Affordable Family Formation

"Affordable Family Formation:" The Neglected Key To the GOP's Future -- My new VDARE.com column is up.

Now that the triumphalism rampant within the GOP after last November's election has died down, and Republicans realize that their current ascendancy is not a historical inevitability but a tenuous margin that needs careful cultivating, it's time to review the fundamental factors making some states red (Republican) and others blue (Democratic).

The key reason why some states vote Republican, I've found, can be summed up in the three-word phrase:

Affordable Family Formation.

The more economical it is to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, the more Republicans you'll find.

The more expensive it is, the fewer families with children you'll find, and thus the fewer Republicans.

Some of this is because family-oriented people move to family-friendly states, but the cost of forming a family in a particular state also affects how many families are formed.

It's a stereotype that a mortgage, marriage, and babies tend to make people more conservative.

But it's a true stereotype.

That's why it's in the GOP's self-interest to pursue policies that keep demand for housing down (such as limiting immigration) and the quality of public schooling up (such as, well, limiting immigration.)

The culture wars between Red States and Blue States are driven in large part by objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking.

Places that are terribly costly in which to raise children, such as Manhattan and San Francisco, unsurprisingly possess less family-friendly cultures than more reasonably priced locales, such as Nashville and Provo.

According to Google, nobody in the history of the Web has ever uttered the phrase "Affordable Family Formation."

But, those three words work both as a hard-headed summary of what drives voting, and as an appealing campaign theme.

The GOP could say to voters:

"We're on the side of making it affordable for you, and your children and grandchildren, to form families. The Democrats are on the side of dying alone."

Of course, Republicans could hardly say that with a straight face as long as their President refuses to repudiate his Open Borders plan that would allow anyone in the world with a minimum wage job offer from an American employer to move here.

Four interlocking reasons form a chain of causality explaining why Affordable Family Formation paints the electoral map red.

I call them the Four Gaps: the Dirt Gap, the Mortgage Gap, the Marriage Gap, and the Baby Gap.

I wrote about each of them in VDARE.com and The American Conservative following the election.

Unfortunately, I discovered them in reverse order of fundamentality.

This time, however, we'll start from the ground up with the Dirt Gap... [More]

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

Perhaps this helps explain the decline in crime:

The Newhouse news service's fine race-and-immigration reporter Jonathan Tilove writes in "Where Have All the Black Men Gone?":

But the most salient statistic about East Orange [NJ] is the number of black men who are not there. Under the age of 18, there are more black boys than girls. Among the adult population, however, there are 37 percent more women than men.

Where are these missing men? Most are dead. Many others are locked up. Some are in the military.

In case you are wondering, East Orange is only 14 miles from Manhattan, so it has enjoyed, de facto, the supposed crime-fighting powers of legalized abortion for 35 years now, ever since the state of New York legalized abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.

Yet, East Orange was one of those pioneering places where the crack wars and the teen murder surge began in the later 1980s rather than the early 1990s. Although Steven D. Levitt's hypothesized "pre-natal culling" failed so signally to cut crime in East Orange, the intensive "post-natal culling" of the most dangerous young men in East Orange began a few years earlier there than in most parts of America.

Richard Price's 1992 novel "Clockers" about Jersey City crack dealers (and Spike Lee's film version) show how much good legalizing abortion early did to fight crime.

Worse yet, the gender imbalance in East Orange is not some grotesque anomaly. It's a vivid snapshot of a very troubling reality in black America.

There are nearly two million more black adult women than men in America, stark testimony to how often black men die before their time. With nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the real imbalance is even greater -- a gap of 2.8 million, according to U.S. Census data for 2002. On average, then, there are 26 percent more black women than black men; among whites, women outnumber men by just 8 percent.

Perhaps no single statistic so precisely measures the fateful, often fatal, price of being a black man in America, or so powerfully conveys how beset black communities are by the violence and disease that leaves them bereft of brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, and leaves whole communities reeling. ...

In the March/April issue of Health Affairs, Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general under former President Bill Clinton and now the interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, exposes the core of the problem: Between 1960 and 2000, the disparity between mortality rates for black and white women narrowed while the disparity between the rates for black and white men grew wider.

Exponentially higher homicide and AIDS rates play their part, especially among younger black men. Even more deadly through middle age and beyond are higher rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The imbalance between the numbers of black men and women does not exist everywhere. There is no gap to speak of in places with relatively small black populations like Minneapolis, Minn.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco and San Diego. And Seattle actually has more black men than women.

But it is the rule in communities with large concentrated black populations. There are, for instance, more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland, and in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pa. There are 36 percent more black women than men in New York City, and 37 percent more in Saginaw, Mich., and Philadelphia. In Newark, the figure is 26 percent.

In East Orange, there were more black males under 18 than females in 2000. And yet, there were 29 percent more black women than men in their 20s.,,

According to The Sentencing Project in Washington, on any given day in America, one in eight black males ages 25 to 29 is incarcerated, and nearly a third of all black men in their 20s are behind bars, on probation or on parole. [More]

If you are wondering why crime fell so sharply in New York City (the subject of a debate between Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell), I'd focus on that statistic that there are now 36 percent more black women than black men in NYC.

It's absurd for Levitt to focus on prenatal culling as a crime-reducer when the post-natal culling of black males in places like East Orange became so ferocious during the late 1980s. If there are 29 percent fewer black men in their 20s than black women in East Orange today, and a few percent of the black women are in jail or dead due to their being involved in criminal activities, then roughly 25 percent of the black male population gets culled by age 25, and those 25 percent tend to be the most violent members of that cohort. If the most dangerous 25% of a cohort disappears, that's going to have a much bigger impact than randomly aborting some of the cohort, prenatally.

