April 18, 2006

The Advanced Placement U.S. History Test for non-Boys

A reader writes:


Your reference to the AP US History test excluding all military history took me back to my high school. In 10th grade I took "Honors World History;" not an AP class (those were only offered to Juniors and Seniors), but intended for those who were on an eventual AP track. My 10th grade teacher had a whole unit on WWII, and it certainly wasn't the PC pap that would leave a kid with the impression that the only things that happened between 1939 and 1945 were Rosie the Riveter and the Japanese internment. We learned about honest-to-goodness battles and one week even had an assignment where we had to design an alternative to the Allies' North African campaign!

I came up with some nonsense about attacking Vichy France's "soft underbelly" with an amphibious landing across the Mediterranean - cut me some slack, I was 15. The point was that it was an assignment that actually tried to get us to think about history and war in way that didn't leave out the actual war.

By contrast, when I took AP US History the next year, the material on the Civil War failed to mention even one significant fact about an actual battle. Phrases like "Pickett's charge," "the Wilderness," "Little Round Top," "Battle of the Crater" and the like were never mentioned. Much focus was given to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, the first black unit.

The AP class was based on a nationalized standard, since there was a test you could teach to. The Honors class was much more up to the whims of the inidividual teacher. I was lucky enough to get an old guy. He retired that year.


So, the great majority of the future verbal elite of America study no American military history during high school. Besides benefiting girls over boys, one purpose of this exclusion is to reduce the politically incorrect surplus of white male heroes in American history. Thus, Ulysses S. Grant is merely a bored and lackadaisical President, not the unflappable commander who turned terrified recruits into a victorious army during the desperate fighting at Shiloh in April 1862, or who conjured up an extraordinary strategy for capturing Vicksburg.

And what of the only man ever promoted on the battlefield by Grant, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, that peerless combination of modesty and valor, the college professor from Maine who might personally have saved the Union during the crisis at Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg? Well, who needs to know about him these days?


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

Is this the My Name Is Earl House?

Is this the My Name Is Earl House? While this ramshackle residence may look like it was nailed together by Jason Lee's white trash TV character from random slabs of discarded industrial materials ("corrugated aluminum metal siding, plywood, glass and chain-link fencing"), he'd picked up alongside the highway while serving a drunk & disorderly sentence (click on the image to see a larger picture that does it even more justice), this apparent shantytown eyesore is actually the famous Gehry House. It is the home in pricey Santa Monica of the most celebrated American architect, Frank Gehry, designer of UFO-crash museums and concert halls from Bilbao to downtown LA.

The Great Buildings website elucidates the the greatness of the Gehry House thusly:


"With the original house almost intact formwise, Gehry, in effect, lifted back the skin to reveal the building as layers, with new forms breaking out and tilting away from the original, to create a forerunner of the Deconstructionist spirit of the eighties. It is almost an idea of 'wrapping' à la Christo, but where Christo seeks through a veil to transform the original to a new sense of being and meaning, Gehry rather produces a discontinuous juxtaposition where one system collides with another resulting in, to quote Bernard Tschumi, a 'super position or disjunctive disassociation.' Where Johansen assembles technological-like elements freely seeding dialogue through the combination, Gehry, through collaging, also basically (but with a different aesthetic) derives an approach to design from the methodology and respect for construction and its architectonic potential as a form maker and space generator."


Whatever.

Can you imagine living across the street and having to look at this every day?

The problem with Westside of LA architecture in general is too much creativity and individualism. While there are some good buildings, there are almost no good streets, because neighbors won't cooperate to subordinate their own tastes to a general "theme with variations" for the entire street. So, you find a lot of streets of dueling fantasies: one movie mogul got the guy who designed the sets for The Ten Commandments to whip him up a a little pharaoh's palace, while the studio executive next door took the concept of an ivy-covered cottage in the English countryside and blew it up to 12,000 square feet, and on and on down the block.

