December 11, 2004

Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

I finally started the new novel about a freshwoman at a Duke-like university. I had some trepidation since the quality of Wolfe's writing fell off so drastically in the last 100 pages of A Man in Full after the masterful body of the book, presumably due to Wolfe's coronary bypass surgery and his subsequent depression. But Wolfe seems in fine form, not ascending the heights of his amazing "In the Breeding Barn" chapter in A Man in Full, but quite serviceable so far.

And his exultation over finding this great topic -- student life in a modern university -- that nobody important had touched is palpable. A dozen years ago when date rape was a hot topic, I did some research to write a debunking article, but found that naive little me was in over my head, so nothing came of it. One thing I discovered was that the girls most likely to be abused are freshmen living away from home for the first time who want to party with football and basketball players and the top fraternities, but who don't belong to a sorority. Sorority girls, in contrast, have sisters to look out for them when they get drunk and traditions of behavior that can protect them to some extent. Poor Charlotte Simmons, from a hillbilly village in the Blue Ridge mountains, appears to fit this model of a girl headed for trouble.

Also, having a teenage girl for the main character solves Wolfe's old problem that while his fascination with and knowledge of fashion and decorating is hugely important to his books, in the manly men he normally writes about, it always seems a little, ahem, gay. Back in the 1960s, Wolfe wrote some brilliant essays about young women, but in the 1970s he became obsessed with physical courage (e.g., The Right Stuff) and lost touch with his ability to write about women, leading to the rather underdeveloped female characters in his two novels. I haven't read enough to see if he's back in touch with his feminine side, but he seems to be off to a good start.

Here's John Derbyshire's NRO article on the book.


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

December 10, 2004

The "Natalist Movement" Explained:

David Brooks' NYT column on "natalism" left me scratching my head: "It's strange that having enough babies to keep the species going needs its own name. What's next? 'Breathingism?'"

The term "natalist" goes back at least to 19th Century France, where the government was correctly worried that the low birth rate of the French was going to put them at a disadvantage on the battlefield against the more fecund Germans. The French government has implemented "pro-natalist" policies ever since. But, obviously, there is virtually nothing in the way of an organized natalist "Movement" in the U.S., as there was in 3rd Republic France. Instead, there is a lot of lower-case movement around the country as people call up moving vans and move to places they hope are better suited for what they want out of life. And it turns out that feelings about having babies are one of the more important sorting mechanisms for where people live and how they vote.

A reader explains:

David Brooks comes up with the word for two reasons: publicity and Internet searching.

People may well forget that you identified the relationship first. Especially since you noticed the white aspect of it. But Brooks has labeled it.

You identified a phenomenon. Brooks identified a "movement". "Movements" get press.

Expect Time or Newsweek to talk about the "natalist movement" if your meme has legs (leggy memes, hmmm).

Since Brooks is the one who identified it and gave it a name, however, he is likely to be the one who gets the press when someone performs a Lexis/Nexis or Internet search on "natalism". I can just see him jockeying for position at an editorial meeting, trying to get play for "The New Natalist Movement", and a front-page byline for himself.

As we both know, Brooks is twisting the truth a bit. There is no natalist movement. There is no natalist organization. There is no natalist consciousness. Some folks just like to make babies. That fact, however, is a commonplace, and commonplaces don't sell papers. "The New Natalist Movement" does, however. And David Brooks is the Faith Popcorn of the movement. He will get the credit as the one who first spotted "the movement" in the wild. In his paper will get credit for cracking the story first.

You are not quite old enough, but I remember "The Movement", which to most outsiders was a bunch of college kids smoking dope, dropping out, doing acid, and screwing like bunnies. The guy who labeled it "The Movement" probably got a fair amount of press and bylines.

Hell, if Morris Dees tried to drum up money to get rid of a handful of redneck cranks living in the sticks of Idaho, he wouldn't have gotten a dime. He gets millions, though, for haranguing folks about "The Militia Movement" and "The White Identity Movement".

To satisfy your curiosity, do a search right now for "natalist" on Google. Track the word each day for the next month. See how many times "Brooks" appears in conjunction with "natalist". See how many times "Sailer" appears in conjunction with "natalist". The results would be interesting.

In my corporate career, I was a good marketing researcher but a lousy marketer. Obviously, nothing much has changed.


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

December 9, 2004

Garance Franke-Ruta vs. Steve Sailer

Anti-Sailerism: There's a classic example of anti-Sailerism over at TAPPED, the blog of The American Prospect by somebody named Garance Franke-Ruta who is in a deep tizzy that David Brooks polluted the pages of the New York Times by citing my "Baby Gap" article.

The defining characteristic of anti-Sailerist diatribes is multitudinous quotations from my writings with no attempt at refutation of the truth of any of them -- the reader is simply supposed to be shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would dare write such politically incorrect things.

