June 29, 2005

Batmania

Random notes:

- Notice how the Gotham City muggers are blond?

- This time, Gotham City looks more like Chicago than New York, with all the liftable bridges over the river and the art deco Wayne Tower looks like a bigger version of the Board of Trade building at the end of Lasalle St. A lot of the underground road footage was shot on Lower Wacker Drive, a rather ominous-looking shortcut under the Loop that I took to work every day for years. However, Chicago is lacking in blond muggers.

- As a boy, Christian Bale starred in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," which was a rare box office dud for Spielberg ($22 million domestically, but I thought was one of the greatest movies ever made. Bale plays an English lad living in the wealthy European suburb of Shanghai on December 7, 1941 who is interned in a brutal camp by the Japanese. Objectively, he's a pitiful victim of the war, but he finds World War II to be a blast. Spielberg took the script by Tom Stoppard and augmented Stoppard's trademark "surreal realism" -- a style Stoppard invented in "After Magritte" where a seemingly impossible tableau is later explained. For example, the remarkably memorable scene that begins with Bale's Japanese friend on the other side of the fence singing a Shinto hymn and climbing into his Kamikaze was largely Spielberg's invention. Stoppard couldn't imagine spending the money the scene cost, but Spielberg came up with the most Stoppardian segment in any of the many movies Stoppard has worked on.

- Gary Oldman doesn't have much to do as the only honest cop in Gotham City, but he gives a seminar in acting solely through facial expressions when he is pressed into driving the Batmobile. Oldman was great way back in 1986's "Sid and Nancy" (he beat out Daniel Day-Lewis for the role of Sid Vicious), but Chloe Webb was even better. But there aren't a lot of roles for funny-looking girls (other than as Danny Devito's girlfriend in "Twins"), so her career never amounted to much. Too bad Tim Roth turned down the role of Johnny Rotten.

- Practically the entire cast of "Batman Begins" is from the British Isles, other than Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, and Ken Watanabe. The British are still just better than we are at the kind of classy showmanship that this kind of film demands.

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

Did the Iranian people just elect a hostage-taker as president?

There's photographic evidence that the landslide winner in the recent Iranian election was one of the creeps who took American Embassy workers hostage in 1978-1980. (Of course, in the age of PhotoShop, seeing in the media should not be believing.)

Another triumph of democracy!

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

Why don't we seal the Syrian border?

asks Andrew Sullivan, wondering why the Bush Administration constantly complains about fighters slipping in from Syria but doesn't seem to do anything about it.

Let me update what I wrote over two years ago about Iraq's borders, just after the capture of Baghdad. Obviously, the U.S. military knows how to seal even a much more dangerous border, from its experience on the Korean peninsula over the last half century. Similarly, Israel has largely stopped the infiltration of suicide bombers by largely fencing off Gaza and much of the West Bank. Heck, the King of Morocco ended infiltration of Polisario guerillas into his new territory of Spanish Sahara by building a dirt berm around it.

There are four likely reasons the Bush Administration isn't letting the military seal the border in Iraq:

1. Bush wants Al-Qaeda fighters to get into Iraq so he can claim Iraq is part of the 9/11 payback.

2. At least part of the Administration wants to conquer Syria, which is more of a problem for Israel than Iraq was, so they want the border to stay porous as an excuse for invading Syria. As Noah Millman has long pointed out, taking out Saddam was a lower priority for the Likud government compared to the threats posed to Israel by Iran and Syria. But, the Likud fellow travelers in the Bush Administration assumed that getting U.S. troops into Iraq would make it more likely the U.S. would then turn on Syria and/or Iran. Neutralizing Syria by sealing the border would lessen the chance of the U.S. invading Syria, so that's not a popular choice within the Bush Administration.

3. Successfully sealing off the Syrian border would give the lie to the claim that it's impossible to seal off the Mexican border to cut back on illegal immigration, and that's the last thing Mr. Bush wants to do.

