April 11, 2006

This should be fun

The Chicago Tribune reports:


Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit: Defamation allegation targets U. of C. author

A scholar known for his work on guns and crime filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the best-seller "Freakonomics."

John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U. of C. visiting professor, alleges that Levitt defamed him in the book by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime. Publishers Weekly ranked "Freakonomics" eighth this week for non-fiction hardcover books.

According to Levitt's book: "When other scholars have tried to replicate [Lott's] results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

But according to Lott's lawsuit: "In fact, every time that an economist or other researcher has replicated Lott's research, he or she has confirmed Lott's conclusion."

By suggesting that Lott's results could not be replicated, Levitt is "alleging that Lott falsified his results," the lawsuit says.

Lott is seeking a court order to block further sales of "Freakonomics" until the offending statements are retracted and changed. He is also seeking unspecified money damages.

Lott acknowledged in the suit that some scholars have disagreed with his conclusions. But he said those researchers used "different data or methods to analyze the relationship between gun-control laws and crime" and made no attempt to "replicate" Lott's work.


I don't believe I've ever offered a public opinion on the more guns, less crime controversy. These things are complicated. Logically, it could go either way. Certainly, there are fewer home invasions in America than in England because American home-owners are so much better armed. On the other hand, having lots of guns around means that some disputes that would merely be assault and battery in England turn into homicides here.

What I have found out from talking to economists in recent years is that the profession is a lot less based on what-you-know than you might expect, and a lot more driven by who-you-know. Although he definitely has his detractors within the profession, Levitt is extremely well connected and thus lots of lower-ranking economists are afraid to call him on his empirical and ethical lapses for fear that Levitt will have his revenge on their careers.


In his hugely successful attempt to turn himself into a brand name celebrity (see him on ABC's 20/20 tonight!), Levitt has managed to turn his legalizing-abortion-cut-crime theory into conventional wisdom in the mass media, even though the great majority of social scientists who have studied the question in intense detail don't find he has come close to meeting the burden of proof. The recent seminar at the American Enterprise Institute brought up many of the empirical problems with the theory, all of which Levitt forgot to mention in Freakonomics. Instead, Levitt implied that his critics were only motivated by moralistic objections. For a brief summary of the empirical failings of the theory, see here.


To turn yourself from scholar to careerist to celebrity, you need to divest yourself of the values of the scholar and put on the values of the celebrity -- you must tell people what they want to hear. For example, consider the Bill Bennett Brouhaha of last fall, when Bennett offered a reductio ad absurdum against abortion based on the 2001 Levitt-Donohue paper's argument that the greater effect of legal abortion on blacks, who have a higher crime rate, should have reduced crime. When attacked, Bennett pointed out, quite right, that the argument was an inherent part of the popular, widely-celebrated Levitt-Donohue theory. In response, Levitt tried to mislead the press into believing that he had not brought race into his theory. This was even though Levitt and Donohue had written in 2001:


"Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent. In other words, taking into account differential abortion rates by race raises the predicted impact of abortion legalization on homicide from 5.4 percent to 8.9 percent."


But that kind of eugenic-sounding argument is not what Levitt's public wanted to hear in 2005, so he weasled out of telling the press the truth about the Levitt-Donohue theory during the Bennett Brouhaha, and left Bennett to twist in the wind while sidestepping his personal responsibility.


Levitt's tenure as a NYT columnist has been an ethical travesty. For example, Levitt grandiosely promoted his former assistant's "Job Market Paper" as "an empirical argument that may fundamentally challenge how people think about sex" without disclosing to readers either his relationship with his former aide or that that the kid's finding wasn't statistically significant.

Thus, I was pleased to see that Levitt has been replaced as a New York Times columnist by economist-aesthete Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution. Tyler is an altogether more admirable person than Levitt. Tyler's basic shtick is to ask "Why is X true?" Then he proposes a number of clever explanations, tells you which one is his favorite, then asks for your thoughts. In contrast, Levitt typically comes up with one explanation and denigrates anybody who comes up with others.

It's also worth mentioning that the advent of hilariously hagiographic journalist Stephen J. Dubner in Levitt's life has been bad for Levitt's soul. By himself, Levitt is a poor prose stylist. When I debated him in Slate.com in 1999, I felt sorry for him because his response was so weakly written. But, Dubner is a facile, persuasive-sounding professional writer, who makes Levitt's slap-dash ideas sound more plausible than they really are. Plus, Dubner worships Levitt, which feeds into Levitt's egomania.