Sometimes, Franke-Ruta can't even be bothered to quote out of context. I particularly liked that my concluding paragraph was quoted in full:

"Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it’s certainly more interesting."

Obviously, by contending that the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking, I've condemned myself by my own words in the minds of all of polite society. No refutation of my shocking faux pas is needed.

Everyone can instantly see how much better the world was back when it basked in reputable ignorance on the question of what drives the red-blue divide.

Franke-Ruta seems to be convinced that I drew a correlation between Bush's share of the vote by state and the total fertility of white women by state because I am a racist. No, I did it because I am interested in the facts. I of course also looked at the correlation of Bush's share and the total fertility of all the women in the state, but the r-squared of that nonracial correlation was only 37%, compared to 74% for the correlation between Bush's share and white fertility. For Franke-Ruta's benefit, let me point out that 74% is twice as big as 37%. As for explaining to her what an r-squared is, well, ...

The reality is that white fertility correlates with Bush's share of the vote better than total fertility or nonwhite fertility does.

By the way, last weekend I found another demographic factor that correlates even better with Bush's share of the vote. It correlates strongly with fertility, of course, but a simple two factor multiple regression model of white total fertility and the new mystery factor has an astonishing r-squared of 87% with Bush's share. I'll try to write it up for this weekend. Franke-Ruta will be even more aghast.

If you want to see some completely apoplectic reactions, check out Atrios. I hope nobody had a stroke. Not a lot of members of the reality-based community there. As far as I can tell, just members of the hate-based community.


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

Garance Franke-Ruta Accused of Racism!

Amusingly, Franke-Ruta has herself (himself?) been accused, at vast length, of racism by a civil rights activist organization, who objected intensely to an article she wrote for The American Prospect. (This was discovered by the blog Across Difficult Country.)

To read the original indictment of Franke-Ruta's purported racism, go here and scan down to "Special Report: In Attack on Hispanics, American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta Is Accused of Journalistic Fraud." I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.

On the other hand, as Across Difficult Country asks, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.

Well, it being the Christmas season, I shall give Franke-Ruta the benefit of the doubt anyway.


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

December 7, 2004

Jim Tharpe vs. Southern Poverty Law Center

Scam Watch -- By the way, the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the official Scam Watch of iSteve.com. See Ken Silverstein's Harper's article "The Church of Morris Dees: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance" for the basics on Morris Dees' money machine. And here's leftist Alexander Cockburn's column on the SPLC's money-hungry machinations.


Lately, as Morris's moneymaking ambitions have expanded, he has turned to attacking people of the quality of Richard Lamm, the Democratic former three term governor of Colorado. I'm proud to be on Gov. Lamm's side of the ethical chasm between him and Mr. Dees, a member of the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame.


Here's something important I hadn't seen before: the revealing statement of Jim Tharpe, the Deputy Metro Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which he made during a Harvard panel discussion about his experience editing a massive Pulitzer-finalist investigative series on the Southern Poverty Law Center during his days at the Montgomery Advertiser:


I’d never done any reporting on nonprofits, I thought they were all good guys, they were mom-and-pop, bake-sale, raise-money-for-the-local-fire-department type operations. I had no idea how sophisticated they were, how much money they raised, and how little access you have to them as a reporter, some of which has already been covered here.

Summary of Findings

Our series was published in 1995 after three years of very brutal research under the threat of lawsuit the entire time.

Our findings were essentially these:

The [Southern Poverty Law] center was building up a huge surplus. It was 50-something million at that time; it’s now approaching 100 million, but they’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs.

A sampling of their donors showed that they had no idea of the center’s wealth. The charity watchdog groups, the few that are in existence, had consistently criticized the center, even though nobody had reported that.

There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the 13 black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the center, which was a shocker to me. As of 1995, the center had hired only two black attorneys in its entire history.

Questionable Fundraising

We also found some questionable fundraising tactics. One of the most celebrated cases the center handled was the case of a young black man, Michael Donald, who was killed by Klansmen in Mobile, Alabama, and his body suspended from a tree, a very grotesque killing. The state tried the people responsible for the murder and several of them ended up on death row, a couple ended up getting life in prison.

The center, after that part of the case took place, sued the Klan organization to which they belonged and won a $7 million verdict. It was a very celebrated verdict in this country. The problem was the people who killed this kid didn’t have any money. What they really got out of it was a $51,000 building that went to the mother of Michael Donald. What the C enter got and what we reported was they raised $9 million in two years using the Donald case, including a mailing with the body of Michael Donald as part of it.

The top center officials, I think the top three, got $350,000 in salaries during that time, and Morris got a movie out of it, a TV movie of the week. I think it was called, "The Morris Dees Story." [Actually, "Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story" with, appropriately enough, Corbin Bernsen (who played sleazy lawyer Arnie Becker on "LA Law") as Morris.]