4. The Syrian border actually isn't all that important. This is primarily an ethno-nationalist rebellion, and Bush is exaggerating the importance of the foreign element so he can tell people his War in Error is part of the War on Terror. Maybe it would be cost-ineffective to worry about the border. Still, how much time does laying landmines use up?

More on sealing the border(s): A reader writes:

Fences are OK. Walls are better. Concrete walls better still.

Tilt-up concrete construction has been used in the Southwest since the 1940s. Essentially, you cast a reinforced concrete slab on the ground (say 4-6" thick) and then, after a few weeks, tilt it up to make a wall. Simple, and quick. An experienced crew can tilt up 30 panels a day and you can make them 60'x60' or larger. Secure? We build prisons out of them in Texas.

If you wanted a 6" thick, 60' high wall of concrete along the border withSyria or Mexico, you would need a few square miles of flat land under guard and semis to move the slabs out to the border. With a few square miles, you could supply multiple crews for a few weeks. Stage the areas to cast the slabs up and down the border and guard the goddamned things like we used to be able to do before GHW Bush and Bill Clinton drove all of the professionals out of the US military. Build a berm and compress the earth, and tilt up the wall in between braces pounded into the earth.

While construction is going on, let everyone know that activity in the immediate few miles will draw fire without any attempt to verify the target. Period.

So, lets assume 25 slabs per crew per day, 10 crews working, each slab 60' long, that would be 2.84 miles a day (15000/5280), and if we were working for 135 days we would be done. End of story. Cost? My back of the envelope is $275,000,000 for materials times a mutiplier for the cost of shipping them in plus the labor (which, if it is military, is already a sunk cost). How about an even billion, which is a lot less than we have spent so far. Patrol night and day in Blackhawks with IR and respond immediately and with overwhelming force every time anything, even a camel, gets close to the wall.

Think that Bush would do it? No, and I don't think that you are being paranoid when you say that this would make people think "Hmmm ... why not here?" I sent a sketch of this idea to a friend in DC a few days ago and but he thought that it might affect the efforts to attract Hispanics to the Republican Party. Wonderful.


Update: My wall expert has now priced out what it would cost to buy the wall from his local Lowe's Home Center:

So, I was thinking to myself, let's assume $500 of rebar and the suggested 3031 80 pound bags of Quick-Crete that Lowe's suggests for one of these wall panels (60'x60'). We would need to look at transportation costs, labor, forms (which can be reused for a while), and so on, but just the concrete and rebar would be $13,000 per slab. We need 34000 slabs to run right down the Syrian border, so that would be $442,000,000 if we bought this at Lowe's, and I would hope that buying in bulk would give us a little bit of a discount. I know, I know, we would have to truck in water, we would have to do the earthworks, and so on. But still -- we could seal the Syrian border with with crap we can buy at Lowe's and even if it costs us $2,000,000,000 because my math is lousy, we would still be running at under 1% of the cost of this goat rodeo so far.

Why do they have to be 60 feet tall? The walls the Border Patrol has built in towns on the Mexican border like Nogales and Naco are about 15 feet tall. They're effective, but the BP boys have to watch them to keep people from climbing over them on extra long ladders. But they don't have any spikes on top of them or electrification or landmines below them, or all the other sadistic (and fun to dream up) anti-personnel schemes that would be perfectly justifiable in using to keep Al-Qaeda terrorists from entering Iraq to set off car bombs.


Randall Parker has been studying the cost of building security barriers. The highest cost per mile he's seen for the highly successful new Israeli fence around (and partly in) the West Bank is $4.15 million.

Even at $4.15 million per mile a barrier on the US border with Mexico would still be under $10 billion and therefore cost less than one year of illegal alien health care.

The Iraq-Syria border is about one third the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The highly effective anti-illegal immigration fence in San Diego came out to about $1.7 million per mile. The Israeli fence is much more lethal (e.g., includes landmines), as is appropriate for dealing with suicide bombers.