When I was a young man, I used to like the look of LA because, visually, it was the funniest city in America (although Las Vegas probably has taken that title away), but my taste for irony has declined. The eclectic local architecture drove Nathanael West to dreams of destruction in The Day of the Locust: "But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses," he wrote. "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."

Still, while the usual expensive Westside street is a stylistic hodge-podge, the typical individual house is at least trying to be attractive, unlike Gehry's rigid digit of a house flipping off the neighbors.


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

The upper middle class vs. the working class

A reader writes:

In reading your post on Cynthia Tucker’s column (and then the rest of her column) there is one point that bothered me. She says:

"The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor."

As a teenager I spent my summers stacking hay, chopping weeds, and performing other jobs in the fields of west Texas for similar wages. My buddies and I were hired by the day or week by local farmers in much the same way as Ms. Tucker found workers. This was in the 1980’s. What bothers me is that after 20 years the same wage for unskilled labor is considered “reasonable” by a member of the educated class. Considering the increases in housing and energy costs since then (as your later posts demonstrates) means unskilled day laborers are making a much lower real wage than 20 years ago. I know illegal immigration contributes to the problem. If you have 15 young guys sharing an apartment then they can work for much less, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

I think, and I think Ms. Tucker’s attitude demonstrates, that culture may play a large part in this problem. I’m now a member of the so-called suburban educated class, but most of my family is still among the working poor. The things I hear from some colleagues and neighbors are beyond belief. Your statement about the upper middle class despising the working class is an understatement. They believe they have a right to $50 a day maid and yard service, and that Americans who won’t work themselves to death and take abuse for those wages are lazy bums who don’t deserve even modest dignity. I’ve heard things said about the working class that these same bleeding hearts would never speak of any other group.

What I wonder is this: Are the educated classes so far-removed from the working classes and so contemptuous of them that they’ve deliberately decided to exclude the native working class from the system? Are open-borders and other destructive policies being pursued so that the “betters” don’t have to deal with the rabble? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the cultural side of this.

Well, these attitudes aren't brand new. In Robert A. Heinlein's 1957 sci-fi novel The Door into Summer, the hero, inventor of a robot that does household chores, says:

"Housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had gone the way of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors for fourteen hours per day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber's helper would scorn. That's why we called the monster Hired Girl—it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully."

I'm reminded of how much the White House servants and guards hated the upper-middle class Clintons, compared to how much they liked the upper class Bushes (41, not 43).

The old Northeastern upper class was raised to have servants, and they tend to know how to treat them. Moreover, in a society of hereditary privilege, there is little expectation that a Bertie Wooster will be a superior individual to a Jeeves. He just happened to have chosen his parents more wisely. Bertie didn't earn the master's role and Jeeves' didn't fall into the servant's lot in life through his own shortcomings. Those are just the places in life they were born into. If they carry out their fate-assigned roles in the time-honored fashion, they both will be satisfied.

The modern meritocratic Baby Boom upper-middle class, in contrast, had little experience with servants growing up. Furthermore, its ideology of egalitarian informality mixed with meritocracy is ill-suited to a master-servant relationship, and often reacts to it in a toxic fashion. Yale Law School grads like Bill and Hillary believe that they are better than other people, including their servants, because they are smarter. But they don't allow themselves to admit they are smarter because they chose their genes more wisely. That would be racist! So,, as good liberal meritocrats, they believe they earned their smartness. No wonder their servants despised them.


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

April 17, 2006

More No Child Left Behind corruption: The test scores of Shunta' get shunted aside:

Thanks to multiple readers for sending me this new AP article:


AP: States Omit Minorities' School Scores
By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER,

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools deliberately aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't counted to judge her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school's performance by race.

Under the law championed by President Bush, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested.

Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers.

The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' undercounting until seeing AP's findings.


I'm not sure whether to quote Captain Renault or Private Pyle, but certainly their reactions to this news would be similar: "I'm shocked, shocked" and "Surprise! Surprise!"