As I said, being the editor on this series really raised my eyebrows. I never knew anything about nonprofits before this. I thought we would have complete access to their financial records; we didn’t. We had access to 990’s, which Doug mentioned earlier, which tell you very little, but they are a good starting point.

Organizations Monitor Nonprofits

I also learned that there are organizations out there that monitor nonprofits. A couple of these that might be worth your time are the National Charities Information Bureau, the American Institute of Philanthropy, and the Charities Division of the Better Business Bureau. They have rather loose guidelines, I think, for the way nonprofits operated, and even with those guidelines, they had blasted the center repeatedly for spending too little on programs, for the number of minorities in management positions, just very basic stuff that they’d been criticized for but nobody had reported.

The relationship with sources on this story was pretty interesting, because like I said, most of these people were our friends, and as somebody mentioned earlier, these were the disillusioned faithful. They were people who didn’t resign. As I said, most of their jobs simply ran out, but they left the center very disillusioned and very willing to talk about it, although most of them wanted to talk off the record.

That presented a number of problems for us. We did not publish anything in the series unless it was attributed to somebody, but we went beyond that. I think if we had stuck with that tack as the only thing we did in the series, we would have ended up with people at the center could have easily dismissed as disgruntled employees.

By looking at 990’s, what few financial records we did have available, we were able to corroborate much of that information, many of the allegations they had made, the fact that the center didn’t spend very much of its money that it took in on programs, the fact that some of the top people at the center were paid very high salaries, the fact that there weren’t minorities in management positions at the center.

If I had advice for anybody looking into a nonprofit it would be this: It’s the most tenacious story. You have to be more tenacious in your pursuit of these things than anything else I’ve ever been a part of. These guys threatened us with a lawsuit from the moment we asked to look at their financial records.

They were very friendly and cooperative, up until the point where we said, "We want to see the checks you write," and they turned over their 990’s and said, "Come look at these." We said, "We don’t want to see those, we know what those are and we’ve seen them. We actually want to see the checks you write," and they said, "Well, there’s 23,000 checks we’ve written over two years, you don’t possibly have time to look through all those," and we said, "Yes, we do, and we’ll hire an auditor to do it."

First Threats, Eventually No Response to Questions

At that point, they hired an independent attorney. They’re all lawyers, you’ve got to understand. They hired an attorney who began first by threatening me, then my editor, and then the publisher. "And you better be careful of the questions you ask and the stories you come up with," and they would cite the libel law to us. So we were under threat of lawsuit for two years, basically, during the research phase of the series.

They initially would answer our questions in person, as long as they could tape-record it. After we asked about finances, they wanted the questions written down and sent to them in advance, and then finally they said, "We’re tired of you guys, we’re not answering anything else," and they completely cut us off.

We published the series over eight days in 1994, and it had very little effect, actually. I think the center now raises more money than it ever has. [Laughter]

The story really didn’t get out of Montgomery and that’s a real problem. The center’s donors are not in Montgomery; the center’s donors are in the Northeast and on the West Coast. So the story pretty much was contained in Montgomery where it got a shrug-of-the-shoulders reaction. We really didn’t get much reaction at all, I’m sad to say.

One of our editorial writers had an interesting comment on it. I think he stole it from somebody else, but his comment was this: "They came to do good and they’ve done quite well for themselves, and they’ve done even better since the series was published." I’m not sure what the lesson in that is, but don’t assume because a nonprofit has a sterling reputation it’s not worth looking into, and don’t assume when you start looking into it that it’s going to be easy to get the information, because it’s not.

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

The Roe Effect

James Taranto claims that he knew all about the relationship between white fertility and Republican voting. See, it's the Roe Effect -- future Democrats get aborted, he says.

The only problem with this popular idea is that there's little evidence that abortion has a big effect on white fertility -- a 2000 Rand Corporation study found:

The white TFR where abortion is legal and Medicaid funding for the procedure available is estimated to be 1.81. Ending Medicaid funding would increase the TFR for whites by 2 percent. Klerman estimates that making abortion illegal would increase white fertility by an additional 3 percent, still below replacement levels.

If abortion wasn't convenient, people would have a lot fewer unwanted pregnancies. They really aren't all that hard to avoid.

It makes you wonder what the point of legalized abortion is if the great majority of aborted fetuses wouldn't have been conceived without abortion being legalized.


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

"Natalism"

-- David Brooks writes:

There is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is 'natalism.'

It's strange that having enough babies to keep the species going needs its own name. What's next? "Breathingism?"


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

Sailer and Brooks' New Red-Diaper Babies

My "Baby Gap" article makes the New York Times:

The New Red-Diaper Babies
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: December 7, 2004

There is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism."