***


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

How interracial marriage keeps the ruling class relatively white in Latin America

From Georgie Anne Geyer's 1970 book The New Latins:

In Bolivia, for instance, divorce came into being with the 1952 revolution, which also disgorged from the lowest depths of society and flung to its apex an entire new class of Indian and Mestizo leaders. Almost without exception, these leaders divorced their original wives and married women of a higher social class -- a class whose status coincided with their newly acquired importance.

Their new children would come out whiter than they were. And so it goes...


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

Who you gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes

From the NYT, "What Other People Say May Change What You Believe:"

A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity. In the new study, subjects were asked to decide if geometric shapes were the same or different.

The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch.

In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card.

Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly.

But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer.

Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time.

The new study tried to find an answer by using functional M.R.I. scanners that can peer into the working brain, a technology not available to Dr. Asch.

The researchers found that social conformity showed up in the brain as activity in regions that are entirely devoted to perception. But independence of judgment - standing up for one's beliefs - showed up as activity in brain areas involved in emotion, the study found, suggesting that there is a cost for going against the group.

"We like to think that seeing is believing," said Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta who led the study.

But the study's findings, he said, show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.

That reminds me of a neurological experiment somebody should do. I suspect that in many people, especially those with a lot of book-learning, there is little connection between the part of the brain that processes their visual perceptions and the part that engages in high level abstract word processing.

I spent a couple of hours once talking to the founders of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. They had decided to explain race and racism to the world. So, we talked about race for two hours. For modern Americans, they were remarkably uninformed. What struck me was how immune both of them were to learning anything from just looking at people as they went about their daily business. If they didn't read it in an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal, it didn't register in their heads. Yet, they are enormously successful academic entrepreneurs. And Tooby and Cosmides are, more or less, the good guys in academia -- they've made the study of sex differences a lot more realistic.

I wonder if people with lower Verbal scores on the SAT would be better at noticing the implications of what they see.

For example, way back in the mid-1990s, I drew up a proposal for a book to be entitled: The Words Don't Match the Pictures: Why the Polite Lies We Tell About Race & Sex Are Undermined by What We See on ESPN. But, then I got cancer and by the time I was better, Jon Entine was well along on his similar book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. So, I helped him out a little bit with his book. It turned out well, but it didn't sell terribly well, and it was quickly swept under the rug.

What strikes me now is how naive I was back then to think that there was a sizable market of well-educated readers who believe what they see with their own lying eyes, rather than subscribing to the pre-digested ideologies they are handed in college and told that this is what intelligent people all believe.

For example, look at all the online discussions where you can sign in anonymously, yet whenever the topic of racial differences in sports comes up, how many people believe their lying eyes? Not many.


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

Croatian-Australian goes first in NBA draft

U. of Utah center Andrew Bogut became the first white guy to be the top pick in the NBA draft since Indiana's Kent Benson in 1977. (Yao Ming was only non-black between Benson and Bogut.) Utah had the top draft picks in both the NBA and NFL this year.

Interestingly, even though the 7-foot Bogut is from Australia, he has those Balkan height genes that have helped Balkan countries win so many medals in Olympic basketball. (Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore, but it still is in third place all time, having medaled in six different Olympics.) Another place with extremely tall Europeans is the Baltics. Lithuania has medaled in three of the last four Olympics.

Earlier this year, Steve Nash became the first white NBA Most Valuable Player since Larry Bird 19 years before.

As I've been saying, these admittedly sparse data points suggest that something has gone wrong with African-American basketball culture. Look at the San Antonio Spurs, who just won their third NBA title in the last seven years. They are led by ultra-solid Tim Duncan, who grew up in the Virgin Islands, and didn't play basketball until he was 14 (he'd wanted to be an Olympic swimmer). Their new star is Manu Ginobili from Argentina (he played on his country's gold medal winning Olympic team), and their point guard is Tony Parker, who grew up in France where his African-American father had moved to play minor league basketball. In other words, they didn't grow up in the 'hood listening to gangsta rap.

