March 29, 2005

Death Taxes and Death

Under current federal law, the inheritance tax will drop from 45% to 0% of the estate's value on January 1, 2010, then rise from 0% to 55% on January 1, 2011. Our Congressmen, being pure and trusting souls, apparently didn't notice that this provided incentives for shenanigans, such as, oh, suicide and murder. But two economists have investigated whether the more minor changes of the past had any effect on the death rate:

"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns
on the Death Elasticity" by Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel B. Slemrod:

Abstract: This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered is ex post doctoring of the reported date of death. However, the fact that we find that postponement, rather than acceleration, of death is more likely to occur suggests that this phenomenon is at last partly a real (albeit timing) response to taxation.

So, that's good news -- people tend to stay alive longer to take advantage of upcoming tax cuts (or their loved ones forget to report their deaths) rather than "Kind Hearts and Coronets"-style murders.

On the other hand, I suspect that this one year suspension of the estate tax is unprecedented in magnitude of the effect.

(Of course, the drafters of the legislation weren't as naive as I claimed above -- I'm sure Karl Rove has a complicated plan to make the suspension permanent. The GOP will argue that the suspension must be made or permanent or it will provide an incentive to murder Granny.)


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

Economics of Immigration

A reader writes:

I quite agree with you that immigration is not a source of prosperity, except perhaps when the immigrants are superior in technical skills and economic virtues to the natives.

The immigrationists got it backwards. Countries aren't prosperous because they take in immigrants, but they take in immigrants because they are prosperous. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are there to prove that countries can become prosperous fast without benefit of immigration.

Brazil and Argentina demonstrate that countries can take in a lot of immigrants without attaining great prosperity. Between 1880 and 1960, Brazil received about 4 million immigrants. (Two of those immigrants were my Dutch parents who emigrated from the Netherlands to Brazil in 1953.)

In fact, as you pointed out, countries can grow economically while exporting people. Between 1840 and 1965, there was both a lot of emigration from Europe and rapid economic growth there. ...

One historical fact overlooked by the immigration enthusiasts is that before 1914 the main immigrant-receiving countries were also big importers of capital. Canada, the US, Brazil, Argentina and Australia were all big recipients of foreign investment before 1914. Moreover, in many of these countries there were untapped natural resources. One example of that were the pampas in Argentina. In the later decades of the 19th century, Argentina started to open these pampas for cattle-raising. The cattle was slaughtered in plants often financed by British capital and transported on railroads also often financed by British capital. The simultaneous arrival of immigrants and foreign investors meant that wages were going up as immigrants were streaming in. The Argentinian population went from 1.8 million in 1870 to 7.8 million in 1914, but people were richer on average in 1914 than in 1870.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that today's situation is quite different. True, the US is the worlds biggest borrower, but this borrowing is not used to finance capital accumulation but to pay for the consumption of imported goods. It is happening because American households save so little and because the plutocratic Republicans are unwilling to tax the rich more heavily and at the same time unable to slash social programs for electoral reasons. The low savings rate of the US may have something to do with the stagnant wages of so many Americans, which in turn may be caused by competition from immigrants.


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

March 27, 2005

Baby Names and Inheritances

The Unified Field Theory: Combining my two obsessions of the last week, let me suggest that somebody should do a study to see whether naming your kid after a rich relative pays off in a larger slice of the inheritance pie or in nepotistic jobs in the rich relative's business.


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

Annotations for my "Golf Courses as Art" article

If you have received in the mail by now the April 11th issue of The American Conservative (article not online - subscribe here) with my long article on golf course architecture, here are links to people and places I referred to in the text. You can read along in the magazine and look up pictures of everything I refer to in writing. (First, though, let me mention that the best all-around website on golf design is www.GolfClubAtlas.com.) Here are the references in order as they appear in my essay:

Augusta National

Augusta National - 15th Hole

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty

Christo's Gates in Central Park

Christo's Running Fence

Frederick Law Olmstead -- Central Park

A.W. Tillinghast -- Bethpage Black

Pete Dye

Tom Doak

Trent Jones Family:

- Robert Trent Jones Sr.