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children.

If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences.

So there are significant fertility inequalities across regions. People on the Great Plains and in the Southwest are much more fertile than people in New England or on the Pacific coast.

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates. [More...]


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

December 6, 2004

"Baby Gap" vs. "Parent Trap"

-- Here's the New Republic's article "Parent Trap" by my neighbor Joel Kotkin and William Frey. Fairly similar, although they didn't come up with the killer statistics that I did about Bush carrying 25 of the top 26 states because they look at overall fertility rather than white fertility, which is the key variable. The average number of babies per white woman in a state accounts for 74% of the variation in Bush's share, but the fertility for all women only accounts for 37%.

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

Kinsey

Kinsey -- John Zmirak has a long review of the new movie and the real life man, which I haven't seen yet. For strong stomachs...

I've long resented Dr. Kinsey because he gives a bad name to sex researchers. The unanswered question about his life is whether he became a sex researcher because he was an omnisexual pervert or did he become an omnisexual pervert because he was a sex researcher. In either case, his life story was bad for the reputation of a legitimate and important field.

By the way, before conducting the big sex study of 4,300 people published in the book "Sex in America" (which turned out to be the anti-Kinsey Report, showing that married couples were having the most and best sex ... with each other, and a lot of other not very lascivious findings), the U. of Chicago researchers put a lot of work into finding out the best kind of interviewers. They found an overwhelming preference among all segments of society for being interviewed about intimate matters by middle-aged white ladies. Kinsey, instead, hired enthusiastic young men, who used their jobs as an excuse to run amok.


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

December 5, 2004

Life Has Been Dreary without the Salinas Brothers in the News

Brother of ex-Presidente murdered in Mexico:

Enrique Salinas, the youngest brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was found dead in a car on the outskirts of Mexico City on Monday, with a plastic bag tied over his head in an apparent murder, officials said. Authorities said there indications that Salinas had been killed as part of an attempt to extort him or get information out of him. "Generally, if you put a bag over someone's head, you're often not trying to kill them, but rather extort them or get some information out of them," said Alfonso Navarrete Prida, the attorney general of the State of Mexico, which abuts Mexico City and where the body was found.

Do you get the feeling that this attorney general sounds like he has first-hand experience with putting plastic bags over people's heads?

Ah, the Salinas family... Life has been dreary without them in the news. If you want to read about the exploits of Carlos and his brother Raul (a.k.a., "Mr. 10%," for his demand that all contracts with the Mexican government include a 10% kickback to the Salinas family), here's my VDARE article.

The Salinases were great friends of the Bushes. For example, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush vacationed three times with his family on Raul's ranch, perhaps to further educate young George P. on how Presidential relatives should behave. Raul is now doing 27 years in the slammer for having his ex-brother-in-law, the PRI chairman, murdered. Raul's wife was arrested in Switzerland while trying to remove $94 million in cash from their safe deposit box.


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

Debunking the Hispanic 44% Exit Poll

New VDARE.com column at left on my vindication by AP and NBC over the exit poll's inflated share of Hispanics for Bush.

I've been on a hot streak since mid-October with four quantitative scoops:

1. Kerry's IQ

2. Debunking the Blue-Red State IQ hoax

3. Showing the baby gap correlates with the Blue-Red gap

4. Debunking the inflated exit poll

***


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

Maureen Dowd's latest menopausal hot flash:

I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas. Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.


"You're weird," my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.

My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house... My mom and sister both blissfully sat through "It's a Wonderful Life" again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants - and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high - except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.

I've given a lot of thought to why others' season of joy is my season of doom ... I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)

It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I've spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I'm no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.

Much of the appeal of feminism, like a lot of other 20th Century intellectuals' fads like Freudianism, consists of trying to persuade others to become as unhappy as you are. Nothing drives liberals crazier than seeing their less intelligent relatives grow up to be happier than they are. The great curse of Maureen's life is that she was the smart one in the family, the one who believed what smart people were supposed to believe, while her brothers and sisters believed all the politically conservative, socially traditional stuff that dumb people believe. Unfortunately, just like they predicted, they ended up happier than her.

Fortunately, she has her bully pulpit from which to try to lure others into her mistakes. It won't maker her any happier, but it will make her feel more fashionable.


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

Barry Bonds' Batting by Age

Barry Bonds told the grand jury he unwittingly used Balco's steroids -- Sure, Barry, whatever you say.