Darryl Dawkins, the former NBA center who called himself "Chocolate Thunder," has become an insightful minor league coach. "Black basketball is much more individualistic," he told Charlie Rosen of FoxSports. "With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, … if somebody makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you've got to come right back at him with something better, something more stylish… It's all about honor, pride, and establishing yourself as a man."

Dawkins, whose showboating Philadelphia 76ers lost to Bill Walton's Portland Trailblazers in an epic 1977 NBA Finals confrontation between the black and white games, now says, "The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish… White culture places more of a premium on winning, and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating."

Arguing that the best teams combine both styles, Dawkins pointed out, "In basketball and in civilian life, freedom without structure winds up being chaotic and destructive."

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

"War of the Worlds"

The good news is that, in contrast to the latest Star Wars bloat-a-thon (and much else this year), it's very well made. The acting is fine, the dialogue doesn't clunk, the editing is not too fast and not too slow, the camera is pointing in the right direction, etc. Spielberg, unlike Lucas, gives you your money's worth of sheer competence.

Actually, the best contrast is to "Independence Day," in that Spielberg and Co. consciously decided to leave out almost everything that made that hit so wildly entertaining. We don't get to see any national monuments being blown up; Jeff Goldblum doesn't show up as some technical genius to explain what's going on; Will Smith doesn't punch out the aliens; Randy Quaid isn't around for comic relief; and there are no references to Roswell or other goofy UFO mythology.

"War of the Worlds" has a certain degree of artistic rigor and compressed intensity because Spielberg follows a quite restrictive rule: We only see what Tom Cruise's blue-collar regular guy sees. He's no superhero, and mostly he just runs away and tries to save his kids. As I pointed out in my recent cover story on Hollywood's politics, current filmmakers are strikingly into family values, at least of the family unity kind.

The downside is that while "War of the Worlds" is an exciting thrill ride and a decent family drama, it's not as much fun as "Indepenence Day." It's not even as interesting intellectually as "Independence Day."

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have written a couple of end-of-the-world blockbuster sci-fi novels, Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall, and they show just how intriguing alien attack and apocalypse can be. Unfortunately, "War of the Worlds" is sadly lacking in the kind of what-if interest in how to survive. It just doesn't give you much to think about, unlike Spielberg-Cruise's wrongheaded but consistently thought-provoking previous sci-fi film "Minority Report." Because of that, it will probably make as much money as "Minority Report" and "Vanilla Sky," Cruise's other highbrow sci-fi film, combined.

For example, if you are living in Newark, New Jersey, and giant alien tripods start smashing up your neighborhood, in which direction do you flee? I think the natural human response is: head for the hills, perhaps a coal mine in the Alleghenies where you can lay low for awhile.

Instead, Cruise's character heads for Boston, which makes no sense at all from a survivalist point of view. It only makes sense from the family drama standpoint. See, that's where his ex-wife is, and he assumes she's a lot smarter than him and will be able to figure out how to save the kids. And the reason she has to be in Boston, rather than in, say, a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, is because they got divorced because she's from the upper class (and Boston is a snobby-sounding city) and he's not, but they still care for each other even though they aren't right for each other.

Okay, but it's not as much fun as all the questions that come up in survivalist stories. Like in "Red Dawn," when the Soviet paratroopers are landing and some high school football players pile into a pickup truck and head for the Rockies, and they stop for 90 seconds to stock up for the winter at a sporting goods shop. You've got a minute and a half to grab everything you'll need to survive and fight: What do you take?


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

Dear Mr. President: Just a reminder ...

No matter how many times you mention 9/11 in your speech on Iraq, that country, for all its sins, had nothing to do with 9/11.


Your Iraq Attaq was not part of the War on Terror. It is the War in Error. Thank you.