- Rees Jones

- Robert Trent Jones II

Alister MacKenzie -- Cypress Point Golf Club

Capability Brown -- Blenheim Castle landscaping

LPGA Nabisco Championship

Alice Dye

Jack Nicklaus

Ben Crenshaw -- Sand Hills

Tom Fazio

P.G. Wodehouse

John Updike

Bernard Darwin

Alister MacKensie's design of Augusta National

Ballybunion New (Cashen) Course

RTJ's Firestone South

Shadow Creek

St. Andrews Old Course

- 17th Green

Old Tom Morris

Willie Park Jr.

Huntercombe

Sunningdale

Charles Blair MacDonald -- National Golf Links of America

Louis Sullivan

Frank Lloyd Wright

Arts and Crafts Movement

Chrysler Building

William Flynn

Donald Ross

Pine Valley

Victorian furniture

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair

Augusta National

- Robert Trent Jones' 11th

- Robert Trent Jones' 16th

- MacKenzie's last bunker at Augusta National

Lever House

Modernist Office Buildings

Pinehurst #2

Robert Venturi

Tournament Players' Club

Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim museum

Whistling Straits

Pacific Dunes


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

Does naming your son DeAndre rather than David doom him?

Richard Morin writes in the Washington Post about a study of Florida students by economist David Figlio that found:

Here's a reason to think twice before naming your newborn Ashlee, Da'Quan or LaQuisha: Economist David Figlio says his research shows that children with such names fare worse in school than siblings with more typical first names.

And it's not the children's fault, says Figlio, a professor at the University of Florida. He argues that teachers subconsciously expect less from students with first names that have unusual spellings and punctuation. As a consequence, he says, these boys and girls suffer in terms of the quality of the attention and instruction they get in the classroom -- differences that show up on test day.

Figlio said these kids also pay a price for their names when teachers and administrators make decisions about who gets promoted to the next grade level or selected to participate in "gifted" student programs: "Drews" are slightly more likely to be recommended for enrichment classes while "Damarcuses" are rejected, even when they have identical test scores.

"I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores," Figlio asserts in a working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "These results are consistent with the notion that teachers and school administrators may subconsciously expect less of students with names associated with low socio-economic status . . . and these expectations may possibly become a self-fulfilling prophesy."

Figlio first attempted to quantify names that connote low socioeconomic status. He used birth certificate data from all children born in Florida between 1989 and 1996 to identify first names that had a high probability of being associated with a mother who was unmarried or a teenager at the time when her child was born, was a high school dropout and came from an impoverished family, independent of the mother's race. He then computed what he dubbed the "Scrabble" score of each name, giving points for infrequently appearing consonants, an apostrophe or names formed by multiple syllables. "These names, empirically, are given most frequently by blacks, but they are also given by white and Hispanic parents as well" -- with similarly debilitating effects for children of all races, he found. (Exotic names popular with less affluent white families included "Jazzmyn" and "Chlo'e," he wrote in an e-mail.)

Looking at siblings is a good methodology, but I'd like to know more about the effect size. (Newspaper write-ups of social science studies almost never tell you the effect size -- reporters generally believe that if the effect is "statistically significant" it is also significant in real life, which often is not the case with a large enough study.) I suspect the intra-family difference between brothers named Jalen and Jacob is small compared to the inter-family difference between families that have any Jalens in them and families that have any Jacobs. So, the answer is, no, it probably won't doom your little D'Andre, but it likely won't do him any good.

It's reasonable that names can influence a child's attitude toward "acting white." Giving your child a lower class black name is announcing your solidarity with lower class black values. Naming your kid Jamal instead of James sends him a message about how you expect him to act, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that individual Jamals act, on average, more like the average Jamal than do individual Jameses.

The economist's explanation about teacher bias sounds not implausible, although I would like to know whether he is measuring just full siblings or, more likely, full and half siblings. There could be substantial underlying average differences even between siblings depending on their names. The kind of woman who names one of her kids D'Shawn or Trevon is more likely to have children by more than one man than the kind of woman who names one of her kids Benjamin or Ansel. If she gives one son a super-black name and another son a more mainstream name, it might mean they had different baby-daddies with different tastes ... and different child-rearing styles and different genes.

Also, a lot of the names of the Aaliyah and Imani type are examples of schoolgirl whimsy. Perhaps when the mother becomes older and wiser she'll choose a less stereotyped named, and that may have some impact on how she raises her child.

