March 20, 2006

The real Larry Summers scandal?

I've written maybe 10,000 words in defense of Harvard President Lawrence Summers's much-denounced speech last year on why women haven't achieved gender equality with men in elite universities' math, science, and engineering departments. But that doesn't mean he's without flaw. Indeed, it looks like Summers was peripherally involved in the Scandal of the Century, the looting of post-Soviet Russia, or at least he dragged Harvard through the legal mud in a misguided attempt to protect a close friend who had gone over to the dark side.

Back in 1993, my elderly father would rant that those Harvard consultants who were advising the Yeltsin government on liberalizing the post-Soviet economy were ripping off the Russian people. Being a true believer back then in the Magic of the Free Market, I pooh-poohed his concerns.

Well, my dad was right and I was wrong. We all understand the superiority of the free market these days, but in any kind of market, it still matters very much who owns what. The "reform" of the Russian economy turned out to be one of the great larceny sprees in all history, and the Harvard boys weren't all merely naive theoreticians. Veteran economics journalist David Warsh's EconomicPrincipals.com reported in 2004:

The US government's long-running wrangle with economist Andrei Shleifer and Harvard University over Harvard's ill-fated Russia Project in the 1990s was resolved last week, in the government's favor.

A Federal judge ruled that, by quietly investing on their own accounts while advising the Russian government, Harvard professor Shleifer and his Moscow-based assistant Jonathan Hay had conspired to defraud the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which had been paying their salary.


Harvard had to pay $26 million and Shleifer $2 million in fines.

The Russian-born 45-year-old Shleifer is a superstar of the economics profession. Like Summers, he is the winner of the Clark Medal, the award for top economist under 40. Shleifer became the editor of Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics at the age of 28, and is now editor of the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Warsh's website reported in 2003:


"Then, too, Shleifer's oldest friend in economics is Lawrence Summers -- who, first as Undersecretary of Treasury for International Affairs, then as Deputy Secretary, was to all intents and purposes his ultimate boss during the period of the alleged transgressions, even though they were separated by several layers of governmental hierarchy."


Summers and Shleifer have vacationed together each year.

Recently, Institutional Investor printed a long expose by investigative reporter David McClintick (author of Indecent Exposure on movie executive/criminal David Begelman, who forged actor Cliff Robertson's name on checks) that begins:


How Harvard lost Russia

Source: Institutional Investor Magazine, Americas and International Editions
David McClintick

The best and brightest of America's premier university came to Moscow in the 1990s to teach Russians how to be capitalists. This is the inside story of how their efforts led to scandal and disgrace.

Since being named president of Harvard University in 2001, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has sparked a series of controversies that have grabbed headlines. Summers incurred the wrath of African-Americans when he belittled the work of controversial religion professor Cornel West (who left for Princeton University); last year he infuriated faculty and students alike when he seemed to disparage the innate scientific abilities of women at a Massachusetts economic conference, igniting a national uproar that nearly cost him his job; last fall brought the departure of Jack Meyer, the head of Harvard Management Co., which oversees the school's endowment but had inflamed some in the community because of the multimillion-dollar salaries it pays some of its managers.

Then, in quiet contrast, there is the case of economics professor Andrei Shleifer, who in the mid-1990s led a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace. In August, after years of litigation, Harvard, Shleifer and others agreed to pay at least $31 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government. Harvard had been charged with breach of contract, Shleifer and an associate, Jonathan Hay, with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

Shleifer remains a faculty member in good standing. Colleagues say that is because he is a close longtime friend and collaborator of Summers.

In the following pages investigative journalist David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus, chronicles Shleifer's role in the university's Russia Project and how his friendship with Summers has protected him from the consequences of that debacle inside America's premier academic institution.


Summers's enemies within the Harvard faculty circulated copies of this article just before his resignation. (And here's another article by Warsh on Summers's costly defense of Shleifer.)

Warsh writes:


How did the defendants in the Russia project --Harvard, Shleifer, Hay and, though he was not charged with wrong-doing in the matter, Summers -- convince the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post and the Financial Times that the collapse of [Harvard's] Russia Project was not a worthy story? What did they say, and how did they say it? To whom, and how often? Let me stress that there is absolutely no question of actual money ever changing hands -- of bribery. At the pinnacles of capitalism, the influence exchange is so deep and liquid that cash is almost never required, except, perhaps, within organizations, in the form of golden handshakes and the like.

Instead, the informal economy of capitalism is one of deference and respect, of favors today and the implicit promise of favors later, of jobs and dinner invitations and admissions to exclusive kindergartens.... Anyone who doubts that this informal economy extends to newspapers knows nothing about how newspapers work.

For at its heart, the Shleifer matter has always had less to do with the failure to export American values to Russia than with the inadvertent importation of Moscow rules to institutions in the United States. That's why Harvard's cockeyed defense is so alarming, why Shleifer's elevation to positions of ever-greater authority in the economics profession is worrisome. No one doubts that he is an original and productive economic thinker. The good news is that it was Shleifer who, as editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, published McMillan and Zoido's article on Montesinos [the corrupt Peruvian spymaster who paid much higher prices to suborn media owners than judges or politicians]. That's the bad news, too, since the editorship confers vast and global favor-trading power.

The worst thing of all is that, starting with his long-time mentor Larry Summers, Sheifer's friends don't seem to understand that they failed the young Russian émigré in the first instance, that they in turn have been betrayed and embarrassed. It is true, as Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin write in their introduction to the forthcoming "Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History" that the United States "changed from a place where political bribery was a routine event infecting politics at all levels to a nation that now ranks among the least corrupt in the world." But it is also true that American aid-giving abroad in the 20th century (Herbert Hoover, George C. Marshall, Creighton Abrams) has been remarkably free of high level corruption -- until now.


Why didn't the press do a good job of covering Russian corruption and the Harvard scandal? Well, who was disproportionately involved in the corruption at both the Russian and Harvard ends? I, for one, had no idea until I read Amy Chua's 2003 book World on Fire about "market dominant minorities," that six of the seven "oligarchs" who paid for Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election in return for the privilege of buying ex-Soviet properties at absurdly low prices (e.g., Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was put in charge of auctioning off Yukos Oil, which owns about 2% of the world's oil reserves -- he sold it for $159 million to ... himself) were Jewish. (Five Jewish on both sides of the family, one on one side). And that's in a country where the Jewish population is about one percent.

For some reason, the American media hadn't been very enthusiastic about publishing that highly interesting fact in the seven years following the 1996 Russian election. We all saw what happened to Gregg Easterbrook in 2003 over a triviality, so you can understand why the reticence about this gigantic story.