Here's Barry's batting performance by age (as of July 1), using the Baseball Reference's single best hitting statistic, Adjusted OPS. The average hitter is a 100. To reach 200 for a single season is out of the reach of most Hall of Famers (Hank Aaron and Willie Mays never did it). As you can see, Barry reached his first peak, achieving 205 and 206, in 1992-93 when he was 27 and 28, which is the typical peak age for a ballplayer. He then declined slowly, as is conventional, to a still outstanding 162 at age 34 in 1999. The next year he bounced back up to 191, which is a little suspicious but hardly impossible for somebody who was already one of the top 20 or so greatest ballplayers of all time, and arguably top 10. Then, from the age of 36 through 39 he went on a four-year tear averaging 257, which is better than Babe Ruth's single best season (1920) of 255, when he was 25. Ted Williams had a 233 when he was 38 but his surrounding seasons weren't too close to that. Bonds' last four seasons include the three best offensive seasons in the history of baseball. That just ain't natural.

age Avg=100
21 103
22 114
23 147
24 125
25 170
26 161
27 205
28 206
29 182
30 168
31 186
32 170
33 177
34 162
35 191
36 262
37 275
38 231
39 260


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

Unaccountability

As I said just before the voting, the election was all about accountability. If you wanted more of what we got over the last four years, then vote for Mr. Bush. The President clearly agrees with my analysis that the voters have ringingly endorsed unaccountability, and he appears determined to give the public what it voted for, in spades. He just re-hired that author of countless mistakes, Donald Rumsfeld (my favorite: equating looting with freedom in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq conquest, instead of ordering our victorious troops to shoot looters).

But, you are probably saying, Rumsfeld is an amateur in the screw-up department compared to the #3 man at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith. So, what will be the fate of Sergeant Snafu? Well, Newsday reports, "Feith was reported earlier this week to have told his staff he was staying."

A reader writes:

Bush can't be so stupid as to think Iraq is a victory much less a political plus. Thus, he is simply practicing the old "we all hang together or separately" tactic. If he fired the Neocons and their tool (Rummy) they would turn on him and he'd be finished. So, he needs them to "cover up" the disaster that is Iraq.


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

The election's over, so the FBI is back to chasing spies:

The FBI conducted a "massive" 6 hour raid on the headquarters of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Wednesday, after a long hiatus in pursuing Neocongate presumably mandated by the Bush administration while the election was going on. You've got to admire the patriots in the FBI who keep pushing this investigation even though 95% of the politicians in Washington want this case to vanish.

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

Baby Gap on The American Conservative

The full text of my important article on "The Baby Gap" is now up on the American Conservative website.


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

1973: The demise of the shotgun wedding

http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#shotdown

Here's a new Census Bureau graph on the increasing median age of first marriages. Graphs like this are misleading because by starting in 1950, they don't show that the immediate post-War decades were anomalous. Before WWII, the average age of first marriages had been higher, but after the War, the abundance of union jobs paying a living wage to very young men allowed the age of first marriage to hit an all-time low. In general, Europe has been a fairly late marriage civilization (compared to the Chinese or Indians) since pre-Christian times.

The age of first marriage for women crept upward after 1960, perhaps due to increasing levels of higher education for women. But the marriage age for men had stayed right at 23 until about 1973, after which it shot upwards for about two decades before stabilizing at around 27. Indeed, if I had to guess the very day the average age of marriage for men started to rise, I'd put my money on Jan. 22, 1973, the day the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade.

There's a lot of other evidence that what we think of as The Sexual Revolution of the Sixties didn't actually happen on a mass scale until about 1973. And the likeliest single reason it happened then is Roe v. Wade.


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

Economics of the Music Industry

More on the Decline of Rock: A reader writes:

My personal theory about the decline of rock-- record company profits are not perfectly correlated with record sales. If a group becomes too popular (say Led Zeppelin circa 1976) they can get a better deal for themselves and reduce the margins of the companies. Ergo, record companies pursue a series of disposable acts rather than nurture those of the highest quality. (Nothing wrong with it, just smart business.) Disco, boy bands, and rap are producer driven and hence ideal forms for the record execs. The Clash, Stones, and Grateful Dead are bad investments.

The Clash used to drive their record label nuts by insisting on lower than usual suggested retail prices for their records.

I don't know enough about the music industry to say if this is true, but this economic logic has almost killed off the sit-com, with reality TV starring amateurs replacing it. The supporting cast of Seinfeld showed just how much leverage even lesser stars had when they got paid about $22 million apiece for the final season. Supposedly, NBC offered Jerry Seinfeld personally $5 million per episode or $110 million to do one additional season (on top of the $66 million in salaries the other three would split, showing the top-rated show would still be profitable even if it paid out $176 million in salaries annually), but he turned it down, saying he had enough money. (Jason Alexander claims Seinfeld has made a billion dollars total in royalties on his ownership of the show.) Likewise, the six member cast of Friends made about a million dollars apiece per episode or $132 million per year (or $143 million if Jennifer Aniston really did get an additional $500,000 per episode.