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

Let's set a date and leave:

The President and the rest of the establishment, such as John F. Kerry during his campaign last year, have been lying to us about what is wrong in Iraq. The reason the Iraqi forces have done such a pathetic job fighting the insurgents is not a lack of military training -- an extremely high proportion of the Iraqi male population served in Saddam's military, most have experience with guns, and they don't need extensive high tech training to patrol neighborhoods -- it's a lack of motivation. Some of the Iraqis hate us; and the ones who hate the ones who hate us don't see much reason to risk their necks fighting them ... when we'll do it for them.

If you were an Iraqi, would you get yourself killed when the President of the United States is willing to order American boys to their deaths in your place?

The only way to get any significant number of Iraqis to fight fiercely for their government is for the U.S. to leave. Then, if they want their government to survive, they'll have to fight. We can provide air support and weapons, but let's get American forces out of Iraq and back to Kuwait.

Many warn that our leaving will precipitate Iraq into a civil war. But, Bush's publicly-stated strategy is to make Iraq into a civil war by getting the Iraqis to do the fighting instead of us. But, they won't fight as long as we'll fight for them.

Therefore, at this point our choices are not between peace and civil war but between a civil war within Iraq and a foreign war within Iraq. Since we are the foreigners who are dying, it seems like a no-brainer for us that we'd prefer the Iraqis settle their differences without us dying on the ground. We'll just drop bombs on the side we don't like, which should keep them from winning.

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

June 28, 2005

James Q. Wilson reviews Levitt's Freakonomics abortion-crime theory in Commentary

From the new July issue of Commentary, not yet online:

During my many years of lecturing on crime, invariably the first two questions I would be asked were: "What do you think of the death penalty?" and "What do you think of gun control?"

No more. Now the first question is whether I believe that legalized abortion has cut the crime rate. For this I can thank Freakonomics, the weirdly named book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner that has been high on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks now. My answer, by the way, is no: I do not believe the evidence shows a causal link between legalized abortion and our reduced crime rate.

Levitt, an acquaintance of mine, is an immensely talented economist whose restless mind has inquired into all sorts of fascinating topics....

Back to abortion and crime. Levitt's argument is that, with the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, many fetuses were killed in America that would otherwise have led to the birth of unwanted children. Such unwanted children, receiving little affection and guidance, would have been more likely to commit crimes when grown. Ergo, their removal from the population had something to do with our lowered crime rates.

Why should we think such children would have been unwanted? Because, Levitt contends, they would have been born to thousands of poor, single, teenage mothers. Levitt conspicuously refrains from saying so, but a very large fraction of these poor, single, teenage mothers would have been African American: over 60 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, and the abortion rate is roughly three times greater among black than among white women.

To prove that abortion reduced crime, Levitt and his coauthor on the original paper, John Donohue, examined crime rates 15 to 18 years after the Roe decision, and found a drop. Moreover, they pointed out that five states had already legalized abortion three to four years before the decision: in these early-legalizing states, crime rates fell sooner than in states that did not permit abortion until Roe.

You would never know it from this book, but not only have these claims been criticized, but several scholars have offered rival theories. On the issue of abortion rates alone, the economists John Lott and John Whitley have written that, even before Roe, many anti-abortion states allowed abortion if the life or health of the mother was at risk; in these states, there were at least as many abortions per 1,000 live births pre-Roe as in states that had made abortion legal. Why, then, attribute falling crime rates to legalized abortion?

Levitt and Donohue have rejoined that, in those states where abortions were still nominally illegal, it was well-to-do white women who mainly availed themselves of the loopholes in the system. But there is no evidence of this; to the contrary, black women were over-represented among those having abortions in such states.

Now look at homicide rates by the age of suspected offenders. In the late 1990s, roughly a quarter century after Roe, the murder rate was falling for offenders aged twenty-six and older -- a class of offenders much too old to have been affected by Roe one way or the other. As for the youngest offenders, those between sixteen and twenty, their murder rates had jumped up in the early 1990s, probably because of involvement in the crack cocaine trade. Again, no Roe effect.