*

By the way, regarding the name "Ansel," which ranks very high among boys names in average education level of parents (Dov is #1), if you are going to name your kid after a celebrity in the hopes, probably forlorn, that he takes after him, it strikes me that Ansel Adams stood for an awfully fine combination of qualities you'd wish for your child to enjoy: nature and art, outdoors and indoors, national parks and museums, strenuousness and long life, aesthetic dedication and monetary success...


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

March 25, 2005

Australians Talk Big, Bleed Small in Iraq

From Michael Duffy in the Sydney Morning Herald:

An American acquaintance - let's call him Hank - has been complaining for a while that the Australian forces in Iraq have suffered no fatalities, while America has lost more than 1500 killed in action. When I suggest this observation is in poor taste, Hank says, "What's in poor taste is the contrast between the tiny number of troops you guys gave and the credit your Government takes for being part of the coalition of the willing. There's a big gap there."

"Maybe," I wonder out loud, "we've just been lucky?" Hank snorts and tells me to go look at the numbers.

At the peak of their commitments to Iraq, Britain had 45,000 people there and the US about 150,000. Relative to population sizes, to match this Australia should have had between 10,000 and 15,000 people in the Middle East at some point. In fact we peaked at just 2000. There are now fewer than 600 Australians serving there, to be joined next month by another 450.

Some of these figures are approximate, as countries use different definitions to reach them. But I doubt this would affect the conclusion that Australia has relatively contributed about one-fifth of the effort that was put into freeing Iraq by Britain and America. Says Aldo Borgu, military analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "There's no doubt our action on the ground doesn't match the Government's rhetoric."

It's an imbalance I've never seen referred to, but it ought to concern both the Government's supporters and its opponents. One would expect conservatives to be worried about the questions of honour and integrity raised by fighting war on the cheap. And those opposed to the war might ask themselves whether John Howard would have gone in if he'd had to pay the full price, not just in numbers but in putting Australian forces into situations of danger, which (as Hank gently points out) we have generally avoided so far.



You've got to admire Australian Prime Minister John Howard's political skills. He gave his most important ally the Big Talk that Bush craved, while protecting his own people's lives.


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

Inside Story on Schiavo Case

A Florida lawyer writes:

I have been following the case for years. Something that interests me about the Terri Schiavo case, and that doesn't seem to have gotten much media attention: The whole case rests on the fact that the Schindlers (Terri's parents) were totally outlawyered by the husband (Michael Schiavo) at the trial court level.

This happened because, in addition to getting a $750K judgment for Terri's medical care, Michael Schiavo individually got a $300K award of damages for loss of consortium, which gave him the money to hire a top-notch lawyer to represent him on the right-to-die claim. He hired George Felos, who specializes in this area and litigated one of the landmark right-to-die cases in Florida in the early 90s.

By contrast, the Schindlers had trouble even finding a lawyer who would take their case since there was no money in it. Finally they found an inexperienced lawyer who agreed to take it partly out of sympathy for them, but she had almost no resources to work with and no experience in this area of the law. She didn't even depose Michael Schiavo's siblings, who were key witnesses at the trial that decided whether Terri would have wanted to be kept alive. Not surprisingly, Felos steamrollered her.

The parents obviously had no idea what they were up against until it was too late. It was only after the trial that they started going around to religious and right-to-life groups to tell their story. These organizations were very supportive, but by that point their options were already limited because the trial judge had entered a judgment finding that Terri Schiavo would not have wanted to live.

This fact is of crucial importance -- and it's one often not fully appreciated by the media, who like to focus on the drama of cases going to the big, powerful appeals courts: Once a trial court enters a judgment into the record, that judgment's findings become THE FACTS of the case, and can only be overturned if the fact finder (in this case, the judge) acted capriciously (i.e., reached a conclusion that had essentially no basis in fact).

In this case, the trial judge simply chose to believe Michael Schiavo's version of the facts over the Schindlers'. Since there was evidence to support his conclusion (in the form of testimony from Michael Schiavo's siblings), it became nearly impossible for the Schindlers to overturn it. The judges who considered the case after the trial-level proceeding could make decisions only on narrow questions of law. They had no room to ask, "Hey, wait a minute, would she really want to die?" That "fact" had already been decided.