Here's the review of Freakonomics in The Guardian, which captures the clammy nature of the book's love affair with itself better than anything else I've seen:

Allen Lane writes:

In the summer of 2003 the New York Times sent the journalist Stephen J Dubner to interview the heralded maverick economist Steven D Levitt. What were the chances of two men with extraneous initials being attracted to one another? Higher than you might think. Levitt recognised in Dubner a man with a gift for hagiography, while Dubner knew a meal ticket when he saw it...

Levitt is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down, but is claimed by all.

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? They all cheat. I know this will come as a terrible shock but dreary data proves it is true.

Levitt is one of the most caring men in the universe.

Why do so many drug dealers live with their mom? Amazingly, I can prove that most of them earn far less than you might imagine.

Levitt is genial, low-key and unflappable...

Levitt is about to revolutionise our understanding of black culture. Even for Levitt this is new turf.


Update: Levitt says he hasn't been replaced by Tyler. In that case, it's time to publish my late January letter to the New York Times' Public Editor:

Dear Mr. Calame:

I have a number of concerns about the relationship between economist Steven D. Levitt and the New York Times that you might wish to consider.

1. Your January 27th article "Students Are Leaving the Politics Out of Economics" by LOUIS UCHITELLE is largely a tribute to the perceived influence of Dr. Steven D. Levitt on young economists. Yet, it nowhere mentions than Dr. Levitt is a also co-columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Shouldn't readers of the article have been informed that the New York Times has a financial interesting in promoting the reputation of Dr. Levitt?

2. The article three times refers to Dr. Levitt's most famous theory -- that legalizing abortion significantly cut the crime rate in America. Nowhere does it mention that last year two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank showed that Dr. Levitt's theory was based on two technical errors he had made and that when the errors are fixed, his data showed no connection between abortion and the crime rate. Both the Wall Street Journal and The Economist gave prominent coverage to this news, but I haven't seen the NYT mention that their columnist's best known theory was based on his own errors. Shouldn't the article have mentioned the controversy over the validity of Dr. Levitt's theory? (For details on this, see http://www.isteve.com/freakonomics_fiasco.htm ).

3. Dr. Levitt used his December 11th column in the New York Times Magazine, entitled "The Economy of Desire," to promote a new unpublished paper by U. of Chicago grad student Andy Francis as:

" ... an empirical argument that may fundamentally challenge how people think about sex."

A rather grandiose claim!


A. It turns out that Andy Francis was a research assistant to Dr. Levitt in 2003-2004.

B. Mr. Francis is currently looking for a job as an economist and he describes the paper praised by Dr. Levitt in the New York Times as his “Job Market Paper.”


C. Unfortunately, Levitt didn't bother to inform the NYT-reading public that the claim trumpeted as a fundamental breakthrough -- that men with a relative with AIDS avoid gay sex -- was based on a sample size so tiny, only 60 individuals in total, that Francis's study did not attain statistical significance even at the loose 5 percent level.

While this apparent attempt by Dr. Levitt to use his soapbox in the New York Times to help out an old student’s job search certainly reflects well on his amiability, my vague impression is that the NYT prefers that its writers disclose this kind of conflict of interest to readers. Perhaps Dr. Levitt obtained a waiver of the disclosure policy in this case from his editors? Or perhaps he forgot to mention it to them at the same time he was forgetting to mention to his readers that Francis's study was statistically insignificant?


Best wishes,

Steve Sailer

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

NBA height

A reader who is a 6'-6" former NBA player writes in response to my posting that the average height of pro basketball players hasn't gone up in 20 years:

Some examples of difficulty in thinking about this: 1) The countries where people are growing tend to be countries where they are short. (There is one Mexican in the NBA; and he isn't from Oaxaca where all the really short people seem to be. I think there are two Chinese, a very tall guy, Yao Ming, and a short one who looks like a mixture, named Lieu.)

2) I have read that the tallest people are Nordic (including Scotland), but they aren't interested in basketball.

As I've written, "Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line." The two places where height and basketball enthusiasm come together are the Baltic and the Balkans, which is why Lithuania, Serbia, and Croatia have done so well in the Olympics, despite their small populations.