As I've said before in the context of exploring how Scooter Libby could serve as a mob lawyer for international gangster Marc Rich on and off for 15 years and then move immediately into the job of chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States, the problem is not that Jews are inherently worse behaved (or better behaved) than any other human group, but that they have achieved for themselves in America in recent years a collective immunity from anything resembling criticism. And being immune to criticism doesn't make human beings behave better.

Now, Warsh's website writes:

Gangsta-nomics

Clarifying the impact of Harvard University's Russia scandal and the Andrei Shleifer/Lawrence Summers affair on the economics profession (generally) and on Harvard (in particular) will take years. The outlines of one mechanism, however, already can be discerned. Tracing its workings through offers clues to what may be the controversy's ultimate resolution.

Just as opening the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes produced both great economic benefits (the North American Midwest could export grains, iron ore, machinery to the world on ocean-going ships) and some undesirable side effects as well (the introduction into the lake system of lamprey eels and zebra mussels), so sending a team of Harvard University experts to advise the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s improved markets in the former Soviet republic, but at the cost of importing to Harvard certain unattractive Russian folkways.

The most obvious of these is the tendency to view anti-Semitism as a powerful explanatory variable in the resignation of Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

Anti-Semitism was a puissant force at Harvard and most other American universities well into the 1950s, but has diminished dramatically in the past half-century, along with most other social concomitants of religious conviction/association. In Russia, it remains virulent. Harvard economic professor Shleifer, who grew up in Russia, often has been the victim of prejudice there. It has not harmed him in the US, nor his co-religionist Summers, especially in this instance.

Yet as Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam noted last week, Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz (law), Ruth Wisse (literature) and former lecturer Martin Peretz were quick to cite Summers' strong defense of Israel as a factor in what Dershowitz termed an "academic coup d'etat... by the die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." "The question I'm being asked," Wisse told Beam, (before praeteritio-otically dismissing it), "is, 'Was anti-Semitism the driving engine of the coup?'"

The traveler furthest down this road was Professor Edward Glaeser (economics), Shleifer's former pupil, long-standing friend and dogged defender, who told The Harvard Crimson that the act of circulating among the Harvard faculty an article in Institutional Investor by investigative reporter David McClintick was "a potent piece of hate creation -- not quite 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' but it's in that camp.""

So far-fetched was that comparison that Glaeser spent the week apologizing to all and sundry -- especially after an article in The New York Times acknowledged the generally high regard in which the McClintick article is held by asking rhetorically, in its headline, "Did an Exposé Help Sink Harvard's President?"

I vaguely suspect, judging from the title "Gangsta-nomics" that Warsh might be trying to hint at something beyond what he explicitly says: that pro-Semitism was a motivating factor among many of Summers's most prominent advocates and may have had something to do with the mainstream media's reluctance to touch the issue of Harvard's role in Russian corruption.

Steven Pinker, who has become much more objective about Jewish issues in this decade, is an honorable exception -- he was clearly outraged by the ludicrous controversy over Summers's statements about sex differences.

But sex differences between men and women just aren't a strongly motivating political factor for most people -- lesbians being the main exception. We almost all have loved ones of the opposite sex, so the corruption of feminist academics who rip off universities isn't all that motivating -- after all, if Larry Summers has to promise $50 million worth of gender preferences for women to make up for his faux pas, well, who knows, maybe your sister or wife or mom or daughter or daughter-in-law will get a job she doesn't really deserve under the Summers Reparations, so it's hard to get too worked up over it.

In contrast, ethno-racial politics are less likely to divide families into payees and payers the way gender preferences do, so they tend to elicit a lot more organized passion. Thus, many of Summers's most adamant defenders were most outraged not, like Pinker and myself, because he was getting railroaded for telling the truth about women and higher math, but because he told an arguable untruth about supporters of Harvard disinvesting in Israel -- that the movement is motivated by anti-Semitism. (In reality, many of the supporters of Harvard divesting investments in Israel are Jews themselves. Personally, I think Israel divestiture is a bad idea, but then I was against South African divestiture, too, and for the same reasons.)

Further, Warsh's elaborate analogy about zebra mussels coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway might not really be about American intellectual life being mildly tainted by the Russian Jewish rational tendency to blame anti-Semitism for their troubles, but about something much more serious: that American intellectual life might have been corrupted by the vast amounts of money the mostly Jewish Russian oligarchs had to toss around to American academics and public intellectuals.

We American intellectuals cannot be bought, but our affections can be rented for a lot less than, say, a second rate soccer player.

Jake Rudnitsky writes in the eXile about how cheaply American politicians can be bought:

American politicians prove that they can be bought for a song compared to their Russian counterparts, in spite of the fact that the US economy is about 5000 times larger.

While [Jack] Abramoff and his cohort Michael Scanlon have nothing to be ashamed of, thanks to their Abramovich-esque lavish spending habits, the amounts that the politicians were bought with are downright laughable. The highest netting congressman was Arizona's J.D. Hayworth, who came away with just $101,000 for his war chest: and now he's got to give it all back, meaning it was little more than an interest-free loan. More typical were the pols who netted somewhere in the mid-30s, including reps from NY, Michigan and Ohio. Now all that money - totaling about $4.5 million - is making its way to neutral charities. Bush, for example, picked the American Heart Association.

What else do they have to show for it? The memory of watching the Redskins or the Wizards endure another losing season from Abramoff's skyboxes? A few nice meals at one of his fancy-pants restaurants or, for DeLay, Abramoff's favorite, a weekend golf trip to Scotland? Golfing in Scotland! Can you imagine a Russian politician agreeing to so much as show up for a cup of coffee if the payoff is a *** golfing trip to a rain-soaked dump! It begs the question, what's the point of being corrupt if it doesn't make your life much better?

Compare, for a moment, Republicans' woeful attempt at abusing power with another corrupt politician currently in the headlines: Leonid Reiman, Russia's IT and telecommunications minister. The Wall Street Journal wrote him up about a week ago after they got an insider close to Reiman to admit that he's worth about a billion dollars.


If Duke Cunningham's the most corrupt politician in federal history (although I doubt it), think about how far you can get with public intellectuals for even less money!

A reader writes:


I will not be surprised if in fifty years historians judge Clinton/Summers/Harvard/Yeltsin/Oligarchs as a worse (more damaging) scandal than Bush/Oil/Texas/Enron.

I wonder when the Chinese will make their play in that market? Gotta do something with that trade imbalance.