In essence, the finding that Terri Schiavo would want to die came down to the subjective opinion of one overworked trial judge who was confronted by a very sharp, experienced right-to-die attorney on one side and a young, quasi-pro bono lawyer on the other.

Nothing unusual about this, of course. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. But it's an interesting point to keep in mind when you read that the Schiavo case has been litigated for years and has been reviewed by dozens of judges . . . yadda yadda yadda.

By the way, I'm guessing that George Felos is probably quite happy to work the Schiavo case for free at this point since it's making him one of the most famous right-to-kill -- I mean right-to-die -- lawyers in the country. His BlackBerry has probably melted down by now, what with all the messages from the hurry-up-and-die adult children you've been blogging about.

*

Another reader comments:



The veracity/provability of Terri's wishes has been the main issue driving the whole debate. And it is one the media completely downplayed or missed or mis-reported. Because these supposed wishes of Terri provide the "fact" of the legal matter, all other subsequent legal filings appear to have been doomed from the start because this fact legally has been unshaken. Therefore, all filings proceed from the same premise: Terri said she didn't want to be kept alive in this condition. Once again, if you accept the premise what must follow is predictable.

Because of the time it took for Michael Schiavo to finally assert this fact (when has not been firmly established in my mind: Terri's family suggests seven years after her initial collapse and after he had taken up with another woman), one has to wonder how Terri's family initially challenged, if at all, Michael's claim that these were Terri's wishes. A couple of weeks ago I was struck by the possibility that Terri's family had suffered as a result of bad or ineffective lawyering. With all of the non-stop 24 hour cable coverage, why has no one tried to find out and report what took place legally before this story became a national issue? Were all the friends, who are coming out now talking about the rockiness of the marriage or disputing that Terri would have felt this way, deposed before Michael filed the right-to-die claim? I don't know.

Has the media reported on this and asked these questions? Not that I've seen. I suspect it is because the matter would have to mention Michael's personal relationships at the time of the filing; it muddies the waters for those who so fervently claim that Michael is solely perservering to carry out his wife's wishes. If facts are inconvenient for your position, ignore them.

It strikes me that the only measure taken over the last 15 years that could have challenged the underlying premise of the right to die case was the recent congressional action which called for a de novo review. That this action wasn't supported by the courts is for those experienced in legal matters to argue, i.e., was the legislation properly interpreted by the courts. However, the media have almost exclusively rushed to paint this legislation as religious zealotry, intervention, the proof of an impending theocracy, etc.... every description except what it actually was: the allowance of a de novo review in the federal courts.



The Florida lawyer who started this thread responds

Well, yes, but . . . the law passed by Congress allowed for de novo review only of constitutional law claims, not underlying factual issues. Specifically, the provision adopted by Congress stated that the federal court would have jurisdiction over any suit or claim "for the alleged violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo under the Constitution or laws of the United States relating to the withholding or withdrawal of food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life."

What are the constitutional rights Terri Schiavo is entitled to have reviewed? Well, they're the usual suspects, like due process -- i.e., were there adequate procedures in place to protect her rights, and were they followed properly? Note that these are questions about laws and procedures, not underlying facts. In effect, the only question that can be asked is "Did she get a fair trial?" not "Did the judge reach the right factual conclusion?"

So why didn’t Congress pass a stronger bill, one that would have allowed for a completely new trial on all factual claims? Probably because they realized it would be a very, very dangerous legal precedent to set -- and likely unconstitutional anyway.

Under the US Constitution, federal courts are explicitly limited in their jurisdiction, and can hear only cases that fall within carefully defined boundaries. All other cases are heard by state courts. Allowing a federal court to step in and try a strictly state issue (which the Schiavo case is) from the beginning would pretty much violate every principle of federalism, and open the door to federalizing every case under the sun.

In truth, Congress was probably hoping that the federal courts would find a way to re-try the facts of the Schiavo case under the guise of considering the constitutional issues. But the federal judges declined to bite -- probably for very good constitutional reasons.



Moving away from legal and constitiutional issues, here's my cynical sociological / economic perspective on some underlying social trends ...

Terri Schiavo and the "I Love You But Please Die" Movement: In the uneven recent remake of "The Stepford Wives," Bette Midler plays the author of a bestselling memoir about her relationship with her mother entitled "I Love You, But Please Die."