Or, you can hire some attractive but anonymous exhibitionists each year for your reality series and promise [portentuous pause, in the manner of Dr. Evil threatening world leaders] one million dollars to the winner!


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

East African Running Genes

No Surprise, Again: "Endurance running is in east Africans' genes" says the New Scientist. Christopher Orlet has more in the American Spectator.


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

Jason Giambi and Steroids

No surprise: The New York Yankee's slugging (but now sick) first baseman Jason Giambi is revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle to be a steroid user.

Last summer, I pointed out that the much acclaimed philosophical revolution in baseball player evaluations pioneered by author Bill James and first put into practice by Oakland general manager Billy Beane (under whom Giambi suddenly leapt to superstardom) had a downside: it particularly valued the kind of accomplishments (homeruns and walks) that could be significantly boosted by taking steroids.

"Sabremetricians" have long derided the bestowing of the 2001 American League MVP award on Seattle's singles-hitter Ichiro Suzuki instead of Giambi. From a statistical point of view, this critique was flawless, but from the perspective of the health of baseball, it was all wrong: Giambi was obviously just another steroid abusing Mark McGwire clone, while Ichiro was a unique talent.

This year, Giambi's health broke down, quite possibly because of steroid and human growth hormone abuse, while Ichiro, at age 30 broke George Sisler's ancient record for most hits in a season.


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

Correlation of Presidential Votes by State

http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#adlai56

An extraordinary change in politics: I've discovered something I am almost flabbergasted by concerning how much Presidential politics has changed since the 1950s.

I've mentioned before how stable the election results by state and by demographic group were from 2000 to 2004. Bush's share of the vote in 2004 by state correlated at the 0.98 level with his performance in 2000. What that means is that if you spent November in a cave and just surfaced today and asked "What happened in the election?" you could be 96% (that's 0.98 squared) accurate in guessing Bush's share in each state with just three kinds of information: his 2000 performance, his new intercept (start Bush off 3.9 percentage points higher), and his new slope (for each 10 percentage points his 2000 share goes up per state, his 2004 share goes up 9.77 percentage points). For example, if he earned a 50% share in a particular state last time, you would expect him to earn 52.7 points this time (3.9 + (5 * 9.77).

So, how does the stability from 2000 to 2004 compare to elections in the past? The impact of third party candidates makes it somewhat difficult to compare seemingly similar pairs of elections, such as the President's father's campaigns in 1988 and 1992. The correlation of Bush41's share in 1988 to 1992 on a state-by-state basis was only .83 (71%), but, perhaps, the intervention of Ross Perot, who captured 19% of the vote, had something to do with that.

The cleanest comparison to 2000 and 2004 is the 1952 and 1956 elections, which twice in a row matched up Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. You would think that the results would have been almost identical from 1952 to 1956, but they correlated only at the 0.78 level, meaning you could only be 61% accurate at plotting Eisenhower's 1956 results knowing his 1952 results and Eisenhower's intercept and slope for 1956. In other words, there was hugely more shifting at the state level between 1952 and 1956 than between 2000 and 2004.

Eisenhower's overall share grew 2.3 points from 1952 to 1956, only a little less than Bush's improvement from 2000 to 2004, but Ike's share fell in 19 of 48 states. In contrast, Bush lost share in only 2 of 51 states (although this may change slightly as final vote counts come in).

Were voters in 1956 much more sensitive to the actual policies advocated by the candidates, and how they would affect their states, and thus more likely to change their votes as both candidates altered their stance on issues to try to appeal more broadly? In contrast, did voters in 2004 vote not so much on the issues as on which (relatively unchanging) part of society they wished to affirm their membership in?

By the way, the correlation between Eisenhower's share by states in 1952 and Bush's in 2004 is -0.01, or utterly random.

Here are the r-squareds for state-by-state correlations for the last eight elections. For 1992 and 1996, I've laid out the correlations both with the GOP candidate by himself and with the GOP candidate plus Perot (i.e., the non-Democratic share of the vote). There seems to be an upward trend over time for elections to become more stable, although 1984 to 1988 was 88%, which is low only compared to 2000 to 2004 (96%). The 1992 and 1996 elections were somewhat perturbed by Perot and by Clinton, who had a certain amount of Southern appeal.


R-Sqd 1984 1988 1992 1992 1996 1996 2000


Reagan Bush Bush Bush Dole Dole Bush





+ Perot
+Perot
1988 Bush 88%





1992 Bush 59% 71%




1992 Bush+Perot 84% 68% 53%



1996 Dole 68% 68% 75% 67%


1996 Dole+Perot 77% 70% 66% 83% 93%

2000 Bush 70% 64% 66% 68% 89% 93%
2004 Bush 72% 66% 72% 69% 88% 91% 96%

***


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

The Decline and Fall of the American Teenybopper:

For about a quarter of a century in the middle of the last century, adolescent girls had a superb sense for recognizing the next big thing in pop musical greatness, going crazy over Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Michael Jackson long before any other demographic segments did . For example, back in 1944 when my late mother-in-law was 14, she put on her bobby-sox and took the El down to the Chicago Loop at 9am to see Sinatra sing for 15 minutes. Sinatra was so popular with bobby-soxers then that he did something like eleven shows a day.