George Akerlof, Janet Yellen, and Michael Katz have argued that legalized abortion actually increased the number of out-of-wedlock first births -- because the availability of abortion, along with the advent of new contraceptive devices, rendered sex "cost-free" for men but not necessarily for the women they impregnated. Were the children who were increasingly likely to be born to unmarried women "unwanted"? Perhaps they were, but we do not know; Akerlof and his colleagues have not given us sufficient evidence.

As of now, no one is entitled to decide who is correct in this matter, whether Levitt or any of his critics. But it is certainly premature to say that Levitt is right, and positively disconcerting to take the work of an enamored journalist that Levitt must be right.

On another controversial matter, however, Levitt is clearly right, and I am his victim. I once wrote that the proportion of juveniles in the population was going up and that therefore the crime rate would go up. Levitt correctly takes me to task for this unwarranted assertion, which was later proved wrong. His criticism reminds me of something my Ph.D. adviser once said, no doubt quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.

Touché ... Levitt, of course, being a classic example of a social scientist who has failed to predict the past. When Levitt concocted his theory in 1999, he only looked at crime rates in 1985 and in 1997, and he forgot to look at crime rates by narrowly defined age groups. So, he completely overlooked the fact that, in direct contradiction of his theory, the first cohort born after legalization went on an enormous teen violence spree in-between 1985 and 1997. Ever since then, with his name and reputation linked to his half-baked theory, he has been hustling like P.T. Barnum to turn his slapdash hypothesis into conventional wisdom to preserve his marketability.


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

Exciting Medical Research:

The Cochran-Ewald theory that many chronic diseases are caused by cryptic infections makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but, it is extremely hard to find the killer germs. Fortunately, Matthew Meyerson, a geneticist at Harvard and Dana-Farber is working on a new approach to looking for germs:

Discovery of pathogenic microbes: We have developed a genomic approach to discover microbial sequences in cryptic infectious diseases. In sequence-based computational subtraction, we generate and sequence libraries from diseased tissues. Sequences that match the human genome are removed computationally, leaving microbial sequences (Weber et al., 2002). We have recently generated several genomic representational methods to complement this pathogen discovery approach and are applying the methods to human disease samples.


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

Solving the Birthrate Implosion and Fixing Pensions:

A reader has a plan:

Childlessness is a form of parasitism. Old people can only be supported by younger people. That means that childless seniors are supported by somebody else's children. The combination of publicly provided pensions and privately raised children means that people who profit most from children are those who don't have them. It is a case of private costs and public benefits.

Of course, part of the costs of raising children are public, such as schools, and in Canada health care as well. Nonetheless, most of the costs of child-rearing are private. However, when a person who raised children and one who remained childless turn 65, both are equally entitled to social security.

This is unfair. It would not be unfair if public pension schemes were funded plans, but they are simply pay-as-you-go systems. The premiums paid today are passed on to the seniors living today. Unfortunately, nearly every country set up a plan that creates the impression in the public's mind that they are paying into a fund and that they are simply getting their money back when they turn 65. It would have been preferable to finance old age pensions from general revenues and provide the same level for everybody, regardless of what they earned throughout their working lives.

In light of the above, it would be a good idea to make the level of old age pensions dependent on the number of children that the pensioner raised. Seniors that raised 2 children to adulthood would get level 100. Those that raised 3 children or more would get level 125. Those that raised one child would get level 75, and those that remained childless would get level 50. That way everybody would get something, but those who contributed most to the formation of younger people would get the most. It should be pointed out that people who don't have to support children are in a much better position to accumulate assets that can help them finance their retirement.

Perhaps you should get credit for the difference between what your children are paying in taxes minus what they are costing the taxpayers in welfare costs. That way, you'd benefit financially from raising your kids to be productive members of society.