That book would have sold very well indeed among Academy Award voters, who fell in love with the drab little euthanasia movie "Million Dollar Baby."

The Baby Boom Generation tends to get what it wants in terms of social attitudes and policies, and the first wave of Baby Boomers (the Bill Clinton cohort born in 1946) is now 59. Their surviving parents are mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians, who are getting past the decorative and cuddly part of old age. But a lot of these parents of Baby Boomers are quite asset-rich, especially if they are homeowners in Blue States, where housing prices have gone up much faster over the last 25 years than in Red States.

In Jane Austen novels, the characters hardly ever shut up about inheritances, but in modern America the whole topic is semi-taboo.

So, to summarize, millions of Blue State Baby Boomers, and a somewhat smaller fraction of Red State Baby Boomers, are in line to inherit a bundle ... but not if Mom or Dad lives forever or, especially, if his or her slowly declining health requires a fortune in expensive care. A nice quick fatal heart attack would do the trick, but with Lipitor and the like these days, oldsters are going slower.

So, when you wonder why a lot of people, especially Democrats, are okay with starving Terri Schiavo to death instead of having her kept expensively alive, follow the money.

It's hardly the only reason for the distribution of opinions on this case, but it's definitely one reason, and part of a big topic that almost nobody wants to talk about in 21st Century America.

The "I Love You But Please Die" Syndrome Embodied in Federal Law:

Under the current estate tax law pushed through by the Bush Administration in 2001, the inheritance tax drops from 45% to 0% on January 1, 2010, then rises to 55% on January 1, 2011.

That sounds less like a carefully-considered law than a high concept black comedy movie pitch:

Potential heirs spend 2009 desperately trying to keep their billionaire Granny alive, then spend 2010 desperately trying to kill her by New Year's Eve. It's "Kind Hearts and Coronets" meets "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" meets "Throw Momma From the Train." The script practically writes itself. (The climax is, of course, in Times Square -- hopefully, Dick Clark will be well enough to do a cameo. And we could write in a heroic IRS agent battling to keep Grannie alive in return for the IRS going easy on the film's financial backers' audits.)

*

How to Avoid "I Love You But Please Die" Syndrome: A reader from Texas writes:

On the issue of estates and killing off the old farts, I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.

I watched (in 1985, when oil went to $12/bbl) people who really should have known better lose pretty much everything, in many cases businesses that their parents and grandparents had built from the proverbial garage and horse cart. That was amazingly stupid and was as much a result of bad planning as the economic crash.

As that generation is getting older (and many have made money again) and their parents are hitting their 80s (and many are still around), I continue to be struck by how few of them actually bother to do estate planning. I hear this a lot from my age cohort (their children) who are saving every penny because they trust their parents about as far as they can spit a rat and (I hear this *all* the time) most would put even odds on their parents winding up broke and moving in with them.

My age cohort (at least the ones I know) are structuring their estate now and most of them have been pushing their parents and grandparents to do the same, and they won't or can't be bothered, guaranteeing a major tax hit and a decent amount of confusion in probate.

Not retirement planning -- estate planning, to leave estates that will survive you more or less intact, which includes life insurance to offset taxes; long term care insurance that was, pre-AIDS, reasonably cheap; shifting assets, sub rosa or not, into the hands of their children and grandchildren, and so on. Trusts are your friend here, as is planning that spans multiple generations and has mechanisms to disinherit junkies, drunks, and idiots.

It amazes me that so many people (and I am sure that it is a horrifying number across the US given that I know a strata of people who really should have this nailed down and generally don't, despite being the perfect candidates) have never structured their affairs to do anything but drop a lump sum of net assets on their children, especially when you have a lot of your net worth bound up in a single thing (like property, as you pointed out, or stock options in a single company or ownership in a single company) and you will die (comparatively) cash poor and asset rich.

I think that you will see a lot more suspicious deaths, a lot more people moving the elderly out of managed care to have them croak three weeks later, and a lot more documented abuse cases as the children start to deeply resent their parents living on and using up money that the kids have earmarked for things.

I have seen this done well (and am a beneficiary of it being done well) and I have seen it done poorly, resulting in people never speaking to siblings again and substantial parts of estates being consumed in attorneys' fees. Doing it right is a lot less painful and in the same way that good manners makes social interaction less stressful, good estate planning makes long term financial security less stressful. And financial stress can make people crazy.