Then, something happened and teenyboppers stopped being able to sense greatness: they were into Bobby Sherman, the Bay City Rollers, and the Backstreet Boys. I think there were several causes:

First, teenyboppers' judgment was at its best during stylistic innovations such as the invention of rock and roll in the mid-Fifties and the British Invasion in the mid-Sixties. In contrast, there has been little stylistic innovation since the second half of the 1970s, which saw the popularization of disco, rap, punk, and the various "new wave" styles. My son listens to LA's "New Rock" station KROQ, but just about everything they play could have been created in 1982.

Second, the way you become a legend with the people who write about popular music -- who are, overwhelmingly, adult males -- is by making music for adult males. Thus, Sinatra took control of his music-making in 1953 and ascended to a new level of sophistication, as did the Beatles in 1965-1967, and the Stones, too, lagging, as always, a little behind the Beatles. As an artist, Presley's weakness was the he was just too nice a guy, too polite and compliant, and never took control of his own artistry, allowing himself to be pushed around by Col. Parker and other mediocrities, although his brief 1968 comeback, which produced "Suspicious Minds" and "Burnin' Love" indicates what he was capable of.

Bob Dylan, however, showed that you could bypass the teeny-bopper stage of your career and go right for the critics.

Third, various impresarios discovered that rather than wait around for some raw genius to strike sparks with teenyboppers, you could manufacture bands that would push young girls' buttons in a Pavlovian fashion.

Fourth, as the search intensified for male singers who could function as unthreatening "practice boyfriends" for young girls, regular guys like Sinatra, who was in his mid-20s when the teeny-boppers discovered him and was definitely not the ideal "practice boyfriend," were shunted aside for more specialized types. What impresarios look for in teenybopper idols are males who seem younger than they actually are, but they are less likely to grow up to appeal to adult males.

A reader writes:

I dunno bout your theory but I have my own observations. Somewhere in the 70s there started increased specialization. Whereas in the past both boys and girls listened to the same bands. Like in the 80s you had hair bands that strongly appealed to guys but not so much girls. And this trend only got stronger culminating with Nirvana. Which is ironic because Kurt Cobain hated the people who loved his music the most, that is, testosterone addled teen males. But also rap, doesn't appeal much to girls, but a lot of guys love it.

I think it would be impossible to have a super-act like the Beatles today. The market is segmented too much to have such a band dominate. Is this good or bad? I dunno, it just is.

Right. A band like The Clash, which has the #8 album on Rolling Stone magazine's Top 500 albums of all time, with London Calling, has a very specific market niche -- high IQ males interested in politics as well as music, which pretty well defines rock critics. But it's hard to get girls interested in The Clash. The gender divisions have only gotten deeper since then. For example, back in 1982 KROQ played lots of girl groups, like The Go-Gos, including some goofy novelty hits, like Toni Basil's cheerleader chant "Hey, Mickey," but today, even though, the general style of the music has barely changed, the only girl group on the regular rotation is No Doubt, and the mix is aimed overwhelmingly at boys.


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

December 1, 2004

Nuland vs. Cosh over "House, M.D."

Sherwin Nuland slams Fox's "House, M.D." for portraying a doctor who is a jerk and Colby Cosh slams back -- The premise of the new show starring Hugh Laurie is: Wouldn't it be cool if every hospital had a Greg Cochran on staff for diagnosing the really hard cases -- an irascible genius who has personally been burned by other doctors' incompetence at diagnosis and now won't let anything, including reputation, civility, and other people's self-esteem -- get in the way of figuring out what the damn disease is?

Everybody has stories abut doctors' incompetence at diagnosis. Personally, back in 1997 I had a board-licensed M.D. feel a hot dog-sized tumor growing out of my armpit and tell me, "Don't worry about it. It's probably just a muscle pull." But he was a nice guy! In contrast, the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma expert I eventually went to who had access to a life-saving cutting edge experimental monoclonal antibody treatment was a jerk, but I'm alive today, seven years later. Thank you, Dr. Jerk!


