infection and a malnourished one-year-old no bigger than a newborn. But what has stayed with him ever since was the eerie quiet of the infant wards. “It would be dead silent, all of [the babies] sitting on their backs and staring at the ceiling,” says Nelson, who is now at Harvard. “Why cry when nobody is going to pay attention to you?” 

Nelson had traveled to Romania to take part in a cutting-edge experiment. It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country’s population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn’t support. Images from the orphanages had prompted an outpouring of international aid and a rush from parents around the world to adopt the children. But ten years later, the new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime’s fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. With backing from the MacArthur Foundation, and help from a sympathetic Romanian official, Nelson and colleagues from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages. They would also track a third set of children, who were with their original parents, as a control group.

Back in 2007, I reported on Dr. Nelson's study. He found that the poor kids who continued to get warehoused in these cheerless Romanian orphanages averaged IQs of 73, while those who got to move in with foster parents averaged 81. A control group of non-orphans averaged 109. 

As I said in 2007, an 8 point boost for getting out of a bleak Romanian orphanage and into a family setting seems a quite plausible nurture effect to me. But, what in the world accounts for the 28 point gap between the fostered kids and the control group of non-orphans?

I found an earlier report by Nelson noting a big ethnic difference:

"Of the 136 institutionalized children included in the study, 78 are of Romanian ethnicity (57.4%), 36 are Rroma Gypsy (26.5%), 1 is Turkish (0.7%), 1 is of subcontinent Indian extraction (0.7%), and the remaining 20 (14.7%) could not be classified. ...

The control group with the 109 average IQ is much different in ethnicity:

"Of the 72 who consented to participate, 66 children (91.7%) were Romanian, 4 children (5.6%) were Rroma, 1 child was Spanish, and 1 child was Turkish."

In summary, major selection effects seem to be driving part of the almost two-standard deviation IQ gap between the foster care and biological family groups.

Before America goes out and more or less kidnaps black babies away from poor black mothers in order to raise their IQs -- the upcoming Borrowed Generations national apology of 2056 -- some more pointed research is needed.

If there really is a critical 2-year-window where children who don't get talked at enough are doomed for life, that would imply certain falsifiable hypotheses:

- For example, some poor black mothers are taciturn and others are loquacious. Do the loquacious ones have children who grow up to have higher IQs relative to their mothers IQs? If so, how much?

- If what really matters to a person's adult IQ is having a middle-class upbringing as a small child with a mother who constantly is nudging you to look at this thing or that thing, wouldn't it be cheaper to encourage blacks to point out stuff to their kids rather than to take their kids away from them for 14 hours per day? If it's all culture, why not improve the culture of the black mothers? That doesn't strike me as impossible to do. If, say, Oprah and Beyonce teamed up to push for a decade to get mothers to talk more to their babies, I wouldn't be surprised if they could move the needle.

- Many middle class white women turn most of the baby-raising over to low IQ servants, many of whom don't speak English and don't have middle class urges to point out every damn thing under the sun to the babies they are caring for. Are these middle class white women damaging the IQs of their own children? Should they leave the workforce and raise their own kids? But if white women stop hiring Honduran illegal immigrants to raise their own babies for them, then who is going to raise the babies of poor black women for them?

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

Occupy Wall Street Raided

I should try to get the NYPD to raid my garage and throw out for me all the decades of junk piled up in there.

Anyway, Occupy Wall Street reminds me of another current phenomenon, food trucks and other businesses that have set themselves up rent-free in the public streets.

For example, in recent years, there's always a big yellow sign advertising "Thai Massages" (I presume that's a euphemism) mounted on a trailer parked in the right hand turn lane at a busy nearby corner. It's a great location for advertising a massage parlor because the pimp doesn't have to rent the land the sign occupies. Less obnoxiously, there's now often a miniature barber shop in a trailer parked in front of a prosperous local strip mall where monthly rents are substantial.

Similarly, downtown Manhattan is, for most people, one of the most expensive places in the world to live, but a couple of hundred people have been camping rent free there for two months.

Why this 200-person free campout is the biggest deal since the Fall of the Bastille, however, is another question entirely.

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

Republicans and ideology

From my new VDARE column:

In his November 9th New York Times column cleverly entitled The Cain Scrutiny, Ross Douthat calls attention to the arresting spectacle of white conservatives rising up to defend the honor of Herman Cain and black manhood against allegations by blonde tramps that the Republican Presidential candidate's sexual advances were unwanted: "We should remember this moment, because it’s a perfect encapsulation of how race’s role in American politics has changed over the last 75 years." 

Indeed.

Read the whole thing there.