Have you ever noticed that Beijing just plain deserves to own Taiwan?

Okay, that's a pretty lame argument, but I'm sure I could come up with more persuasive-sounding justifications than that for whatever Beijing wants ... but, I just don't feel motivated at the moment. Perhaps some motivation will show up in an envelope one of these days.


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

Why don't professional economists write sense about immigration?

A reader replies:

You keep asking why economists don't write more about immigration. As a PhD student let me give you a simple answer, that is really already contained in your own text:

Because it *is* trivial Econ 101 supply and demand. Sure, you can always try to quantify the effect, as your pal Borjas does.

But if you want to be a successful economist, you can't write about a topic where the theory is already developed and known. Which top journal is going to publish something about a topic that is basic supply and demand?

You are right in your characterization that economists do not do biodiversity because they don't understand genetics, no question about that. Most students here are shocked to learn that there is such a thing as say genetic differences between whites and Asians. Some are not hostile to accepting the idea, but if you have no intuition whatsoever about a topic, how are you going to do work with it? And of course I suspect journals are going to be very reluctant to accept work in this field, so obviously it will hurt your job market prospects in reputable schools.

But immigration is another story altogether. People don't do it simply because it is not a "hot" field theoretically, the causes and mechanism seems to already be well known. I kind of agree, any decent economist can tell you the mechanism behind immigration. I cannot see the room for great theoretical advances.

What knowledge that is needed to be disseminated in the public sphere and what gets rewarded in professional economics are two completely different things, the latter must not only be important, but also innovative. However the political correctness that makes research into biodiversity impossible is *not* the cause of the lack of research into immigration.

Since I am an immigrant (from [a Third World country] to [a European country], I already have some interest in the topic, and have considered writing about it. What is stopping me is not political correctness (which is what is stopping me from doing say race or IQ), but the lack on sophistication and consequently job market reward.

OK, so 90% of non-European immigrants in Sweden voted for the left in the last election (compared to 52% of the public). Easy to explain with simple theory.

OK, so less than half the immigrants from outside Europe and America have jobs in the welfare state. Trivial economics.

Nor do I want to be a Borjas type, just estimating the numbers for basic and already known theory, and in the process typecasting myself as another minority that only does work about minorities.

The only topic where I can see some room for advanced work is the political economy of immigration, why Europe and the US keep having immigration, even though it damages their respective societies, and is not supported by the majority of voters nor any strong special interest. I suspect that the cause is information asymmetries in politicians' intentions:

Voters don't want immigration, but they also have a strong aversion towards bigoted politicians (they want "nice" guys). Anyone can cheaply claim they are not racists and love all people, so just saying it is not enough. Supporting continued immigration is costly, but the cost is obviously higher for the bigoted bad guy than the nice liberal. So by not opposing immigration politicians credibly signal they are "compassionate," and in the end the only anti-immigration politicians that are left are the bigots. If voters are somewhat averse to immigration but very averse to racism they will vote for the good guys who support, even though they and the nice guys would both prefer to stop immigration.

The end result is a bad equilibrium where harmful policies are continued. One implication is also that referendums on immigration will be more anti-immigration than elections.

I might well write the paper above, but if I want to spend my time wisely immigration is not what I would concentrate on, when there is so much interesting work to be done in entrepreneurship, labour supply, political economics etc.

I hope this gives you some idea about the intellectual atmosphere that leads to so little work about immigration, even though the topic is important for the public. (I guess eventually some good rhetorician will quit academic economics and just write a simple version of what everyone knows for the public.)


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

Whole Foods Demographics

The one thing I've noticed about the shoppers at the organic foods supermarket chain is the huge preponderance of Former Hot Babes. But where are the Current Hot Babes shopping? Do they get invited out to dinners constantly and thus don't need to shop at supermarkets much at all? Do they live on celery, black coffee, and cigarettes? Or can't they afford to shop at Whole Foods because they haven't snagged an affluent husband yet?

A reader responds:

"Trader Joe's seems to have a decent number of Current Hot Babes."

I only shop at Trader Joe's on the rare occasions when I need to pick up some kind of gift food to bring to a party, like an exotic dessert. I guess Current Hot Babes get invited to a lot more parties than I do.

Another reader writes:

Whole Foods definitely markets to people over 35, typically in their 40s & 50s. It's for those who are established and want to show off their status, while trying to mask their snootiness with feel-good flimflam about returning to nature. They're like the people my Italian professor called "gli ex-sessantottini" -- the ex-'68ers.

Trader Joe's markets to younger people, mostly 20-somethings who are part of the iPod group. Their customers don't want to appear snooty, but they still wouldn't condescend to shop with the rubes, so they go to the "alternative" alternative grocery store. Whereas WF names their products to showcase their organicness, naturalness, and purity, TJ names their products to showcase how hip & clever they are (e.g., a fig bar called "this fig walks into a bar..."). Essentially, WF customers broadcast their moral superiority, while the young 'uns at TJ broadcast their hipness quotient superiority. Where the hip lead, Hot Babes are sure to follow.

Or vice-versa. If Hot Babes decided to hang out in working coal mines, coal mines would be hip.


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

March 18, 2006

The New Scientist on Cochranism


Editorial: Are we still evolving?
11 March 2006

Questions about the evolution of modern humans must rank among the most intriguing in all science - new insights are coming thick and fast

QUESTIONS about the evolution of modern humans must rank among the most intriguing in all science. Are we still evolving? If we are, what subtle pressures are changing us? In which direction are they pushing us and what will we be like in, say, 1000 years?

Fascinating as these questions are, they are also controversial, and the answers are likely to offend sensitivities over such things as the relationship between genes and intelligence, or genes and "race". Equally, negative memories of eugenics are never far away.

Oddly enough, negative memories of the tens of millions slaughtered by egalitarian ideologies are always far away.

In the face of such fraught political questions, some biologists would prefer to believe that our evolution more or less stopped before the emergence of modern humans some 50,000 years ago. That position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain (see "And us"),

Are we still evolving?
11 March 2006 Kate Douglas Magazine

Some say no, but others believe the process is moving faster than ever - so which is it, asks New Scientist

"ARE humans still evolving? In the vernacular sense of improving morally and intellectually - by cultural changes - I think so," says Steven Pinker. "In the biological sense of changes in the gene pool, it's impossible to say." If pressed to come off the fence, however, the Harvard-based evolutionary biologist [actually, Pinker calls himself a [cognitive scientist"] knows where he stands. "People, including me, would rather believe that significant human biological evolution stopped between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, before the races diverged, which would ensure that racial and ethnic groups are biologically equivalent," he says.