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

February 21, 2004

Africa, AIDS, and multiple concurrent relationships

New and Improved, with the magic ingredient: proofreading! --


Needed Role Model: O.J. Simpson? -- Discover Magazine runs an interesting article (not online) on the big improvement that Western statisticians finally realized they had to plug into their models to explain why HIV spreads so much faster in sub-Saharan Africa -- "multiple concurrent relationships." Originally, American computer whizzes assumed that the sexual behavior of Africans resembled to one degree or another various American models -- monogamy, serial monogamy, promiscuity, mistress-keeping, prostitution, etc. But they missed the key difference between Africa and much of the non-tropical world: a large proportion of both the men and women of Africa are involved in simultaneous long term relationships with two or more members of the opposite sex.


The author of the Discover article fails to pick up on the cause, but it leaps out from her interviews with African men: the lower level of male jealousy in Africa. The men the journalist interviewed drinking beer in a Botswana bar one morning all claim to have more than one long-term girlfriend. There's nothing surprising in this. What is very surprising for Westerners, though, is the complacency with which they assume that their multiple girlfriends probably have multiple boyfriends, as well. Feminists should be delighted by their enlightened commitment to sexual equality, their assumption that what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, too.


An anthropologist friend of mine living with an African tribe went off on a multi-day trip with some of the men of the tribe. They were supposed to be back, say, Wednesday morning but on Tuesday evening they were making such good time that he suggested they drive onward and get home late that night. His hosts were dismayed at this ungentlemanly suggestion. A good husband, they explained, never unexpectedly showed up late at night. It could create the most embarrassing scenes with his wife and her lover.


In contrast, O.J. Simpson assumed it was perfectly reasonable for him to have many women, but the notion that his ex-wife was fooling around with a younger version of himself, USC Heisman Trophy winning running back Marcus Allen, drove him nuts -- a much more American than African response.


Evolutionary psychologists explain why men are more sexually jealous and women are more romantically jealous (i.e., a man more hates the idea of his wife sleeping with another man, while a woman more hates the idea of her husband caring for another woman) by reference to the old rhyme:


Mother's baby

Father's maybe


In other words, a man has to police his wife's sexual fidelity in order to not get saddled working like a dog for 18 years to support another's man's child. But what happens in the large swathes of the world where the husband doesn't expect to slave away to support his wife's children, legitimate or not? Evolutionary psychologists aren't very good at thinking about diversity. They simply assume that humanity is so homogenous that they can understand the whole human race by giving questionnaires to their UC Santa Barbara students.


Indeed, African men are more likely to insist than to object to their women going out into the workplace. By one estimate, women do not just 50% of the work, but 80% of the work in sub-Saharan Africa.

And that seems to be the key to explaining the AIDS epidemic in Africa: on average, African men aren't jealous enough to do what it takes to keep their women faithful. Why not? Because they are less likely than men in the rest of the world to support their women's children, so getting handed cuckoo's egg kids by adulterous wives is less skin off their noses than it would be for men in cultures where husbands are expected to make higher degrees of paternal investment in their nominal kids.


Thus, you see in African cultures tendencies both toward hyper-polygamy and matrilineal/matrilocal family structures. Outside of the tropics, you have to be the Emperor of China or the equivalent to be able to afford a huge number of wives. But, in systems of tropical agriculture where most of the work is gardening (e.g., weeding), which women, with their nimble fingers, can do better than men, you sometimes see handsome men with 100 or more wives. Of course, he can't afford to keep them locked up in harems, so he puts them to work in the fields, where they can produce enough to support themselves and their children. Now, the 99 local bachelors who are left over are going to spend a lot of effort to lure the polygamist's wives out of the fields and into the bushes, so, many of the children born to the local Big Man's wives are not going to be his genetic offspring. But their mother's can support them, so it's no big deal to him.


Likewise, it's much more common for tropical folks like Africans and Melanesians than elsewhereto have social structures where there is so little certainty of paternity that the mother's brother plays a major role as the adult male in the lives of the mother's children. After all, he knows for sure that he's at least the half-uncle of his sister's kids, while her husband might have no genetic relationship to them. These sometimes are "matrilocal" families where the brother lives with his sister and her children, while her husband and other lovers may live with their sisters.

Another time, the anthropologist was once about to go off on a dangerous trip into lion country. The tribespeople were very worried about him, and asked what to do with his possessions in case he gotten eaten. He said, "Just send them to my wife." They were shocked at this immoral reply: "Don't you want us to send them to your family?" (i.e., to his sisters) they asked in disbelief.


(Of course, polygamy and matrilocalism are somewhat contradictory in practice. A man with 100 wives who lived in 100 different villages would be as exhausted as the traveling salesman in a 1920s joke. So, there is a wide vary of African family structures. But, the overall bell curves of kinship systems in Africa are significantly shifted in directions implied by the relatively higher ability of African women to fend for themselves and their children without males as providers.


This lack of male jealousy makes Africans particularly susceptible to the spread of venereal diseases like AIDS.

By this analysis, O.J. Simpson would represent assimilation toward the non-tropical norm of high male jealously