3) The NBA is super-specialized. On the inside we have "the bigs", two of 'em. They had better be close to 7" or the team is doomed. At least one substitute who is also huge is needed. The remaining three players are where the 6-6 to 6-9 players reside (although a point guard can be almost any height if he has the skills). For a championship team, all these players must be able to shoot. Because inaccuracies propagate directly with the length of arms and hands, as do response times to stimuli, it is very unusual for a very tall man to be a good shooter (not talking about slam-dunk contests here!).

I recall the impact of Bob McAdoo in 1973-1974, a very tall man (although I see now that they've reduced his listed height to 6'-9" from the 6'-11' he was advertised to be back then) and outstanding leaper, who averaged 15.1 rebounds per game, yet who was a deadly outside shooter. His shooting percentage was a gaudy .547 while scoring 30.6 per game (and that was without the 3-point line back then). It's hard for somebody to average 30 points per game while shooting much over .500 because of the large number of shots required to score that much. Diminishing marginal returns sets in. For example, none of the top 10 scorers in the NBA this season is shooting .500 from the field. But even McAdoo couldn't stay that much of an anomaly for long, and his career declined under the pressure of carrying every club he was on, until he found a role as a valued substitute on the great Laker teams of the 1980s.

And 4) Although it is a huge advantage, height is somewhat counter-balanced by quickness and body-control. So we may be on a plateau here. We've leveled out at an average of 6-6 to 6-8. I don't think you can improve the speed of the electro-chemistry by which impulses are transmitted around inside the human body or the way errors are propagated by extra length. Ergo, you can't get rid of the penalty for being tall.

That sounds likely to me. I was an extremely average schoolboy athlete. My impression is that my outsized height (I'm 6'-4") meant that I looked gawkier than average when playing sports, but tended to be a little more effective than I looked. For example, I looked lousy playing tennis, but won more than you'd think judging by my form because of my long reach. Overall, in regular life, I'd say the best height for a man is a little over 6 feet, like 6'-1.5"President Reagan. He was a mediocre athlete, but recall how much better he moved than the first President Bush, who at 6'-3" looked gawky, even though he was a much better athlete.

One other thing -- The NBA has expanded from 23 teams to 30 teams over the last 20 years, which, all else being equal, would reduce average heights, but that's not an extreme degree of expansion and the growth in the game around the world should have made up for that.


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

What Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't understand

From my upcoming American Conservative [subscribe here] article debunking the widespread myths about the politics of California (such as that Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 cost the GOP the state):

After getting off to a strong start, including repealing the illegal alien drivers license bill as promised, Gov. Schwarzenegger stumbled badly in 2005 by not realizing that his slate of initiatives to undermine the power of the public employees unions were perceived by his natural base, the white lower middle class, as an assault on their survival in California's outlandishly expensive housing market. Firemen, cops, nurses, and teachers, finding themselves squeezed between the Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Hollywood entertainment lawyers above them and the masses of illegal immigrants below them, and in direct competition for homes with extended families of Asian legal immigrants who often muster three or four paychecks per household, rallied support from their neighbors, who saw their union perks not as sinecures, but as life preservers.

This is the kind of thing that Mayor Daley of Chicago understands in his bones, but Schwarzenegger just didn't get.


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

La Griffe du Lion is back

The Zorro of statisticians returns with an essay on

POLITICS, IMPRISONMENT AND RACE

To the civil rights activist few things are more vexing than the profound racial disparities in our prison system. An adult black man, for example, is seven times more likely than a white to be housed behind bars. Paradoxically, the largest disparities are found in political domains controlled by liberals -- the very leaders in the struggle for racial justice. By revealing how criminal behavior is distributed among the races, Prodigy resolves this paradox showing it to be an unintended consequence of liberal benevolence and goodwill.

We all know that African Americans are imprisoned disproportionately to their numbers in the general population. According to the last decennial census a black man was 7.4 times more likely to be found behind bars than his white counterpart. In the language I'll use today, we would say that the disparity or incarceration ratio was 7.4. State-by-state, the figures varied widely from 3.1 to 29.3. But contrary to expectation, the highest disparity ratios turned up mostly in politically progressive states, while the smallest ratios were mostly found in conservative states. Though the numbers change a bit from year to year, this racial-political pattern of imprisonment endures. One of the questions I will answer today is, why?...