It's an understandable position given the political implications of being wrong. And in one important sense Pinker is absolutely spot on: it's very difficult, if not impossible, to observe human evolution in action. But saying it isn't happening is an increasingly difficult position to defend scientifically. Recent discoveries show that we must reject the idea that human evolution stopped dead 50,000 ...


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

Surprise! The Law of Supply and Demand applies to immigration!

Here's the abstract of a new paper by economist George J. Borjas:

Immigration in High-Skill Labor Markets: The Impact of Foreign Students on the Earnings of Doctorates

The rapid growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities has transformed the higher education system, particularly at the graduate level. Many of these newly minted doctorates remain in the United States after receiving their doctoral degrees, so that the foreign student influx can have a significant impact in the labor market for high-skill workers. Using data drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, the study shows that a foreign student influx into a particular doctoral field at a particular time had a significant and adverse effect on the earnings of doctorates in that field who graduated at roughly the same time. A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent. About half of this adverse wage effect can be attributed to the increased prevalence of low-pay postdoctoral appointments in fields that have softer labor market conditions because of large-scale immigration.

It's amazing how few economists will admit that in public. The really funny thing is that Borjas has ridden this one basic Econ 101 idea all the way to an endowed chair at the Kennedy School at Harvard, in part because he has so little competition from other economists, the vast majority of whom want to pretend that, for mysterious reasons, the law of Supply and Demand doesn't apply to anything having to do with immigration. This is a fascinating example of market failure, and some economist should do a paper on why most economists are so reluctant to cash in on this massively important topic of immigration.

For a representative quote from the economic mainstream, Bryan Caplan of George Mason U. writes on his Econlog:

In "Educated Preferences: Explaining Attitudes Toward Immigration In Europe," Hainmueller and Hiscox confirm what I've been telling economists for years: Low-skilled workers are more opposed to immigration because they are less economically literate, not because they selfishly calculate that immigration is especially bad for their pocketbooks:

[P]eople with higher levels of education and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question. Across Europe, higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants. These relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force (i.e., those competing for jobs) and those not in the labor force.

As a professor, I work in one of the few labor markets that is almost totally open to foreign competition. How often do you think I've heard an American professor grumble that foreign Ph.D.s "Are taking our jobs!"? Try never.

In the Comments to this posting, various grad students say, "Yeah, sure, a professor would say that, wouldn't he?" One of many writes:

"Adding to the echo chamber, of course currently tenured professors aren't going to complain about it. That's like pointing out that undergraduates currently at Harvard aren't that exercised about Harvard's use of affirmative action."

In general, natives who have jobs requiring them to be highly skilled in their native language don't much fear that poor foreigners who don't speak their language are going to drive down their salaries. In contrast, natives who are better at working with their hands than at working with words rationally fear competition from immigrants who speak other languages. Unfortunately, almost all the published discourse is of course written by natives who are skilled with words, and thus have little to fear from foreigners.


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

Upcoming conference at the American Enterprise Institute on abortion and crime

Abortion Legalization and Crime Rates: Is There a Relationship?


Start: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 1:00 PM
End: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 5:00 PM

Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

In 2001, John Donohue of Yale University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago published a paper entitled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” in which they argued that legalized abortion in the 1970s significantly contributed to decreased crime in America during the 1990s. The article sparked a fierce controversy which has yet to abate. The controversy further captured public attention when Levitt featured the argument in his bestselling book, Freakonomics. In this AEI event, nearly every economist who has studied whether there is a link between abortion and crime will weigh in on the available empirical evidence, including Professor Donohue and his leading critics. Is there a link between legalized abortion and crime rates? If so, in which direction is it?


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

March 17, 2006

More on genealogical DNA testing

The point I wanted to make about paying for DNA testing to understand the racial admixture in your genealogy is that at present it's mostly useful for, say, African-American intellectuals like Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, who discovered he was about half white. Most white Americans, on the other hand, are over 95% white, and thus their nonwhite proportions are down in the margin of error for the test. For example, if the test reports that you are 98% Caucasian and 2% American Indian then you can be assured of, well, not much. You might have had a few Indian ancestors, or that might be an error caused by Siberian genes migrating into Europe, or who knows what else. So, the reason that racial admixture tests tend to be not very exciting for white Americans is because, in contrast to what we're constantly being lectured, white Americans aren't very admixed at all.

However, the tests are quite good at looking at large sample sizes of peoples. So, if they say that white Americans are x% American Indian on the whole, then that's pretty reliable.


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

"Pedigree collapse" due to inbreeding

"Pedigree collapse" due to inbreeding -- Genealogists use the term "pedigree collapse" (coined by Robert C. Gunderson) to signify the phenomenon that if you go back enough generations in your family tree, the number of unique individuals is less than the number of slots due to inbreeding so ancestors end up doing double duty as redundant forebears. The number of unique individuals per generation in your family tree forms roughly a diamond shape, expanding for a number of generations into the past, then collapsing the farther back you go.

The term "pedigree collapse" almost never ever comes up in discussions of race because American intellectuals don't grasp that race should be thought about in genealogical terms, but it's useful for understanding how racial groups are formed and fade away.

If you go back to ancestors alive 4,000 years ago, say, George W. Bush might indeed by descended by 1 path from n!Xao, a Bushman in the Kalahari, but he'd also be descended from Owen, a farmer in Essex, by 800,000,000 different paths. Add them all up and it's reasonable to say that George W. Bush is a lot more British than Bushman. Nobody actually doubts that, but when people like Steve Olson start talking about genealogy, they quickly get bogged down in essentially symbolic thinking, in which having one ancestor from ethnic group X is somehow just as important as having many millions from ethnic group Y.

Here's an interesting description of pedigree collapse from John Becker:

We all are blessed with two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on. If the average generation is twenty-five years, in 1200 years (back to 800 AD, the time of Charlemagne) each person has 281.5 trillion grandparents. That's the way geometric progressions work. The number of grandparents doubles every 25 years and in 12OO years or 48 generations, 281.5 trillion names would be on your pedigree.

But hold on, you say! In 800 AD there were not that many people on the whole planet. How could I - or any person - have that many grandparents? The answer is that while you must have this number of grandparents, given the imperatives of human procreation, they are not all different people. Some names on your pedigree appear twice, three times or even hundreds of times in the 1200 years.