Crazy enough to kill their parents.


Of course, the other side of the coin is that by not locking in any formal estate planning and keeping all the potential heirs guessing as to what the will might eventually say, an oldster can maintain a lot of power over his or her potential heirs.

By one estimate, there will be six million estates of over $1 million settled over the next few decades, so the stakes are high, indeed.

The common law evolved in sizable part to handle inheritance issues, but the Right to Die laws emerged during recent decades when we've largely stopped talking publicly about estates, so there is a potential for contradiction. The question of conflict of interest in right-to-die cases is a very serious one..

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

How to Avoid the "Hurry Up and Die" Syndrome

A reader from Texas writes:

On the issue of estates and killing off the old farts, I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.

I watched (in 1985, when oil went to $12/bbl) people who really should have known better lose pretty much everything, in many cases businesses that their parents and grandparents had built from the proverbial garage and horse cart. That was amazingly stupid and was as much a result of bad planning as the economic crash.

As that generation is getting older (and many have made money again) and their parents are hitting their 80s (and many are still around), I continue to be struck by how few of them actually bother to do estate planning. I hear this a lot from my age cohort (their children) who are saving every penny because they trust their parents about as far as they can spit a rat and (I hear this *all* the time) most would put even odds on their parents winding up broke and moving in with them.

My age cohort (at least the ones I know) are structuring their estate now and most of them have been pushing their parents and grandparents to do the same, and they won't or can't be bothered, guaranteeing a major tax hit and a decent amount of confusion in probate.

Not retirement planning -- estate planning, to leave estates that will survive you more or less intact, which includes life insurance to offset taxes; long term care insurance that was, pre-AIDS, reasonably cheap; shifting assets, sub rosa or not, into the hands of their children and grandchildren, and so on. Trusts are your friend here, as is planning that spans multiple generations and has mechanisms to disinherit junkies, drunks, and idiots.

It amazes me that so many people (and I am sure that it is a horrifying number across the US given that I know a strata of people who really should have this nailed down and generally don't, despite being the perfect candidates) have never structured their affairs to do anything but drop a lump sum of net assets on their children, especially when you have a lot of your net worth bound up in a single thing (like property, as you pointed out, or stock options in a single company or ownership in a single company) and you will die (comparatively) cash poor and asset rich.

I think that you will see a lot more suspicious deaths, a lot more people moving the elderly out of managed care to have them croak three weeks later, and a lot more documented abuse cases as the children start to deeply resent their parents living on and using up money that the kids have earmarked for things.

I have seen this done well (and am a beneficiary of it being done well) and I have seen it done poorly, resulting in people never speaking to siblings again and substantial parts of estates being consumed in attorneys' fees. Doing it right is a lot less painful and in the same way that good manners makes social interaction less stressful, good estate planning makes long term financial security less stressful. And financial stress can make people crazy.

Crazy enough to kill their parents.

By the way, under the current estate tax law pushed through by the Bush Administration in 2001, the inheritance tax drops from 45% to 0% on January 1, 2010, then rises to 55% on January 1, 2011.

That sounds less like a carefully-considered law than like a high concept black comedy movie pitch: Potential heirs spend 2009 desperately trying to keep rich old Granny alive, then spend 2010 desperately trying to kill her. The script writes itself.


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

How to Get Rid of Mugabe

Nicolas D. Kristof reports from Zimbabwe:

The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.

"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. ... Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."

A friend of mine has a fair amount of black budget experience organizing coups for the U.S. Government back during the Cold War. He says for a reasonable sum, he could put together a unit of his old mercenary pals who could overthrow the racist Mugabe regime and save a lot of people's lives.


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

Baby Name Theory

A reader writes:

So many popular girls' names have followed the same path that it can hardly be coincidence:

place name >
surname >
upper-class boy's name >
upper-class girl's name >
middle-class all-the-rage girl's name >
tired old trailer-trash girl's name >
ewww, we wouldn't touch it with a pole!