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

Why boys are less and less interested in school, Part MXXVII

From The Princeton Review's Cracking the AP U.S. History Exam:


Here's some good news. The [Advanced Placement] U.S. History Exam doesn't ask about military history. You will never see a question on the AP exam like the one below:


XX. Union general Ulysses S. Grant was intent on capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi because ...


Can't have anything on the test that boys find interesting and girls don't, even if it was really important. On the other hand, questions about hideously dull 19th Century battle-axe feminists who were rightfully ignored until the formation of Women's Studies Departments in the 1970s are crucial to understanding American history.


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

The Joys of Elderly Tourette's Syndrome: Lee Iacocca on the Bush Administration

The older you get, the harder it is to keep from blurting out exactly what you think. That's not much fun for the people around you, but it sure can be fun for readers. Here's 81-year-old former Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca in an interview (not online) in Calabasas, a glossy local lifestyle magazine that for some reason I get for free, apparently on the severely mistaken assumption that I could afford a single thing that has ever been advertised in it:


Q. "What sort of CEOs do you think George W. Bush and his administration make?"

Lee Iacocca. "I make speeches for the Washington Speakers Bureau, get $75,000 for 30 minutes, and all I ever say is, "Here's what management is about. Hire good people and set some basic priorities and objectives" Well, let's see how George Bush qualifies. The people that surround him are just friends, and I think most of them just schmucks, because I know a lot of them. Who runs the country? Cheney, is getting old and sick and had this hunting accident. And "Rummy," Rumsfeld, whom I know real well -- they've been together forever, and they run the country. They had Condoleezza Rice for lunch. I don't know what she's got on Bush, but, boy, he believes in her. Other than those three, the mastermind of them all, the boy genius, is Karl Rove -- slime bucket that he is. You've got to know him to see how slimy he is."


And here are 82-year-old Senator Ernest Hollings's parting views of the Bush Administration.


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

Jesus's Jewish wit

In an insightful review of the Gnostic "Gospel of Judas," Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker says:


"One of the unnerving things about the new Gospel is that Jesus, who never laughs in the canonic Gospels, is constantly laughing in this one, and it’s obviously one of those sardonic, significant, how-little-you-know laughs, like the laugh of the ruler of a dubious planet on 'Star Trek.'"


Your Lying Eyes points out, however, that the Gospel of John has quite a few instances of wit. Humor is highly dependent on surprising changes of reference, and so it tends to have a short half-life as the surprises get incorporated into the culture and are thus no longer surprising to those who come along later. That's why acting companies have to work frantically to milk any laughs out of Shakespeare's plays today, and Lenny Bruce's routines from less than 50 years ago fall flat. So, it's hardly surprising that even an acute observer like Gopnik could overlook the humor in the New Testament.


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

Exxon boss' $400 million golden parachute

ExxonMobil supremo Lee Raymond has retired with a payout of something like $400,000,000 (I can't begin to make sense of all the details of his package, so it might really be more or less), including a check for $98,400,000 instead of annual pension payments. But, hey, this was only 1.1% of Exxon Mobil's $36,000,000,000 profits last year. Mr. Raymond worked for Exxon for 43 years, so his retirement package is less than $10 million per year, which seems quite fair. And his annual pay in 2005 of something like $50,000,000,000 was only 0.13% of profits. Quite a bargain!

And, since Mr. Raymond was responsible for orchestrating the vast global conspiracy that drove oil prices so high last year in order to generate Exxon Mobil's colossal profits, he clearly deserves every penny. Oh, wait a minute ... he testified to Congress that he didn't have anything to do with oil prices being so high. So, then, what exactly did he do to deserve this? Did he outcompete his rivals? Well, it sounds like his main accomplishment was merging Exxon with Mobil in 1999, which isn't exactly outcompeting them. Why did the Clinton Administration approve the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999? Were they going to both go out of business if they didn't merge?


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

Did Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller The Tipping Point help get us into Iraq?