Cousins have married and, if they were first cousins, their offspring will have only six great grandparents rather than the normal eight. Those offspring will have pedigrees which have "collapsed" from 8 to 6 or 25% in the 4th generation back. That 25 % collapse will be present in each and every one of the 44 generations back to 800 AD. The same phenomenom occurs when 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins marry although the percentage ‘collapse’ is not as dramatic. A dramatic collapse occurs when siblings marry as was the norm for Egyptian pharaohs and Inca kings. In those cases there is a 50% collapse (from 4 to 2) at the 3rd generation, the grandparents...

- King Alfonso XIII of Spain (1886-1941) had only eight different people as his great great grandparents rather than the normal sixteen, a 50% collapse of his pedigree at the 5th generation. [Cecil Adams says 10, not 8 unique gg grandparents.]

- Prince Charles' pedigree has been examined by Gunderson who found that 17 generations back when Charles should have had 65,536 progenitors, he only had about 23,000, a collapse to 35 % of the theoretical.

- A great deal is known about the family histories of the Amish who came to North America from Switzerland in the 18th century. It is estimated for one family about whom a very complete genealogy has been compiled that 21.5 % of 627 marriages in this family were between 2nd cousins or closer.

- Mr. K. W. Wachtel, a demographer cited by Shoumatoff, built a probability model for a child born in England in 1947. Around the time of King John who reigned from 1199 AD to 1216 AD, this 1947 child would have about two million grandparents in the same generation. This represents about 37% of the progenitors required 30 generations back. This is the first type of pedigree ‘collapse’ that occurs. The child would be descendant from 80% of all the people in England at that time.

- But now a ‘collapse’ in the absolute number of progenitors starts to occur for this 1947 child. The actual number of different grandparents would start to decrease at this point - 30 generations back. Theoretically the further one goes back from this point the smaller the number of different grandparents there would be until one reached one's theoretical ‘Adam and Eve’. Put in graphical terms and viewing the child's pedigree from the bottom (now) to the top (early), the number of names creates a diamond with one person at the bottom in 1947, two million people in the generation 700 years earlier and then an ever-decreasing number dwindling to the original ‘Adam and Eve’, say, several thousands of years before that at the very top of the chart.

Alex Shoumatoff''s 1985 book A Mountain of Names introduced Gunderson's concept of pedigree collapse to a broader public. Shoumatoff quotes prominent anthropologist Robin Fox (co-author with the similarly animalistically-named anthropologist Lionel Tiger):

"If we could only get into God's memory, we would find that eighty per cent of the world's marriages have been with at least second cousins," the British social theorist Robin Fox told me recently. "In a population of between three and five hundred people, after six generations or so there are only third cousins or closer to marry. During most of human history, people have lived in small, isolated communities of about that size, and have in fact probably been closer to the genetic equivalent of first cousins, because of their multiple consanguinity. In nineteenth-century rural England, for instance, the radius of the average isolate, or pool of potential spouses, was about five miles, which was the distance a man could comfortably walk twice on his day off, when he went courting- his roaming area by daylight. Parish registers bear this out. Then the bicycle extended the radius to twentyfive miles. This was a big shakeup." Even in today's much more mobile English society-according to an estimate in Fox's book "Kinship and Marriage"-the average isolate for any given individual, which is "to some extent determined by the previous marriage choices of his ancestral consanguines," varies from about nine hundred people to just over two thousand.

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

March 16, 2006

Another student request

I believe that children are our future Department, International Edition:

hi, Steve Sailer, we are Sosa & Yasoura If you are a sailer or a fisherman please we need help from you we are bahrani students & we are doing an english project about the sea, so if you have information & pictures about the sea or about fishing please send them, if you can also, we want to make an interview with you about you sea life please answer quickly


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

The good and bad of population genetics in Slate

The Good: John Hawks on DNA genealogy tests

The Bad: Science journalist Steve Olson on "Why We're All Jesus' Children: Go back a few millenniums, and we've all got the same ancestors." The quality of Olson's thinking can be guessed from his decision to aim his article at fans of The Da Vinci Code.

I reviewed Olson's National Book Award-nominated Mapping Human History, a popularization of the work of population geneticists like L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, on VDARE.com:

In his book, Olson stops every few pages to tell you that there are no races that have been absolutely isolated genetically since the beginning of time because—you will be shocked, shocked to learn this—humans have been known to outbreed. (The reality of course is that for any human racial group, the inbreeding glass is both part empty and part full.) This makes Mapping Human History rather like a geology book that repeatedly admonishes the reader that the Earth is not flat...

Another curious feature that Olson's book shares with many other contemporary writings about population genetics is the author's apparent longing for the abolition of his own subject matter via universal random interbreeding. Although animal and plant biodiversity is routinely celebrated as a supreme good, the conclusions of books on human biodiversity tend to treat it as a temporary evil that will soon be gone, and good riddance to it. It's as if that geology textbook ended with an ode to the blessed day when the Earth will plunge into the Sun, thus happily eliminating the need for a science of geology.

Olson's new article is about his theory that everybody alive today is descended from everybody who ever lived who has descendents alive today. Okay, maybe, but the more functionally important question is where most of your ancestors came from. And for that, you need to think about the degree of inbreeding, which Olson refuses to mention explicitly.

He writes:

Imagine that you could identify all of your great-great-great-great- … grandparents 20 generations back—from about the time Columbus stepped ashore in the New World. (You would never be able to, of course, because no paper records connect you to virtually any of those people, but pretend that God handed you a perfect genealogical record.) Assuming typical human mating patterns, your direct ancestors 20 generations ago consisted of somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 different people. Taking the lower figure, perhaps 480,000 of the ancestors of the average African-American were living in Africa in the year 1492, and approximately 120,000 were living in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. For the average European-American, more than a half-million ancestors were living in Europe, with the rest scattered through Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Let's do the math. Ten generations back (about 250 years at 25 years per generation), your family tree has 1,024 open slots for ancestors (2 to the 10th power). Twenty generations back (500 years), your family tree has 1024 times 1024 or 1,048,576 or one meg of open slots.

Olson claims, " your direct ancestors 20 generations ago consisted of somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 different people," but the higher end figure is obviously absurd. Your ancestors would have had to have been for each of the last 20 generations as outbreeding as Tiger Wood's immediate ancestors for virtually all the 1,048,576 slots in your family tree to be filled by different individuals. Olson's lower bound of 600,000 also seems absurdly high too.

Thirty generations ago, your family tree had one gig of open slots. Let's round these down from now on. So 40 generations or back around 1000 AD, you had one trillion open slots.