However, not all the decline in crime came just from culling criminals. The 14-17 year old murder rate for black male youths born in the early 1980s was only one third as high as for black male youths born in the late 1970s. (Abortion can't explain that because the non-white abortion rate peaked in 1977.) I like to think that a lot of little brothers learned lessons from the abattoir years of 1990-1994.

[All my blog entries on the abortion-crime controversy are here. My original American Conservative article on the subject is here.]

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

Why aren't the Kentucky Derby getting winners getting faster?

Longshot Giacomo won today in 2:02.75, which is about average for the era since 1950 in which Kentucky Derby winners haven't gotten any faster. He didn't come close to Secretariat's 1973 record of 1:59.4. Conditions were said to be close to ideal, so there's no excuse on that front.

As I graphed below, the winning times at the Derby have been stable since 1950. A reader writes:

The general consensus is that American horse breeding has been skewed by:

1. Drugs. Almost all American horses are on butazolidin and lasix. Illegal doping would obviously disguise underlying flaws in breeding even more than legal drugs. Doping not only skews underlying speed but disguises fragility.

2. Negative feedback loops. It does seem that horses are more fragile. This perception causes trainers to work horses less, leading to a sort of strange feedback loop, because the lack of strengthening opens up horses for injury. But trainers only get blamed for overwork, not under work. The end result is that it is not clear how durable a horse really is, making it harder to select for durability in a lineage or screen out fragility.

3. The Kentucky Derby itself. Since breeding in America is focused on the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky Derby winners as well as the type of horses that can get into the Kentucky Derby are over bred. Note that the type of horse that can get into the Derby does not necessarily correlate with overall genetic fitness, and a horse that wins the Kentucky Derby might not be the most genetically fit sire. For whatever reason there is generally a negative correlation between precociousness and stamina. I would argue that none of the horses in this year's Kentucky Derby have 1 1/4 pedigrees, let alone pedigrees to get 1 1/2 (most races in America are at shorter distances as well). Horses that have better stamina pedigrees are often not competitive early enough to get the graded stakes earnings to get into the derby. Kentucky Derby Winners get retired early (the money is in breeding, not racing), so genetics that might be evident from racing at later ages (even as an older 3 year old), such as fragility, or how much stamina the horse really has, are not discerned until after they have sired many offspring.

European racing does not allow even the legal drugs allowed here. There are important European races for four year olds, and many more races at longer distances. The fewer questions about the actual abilities of any given European sire increases the odds of breeding success, and therefore has resulted in superior genetic fitness of European horses, who are better than their American equivalents in average racing ability (on turf, of course) and durability.

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

Finally, a couple of non-credulous, evenhanded reviews of Freakonomics:

Sharon Cohen writes on the Associated Press:

Levitt and John Donohue, then of Stanford University Law School, created an uproar in 2001 when they concluded that legalized abortion significantly contributed to a drop in crime in the 1990s.

Here's Levitt's explanation: "Legalized abortion lowered unwantedness. Unwantedness is related to crime, so legalized abortion lowered crime."

Angry letters poured in. The right AND the left fumed. The authors were branded racists proposing a form of eugenics. Levitt insists he was stunned by the reaction and the study made no moral judgments on abortion.

"It never occurred to us that anybody would be upset," he says. "I've done a lot of research. No one ever cares."

Some critics complained the study used limited data. Others claimed it misinterpreted numbers and made unfair comparisons. "He's picking up the decline in crack and calling it the abortion effect," says Ted Joyce, an economics professor and expert on reproductive health policy at Baruch College in New York.

Exactly. Levitt has rigged the deck by declaring that the only question of interest is why the second generation born after abortion was legalized had lower crime rates. That the first generation born after abortion was legalized had higher crime rates, well, his Wizard of Oz-like attitude toward that crucial fact has been: "Pay no attention to all those teen murderers behind the curtain!"

In Salon, reviewer Andrew Leonard, who actually did the work of reading my article in The American Conservative before writing his review, prudently declared himself agnostic on the abortion-cut-crime question.

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

Levitt caught embroidering truth:

From a U. of Chicago Graduate School of Business News report on a talk given by Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt:

His research tells him that 35 percent of the “incredible drop in crime” in the early 1990s was due to abortion legalization.

While conceding that some people aren’t completely convinced of his findings, “I think it’s pretty compelling,” Levitt told students in the Milton Friedman Group on April 25 at the Hyde Park Center.

Levitt said he based his theory on two pieces: unwanted, unloved children are at highest risk for crime; and fewer unwanted children—a million a year—came into existence because of abortion’s legalization.

Levitt needs to bamboozle the public about the size of the reduction in unwanted births because it's central to his theory's appeal. Yet, it's also imprudent of him to blatantly mislead the public like this because we can quote him on what really happened: "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …" Most legal abortions, as Levitt has admitted, are pure waste -- a fetus who never would have been conceived without legalization gets aborted.

The peak number of abortions per year was 1.6 million. The number of births was running at about 3.7 million before legalization of abortion. This would suggest a reduction in the number of births due to abortion of around a quarter of a million. Other methodologies might raise that to a half million, but Levitt knows very well that it wasn't a million. Levitt himself told an interviewer regarding the impact of legalization:

“One in four of the pregnancies which took place were just because people were lazy,” he says. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot of abortions.”

The article on his U of C talk continues:

He tested his theory on the data and it fit. In addition, states that legalized abortion three years earlier than Roe v. Wade saw their crime rates dramatically dip three years earlier than other states.

Notice how Levitt tries to skate by the fact that the early-liberalizing metropolises are also precisely where the serious violent crime rate first went up. As Levitt acknowledged to me in 1999, “[T]he high abortion places like New York and California tended to have a bigger crack problem, and tended to have crack arrive earlier.