E.g.: Tracy Stacy Kimberly Hayley Lindsay Ashley Courtney Whitney Kelly Kelsey

and way back:

Shirley Evelyn Vivian Beverly

A fellow Whitney descendent told me she suggested her daughter and son-in-law name their girl Whitney. They objected that it was too common! This is a seldom-heard argument against fad names-- it ruins the name for those few families who have a legitimate reason to use it.

The French baby name site graphs Claude, Marie and George (no "s") for both sexes. The Romans usually gave their girls feminized versions of men's names. This practice appears a lot less common among Teutons and Greeks, and Hebrew names seem to have avoided it altogether. (Though later groups did it with popular Hebrew boys' names, e.g. Jane/Jean/Joan/Jenny for John, and Jacqueline for Jacob/James.)

So why, in our ultrafeminist, gynocratic age, did we first increase the use of feminized male names-- Patricia, Michelle, Nicole, Danielle-- and then go beyond that to outright giving boys' names to girls? ("Hillary" is particularly weird-- St Hilary was into crushing heresies, as was his namesake Hilaire Belloc.)

What's really odd is giving presidential names like Taylor and Madison to girls. Hell, "Madison" literally means "son of Matthew or Maud". "MacKenzie" means "son of Comely". (Shouldn't she be comely herself?)

Reese Witherspoon's name is actually Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon, so unlike copycat fans her name actually honors a relative. (Of course she's truly a blue-blood, with a street in Princeton named for her headmaster forebear.)



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

Boutiquification of Cities Renders Them Sterile

Portland is an inland city that has artificially created its own Dirt Gap by declaring much of what would normally be its suburbs off limits for development on environmental grounds. This has raised housing prices in the city so much that Portland is not only resisting the illegal immigrant tidal wave, it's ethnically cleansing itself of blacks. In Jonathan Tilove's 2003 book Along Martin Luther King, Portland's MLK Boulevard was the only one he knew of where whites were moving in. Portland is going so upscale that its one of the few cities in the country with a growing Jewish population.

In many ways, this is a successful strategy in response to illegal immigration, but there's just one problem: Portland is just too expensive for families. The NYT reports Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children. Schools are being shut down because, while there are many trendy restaurants, there are few children. (By the way, can we lose the cliché "vibrant cities"? What does it mean? Usually, newspapers use it to imply "a whole bunch of Hispanics live there," but here it's being used to mean the opposite. I don't think it actually means anything.)


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

Sailer Articles 2000

2000 Articles by Me - No, check that, I mean a dozen articles by from the year 2000, never before online:

Sports:

How to Tell If Your Sports Hero Is on Steroids

Kenyan Runners: Nature or Nurture?

Surprisingly, Gender Gap Widening in Olympic Running

Politics and Science of Language and Speech

Can the European Union Be Multilingual and Democratic?

Are English-Only Laws Wrong?

Chomsky, Pinker, & Deacon on Bilingual Education

Does Al Gore Lisp?

Dynasties and Nepotism:

Bush-Gore Race Marks Return of American Dynasties

Political Dynasties Are Thriving

Nepotism: From "Gladiator" to the Clinton Clan

Politics:

2000: The Five Billion Dollar Election

Compassionate Conservative Thinkers Pleased by Bush

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California Politics: Two of my old articles never before on iSteve.com:

Ward Connerly on the Lessons of Pete Wilson's 1994 Win

Racial Dynamics of Schwarzenegger's Recall Win

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

March 24, 2005

A Conversation with Armand Marie Leroi

From the introduction to The Nature of Normal Human Variety:

In the early '90s, I was visiting Cambridge and went out to dinner with the late Stephen Jay Gould. During a long evening of conversation we talked about his ideas concerning race, racial racial differences, racial equality, including his well-known writings on the use and misuse of IQ tests and other such measures. I came away from the conversation with the distinct sense that he believed there were some things better left unsaid, some areas of investigation that were out of bounds if he wanted to have a just society. Nothing strange here. His views were, and still are, consistent with the daily fare of the editorial pages of many of our important newspapers and magazines.

Armand Leroi, a biologist at Imperial College, feels differently. He loves what he calls "the problem of normal human variety".

"Almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, he says, "it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street. We live in an age now where the deepest scientific problems are buried away from our immediate perception. They concern the origin of the universe. They concern the relationships of subatomic particles. They concern the nature and structure of the human genome. Nobody can see these things without large bits of expensive equipment. But when I consider the problem of human variety I feel as Aristotle must have felt when he first walked down to the shore at Lesvos for the first time. The world is new again. What is more, it is a problem that we can now solve, a question we can now answer. And I think we should."