You can see where this is going. Back in about the year 1 AD, eighty generations ago, you had roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 openings for ancestors. There weren't quite that many people alive back then, so the inbreeding coefficient (one minus the number of unique individuals in your family tree at that point divided by the number of slots to be filled) mathematically had to be over 99.99%.

So, inbreeding matters.

Now, it's theoretically possible that in your family tree just 120 generations ago, like Olson claimed, you number ever single living person in 1000 BC who has living descendents today. I doubt that's true -- there was just too much isolation of Andaman Islanders, Tasmanians, Tierra del Fuegans, New Guinea Highlanders, and so forth. But, overall, even if it were true, it's just a talking point. What counts is the distribution of genes, and those are driven by inbreeding.

And, as I've been pointing out for years, inbreeding is what turns an extended family into a racial group: a racial group is a partly inbred extended family.


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

"Thank You for Smoking"

opens in selected cities on Friday. From my review in the upcoming April 10th issue of The American Conservative (subscribe here):

As the average American ages, public interest in music and film declines while the obsession with politics grows. Baby boomers, who spent the 1960s arguing over the Beatles v. the Stones and then the 1970s debating De Niro v. Pacino, now call in to talk radio to harangue about Republicans v. Democrats.

Hollywood was slow to catch on, but since "Fahrenheit 9/11" it's been pushing leftwing agitprop like "Syriana." While plenty of money could be made with rightwing movies, the box office slump will have to get a lot deeper before Hollywood will stoop so low as to appeal to the 51% of the public that voted the wrong way in 2004.

In the meantime, fortunately, there's the witty centrist satire "Thank You for Smoking." It's a reasonably faithful adaptation of the 1994 novel by Christopher Buckley (son of William F.) about the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry, the "yuppie Mephistopheles" Nick Naylor. Produced by David O. Sacks, a research fellow at the libertarian-conservative Independent Institute, the film's plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward cigarette companies and their killjoy enemies probably won't make it a huge hit, but it's smart and entertaining, although more amusing than hilarious.


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

March 15, 2006

The Official Bad Guy of the Balkans is dead

In the fifth year of his trial for being "The Face of Evil" (as Newsweek declared him while we were bombing his country back to the industrial stone age in 1999), Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic died of a heart attack in custody in the Netherlands. Traces of another drug that would counteract his blood pressure medicine were found in his body, raising the possibility of suicide, murder, malpractice, or a complicated attempt to get himself to Russia by making his medical care look bad.

Demonizing Milosevic as the cause of all the carnage in the Balkans was a lot more enjoyable for all concerned than actually thinking hard about what caused the decade of troubles. Milosevic was a bad guy, but he was a symptom, not a cause of the circumstances. History has been falsely rewritten to turn him into the dynamic instigator of disaster in the mode of Hitler. As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2000:

In a lifetime of being boggled by the American press, I don't believe I've ever seen anything as baffling as their rote insistence that the last ten years of war in the Balkans were caused by "dictatorship," for which the solutions were "democracy" and "multiculturalism."

Folks, democracy is what caused the mess. Multiculturalism works fine ... under a real dictator, like Tito. He had multiethnic Yugoslavia locked down tight, nice and peaceful. But when the inhabitants got more say in their lives, they started killing each other. They wanted democracy. But they knew that to have it, they needed mono-ethnic states.

When the old multiethnic Yugoslavia cracked up, the rest of the world recognized the phony borders that Tito had concocted to minimize the size of the Serbian administrative unit within his empire. This left large numbers of Serbs living outside Serbia, where they were exposed to their historic enemies. The great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained it all in The Times of London in 1997:


The bloody Yugoslav tragedy has unfolded before our eyes (and is it over yet?) To be sure, blame for it lies with the Communist coterie of Josip Broz Tito, which imposed an arbitrary pattern of internal borders upon the country, trampling on ethnic common sense, and even relocating ethnic masses by force. Yet blame lies also with the venerable community of Western leaders, who -- with an angelic naiveté -- took those false borders seriously, and then hastened at a moment's notice, in a day or two, to recognize the independence of several breakaway republics whose political formation they apparently found to be advantageous. It was these leaders, then, who nudged Yugoslavia toward many grueling years of civil war; and their position, declared as neutral, was by no means such.

Yugoslavia, with its seven estranged peoples, was told to fall apart as soon as possible. But Bosnia, with its three estranged peoples and vivid memories of Hitlerite Croatians slaughtering up to a million Serbs, had to remain united at all costs - the particular insistence of the United States Government. Who can explain the disparity of such an approach?


... Democracy also needs a "settled distribution of property." Britain's modern parliamentary system dates from the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This permanently confirmed Henry VIII's theft of the Catholic Church's properties, thus ending 150 years of turmoil. But everyone in the Balkans is convinced that somebody from another ethnic group stole valuable land from his father or grandfather or great-great-great-grandfather. These suspicions are usually accurate. (Of course, everybody conveniently forgets that the land he lives on was usually stolen from somebody else too.)

All this was well understood in the West during the century between the Glorious Revolution and the framing of the American Constitution. But it's been forgotten since, because we don't need to worry much about who owns what anymore. You don't have to worry that your house will be handed back to the descendents of the Indians who used to camp there. Your property is secure because the white race decided to steal the vast majority of the land from the red race, and then not worry about it much anymore.

That's why our leaders and media couldn't understand what was clear to the peoples of the Balkans: Tito's bogus borders left only two alternatives - redraw the borders or ethnically cleanse them.

Instead, we just decided that the Serbs were Evil. So, we had years of carnage in Bosnia until they finally ended up with a de facto three-way partition anyway. Franco Tudjman solved the problem in Croatia by ethnically cleansing all the Serbs. Kosovo was and remains a fiasco.

The good news is that, in the northern Balkans, we now are closer to normal (i.e. ethnically-homogenous) nation-states. Slovenia is a nice little European country. Croatia is calming down now that the Serbs are gone. They've at least stopped killing each other in Bosnia now that they have borders of sorts.


Also in 2000, I explained in Toronto's National Post how the NATO powers could have avoided all the bloodshed and expense of the Kosovo War for about $5 billion in buyouts.

But, nobody cares. It's just so much more satisfying to decide somebody is the bad guy and bomb them than to try to resolve problems peacefully.

A reader responds:


Your Kosovo recollections reminded me of this documentary on PBS that aired last year. It was surreal. They followed this Albanian-American (?) Businessman around as he raised money and bought weapons for the KLA. I kept thinking he'd have the FBI & ATF knocking on his door the next morning after it aired, but the documentary said it was all legal.