Levitt seems to think longer lag periods are more trustworthy. If NYC and LA legalized abortion in 1970 and the juvenile murder rate went up in those places 17 years later and then fell there 22 or so years later, Levitt wants us to believe that we should trust him that legalization's effect was not felt 17 years after 1970, but was felt 22 years after 1970. In Levitt's Private Universe, the longer the lag in years between a potential cause and its hypothesized effect, the more trustworthy the connection is!

But what about the spike in crime among young black males in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which critics offer as a puzzle piece that doesn’t neatly fit Levitt’s solution?

“The answer, to me it seems obvious,” Levitt said. “It’s crack cocaine.”

You can see how Levitt tries to have his cake and eat it too. The enormous rise in murder and serious violent crime rates among precisely the group most culled by the legalization of abortion -- young urban blacks -- is assumed away as having nothing to do with abortion. It's purely the result of an exogenous event, the rise of the crack wars. Okay, but then, in contrast, the fall in serious violent crime rates is assumed to be the result of abortion, not the decline of the crack wars.

Levitt, when given a choice between two sets of data, consistently uses the fuzzier, more uncertain evidence to justify his theory and pointedly ignores the more straightforward, more precise comparison. For example, he likes to look at data for two groups of criminals, over and under age 25 and make surmises about the effects of abortion legalization that can't be prudently drawn out of such coarse categories. In contrast, he hates to look at data for sharply defined groups, such as 14 to 17 year olds, where you can actually focus on individuals born before or after legalization.

Similarly, he prefers to look at the change in the crime rate for two points twelve years apart, one before and one after legalization, but hates to look at changes, say, six years apart. Levitt's philosophy seems to be that the more intervening years and intervening events, the clearer the reading you can get on the effects of legalization!

For example, the article goes on:

Crime statistics show that crack cocaine use hit young black males especially hard in their teenage years but didn’t translate into an increase in the amount of crime committed over the course of their whole lives, he said, thus accounting for the spike.

But, obviously, this is an apples to oranges comparison. By their late 20s, the most dangerous members of the cohort of black urban males who were born soon after legalization were, more than any other cohort in American history, confined to prisons, wheelchairs, or coffins, where their ability to commit more crimes was limited, at best. That in their late 20s, this highly-culled cohort was still committing serious crimes at an average rate after all this depletion of their most violent members says something about what they were like before all this post-natal culling of their most criminally-inclined members. Instead, Levitt wants us to focus on the pre-natal culling a quarter of a century before.

*

Colby Cosh points out that Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory triggered even comedian Jon Stewart's BS detector on The Daily Show:

Alex Tabarrok--an American economist whose acquaintance overlaps slightly with mine--recently watched a fascinating exchange between overexposed freakonomist Steven Levitt and overexposed fakejournalist Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

...Levitt said that in estimating the effect of abortion on crime he controlled for other variables like police and prisons. Jon Stewart pressed Steve for an explanation of how someone could "control" for other variables--amazingly, Stewart seemed genuinely interested in an answer but, wisely, Steve demurred...

Stewart's question reveals both a gap in his education and a laudable ability to spot legerdemain (which is a pretty good cement for such educational gaps). It might be helpful, in fact, if the public at large knew that the phenomenon of "experimental control" covers many orders of rigor...

This matter of experimental control is a pretty deep pool. I would be the last person to advise us to dispense with inferential "controls" in the squishier sciences. But Jon Stewart is probably quite wise to dig in when someone tries to skate with him across that pool, arm-in-arm.

You can read the rest of Colby's explanation of why economists so often develop too much confidence in their non-robust statistical models here.

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

Gay "Marriage" Turn Out to Be Lesbian "Marriage:"

The NYT reports:

[The gay marriage] issue's most vocal opinion leaders have been men, often leaving the impression that marriage is the preoccupying goal of one sex more than the other. Yet of the close to 5,400 couples who have married in Massachusetts since last May... almost two-thirds of the couples have been women.

Nobody knows for sure, but academic researchers assume that gay men outnumber lesbians about two to one, so this would imply that lesbians get "married" about four times as much as gay men. No surprise there...

Boston was one of the few cities and towns in the state where male marriages outnumbered female ones.

As I pointed out 11 years ago in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," lesbians, for whatever reason, tend to be more rural, flocking to towns like Northampton, MA, while gays tend to be highly urban.

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

How Freakonomics Was Marketed onto the Bestseller List:

The Book Standard reports:

Getting a Buzz On: How Publishers Are Turning Online to Market Books May 06, 2005 By Rachel Deahl

“Buzz” is close to supplanting “love” as an overused, devalued—but very effective—term. In the book world, it’s credited with being the reason some titles become bestsellers while others, well, don’t... These kinds of success stories have driven publishers like William Morrow, which recently launched a successful marketing campaign to promote one of its latest titles, Freakonomics, to focus on generating buzz for a book above all else. And to do it online.

Published April 12, Freakonomics has found a larger-than-expected audience, due partly to publisher William Morrow’s strategically placed advance copies, some with industry professionals, but perhaps more importantly, with bloggers.

The book, which melds pop culture with economics to answer riddles such as why most drug-dealers live with their mothers, undoubtedly benefited from positive pre-publication reviews such as Kirkus Reviews and release-date reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and others. Nor does it hurt that the book’s high-profile co-authors are Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (the two met when Levitt, a young economist, was being profiled by Dubner, a prominent journalist working on a piece for the New Yorker), has gotten a big push from support within the blogosphere.

Publicists for the book sent galley copies of the title to over a hundred bloggers who, in turn, profiled or reviewed the book on their sites. The result—Freakonomics has sold 34,000 copies to date, according to Nielsen BookScan—has been overwhelmingly positive. Dee Dee DeBartlo, a publicist at Morrow, says the house has targeted bloggers in previous campaigns, but never so strategically.