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

The Obama Touch

I wanted to call attention to this article from last month's LA Times because it provides an interesting example of the Obama Administration's preferred mode of operation: the fix-is-in. Barack Obama doesn't particularly like confrontation. What he likes is exemplified by this pseudo-confrontation over "civil rights," where both sides, the feds and the L.A. school district, were already in agreement that the taxpayers should pony up a lot more money for blacks and the children of illegal aliens, but neither side wanted to scare taxpayers by yet putting a dollar value on their deal, the bill for which will come later:

LAUSD agrees to revise how English learners, blacks are taught 

Officials say the accord, which settles a federal civil rights probe, could be a national model. The district is not accused of intentional bias, and deciding how to make changes will be done locally. 

October 11, 2011|By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times 

The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to sweeping revisions in the way it teaches students learning English, as well as black youngsters, settling a federal civil rights investigation that examined whether the district was denying the students a quality education. 

The settlement closes what was the Obama administration's first civil rights investigation launched by the Department of Education, and officials said Tuesday that it would serve as a model for other school districts around the country. 

"What happens in L.A. really does set trends for across the nation. More and more school districts are dealing with this challenge," said Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights. 

The agreement poses a potential financial problem for the school district, which has faced multimillion-dollar budget cuts and layoffs over the last few years. 

The Education Department launched the probe last year, at first to determine if students who entered school speaking limited English, most of whom are Latino, were receiving adequate instruction. The nation's second-largest school system has more students learning English, about 195,000, than any other in the United States — about 29% of the district's overall enrollment. Later, at the urging of local activists, investigators widened the probe to include black students, who make up about 10% of the district's enrollment. 

Federal authorities do not accuse the district of intentional discrimination. But the settlement requires a top-to-bottom revision of the district's Master Plan for English Learners, which is already well underway. The goal is to let the district develop the details, under continuing oversight from the Office for Civil Rights, a branch of the Education Department. 

Under the settlement, the district for the first time will focus on the academic progress of students judged to have adequately learned English. Many of these students subsequently flounder academically.

The reporter is messing up the issue, which almost nobody understands: there are a lot of young people in L.A. who are from Spanish-speaking homes, but who, with Ron Unz's 1998 initiative stifling bilingual education, now speak English like Moon-Unit Zappa. But many of these English speakers remain officially classified as English Learners because they can't pass written tests. Year after year goes by, and these kids who have passed the spoken English test continue to fail the written English test, just as they continue to fail their math and science tests.

How come? Because they aren't very bright.

But you can't say that, so everybody pretends that they must be victims of discrimination who are having their civil rights violated.

The district will also concentrate efforts on students who have reached high school without mastering the English skills necessary to enroll in a college-preparatory curriculum and who may be at risk of dropping out. 

L.A. Unified also agreed to provide students learning English and black students with more effective teachers. Improved teaching would result from "ongoing and sustained" training, among other potential efforts, Ali said. 

The decision on how to improve instruction will be a local one. The district will be judged in large measure by student performance data. The ultimate sanction for not living up to the agreement would be withholding or withdrawing federal funds, Ali said. 

L.A. Unified was selected for the investigation in large measure because it is an epicenter for the challenge of educating students whose native language is not English. For years, district officials insisted that L.A. Unified performed as well as or better than nearly all other school systems with this population. 

Federal officials did not challenge this record. Instead, they emphasized that past efforts simply haven't succeeded as well as they must. District officials, in fact, have echoed this rhetoric. Former board member Yolie Flores consistently criticized the district's performance with English learners. 

Under federal law, discrimination can exist even when it is not intentional, based on the levels of opportunity afforded students through even well-meaning policies and practices.

So, this seemingly confrontational but actually conspiratorial process has resulted in an agreement that everybody participating wanted. Of course, no representatives of the taxpayers were invited to the talks. But, the taxpayers haven't been told yet how much this binding agreement will cost them ultimately, so almost zero attention has been focused on this scam among the general public.

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

Was "Bad Teacher" first Post-Obama hit movie?

Last summer's comedy Bad Teacher, with Cameron Diaz as a bad teacher, finished up in domestic theaters with exactly $100 million in box office revenue (plus another $115 million abroad), which is a lot for a comedy with a $20 million budget. A friend argues that Bad Teacher represents perhaps the first distinctly Post-Obama hit movie, a scalding reaction to the sanctimoniousness that propelled Obama to the White House. Perhaps.

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

Stereotype Threat v. Stereotype Pet

The Stanford sociology department is sponsoring a speech on an exciting conceptual breakthrough: "Stereotype Promise."

Jennifer Lee
Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation 

The Tiger Mother and Asian American Exceptionalism?
Framing Success and “Stereotype Promise” among LA’s Second Generation 

*Jointly sponsored with the Department of Sociology and the Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Colloquium with Q&A 12:30-1:45
email suemartin@stanford.edu for more information 

"Why do second-generation Asians exhibit exceptional academic outcomes, even when controlling for socioeconomic factors like parental education, occupation, and income? ... Moreover, the external validation and reinforcement of the frame by teachers can generate a “stereotype promise” among Asians—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby boosting one’s performance. As a result, Asian students—regardless of ethnicity, class, and gender—gain an advantage over their non-Asian peers in the context of U.S. schools."