What I found unnerving was he alluded to fighting NATO troops, which I assume contain US troops.

His beef was that he wanted to see Kosovo re-united with Albania, and those pesky KFOR troops kept spoiling the fun.


Yes, but he wasn't The Face of Evil, so nobody cares.


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

Will the Senate set off another illegal immigrant baby boom?

The Senate is debating immigration. One of the biggest dangers is that any kind of quasi-amnesty for illegal immigrants will set off a baby boom among its beneficiaries like the one launched by the 1986 amnesty, which did grievous damage to the California school system, which had tremendous difficulty digesting this pig in the python bulge in births to amnestied illegals. Of course, the chance that anyone will actually mention this danger to the Senators is remote -- the whole topic is too politically incorrect to even think about.

Laura E. Hill and Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California wrote:

“Between 1987 and 1991, total fertility rates for foreign-born Hispanics [in California] increased from 3.2 to 4.4 [expected babies per woman over her lifetime]. This dramatic rise was the primary force behind the overall increase in the state’s total fertility rate during this period. Were it not for the large increase in fertility among Hispanic immigrants, fertility rates in California would have increased very little between 1987 and 1991.

“Why did total fertility rates increase so dramatically for Hispanic immigrants? First, the composition of the Hispanic immigrant population in California changed as a result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. In California alone, 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants applied for amnesty (legal immigrant status) under this act. The vast majority were young men, and many were agricultural workers who settled permanently in the United States. Previous research indicates that many of those granted amnesty were joined later by spouses and relatives in the United States... As a result, many young adult Hispanic women came to California during the late 1980s. We also know that unauthorized immigrants tend to have less education than other immigrants and that they are more likely to come from rural areas. Both characteristics are associated with high levels of fertility. As a result, changes in the composition of the Hispanic immigration population probably increased fertility rates.

“Another possible reason for the sudden increase in fertility rates for Hispanic immigrants is also related to IRCA. Because many of those granted amnesty and their spouses had been apart for some time, their reunion in California prompted a “catch-up” effect in the timing of births...”


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

March 14, 2006

"The New Adventures of Old Christine:""The New Adventures of Old Christine"

A reader writes about the new sitcom starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, who was Elaine on "Seinfeld." Her father, by the way, is billionaire businessman Gérard (William) Louis-Dreyfus. Forbes estimates the family's net worth at $2.9 billion.

The premise is she is divorced and her husband’s new girlfriend is also named “Christine”.

The show comes off as a kind of liberal rich actress trying to reconcile her liberal views (which make her a good person) with the way she lives her life. In the pilot she is sending her young son to a private school and clearly feels conflicted. She tells her son that he shouldn’t think he is better than anyone. He responds by asking if he is better than “murderers”. She responds that yes he is better than murderers but no one else. Then he asks if he is better than “racists” and she has to admit that, yes he is better than racists. I think there is an implication of a moral pecking order here.

We next see them driving to school in a tiny hybrid (I assume) auto and the kid notes that all his classmates are in huge SUVs. He asks why everyone else has such a large car and Christine responds something to the effect of “they don’t believe in themselves”.

When the enter the classroom it looks like Hitler youth. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is the only brunette in sight. The kid asks, innocently, “where are all the black kids?” His mom responds that they had one in the brochure. Earlier in the show she reveals that he was accepted to the highly competitive school by claiming to be 1/16 Cherokee.

She displays a mild guilt throughout the show. The way I read this is that these people ... rationalize sending their kids to private schools, away from minority students by claiming they were somehow tricked and anyway they aren’t as “white” as most of the people in the school and they are still good people because they rate racists a step above murderers and care about the environment and show it by driving a consciously small car.


One of the striking anomalies of modern American life is the degree to which very wealthy Jews (even members of the Forbes 400 overclass) still feel oppressed by the supposed dominance of the old WASP upper class, even though fellow Jews typically make up at least a plurality of the ultra-elite circles in which they move.

I'm also dubious about the ubiquitous term "guilt." If a Julia Louis-Dreyfuss character, with her fabulous head of hair, is the only brunette in sight in a private school classroom full of blondes, then her vocal solicitude for the blacks excluded from the school probably doesn't have much to do with blacks per se, or her own sense of guilt, as with using blacks as props in her struggle for social one-upsmanship over the blondes. A lot of black anti-Semitism is motivated by their sense that Jewish expressions of racial liberalism have more to do with intra-white ethnic gamesmanship than with blacks.

On Gideon's Blog, Noah writes:


And the rabbi gave an interesting sermon apropos of Purim (which starts tonight). He compared the position of the Jewish community in America today with Queen Esther's position in King Ahashuerus's Persia: that is to say, a position of power or, more precisely, profound influence on those who wield power. And, he said, that power implies responsibility - specifically, the responsibility to use it to prevent grave wrong (as Esther did in acting to prevent the genocide of the Jews). He went on to urge the congregants to write letters to Congress to press for stronger action on the situation in Darfur.

Now, this is not an argument I've heard very often. Usually, when I hear a Jewish exhortation to the flock to do something about this or that injustice, and to be especially sure to take such action because you (the hearer) are Jewish, the reasoning takes one of three forms. Either (1) we Jews have suffered, so we should be acutely sensitive to others' suffering, and not accept the excuses of those who either perpetrate or ignore that suffering; or (2) as God liberated the Jews from captivity in Egypt, and as we are enjoined to imitate God in His striving for justice, we have a religious obligation as Jews to help the oppressed; or (3) Jews should be aware of our collective vulnerability, historical and continuing, and therefore for our own good always take the other side of the kinds of groups, movements and individuals who have victimized us in the past, and who could threaten us again in the future. Nothing wrong with any of these arguments. But you (or at least I) rarely hear a Jewish leader saying, in so many words, that Jews must act to prevent this or that injustice because we are powerful, and power implies responsibility.


That with power comes responsibility was apparent to Stan Lee (originally Stan Lieber, writer of Spiderman), but the notion that American Jews are now pretty powerful is usually dismissed today as an anti-Semitic canard.

I'm a huge fan of enlightened self-interest, so I'm worried that Jews, who need a realistic understanding of their own situation, are not getting an accurate picture due to the fear imposed on the media of having your livelihood ruined for one frank remark. Think of how Gregg Easterbrook, of all people, was fired from his ESPN football commentary job by Michael Eisner in 2003,for mentioning the moral responsibilities of Jewish movie studio executives in his blog on The New Republic, which is owned by that notorious anti-Semite Martin Peretz. And note how little protest Easterbrook's firing engendered.