Freakonomics also got a boost from a similar campaign launched by a company that has styled itself as a buzz-specialist. As part of a 12-week marketing blitz engineered by Boston-based BzzAgent, Inc., advance copies of the title were mailed to a thousand possible supporters. BzzAgent, which works on generating word-of-mouth for various products, contacted a targeted group of “agents”—all of whom have registered with the site, listing their interests and tastes—to read the book. BzzAgent uses its member base for all its campaigns, tapping into an audience that can, theoretically, champion any product. Like Morrow’s blogger outreach, the success of the BzzAgent campaign rested wholly on recipients taking it upon themselves to advertise and recommend the book.

Established in 2001, BzzAgent had an exclusive contract with Penguin until last year. Now, with a focus on books, the company is working with various publishers and, according to Kelly Hulme, BzzAgent’s head of publicity, these campaigns work precisely because they’re about generating good feedback instead of simply manufacturing it. “Books have been our main focus because publishers seem very interested in the honest feedback of readers,” she says. “And because, obviously, word-of-mouth is one of the ways a book catches on.”

Lynn Grady, Morrow’s associate publisher, said Freakonomics got another push from its exposure on the Little Big Mouth List. An industry version of the list BzzAgent used, the tool was established two years ago by the Young Publishers Group (YPG), a networking organization founded by the American Association of Publishers for junior publishing professionals. This list is essentially a collection of members who’ve indicated that they want to receive advance copies of certain genre titles that they will, in turn, recommend to other industry professionals and to the general public. According to the AAP’s Katie Blough, the Little Big Mouth list currently includes 900 members from 50 different houses. Although organized by the AAP, the publishers themselves distribute their titles directly to the “little big mouths,” who have selected the types of books they like, from over 20 genres.

Meanwhile, Dean Soxblog Barnett, who wrote that embarrassingly effusive review of Freakonomics for The Weekly Standard is in a tizzy that I mentioned:

One reason that a number of bloggers are wetting themselves with joy over Freakonomics is because Levitt's publicists put together an innovative PR campaign that made bloggers feel appreciated.

Barnett wants to make it very clear that he didn't qualify for any of the lists of people even marginally influential enough to get a free book. Point taken, Dean!

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

Explaining the Flynn Effect?

One of the more dubious sounding implications of the mysterious Flynn Effect -- i.e., rising raw IQ scores -- is that if you go far enough back into the past, the average person would have been a complete idiot, and the greatest genius of the age would have been no smarter than George W. Bush or John Kerry.

That's not very plausible. Maybe the reality works more like this:

As Flynn & Dickens say, people mold their own environments based on their genetic predilections, so genetically smart people choose more mentally stimulating environments, which makes them even smarter. But as Steven Johnson points out, mental stimulation, even if it's just watching television or figuring out what the buttons on your new gadget do, is a lot cheaper today than in the past.

So, consider two individuals in, say, 1665 in England. One is a farm laborer, who spends much of his time in the fields not talking to anyone and goes to bed not long after it gets dark. He gets little mental stimulation. He'd like more -- he went to a play once about a prince and a ghost who was his dad who wants him to kill his uncle, and he liked it, especially the fighting part at the end where everybody dies -- but players seldom come through his village and they are expensive when they do. He would score, say, a 60 on a modern IQ test, although he did his duties better than a 60 IQ person would today. He just wasn't practiced at solving novel problems. in 2005, with the telly on six hours a day, he might score 90.

Living near him in 1665 is a young man who has been sent down to his country home from Cambridge University because an outbreak of the black plague has made urban centers dangerous.

Unlike the local yokel, this student brings his own incredibly stimulating environment with him inside his head. Like the farm laborer, he occasionally sees an apple fall from a tree, but when he does, that gets him thinking about the mathematics of gravity. Indeed, what the student needs to bring his smartness to superhuman levels is not more mental stimulation, but the peace and quiet that 18 months at home will afford him. Talking to himself makes him smarter than talking to other people does, because, compared to himself, they just don't have much worth saying.

How would Isaac Newton have done back then on a modern IQ test? I suspect that with a bit of practice to familiarize himself with the novelty of it, he'd max out any IQ test.

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

"Freak Out!" Advises The Weekly Standard

Another small step in Steven D. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory becoming conventional wisdom is the ecstatic review of Freakonomics on The Weekly Standard's website. Dean "Soxblog" Barnett writes:

STEVEN D. LEVITT CLAIMS that physically he is the "weakest human being alive." He may also be one of the most courageous.

Along with his coauthor Stephen Dubner, Levitt has written a book called Freakonomics, which details his innovative and brilliant way of looking at the world. Levitt's mind works in the following manner: First he asks questions that few have the creativity to ask; then he follows a rigorous statistical analysis to find the answers.

Some of Freakonomics' conclusions are fearlessly contrarian. To wit, Levitt posits, among other things, that some teachers are cheaters, real estate agents tend not to serve their clients' best interests, successful parenting has a lot more to do with who the parents are than how they actually parent, and crime rates dropped in the 1990s as a direct result of 1973's Roe v. Wade decision. In spite of the controversy that Freakonomics is almost certain to cause, Levitt has produced a work full of stunning insights that can rightfully be called genius.

One reason that a number of bloggers are wetting themselves with joy over Freakonomics is because Levitt's publicists put together an innovative PR campaign that made bloggers feel appreciated. The flacks apparently Googled up a list of bloggers who had mentioned Levitt previously and mailed them free copies of the book about a month before it came out.