I don't think "stereotype promise" reminds people enough of "stereotype threat." "Threat" and "promise" are kind of antonyms, but it's not self-evident that they are being used as opposites. Therefore, Professor Lee's assertion that that Asians outperform others because teachers are biased in favor of apple-polishing Asian students should be renamed "stereotype pet."

Is it true? I don't know, but it's definitely more memorable as Stereotype Threat / Pet.

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

Bad Rachel: How neocons really feel

A reader notices that an old acquaintance from decades ago now has her own blog: Bad Rachel. A fairly representative post is here.

Rachel Abrams of the Weekly Standard is the daughter of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, and half-sister of John Podhoretz.

Her husband Elliott Abrams was, according to his biography at the Council of Foreign Relations where he now hangs his hat, "Former senior director for democracy and human rights, senior director for the Near East, and deputy national security adviser handling Middle East affairs in the George W. Bush administration."

In other words, Rachel Abrams is a diplomat's wife. A diplomat assigned, presumably, to bringing peace and reconciliation to the Middle East.

Mrs. Abrams, however, gives us the less diplomatic version of the family feud.

I always wondered about Bush putting Elliott Abrams in charge of Middle Eastern diplomacy. Do you think it was at all possible that people in other countries thought that Mr. Abrams, during his Bush Administration career in charge of Middle Eastern diplomacy, was something less than a completely fair-minded neutral facilitator? Perhaps something Mrs. Abrams said at diplomatic cocktail parties might have given the rest of the world reason to doubt the good faith of Mr. Abrams

Of course, if other diplomats ever did doubt the objectivity of Mr. and Mrs. Abrams, that would just prove they're hateful bigots and probably should get cruise-missiled. (We're looking at you, Luxembourg.)

By the way, a commenter has asserted that Midge Decter is the original for fussbudget Lucy van Pelt in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts cartoons. Is there any truth to that?

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

Try this fun Google search!

Type this into Google:

rape football -paterno

I get 43,100,000 hits, and that is without any references to Penn St.'s disgraced coach. Now, some of those are pro football players, some high school, and some foreign soccer players. But, anybody who follows college football knows that players (although not coaches) get formally accused of sexual assault. A lot. And then, usually, the story goes away. 

The prototypical case is of the kind that makes up the central mystery in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full: black player, white woman. There's not much of a media market for those kind of dog bites man stories, which is why so much publicity was given to the Duke lacrosse team hoax. (Similarly, "manager rapes aspiring boy band singer" or "movie producer rapes aspiring child star" are dog bites man stories that don't get much traction in the press.) 

College football is a great game. I hadn't been to a college football game since watching Plaxico Burress stomp all over Northwestern in the 1990s, but a neighbor gave me a couple of his season tickets to last Saturday's UCLA 29 - Arizona St. 28 upset at the Rose Bowl, and it was a terrific spectator sport experience.  

I heartily commend to aggressive rich men with a need to win that they try manipulating college football as a fine substitute for manipulating the U.S. government into bombing their relatives' tribal enemies for them. 

On the other hand, the Penn State scandal, much as it's a man bites dog story, provides an opportunity for intelligent conservatives to reflect upon how much energy and money they pour into college football and other zero sum sports, a little bit of which could go a long way in the real world.

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

Living Forever

Here's a fun article in New York Magazine by Jesse Green, What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?, about a medical research project in New York on Ashkenazis over the age of 95, including a quartet of four wealthy siblings, the Kahns, all over 100. One Kahn still comes into work everyday as chairman of his financial firm to check up on his 69-year-old son, the CEO, to make sure, presumably, that the youngster's callowness doesn't trip him up.

For these studies, Barzilai has assembled a cohort of some 540 people over the age of 95 who, like the Kahns, reached that milestone having never experienced the so-called big four: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and cognitive decline. He theorized that these “SuperAgers,” as he calls them, must have something that protects them from all four conditions. Otherwise, when they didn’t have a heart attack, say, at 78, they’d have succumbed quickly to the next thing on their body’s inscrutable list. So instead of looking, as most genetic studies do, for pieces of DNA that correlate with the likelihood of getting diseases, Barzilai looked for the opposite: genes that correlate with the likelihood of not getting them—and thus with longevity. 