Social critic Steve Sailer observed in 2001 that conservative states tend to incarcerate whites at high per capita rates. Figure 1 confirms Sailer's observation. It shows, for adult men, the relationship between a state's white incarceration rate and its average LQ. The relationship is strong and inverse (R = -0.56).

[More]

One question that I don't know the answer to is whether conservative states tend to imprison more whites because they are more conservative, or they are more conservative because they have more hell-raising white people who need more locking up for society to function. La Griffe shows that the simple assumption that liberal states have higher thresholds of criminal behavior before locking people up goes a long way to explaining the imprisonment patterns that we see. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, liberal Connecticut really does have better behaved white people than conservative Oklahoma. (Also, the imprisonment data by state could be adjusted for the age of the population -- states with lots of old white people like Pennsylvania and North Dakota are going to naturally have fewer people imprisoned than states with younger folks.)


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

NBA players not getting taller

Basketball players used to get taller all the time, but not anymore. The average height of an NBA player at the beginning of the 2005-2006 season was 6'-7.18", down from 6'-7.36" 20 years before. For each of the last 20 years, players have averaged more than 6'-7" and less than 6'-8". (Average weight, however, has gone up from 214.4 to 223.1 pounds, with the largest increase taking place in the early 1990s.) This stability in height is rather surprising, however, considering how much more globalized is the pool of athletes from which the NBA is now drawn. Although Americans aren't getting much taller, lots of foreign populations are.

Perhaps the NBA has gotten more rigorous about measuring athletes' heights (e.g., Charles Barkley, drafted in 1984, was usually listed at 6'-6" but was really about 6'-4"). Or perhaps there has been a trend toward more agile and coordinated -- and thus, all else being equal, shorter -- players that has balanced out the trend toward taller players that drawing from a larger pool would normally induce.

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

"Lucky Number Slevin"

A clever but hideously violent gangster movie with an impressive supporting cast of Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman (playing a bad guy!), Ben Kingsley, and Stanley Tucci. Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu are better than you'd expect as the leads, too.

Freeman is "The Boss," the leader of a black mob. For 20 years he has been at war with his former partner Kingsley, "The Rabbi," the leader of a Hassidic mob. They live in penthouses across the street from each other behind three inches of bulletproof glass, and try to dream up ways to kill each other. Bruce Willis is the arch-hitman they both hire to get the other. It's a lot like the old "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon in Mad Magazine where the secret agent in the white trenchcoat and the secret agent in the black trenchcoat devise elaborate ways to blow each other up.

Unfortunately, "Lucky Number Slevin," while stylized almost to the point of surrealism, is almost never funny. It reminded me of Wes Anderson's movies like "The Royal Tenenbaums," where he unleashes prodigious amounts of creativity and whimsy but goes out of his way not to be funny. So, the characters aren't amusing and are horrifically unlikable, so the whole picture is distasteful.

By the way, I'm reviewing "Friends with Money," a chick flick "Sideways" with an impressive female case of Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, and Joan Cusack in the next American Conservative.


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

The Wind from the South

The NYT reports:

Ollanta Humala, a former military officer and fierce nationalist, received the most votes in the presidential election on Sunday, edging out a pro-globalization candidate, a former president and 17 other candidates by pledging to guide Peru away from Washington-backed market reforms. By Sunday night, unofficial results showed that Mr. Humala, 43, was far from securing the majority needed to win the vote outright and avoid a runoff...

His father founded an ultranationalist movement, etnocacerismo, that celebrates the superiority of the Indian race over those Peruvians descended from the Spanish. His mother has called for gays to be shot and a brother, Antauro, led a rebellion against the government last year.

Ollanta Humala has distanced himself from his family and tried to stress his message of a new economic direction for Peru. He has provided little detail, saying his plans are similar to those in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, where leftists have won office.


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

The fence-couldn't-work meme

One of the strangest bits of conventional wisdom in the media is that no fence along the Mexican border could possibly work. These pronouncements are often made by people who have paid a lot of extra money to live in gated communities. Within America, there are countless miles of high-security fences and walls around prisons, nuclear power plants, armories, warehouses, factories, target ranges, airports and the like. All in all, it works quite well. This isn't nanotechnology. It's something we know how to do.

Similarly, the Israelis have found their fences around the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be quite effective at keeping out suicide bombers, who are, by definition, highly motivated. Here's a diagram of the Israeli fence. The Israeli economy is about 1/200th of ours, but they've succeeded in effectively fencing off a border about 1/10th as long as ours with Mexico.