As I pointed out when word came out that the Department of Education had given columnist Armstrong Williams almost a quarter of a million dollars in bribes, that seemed like suspicious overkill: you could buy scores of columnists' affections for a fraction of that price. Just show 'em a little love -- e.g., invite them to speak at your conference and nod appreciatively -- and they'll be your golden retriever. Bloggers apparently come even cheaper -- just send them a copy of your book!

[Barnett writes to say he bought his copy of the book at Amazon.]

Back to Barnett, whose blogname is James Frederick Wright:

FREAKONOMICS IS MOST LIKELY to become controversial (and perhaps notorious) because of its chapter on crime and abortion...

Levitt convincingly argues that the fortuitous drop in crime of the late 1990s was due to 1973's Roe v. Wade decision.

Here is Levitt's theory boiled down to its essence: "Decades of study have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade--poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get--were often models of adversity . . . Just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet." Levitt goes on to support this assertion with an almost unassailable statistical analysis (although given the discomfiting nature of his argument, it is likely to be vigorously assailed nonetheless).

The link, nicely, is to my follow-up page of blog items and data further debunking Levitt's theory. (Linking to my original article would have made more sense, but perhaps The Weekly Standard doesn't want to deign to acknowledge The American Conservative's existence.)

Still, I get irritated by the constant assumption that I object to Levitt's theory because I find it "discomfiting." All these Jack Nicholsons of the keyboard insinuate to me, "You can't handle the truth!"

Okay, okay, fine, I'm a politically correct wimp. But the reason I object to Levitt's theory is that it doesn't appear to be true. If the evidence was on Levitt's side, a wimp like me sure wouldn't get into this uneven fight with the glamour boy of the whole economics profession.

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

Why legalizing abortion didn't cut crime

A reader writes:

I have been following this debate with some interest. It seems to be that most internet commentators merely draw attention to your critique without adding their own thoughts. Perhaps, they are scared of Dr. Levitt.

Obviously, all the commentators who have endorsed Levitt's theory haven't looked hard at the actual crime numbers. But, I suspect they just assume that Levitt is fleshing out an idea they've long had about the effects of abortion. As another reader writes:

I heard this on the Howard Stern radio show 15 years ago

Q. What do you call an abortion clinic in Harlem?
A. Crimestoppers.

So Levitt's chapter is a joke in more ways than one.

To be honest I can't see how abortions haven't reduced crime to a degree. What if all the abortions that took place since 1973 never happened? We would have disproportionately more poor black males being born and hence more crime in all categories except insider trading and spying for the Soviet Union, Israel or China.

That kind of racial eugenics thinking is clearly the reason so many people assume Levitt is right, even when I show his theory badly fails its obvious tests. They understood that Levitt's "wantedness" theory is a euphemism for legal abortion cutting down on the number of blacks (a point Levitt made more explicitly in his 1999 first draft paper, written with John J. Donohue).

But the reality turns out to be much more complicated, when you first realize that legalized abortion led to almost 30% more pregnancies. Indeed, legalized abortion appears to have hollowed out the black middle and working classes, while expanding the black underclass.

The effects at the bottom of the social scale of legal abortion are very hard for someone at the top of the social scale to predict, as this reader shows:

Before I became a lawyer I was a social worker in a major urban area, handling an AFDC caseload. Almost all my clients were similar in that they had at least one child, usually born out of wedlock. But there were big differences when it came to having additional babies. The clients who had fewer out of wedlock children generally were the more intelligent, competent, and organized people in my caseload.

Obviously, I'm speaking in relative terms here. Most of my clients weren’t big brains. But there are gradations of intelligence and ability among welfare clients, as in any group of people. And some members of my caseload clearly were better at learning from life than were others.

For my more able clients, having the first baby sometimes served as a wakeup call. They now realized how difficult it was to raise a kid. They also had an incentive to better themselves through work experience and education so they could support the child and claw their way into the middle class.

By contrast, the less intelligent and less competent often seemed to be "unwakeupable." Learning from experience was not their strong suit. Our office's clients included drug-addicted mothers with multiple babies who had seen one child after another taken away and put into foster care. That didn’t stop them from having more.

Given what I saw as a welfare worker, I'd say that trying to gauge the impact of abortion on crime by making assumptions about "wantedness" makes no sense at all.

Clients who had abortions didn’t necessarily want to do so. They often felt sad, even bitter, about the experience. But they saw themselves as being forced into it by circumstances.

Clients who had multiple out-of-wedlock babies may have "wanted" them, but their attitudes toward childbearing bore no resemblance to middle class notions of "planned parenthood." Many clearly got pregnant intentionally, but for reasons that middle class observers would find incomprehensible. They often thought having a baby would give them status with their friends, or make their boyfriends love them, or provide them with a child who would always need them.

In short, the clients in my welfare caseload who had abortions tended to be reasonably competent and devoted caretakers of their existing children, while those who had additional babies were more likely to be immature and clueless. From what I can tell, my caseload was entirely typical for urban areas throughout the country. I wish someone could explain how this real-world experience fits with Levitt's theory that abortion somehow culls potential criminals.

Many people who subscribe to the idea that abortion cuts crime seem to be thinking something along the lines of the following (though they won’t admit it in polite company): Blacks commit more crimes than whites. Blacks also have more abortions than whites. Culling all those black babies must be cutting crime.

But this is racist nonsense of the worst sort. Not all blacks commit crimes, only a small subset of them do. Is that crime-prone subset having most of the abortions? My experience says no.

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

The Flynn Effect & Basketball:

Continuing iSteve's nonstop coverage of what high-IQ Steves are thinking about, in Wired, Steven Johnson writes in "Dome Improvement":

The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:

The same person tested twice: 87
Identical twins raised together: 86
Identical twins raised apart: 76
Fraternal twins raised together: 55
Biological siblings: 47
Parents and children living together: 40
Parents and children living apart: 31
Adopted children living together: 0
Unrelated people living apart: 0

After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.

Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.

Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."

Flynn is, personally, a great guy, he does important research, and this explanation is not implausible. For example, it helps explain why identical twins tend to become more alike in IQ as they get older -- as they grow apart, they mold their environments to fit their genetic makeups better. Most notably, their environments are no longer distorted by having to play an unnatural role distinct from that of their identical twin (such as leader or follower, which many twin pairs adopt just so they get things done). For example, two extremely tall identical twins on one high school basketball team can cause problems because both are natural centers, but one has to play power forward. If they go to different colleges, they might both then play center -- i.e., their environments become more appropriate for their genetic codes.

Still, Flynn needs to lose this pseudo-example about NBA players. Living in New Zealand, he seems to have forgotten that NBA basketball players are not distinguished by just a 1% biological advantage over non-NBA individuals.

Now and then, I run into movie and TV stars on the street -- Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Geena Davis, etc. -- and when dressed to be inconspicuous, they are fairly inconspicuous. Most screen stars are not obvious genetic marvels, although they are clearly above average in looks and talent. So, Flynn's 1% genetic advantage theory might, or might not, be true for Tom Hanks.

(Although it's definitely not true for Robin Williams, at least not as a stand-up comedian, where he's about seven standard deviations from the mean. Dana Carvey tells the story about how, long ago, as a young man trying to get his courage up to try comedy, he went to an open-mike night, and promised himself he'd get up on stage if he thought he was better than the other amateurs on the list before him. Dana was feeling very good about himself, until the guy before him did his act: "Oh, no, I'll never, ever be even close to him!" he lamented. That amateur was Robin Williams.)

But Flynn's assertion doesn't work at all for the NBA stars I've run into: Wilt Chamberlain, Patrick Ewing, Bill Walton, Dennis Rodman, Horace Grant, Mark Eaton, etc. These guys are astonishing physical specimens.

For example, a few years I was walking down Rush Street in Chicago on a Friday night when out of a restaurant ahead of me comes Bill Walton, the greatest white center ever. He always insisted on listing himself at 6'-11", but he's one of the rare basketball players who is considerably taller than his official height. What was more surprising is how impressive the breadth of his shoulders and his overall musculature were even at about age 50. He was going my way, so I trailed about 30 feet behind him for quite a few blocks to watch the amusing reaction of pedestrians passing him. Many seemed stunned by his size, especially women, few of whom recognized him.

More seriously, the Flynn and Dickens model is not very exciting in its implications. All it says is that people create their own environments to suit their genetic strong suits. For example, I've molded my life so I spend a lot of time crunching data and very little time with a wrench in my fumble-fingered hands. If I spent lots more time trying to repair stuff, I'd be a little bit better at it, but, so what? I'd never be as relatively good at it as I am at crunching data, so why spend my life butting my head against my genetic brick wall?

Similarly, if Flynn and Dickens are serious about altering the environments of blacks enough to put a sizable dent in the white-black IQ gap, they would call for a police state that bans all manifestations of hip-hop, that executes Jay-Z and Dr. Dre as bad examples, that puts minor rappers and black celebrities in concentration camps, etc. I doubt if that would work, but it's at least a semiserious proposal for grappling with a problem of this magnitude. But, Flynn and Dickens aren't serious at all about closing the IQ gap so they don't call for serious measures, just token ones that their own analysis shows are insufficient.

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

Gregg Easterbrook Falls for Levitt's Abortion-Cut-Crime Theory

Gregg Easterbrook Falls for Levitt's Abortion-Cut-Crime Theory: Easterbrook, who ought to know better, writes in the Washington Post:

Consider Levitt’s notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, “Freakonomics” shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt’s clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. All legalized abortion about five years before Roe.

No, youth violent crime started going up, not down, 16 years after legalization (1970 in cities where crack got started about 1986, 1973 in the rest of the country, where the bad stuff arrived about 1989).

A reader writes:

Regarding the press's effusive response to Levitt's theory that legalized abortion has cut crime rates:

Many members of the educated classes probably believed this about abortion long before Levitt ever formalized the argument. His book has just made it more acceptable to talk about the subject openly. Poking holes in Levitt's argument does not change minds among the educated elite because his theory happens to fit so well with their view of the world.

For the educated, the process of having a child activates the same decision making skills as making a major career move. They can't even imagine doing it without considering timing, finances, impact on their professional lives, and a host of other factors.

They realize that accidents happen, of course -- and that's where abortion comes in. Abortion corrects family planning mistakes. It also allows the careless lower orders to catch up with themselves, the responsible users of birth control.

The educated assume that, with abortion available to eliminate errors, live births surely must represent children that are planned (or at least actively wanted by the time they're born). Given these assumptions, it just seems obvious to elites that abortion must be cutting crime by reducing the number of babies in the "unwanted" category.

Maybe the chattering classes would find it less obvious if they could see the issue from evolution's point of view -- one in which planning and wantedness have nothing to do with reproduction.

As far as nature is concerned, producing offspring is the default position. It's just what living things do. Beating nature at her own game takes intelligence, foresight, and planning -- all of which tend to be in short supply at the bottom rungs of society and among the low IQ population.

Every means of avoiding baby production -- abstinence, contraception, abortion --requires some level of self control, active decision-making, or competence. By contrast, producing a baby requires nothing more than having sex and waiting.

Thus, it is almost inevitable that many babies will be born to women who are among the most impulsive, the least capable, and the least intelligent. How could it be otherwise? No need to even consider the issue of wantedness. It's just evolution winning again.

Inopportune pregnancy obviously has been around for a long time. During the 15th through 19th centuries, many European countries apparently dealt with the resulting babies by dumping them into foundling homes, where the vast majority died from disease and malnutrition. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy discusses this in horrifying detail in her book *Mother Nature,* where she estimates that millions of babies were abandoned throughout Europe. Some foundling homes even installed revolving barrels so that parents could drop off infants anonymously.