In the long run, it not good for the Jews to be the one group immune from criticism.

By the way, totally changing the subject, speaking of former cast-members of Seinfeld trying to make it with new sit-coms, isn't it about time for the television industry to stop trying to figure out a new sophisticated "Seinfeld"-like vehicle to star Michael Richard, who as Kramer was perhaps the funniest supporting character in television history, and make this slapstick expert the star of a show for children?


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

Hollywood Heffalumps

Below I quoted from Annie "Brokeback Mountain" Proulx's diatribe against Academy Award voters for choosing " Trash - excuse me - Crash" over her ineffably wonderful gay cowboy movie. The most puzzling aspect of her rant was her twice referring to members of the Academy as "heffalumps." Quite a few readers have written in to explain the reference:

- I think “heffalump” is what they called the elephant in Winnie the Pooh. I suspect it is a cute way of accusing the academy voters of being Republicans…perhaps the ultimate insult in Hollywood.

- Heffalump=elephant=Republican. Thus she accuses the voters of being right-wing.

- Perhaps I'm remembering wrong because I wasn't paying close attention, but first Brokeback Mountain was the bold movie that would make the conservative USA confront its stereotypes about gays. Apparently Ms. Prolix believes the movie has completed its mission and now the motion picture industry is out of step with the new gay-tolerant, post-Brokeback USA.

- PS. Note her dismissive talk about films about “runaway slaves”. Sure sounds like racism to me……


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

"Bareback Mounting:" It's the gift that just keeps on giving ...

I'd deleted most of my Oscar postings below because, cinematically speaking, 2005 is, like, over, but the partisans of "Brokeback Mountain" just won't let it go. Now, E. Annie Proulx, author of the slash fiction short story the movie was based on, has penned this hilariously obtuse and envious rant in The Guardian:


The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before... We should have known conservative heffalump [huh?] academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.


This woman really, really likes being on the winning team when it comes to awards, and hates losing them. She reminds me of Hank Hill's ultra competitive egomaniacal wife Peggy on the "King of the Hill" show. Dennis Dale can only shake his head at Untethered:


It seems there’s no gay element in Hollywood whatsoever; in fact, all the homosexuals are out riding the range, muttering sweet nothings in one another’s ears with husky John Wayne baritones. Those flamboyant creative types all over the film industry? Secret NASCAR fans ...

The author is shocked, shocked that studios engage in lobbying. How dare they throw themselves before our media stampede? Having just proclaimed the issue of race and segregation passé before the exigency of seventies era closeted cowboys, she still sees fit to chide the stuffy academy for its gated segregation, and sees no bigotry in declaring them a bunch of old farts. Age? Everyone gets old. Where’s the cache in that? So fire away, and heads up you wrinkly old coots.

But oh, that "yeasty ferment." As I reflect that this is a wealthy and respected author and I have to get up in the morning to go to a regular job, I'm relieved there are no guns or sturdy rope in the house.


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

An Evil Twin defense for Claude Allen?

The President's former domestic policy adviser, who resigned because of charges of retail fraud, has an identical twin with a long record of legal trouble named Floyd. The NYT reports:


People close to [Claude Allen] said they were stunned at the charges. Friends described him as the "goody-two-shoes" of his family who never drank at fraternity parties and went out for ice cream instead. His identical twin, Floyd, a former football player at the Virginia Military Institute, never matched his brother's achievements.


If only their parents had named them Claude and Flawed ...


"It's just the darnedest thing," Renee Allen, their stepmother, said from her retirement home in Atlanta. "I actually started to call Floyd to ask him what happened, but then I saw it wasn't him."

Through his lawyer, Mr. Allen denied the charges, saying there was a mix-up concerning his credit card. Maryland authorities charged Mr. Allen, 45, last Thursday with trying at least 25 times over the last five months to return and collect refunds for goods he never purchased, including a home theater system, clothes and items worth as little as $2.50...

Like others who know him, his stepmother cannot understand the turn of events. "I simply have no idea where things could have gone wrong in his life," Mrs. Allen said.

Floyd was the twin who "kept running into bad times," while Claude Allen intervened repeatedly to help him, she said.

In 2001, Floyd Allen declared bankruptcy in Virginia; a year earlier he was ordered to pay $6,450 in a civil suit brought against him by a travel company, according to state and federal records.


The evidence against Claude Allen is apparently mostly security camera videotapes of him picking up items off the shelf that are the same as the ones he had bought previously and lugging them over to the Returns counter and getting a refund. If I was his lawyer, I'd ask the witnesses, "Can you be sure the man in the videotape is not Claude Allen's evil twin?" Or, if I had established that they were fans of "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey," I'd ask, "Can you be sure the man in the videotape is not Claude Allen's evil android twin from the future?"


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

New Book by Arthur Jensen Coming

Clocking the Mind : Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences, by Arthur R. Jensen - $96.95 - This item has not yet been released (June 14, 2006 appears to be the release date).


Mental Chronometry (MC) comprises a variety of techniques for measuring the speed with which the brain processes information.

First developed in mid-1800, MC was subsequently eclipsed by more complex and practically useful types of psychometric tests stemming from Alfred Binet. This class of mental tests, however, has no true metric relating the test scores to any specific properties of the brain per se. The scores merely represent an ordinal scale, only ranking individuals according to their overall performance on a variety of complex mental tasks. The resulting scores represent no more than ranks rather than being a true metrical scale of any specific dimension of brain function. Such an ordinal scale, which merely ranks individuals in some defined population, possesses no true scale properties, possessing neither a true zero or equal intervals throughout the scale. This deficiency obstructs the development of a true natural science of mental ability. The present burgeoning interest in understanding individual differences in mental abilities in terms of the natural sciences, biology and the brain sciences in particular, demands direct measures that functionally link brain and behavior. One such natural ratio scale is time itself - the time it takes the brain to perform some elementary cognitive task, measured in milliseconds.

After more than 25 years researching MC, Jensen here presents results on an absolute scale showing times for intake of visual and auditory information, for accessing short-term and long-term memory, and other cognitive skills, as a function of age, at yearly intervals from 3 to 80 years. The possible uses of MC in neurological diagnosis and the monitoring of drug effects on cognition, the chronometric study of special time-sensitive talents such as musical performance, and presents a theory of general intelligence, or g, as a function of the rate of oscillation of neural action potentials as measured by chronometric methods. Finally, Jensen urges the world-wide standardization of chronometric methods as necessary for advancing MC as a crucial branch of biopsychological science.


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