***


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

April 10, 2006

At the San Fernando Valley pro-amnesty demonstration: Not too impressive ... a couple of thousand people marching south on Van Nuys Blvd. Lots of American flags, but plenty of Mexican flags too, including the biggest flag of all. The most striking thing to me is how short illegal aliens turn out to be on average. I would guess that there wasn't a big turnout of American-born Hispanic adults because the average height was well below the Mexican-American average. I didn't see anybody who wasn't mestizo taking part.

Why, exactly, did they schedule protests by "undocumented workers" on a work day instead of a weekend day?

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

The Duke Lacrosse Goat Rodeo only gets better: KTLA reports:


Lawyers representing members of the Duke University lacrosse team say DNA tests found no link between players and an exotic dancer who says she was raped at a team party.... An attorney representing the team says tests by the state crime lab found no DNA material from any young man on the body of this complaining woman.

Defense attorneys also say time-stamped photographs show the woman was already injured when she arrived at a party.


Also, WRAL reports:


According to a 2002 police report, the woman, currently a 27-year-old student at North Carolina Central University, gave a taxi driver a lap dance at a Durham strip club. Subsequently, according to the report, she stole the man's car and led deputies on a high-speed chase that ended in Wake County.

Apparently, the deputy thought the chase was over when the woman turned down a dead-end road near Brier Creek, but instead she tried to run over him, according to the police report.

Additional information notes that her blood-alcohol level registered at more than twice the legal limit.

In spite of that incident, her attorney at the time, Woody Vann, asserts that what happened then should not cause people to question her character now. He said she is a decent and credible human being.


Isn't it about time that Tom Wolfe's critics publicly admit that the man understands modern American better than any of them could ever dream of?

Once again we see from the media's frenzied hunt for the Great White Defendant (to use Wolfe's term from 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities), so reminiscent of the last umpteen episodes of the Law & Order franchise, that what white Americans really like is sticking it to other white Americans. As Wolfe pointed out in his description of the New York City district attorney's office, white Americans find the transgressions of African Americans and Hispanics to be depressing and boring, in large part because whites see themselves (condescendingly) not as being in status competition with minorities, just with other whites. This is not because white people hate white people as a whole, just other white people they are competing with for status. The Duke lacrosse team, a bunch rich preppie jerks, makes a wonderful target for other whites wishing to parade their moral superiority.


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

I made Liz Smith's gossip column

And I didn't even have to do anything humiliating! The grande dame of gossip quotes from my review of "Thank You for Smoking:"

ARE MOVIES more anti-cigarette these days?

On the contrary, Steve Sailer tells us in "The American Conservative," "Lighting up is presently considered the surest way to give characters that edgy 'indie' attitude. A study in The Lancet found there was as much smoking in movies in 2002 as in Humphrey Bogart's heyday. Despite all its high-minded talk, Hollywood cares more about its coolness quotient than its social conscience."

Google allows any movie reviewer to do rapid factual research on the issues brought up in a movie, but it's remarkable how few bother, even with a film like "Thank you for Smoking," which is aimed directly at the kind of people who watch cable news more than movies. Instead, they typically check off what they liked about the film (of the "The fourth male lead, Tom Sizemore, was really good" ilk) and disliked.

For a good description of what a critic should do, Ben Yagoda's analysis of the failures of the NYT's Stakhanovite book reviewer Michiko Kakutani is worth reading:

It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time...

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling... Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home...

As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)" Tynan's tutor, who happened to be C.S. Lewis, was offering a lesson Kakutani could have benefited from... (Another Lewis quote with relevance to Kakutani: "If we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.")


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

April 9, 2006

Immigration: Don't Worry, Be Sappy

Dennis Dale writes on Untethered:

You’ve probably tired by now of those of us opposed to illegal immigration bemoaning the use of sentimental clichés in its defense; but it is exasperating, especially since the bromides work so well. People never seem to tire of comforting platitudes designed to make them feel morally superior. It is a cozy alternative to complexity and the effort of will necessary to tell someone no. Don’t worry, be sappy.

Steven Pinker told me:

Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Isn't it striking how the same liberal intellectuals who bemoan movies with happy endings as unrealistic and who demand careful Portland-style city planning to prevent sprawl and population growth are fervent defenders of our unplanned immigration shambles on the grounds that while it looks out of control, maybe if we all just clap our hands together and wish real hard, we might get a happy ending.