My guess is that the foundling home system, brutal as it was, probably was much more efficient than modern day abortion at culling the crime-prone and otherwise "least likely to succeed" babies.

In past centuries, women who failed to acquire adequate economic resources through marriage or work would also have failed to keep their offspring alive. Without welfare available, unwed or poor mothers would have had little choice but to give their infants up to the foundling home, and to likely death. Thus, most women who successfully raised children would have been at least minimally competent in a social and economic context.

By contrast, today's "abortion + welfare" system virtually ensures that many of the most incompetent and least intelligent women will give birth and raise their children to adulthood. The likely result is an increase in crime, not a decrease.

Many of those discussing Levitt's argument coyly refer to it as "controversial," while clearly thinking it's a bit of a giggle. I wonder if they would find it so amusing to see what a really effective "preemptive execution" system looked like.

Let me try to model this with numbers. The model that Levitt wants you to assume, even though he knows it's not true, is something like the following:

- Assume before the legalization of abortions that there are 100 conceptions and thus (ignoring miscarriages) 100 births.

- Assume that abortion is legalized and the 25 "most unwanted" pregnancies are aborted.

- Assume that "most unwanted" is roughly synonymous with "least promising."

- So, now only the 75 most promising fetuses are born and the 25 least promising never grow up to mug you. As J. Stalin liked to say while signing death warrants, "No man, no problem."

Now, it's easy to see the lack of realism is these assumptions. The assumption that the 25 who get aborted will be the 25 least promising is grossly over-optimistic. For example, women are seldom making decisions on abortion not based on where their unborn children would come out relative to the other 99 but on other, more personal grounds. There might be a certain tendency in that direction, but it's going to be attenuated.

But, that's just the surface of what's wrong with this model. It's actually radically fallacious because it doesn't account for the vast increase in unwanted pregnancies, which is ethically sleazy of Levitt, because he knows all about what actually occurred.

Here's what really happened, according to Levitt's own statement in Freakonomics: "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …"

Thus, what happened looked more like this.

- After legalization, there were now 129 conceptions, not 100, and 35 abortions, leaving 94 births instead of 100.

- But who were those 94 births? This is where it gets terribly murky.

--- Some of those births will be of the 29 who wouldn't have been conceived without legalization. Women got pregnant assuming, consciously or unconsciously, that they'd have an abortion, then didn't get one for any of a host of reason. Will these kids turn out better or worse than the ones who are getting aborted? Who knows?

The 94 births could have turned out more promising, less promising, or the same. Nobody knows, including Dr. Levitt.

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

The Notoriously Anti-American FBI Arrests Patriot Who Only Wanted to Help 51st State

The AP reports:

The FBI arrested a Pentagon analyst Wednesday on charges that he passed classified information on Iran to employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group. Larry Franklin, 58, of Kearneysville, W.Va., turned himself in Wednesday morning, FBI spokeswoman Debra Weierman said.

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

Michael Blowhard on "Weirdos and Culture:"

The suave and cheerful cofounder of 2Blowhards reacts to Terry Castle's hilarious memoir on Susan Sontag, the one that I noted awhile back, with an essay on the kind of people he has met in his three decades in the culture industry:

When I came to NYC in the late '70s and sneaked into the culture-and-media world, I was under the sway of a lot of Romantic-'60s ideas about art, inspiration, and madness. My reasoning -- too dignified a term for what was really a set of adolescent feelings and fantasies -- went along these lines: you have to be a little crazy to commit substantial life-resources to the culture world. The culture-life is impractical and quixotic, after all. But that kind of craziness is good! It's sweet! It's generous! It's a gift! It's all about the giving and the getting of pleasure! And pleasure is a wonderful, indeed priceless, thing! ...

It took me ages to understand that many of the people I was encountering in the cultureworld weren't charming eccentrics or engaging oddballs. What I finally woke up to was the simple fact that many people in the cultureword are real weirdos -- people who are so deeply off as to be close to mentally ill, if not actually mentally ill. They aren't crazy with a small c -- crazy as in eccentric. No, they're Crazy with a great big C -- crazy as in loony-bin-worthy, or something close to it.

I also woke up to the fact that many inhabitants of the cultureworld aren't sweetly nuts. They're destructively nuts. In my clueless smalltown way, I'd had trouble imagining that anyone -- anyone short of a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Jeffrey Dahmer -- might wish the general run of humanity ill. Yet what I found was that a fair number of people in the American cultureworld seethe with bile and contempt towards the mainstream. [More]

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

The Failure of Eugenic Breeding

Enormous amounts of money are spent to acquire the best breeding stock for thoroughbred horse racing. The average time of the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby dropped steadily up through middle of the 20th Century (as shown in the red line above), yet there has been virtually no overall improvement in average time since 1950 (as shown in the blue line). If the improvements seen from 1896-1949 had continued, the average winning time today would be about three seconds faster.

Instead, Secretariat's 1:59.4 back in 1973 remains the Kentucky Derby's record, and only one other winner broke two minutes.

In contrast, in most human races (e.g., running, swimming, etc.), where there is no organized artificial selection, times have improved significantly since 1973.

This lack of improvement in thoroughbred racing is sometimes attributed to too much inbreeding: all thoroughbreds are descended from three Arabian stallions and 20 English mares.

Genetic variations are still possible, however. According to the leading veterinary pathologist, Secretariat's heart was twice as big as the average thoroughbred's and 30% bigger than the next largest he had ever seen in thousands of autopsies. This may explain why Secretariat was something of a bust as a stud: he must have had a unique combination of genes providing both a freakishly large heart and the optimal infrastructure to support it.