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

Latin American Zillionaires:

An Indian reader draws an analogy to South Asia:

India has extreme inequality and one of the reasons for it is that capital is a lot less mobile. People don't pay taxes honestly (partly because they can get away with it and partly because there was a time when Taxes were extortionately high). The result is that there is a huge pool of money swimming around which in India is called "Black money". "Black money" is a very broad term and includes all kinds of money - from the proceeds of crime to simply money on which Tax has not been paid. This money is obviously less mobile than legitimate money (which in India is called "White money") because it doesn't get channeled as easily into the economy.

The result is that there are vast fortunes of hidden wealth often behind the facade of middle class mediocrity. And because it is hidden wealth and the owners of the wealth do not trust anyone but their immediately family and cousins, the wealth tends to remain concentrated in the hands of those families in a way that prevents it from being used productively (which would give the opportunity to others to make money and become wealthy or better off).

So it is not uncommon for business families to be sitting on vast fortunes that are completely invisible to the Taxman. I suspect the same thing is in play in Latin America because a lot of the "wealth" in Latin America is from illegitimate businesses or activities.

The only way to create a better future for everyone in such countries is by reducing the size of the illegitimate economy and bringing as much wealth as possible into regular capital investments. But thats a hell of a lot easier said than done when you have centuries old traditions of not trusting anyone.

One of Mexico's worst problems is the difficulty the government has in finding taxable income. Vast amounts are hidden so the government sets tax rates high to get more out of what income it can find, which just encourages more people to evade taxes. So, the government doesn't collect enough money to pay for decent education.


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

June 27, 2005

Make Poverty History: A Constructive Suggestion

Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof are working together to make a very big deal out of getting more aid for Africa out of the G8 countries this week.

Sub-Saharan Africa's single biggest problem is its average IQ of around 70. Since African-Americans score around 85, and they share about 80% of their genes with their African cousins, it's likely that the poor environment in Africa depresses the average IQ substantially.

Probably the cheapest way to raise IQs in Africa is to attack diseases caused by a lack of micronutrients that are known to lower IQ, such as "cretinism," which is caused by lack of iodine. Western countries started fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron back before WWII, and that quickly eliminated what had been a substantial problem here.

UNICEF sponsored a big study of the problem last year. I wrote about what we could be doing to help the Third World in this regard here and here. But nobody else in the media seemed very interested because they aren't supposed to write about black IQ. See, good people think it's more moral to let cretinism and the like ravage Africa than to mention IQ in polite society. Only evil people like me are so disreputable as to try to get the world to solve the problem.

By the way, does anybody remember Geldof's band, the Boomtown Rats? He seemed smart, funny, inauthentic, and insincere - I especially liked his faux-Springsteen pseudo-epics such as "Johnny's on the Street Again." They were awfully catchy, but their phoniness kept them from catching on big here in the US. Who would have guessed he would make a future career for himself in saintliness?


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

Latino Power?

"Latino Power?: It Will Take Time for the Population Boom to Translate [into Votes]" writes Robert Suro of the Pew Hispanic Center in the Washington Post, confirming what I've been saying since 2001 ("Mexican-American Vote Smaller than Widely Thought"). Suro echoes my VDARE article in May debunking the "Latino Power" cover story in Newsweek.


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

US Ladies Open

Seven Koreans named Kim qualified for the Ladies US Open golf tournament (or close to 5% of the field). One of the least known was a young woman who changed her name to Birdie recently because "Eagle" sounded like a boy's name.


LPGA officials were enraptured because four American teenage amateurs were in the chase for the biggest title in women's golf. Foreigners have been winning too much on the LPGA tour for the good of the fame in America. And everybody likes a cute teenage girl.

Fifteen-year-old Michelle Wie, the willowy 6-footer with the perfect complexion and doll's features who can drive the ball 300 yards, was tied for the lead starting the final round. Victory would have made her the most celebrated female athlete on Earth: an Anna Kournikova who wins, both an American and an extremely tall East Asian, who would be almost as popular in East Asia for her height as Yao Ming. But, not yet: she skied to an 82.