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

Do cops need much IQ?

Do cops need much IQ? In response to my posting about how the U.S. Justice Department is forcing a Virginia police department to water down its entrance exam because blacks and Hispanics are less (surprise!) less likely to pass the math test, a reader writes:

You are probably already aware of it, but I would like to direct you to page 87 of the "The Bell Curve" (hardback version). On that page is a mini-article called "Choosing Police Applicants by IQ", that immensely bolsters the case for highly g-loaded testing in law enforcement (which is obviously the true reason that some tough math should be on the test). Here are a few excerpts: "...

In April 1939, after a decade of economic depression, New York City attracted almost 30,000 men to a written and physical examination for 300 openings in the city's police force...."

"...The written test was similar to the intelligence test then being given to the federal civil service. Positions were offered top down for a composite score on the mental and physical tests, with the mental test more heavily weighted by more than two to one."

"....Times being what they were, the 300 slots were filled by the men who earned the top 350 scores." [Some top scorers didn't ultimately accept the job]

"....They attained far higher than average rank as police officers. Of the entire group, four have been police chiefs, four deputy commissioners, two chiefs of personnel, one a chief inspector, and one became commissioner of the New York Police Department. They suffered far fewer disciplinary penalties, and they contributed significantly to the study of teaching of policing and law enforcement. Many also had successful careers as lawyers, businessmen, and academics after leaving the police department."

That reminds me of one of the hidden forces in American history is this: One of the things that led American liberals to develop unrealistically high expectations about the competence of government is the strong quality of government employees recruited during the Depression, WWII, and early Cold War years. Government jobs were more appealing back then to higher quality workers. In contrast, by the time the Bush Administration took on the vast job of remaking Iraqi society, the quality of the government work force had been depleted by two decades of private sector prosperity.

In contrast, when Congress gave Washington D.C. a huge budget increase to hire 2,000 more cops about 15 years ago, they brought in some really low rent people, and their murder conviction rates plummeted because semi-illiterate cops couldn't fill out the evidentiary paperwork well enough for prosecutors to present a persuasive case.

Anyway, the question of IQ tests for cops raises the issue of whether IQ is negatively correlated with any desirable traits in policemen. We know that most cognitive traits are positively correlated with each other. This is called the g (for "general") factor theory and it appears to be well established. Rhythmic ability is the one major exception (which won't surprise you if you've ever heard high IQ rock stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, or Pete Townshend tell anecdotes about drummers they've known -- Townshend's story about Keith Moon's unfortunate experience with the drug that naturalists use in dart guns to tranquilize polar bears is a classic).

For example, the assumption behind the NFL mandating the Wonderlic IQ test for football draft prospects is that IQ is uncorrelated with physical or emotional traits of interest, so, all else being equal, the higher IQ prospect is a little more desirable.

One personality trait that's useful in cops and other security personnel is verbal dexterity to pacify and intimidate potential troublemakers. For example, I interviewed political scientist Frank Salter about his study of nightclub bouncers:

"Bouncers can all fight," Salter noted, "But they rank each other by their talking ability. The lowest ranked fought the most. The highest ranked had the best social skills." Salter found, "The best bouncers and doormen are articulate and quick with comebacks."

In contrast, I'm totally lacking in this ability. My brain is geared for the long haul, not for the short burst. I suspect that IQ correlates positively with this kind of talent at most levels, but at some high level, the correlation might break down with people tending to be too intellectual to make good cops.

One municipality got in the news a few years ago for turning down an applicant for the police force because he had an IQ of something like 128. The city argued that a smart cop would be too likely to use his brainpower to invent complicated frauds.

In my experience, smart people tend to be more honest. For example, my wife has twice dropped a credit card in the Costco parking lot, where the customers are pretty average. Both times she called it in a few hours later, but by then the finders had run up huge bills on it. (The first one spent 1,800, about $300 at each of six grocery stores within the first three hours, probably buying liquor or cigarettes, I would guess.) Tonight, she left her wallet at the art house cinema in Encino. She figured, based on her Costco experience that there was no hope, but I said, "It's a different demographic." So, I called the office at the movie theatre, and it had already been turned in. Similarly, when I was at Rice U., a strong science and engineering school, several times I'd accidentally left my $200 HP calculator sitting out, but it was never stolen.


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