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

French Baby Names

Here's a website that shows the absolute number of French babies given various names over the years of the 20th Century. Here is Jean, which was hugely popular through 1950, and then just about died. (You can see the Great War's terrible effect on France in the birth trends.)

And here's Dylan, which is now the #15 boy's name in France.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Terri Schiavo and the "Hurry Up and Die" Movement

In the uneven recent remake of "The Stepford Wives," Bette Midler plays the author of a bestselling memoir about her relationship with her mother entitled "I Love You, But Please Die."

That book would have sold very well indeed among Academy Award voters, who fell in love with the drab little euthanasia movie "Million Dollar Baby."

The Baby Boom Generation tends to get what it wants in terms of social attitudes, and the first wave of Baby Boomers (the Bill Clinton cohort born in 1946) is now 59. Their surviving parents are mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians, who are getting past the decorative and cuddly part of old age. But a lot of these parents of Baby Boomers are quite asset-rich, especially if they are homeowners in Blue States, where housing prices have gone up much faster over the last 25 years than in Red States.

In Jane Austen novels, the characters hardly ever shut up about inheritances, but in modern America the whole topic is semi-taboo.

So, to summarize, millions of Blue State Baby Boomers are in line to inherit a bundle ... but not if Mom or Dad lives forever or, especially, if his or her slowly declining health requires a fortune in expensive care. A nice quick fatal heart attack would do the trick, but with Lipitor and the like these days, oldsters are going slower.

So, when you wonder why a lot of people, especially Democrats, are okay with starving Terri Schiavo to death instead of having her kept expensively alive, follow the money.

It's hardly the only reason, but it's out there, and part of a big topic that almost nobody wants to talk about in 21st Century America.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 23, 2005

New Global Genetic Maps

I often emphasize the famous color map of the major races on the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's History and Geography of Human Genes, since that book remains the standard work of population genetics. Yet, it was published back in 1994, and data collection for it was halted way back in 1986, before modern DNA analyses came on line.

Fortunately, a blogger calling himself NuSapiens has constructed a number of attractive maps out of more recent DNA data. I don't see any massive disagreements with Cavalli-Sforza's old map, but they display a lot of interesting new detail.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Sexual Attraction vs. Social Attraction

The BBC reports:

Same face builds trust, not lust

Some characteristics of the student's face were replicated on the man's face Similar facial features make people trust, but not fancy, each other, research has suggested. Of 144 students studied, the majority picked individuals who most looked like them to be the most trustworthy.

But when it came to sexual attraction, most picked those with differing facial characteristics, said psychologists at Aberdeen University, UK. The results suggest that people steer clear of those who "look like family" to avoid inbreeding.

The students were shown a series of paired faces. However, they were unaware that shortly before the experiment many of the photographs had been subtly altered by psychologists to resemble the student before they looked at them.

These results back the notion that people trust kin but avoid them in a sexual setting due to the costs of inbreeding.

"This supports the idea that people - perhaps unwittingly - detect facial resemblance," said researcher Dr Lisa DeBruine. "It means to them, on some level, that this person is 'family' and they are more trusting of them."

The similar faces were also described as sexually unattractive by the students. "These results back the notion that people trust kin but avoid them in a sexual setting due to the costs of inbreeding."

I'm not sure I trust the methodology, but the results make a lot of sense to me. It seems to me that sexual attraction and social attraction tend to work in opposite directions. "Opposites attract" but "Birds of a feather flock together." Either Dear Abby or Ann Landers (or both) used to advise their readers to marry somebody who was your social match but psychological opposite.

A common movie story is the wealthy blonde girl who is supposed to marry the wealthy blonde boy from her country club, but she instead runs off with the dangerous dark haired boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Indeed, the single most popular story in Western culture might be this Romeo and Juliet tale of lovers from warring extended families.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Not Too Brightly

The New York Daily News reports:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday. The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

"I was pressured into it. He threatened me," the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam. "I gave him my all," said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. "He gave me what he thought I was worth."

Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city's worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job. "I'm tired of taking this test and failing," Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon's probe. "I want you to help me."

Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com