Instead, 17-year-old blonde Morgan Pressley played terrifically, and stood in the 18th fairway tied with Birdie Kim who was in a deep bunker to the right of the green. Then, Kim holed out her sand blast from nearly 100 feet away to win one of the wilder tournaments in years. Young Morgan looked distinctly irate that Birdie's one in a thousand shot had gone in, costing her the U.S. Open at age 17. That bodes well for her future success -- it was often said of Arnold Palmer that he holed so many 30 footers to win on the last green because he sincerely felt he deserved to make them.

This tournament was unusual in the number of very young players in contention, but in general, females seem to win at younger ages than males. Sure, Tiger Woods won the Masters at 21 and Jack Nicklaus the U.S. Open at 22, but Palmer didn't win a professional major until he was 28, and Hogan didn't win one until he was 36 (although WWII got in the way).


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

June 26, 2005

Another triumph of democracy in the Middle East

The Washington Post reports:

The United States and its European allies are bracing for a tough new opponent in Iran with the election to the presidency of Tehran's ultra-conservative mayor, a relative unknown to the outside world whose campaign pledged to take a harder line in talks on Iran's nuclear program, according to U.S. and Western officials, as well as Iranian analysts.

The upset victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has alarmed U.S. and European officials over issues including the future of Iraq, the Middle East peace efforts and the impact on oil markets. Any prospect of ending more than a quarter of a century of tensions with Iran is also unlikely after Ahmadinejad begins his four-year term this summer, the officials said.

The unpleasant irony is that Iran was one place where the trend was our friend before we invaded Iraq, as a quarter century of fundamentalism had made many Iranians heartily sick of the mullahs. But putting 140,000 troops on Iran's border does not appear to have made Iranians like us more.

Michael Ledeen is in full blither here.


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

Max Boot says the insurgents are bound to lose

in Iraq:

The rebels lack a unifying organization, ideology and leader. There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro or Mao Tse-tung.

Which means there is nobody to capture, kill, or negotiate a deal with. The Shining Path rebellion in Peru and the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey both ended abruptly with the capture of their respective numero unos. The Afrikaaners could negotiate a deal with Mandela and know that his rebels would abide by it.

We don't know for sure that nobody will eventually emerge from the insurgency as a charismatic leader -- Bonaparte didn't emerge until about six years into the French Revolution -- but we're probably worse off without a centralized command. Lack of centralization means the insurgency could go on irrationally long, with the worst hot-heads keeping it going with more atrocities setting off more reprisals, etc etc.

A reader writes:

Exactly. The error people make in dealing with Arab polities is to assume there is some “there” there when they negotiate with the leaders of Arab states.

In fact Arab states seem more and more like Potemkin polities, just a bunch of soldiers controlling some oil wells who have set up shop to impress international visitors but are not really in control of their people.

Arab societies are much more swarm-like – organized from the bottom-up by clans, rather than top-down by states. That’s why they seem ineffective in mobilizing their populi for war or economic development but good for stuff like weddings, mafias and guerilla war.

So regime change does not really change much, apart from the name on the shingle hanging on the street-front of the Potemkin state.

You still got the same people with the same families, only now you really pissed quite a few of them off because your “smart” bomb just blew up cousin Ahmed.

That’s why the US should not bother with nation-building or state-construction in the ME: if the Arabs can't do it, it does not seem likely that the US Army can do it whilst simultaneously fighting off legions of the irate cousins of Ahmed. (Boy do I feel sorry for the GI’s in Iraq.) [The high Sunday is forecast to be 112.]

The US’s continued presence in Iraq is just stirring up the hornets nest even more. If the US leaves the Suunis will probably go back to what they like doing best, throwing weddings and engaging in a little mafia activity. Hopefully, this will give them less incentive to participate in guerilla war and encourage them to turn on the opportunistic jihadis.


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