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

"A Latticework of Mental Models"

In support of my argument below that the more, and more accurate, mental models you hold in your head, the easier it is to remember facts and make connections, a reader sent me to the first chapter of a book called Investing: The Last Liberal Art by Robert G. Hagstrom. It starts off with a talk given by Charlie Munger, who is the brains behind the brains at Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffet's vice chairman, Munger told USC students:

Rather than discussing the stock market, he intended to talk about "stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom." ... He challenged the students to broaden their vision of the market, of finance, and of economics in general; to see them not as separate disciplines but as part of a larger body of knowledge, one that also incorporates psychology, engineering, mathematics, physics, and the humanities.

In this broader view, he suggested, each discipline entwines with, and in the process strengthens, every other. From each discipline the thoughtful person draws significant mental models, the key ideas that combine to produce a cohesive understanding. Those who cultivate this broad view are well on their way to achieving worldly wisdom, that solid mental foundation without which success in the market - or anywhere else - is merely a short-lived fluke.

To drive his point home, Charlie used a memorable metaphor to describe this interlocking structure of ideas: a latticework of models. "You've got have models in your head," he explained, "and you've got to array your experience - both vicarious and direct - on this latticework of models." So immediate is this visual image that latticework has become something of a shorthand term in the investment world, a quick and easily recognized reference to Munger's approach...

This makes us not only better investors but better leaders, better citizens, better parents, spouses, and friends.

Well, I'm certainly not living evidence that this approach makes you a better investor! But I do like to think I'm a better citizen because I try to look at events through a variety of fairly simple models. For example, I've noticed that, generally speaking, it's easier to select individuals of a desired type than to social engineer random individuals into the desired type, so it's easy to see that much of the conventional wisdom -- e.g., going to Harvard makes you smart -- is bollocks.

Striving to find simple, broadly applicable models opens me up to charges that I believe in stereotypes, I'm a bigot, yada yada yada. Worse, it violates the key maxim of professional intellectuals: KICS: Keep It Complicated, Smartie. If there really are simple, broadly applicable truths, does the world need to pay for so many professionals devoted to making up and elaborating complicated lies?

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

Sharansky Resigns to Protest Sharon's Gaza Pullout:

Unlike the physically attractive West Bank, the Gaza Strip is widely considered a leading candidate for The Worst Place in the World, a densely-packed seaside slum running out of fresh water. Israel conquered Gaza back in 1967 and has occupied it ever since. About 7,000 Israeli settlers live in fortified compounds in the Gaza Strip, mostly, as far as I can tell, to stick a thumb in the eye of their Palestinian neighbors by flaunting their power and wealth. Because Israel fenced Gaza off in 1994, it was not an important contributor of suicide bombers during the recent intifada, but the Jewish settlers within Gaza require a huge commitment of Israeli Army forces vastly disproportionate to their numbers and contribution (if any) to Israel's well-being.

Ariel Sharon, that notorious anti-Semitic pacifist wimp, has decided that it is in Israel's national interest to uproot the Gaza settlers, paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars per family to leave.

Now, President George W. Bush's guru of democracy, Natan Sharansky, author of Bush's new favorite book The Case for Democracy, has resigned from Israel's cabinet to protest Sharon's pullout plan. Sharansky predictably cited as his justification for continuing the settlements in the god-forsaken Gaza Strip the Palestinians' also predictable failure to become a fully-functioning democracy complete with women's rights, a free market, and full security for dissenters (according to Joel Rosenberg in National Review). That the Palestinians recently held a reasonably fair election isn't good enough for Sharansky or National Review.

Back in February, I pointed out that Sharansky's purported democracy fetish smelled like a hoax and a trap:

Sharansky is a former housing minister of Israel, with strong ties to the settler movement. His book saying that the solution to the Israel-Palestine problem is for Palestine to become a democracy is widely seen as idealistic, but a more cynical interpretation is that Sharansky is trying to set the bar so high that Israel will never have to deal with the Palestinians and can continue their settlements in the West Bank indefinitely.

It turned out I wasn't cynical enough. Sharansky is now playing the "democracy" card not just to save the quarter-million West Bank settlers from having to return to Israel, but to preserve the 7,000 Gaza Strip settlers as well!

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

What's Wrong with Sherlock Holmes' Theory of Knowledge

After reading about how ignorant Harvard gradsA Study in Scarlet (chronologically the first Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson story) that has interested me since I was a boy: were about practical astronomy, a reader sent me a passage from Arthur Conan Doyle's

[Sherlock Holmes'] ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

In terms of time, there's some truth to this idea -- time spent reading astronomy books is time that can't be spent studying how to distinguish between the scores of brands of cigar ash that killers might leave at the scene of the crime.

Nonetheless, I think Holmes' view is fundamentally fallacious. The more and more accurate models you have in your head, the easier it is to remember facts because the truth all fits together. You can crosscheck facts and ideas more easily.

For example, these Harvard grads have a model in their head that says that if their new employers send them off to the New Zealand office in July, they should have take their swimsuits and tropical weight business suits because the earth is closest to the sun in July. Maybe they've heard that it's winter in the Southern Hemisphere when it's summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but facts are a lot easier to remember if they function as examples for a theory in your head, rather than as just random bits of data.

For example, it's hard to remember what your previous phone number was because it's meaningless digits. In contrast, it's not that hard to remember the atomic weight of, say, carbon or oxygen if you understand why the periodic table of elements is laid out the way it is.

Similarly, you can remember a lot more facts about modern life if you keep simple models in your head about certain taboo topics such as race, gender, and IQ. If you think honestly, you can think better because the truth all fits together, one fact leading to another. In contrast, politically correct myths are all intellectual dead ends.

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