The top correlate for longevity is one that requires no blood test to discover: having a SuperAger in your family already. ... Barzilai has so far identified, or corroborated, at least seven associative markers. The most significant is the Cholesterol Ester Transfer Protein gene, or CETP, which in one unusual form correlates with slower memory decline, lower risk for dementia, and strongly increased protection against heart disease. (Among other things, it increases the amount and size of “good” cholesterol.) Only about 9 percent of control subjects have two copies (one from each parent) of the protective form of CETP, while 24 percent of the centenarians do, including all four Kahn siblings. 

There’s evidence, as well, that small stature among the SuperAgers (Irving is now about five foot two) may reflect the influence of a protective factor seen throughout nature; ponies live longer than horses. ... 

But the Einstein project is fascinating for a major reason beyond its science: Its main test group consists entirely of Ashkenazim—that is, Jews who descend, as more than 80 percent of American Jews do, from communities in the Pale of Settlement of Eastern Europe. In longevity news, the spotlight frequently passes from one group to another: Georgian yogurt eaters, Japanese pensioners, the Pennsylvania Dutch. But 540 Jews in a New York–based study of extreme old age is too delicious. The mind cramps with the possibility of jokes. 

... Barzilai centered his studies on Ashkenazim not because they live longer or produce more centenarians than other ethnic groups. They don’t. It’s that their unusual development as a homogeneous community makes them easier to study at the level of DNA. Genetic research done by Barzilai’s Einstein colleague Gil Atzmon suggests that Ashkenazim branched off from other Jews around the time of the destruction of the First Temple, 2,500 years ago. They flourished during the Roman Empire but then went through a “severe bottleneck” as they dispersed, reducing a population of several million to just 400 families who left Northern Italy around the year 1000 for Central and eventually Eastern Europe. Though their numbers increased dramatically once there, to some 18 million before the Holocaust, studies suggest that 40 percent of today’s Ashkenazim descend from just four Jewish mothers. How proud those mothers would be to know that the reason their mishpocheh has remained far more genetically alike than a random population—Barzilai says by a factor of at least 30—is that until recently their sons almost never married outside the clan.

As I've pointed out, "white guilt" is guilt over being too ethnocentric, "Jewish guilt" is is guilt over being not ethnocentric enough.

That likeness means that small genetic differences—as small as one “letter” of DNA code—are more easily spotted on Ashkenazi genes than on those of, say, Presbyterians. Icelanders are good, too: They are all descendants, Barzilai says, of five Viking men and four Irish women. But they are a tiny population, with proportionately fewer centenarians, and aren’t so easy to find in New York. Ashkenazim are plentiful. And because they are also fairly similar in their educational and economic status, some of the variables that can muddy the picture are already controlled. 

Others are controlled more explicitly. An Einstein study published in August asked whether the SuperAgers, over the course of their lives, had better health habits than the general population. 

The answer was no; their habits were, if anything, worse. They smoked as much or more than others and were no better about diet or exercise.

My father is 94. He never smoked, drank only moderately, and comes from a high energy family that needs to be moving all the time. His nephew, my hippie cousin, for example, was an organic farmer for decades, and now that he has a desk job, he spends about 25 hours a week at the gym. When my cousin came for a visit to his parents in Arcadia, CA, at the age of 51, he hiked to the top of Mt. Wilson, a 5,000 foot ascent, every day for two weeks. It's unfortunate that social scientists don't seem to have a reliable quick test of energy the way they have tests of intelligence, since it's obvious that energy differs widely among individuals and is important in influencing life outcomes.

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

High-stakes Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat -- the argument that the reason blacks or other Groups of Concern score worse on tests is because of stereotypes that they score worse on tests -- has been a wildly popular concept since the 1990s. It has proven fairly easy in psych lab experiments to get college student volunteers of the chosen varieties to not score well on zero-stakes tests by hinting to them that they are expected not to do well. To fulfill their professors' desires for a publishable result, all they have to do is slack off instead of work hard on the meaningless test, and college students are good at slacking off. 

On the other hand, it would be unethical to try to drive down the scores of members of Groups of Concern on high-stakes tests, so there is very little experimental data on whether stereotype threat actually exists on high-stakes tests, which is what everybody cares about. So, Walters, Lee, and Trapani did a study in for ETS in 2004 looking at various factors that had been alleged in experimental studies to cause Stereotype Threat using real data from the high-stakes GRE. This is about as close as anybody can come ethically to studying Stereotype Threat on a high-stakes test.

The study investigated the applicability of previous experimental research on stereotype threat to operational Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test testing centers. The goal was to document any relationships between features of the testing environment that might cue stereotype threat as well as any impact on GRE test scores among African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and female test-takers. Among such features were the gender and ethnicity of test proctors and more general factors, such as the size, activity level, and social atmosphere of test centers. Our analyses revealed several relationships among environmental factors and several variations in test performance for all groups. However, we found no direct support for stereotype threat and, in fact, found some effects for proctor ethnicity that ran counter to a stereotype-threat explanation.

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