Novelist Walter Kirn writes:


For Iraq, I blame the managers, of course, but I also blame their reading lists. More than once, while predicting victory, Donald Rumsfeld has used the magic words "Tipping Point." This new pop formula for achieving vast results from relatively limited efforts has turned out to be one disastrous abracadabra. Saddam goes, they all go. We don't need a huge army. Iraq is ready for democracy -- just give it a strategic nudge. The entire Middle East will follow.

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today's executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel's back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on "critical mass" is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It's the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

What's next? The Freakonomics war? The Six-Sigma attack against Iran? The Blink campaign against global terrorism? Capturing Osama the Warren Buffett Way?


Despite getting an MBA and spending 18 years in corporate America, I seldom could read more than the first chapter of any business bestseller. Most good new management ideas can be described in a magazine article. An entire book will turn out to be either egregiously padded out, or too complicated to implement.

Gladwell, however, has perfected a new technique in which he makes millions by offering content-free advice to business people. In Gladwell's world, all they have to do to get rich is to make the right decision. Blink, for example, tells us to go with our gut reactions -- but only when they are correct! When your instantaneous feelings turn out to have been wrong, well, then you should have used a complex, formal analysis process.

You may be wondering what this "tipping point" is. Well, you see, and follow me closely here, Gladwell's theory is that rising trends, such as crime rates or sneaker sales, tend to go up until they reach a "tipping point," and then they go down. Or vice-versa. Or sometimes they reach a tipping point and then they go up even faster. Or down even faster. But you can be quite confident that, sooner or later, something or other will happen.

In truth, the Domino Theory proved moderately accurate -- when South Vietnam collapsed, so did the anti-Communist regimes in Cambodia and Laos. Then followed a half decade of Soviet successes in the Third World around the world. You can think of it as the Bandwagon Effect. People like a winner and so they tend to go with the flow of whoever seems to be winning.

The flaw in the Domino Theory turned out to be that the Third World just wasn't very strategically important. The subsequent Communist triumphs in Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan turned out to be bad for the inhabitants of those countries, but basically a big waste of time and energy for the Kremlin. Probably the only thing that could have saved the Soviet Union was a massive armored push south to capture the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, capitalism was proving its superiority over communism in places that do matter, like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong with beneficial reverberations around the world.

The real example of the Domino Theory in action was Eastern Europe in 1989-1991. The problem with applying that analogy to the Middle East is that Eastern European nations had one big problem -- they were tyrannically ruled by the Soviet Communist party. In contrast, Middle Eastern nations have no end of problems.


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

Are Mexican illegal immigrants compatible with Blue State norms?

A tax accountant writes:


One other thing about taxes and illegal aliens. The folks they are letting in, they are not going to be smart enough to actually comply with our complex tax laws and other regulatory obligations. So there is going to be an increase in the flouting of those laws. They also will not see the need of such regulatory burdens - why should they care about the environment, zoning laws, etc.


This is an important paradox. Liberal Blue State whites look down upon conservative Red State whites as low IQ morons incapable of functioning in a complex sophisticated society -- look at the vast popularity of the State IQ Hoax with which millions of Democrats have consoled themselves for their losses at the polls.

Liberal whites also view illegal immigration as a great way to stick it to those horrible conservative whites -- for example, here's James Wolcott of Vanity Fair giving us the view from the Conde Nast Building on illegal immigration -- but aren't they really sticking it to themselves?

For example, I kind of like the LA Times. It's fairly smart and very serious and high-minded, the ultimate non-tabloid. As Mickey Kaus complains, it's a boring newspaper, completely unrepresentative of the lurid mess that is Los Angeles, but, then, I'm a rather serious and high-minded reader, so I like it more than if it were the kind of "Uncle Tortures Tot with Hot Fork" tabloid that would be more appropriate for the population of 21st Century Los Angeles.

Obviously, by championing illegal immigration over the years, the newspaper has been destroying its own readership, by helping drive out middle class, literate, English-speaking Angelenos. The immigrants who are replacing them find it a snooze, if they can even read English, or read anything at all. Eventually, the LA Times will be read only by the wealthy living in the Hollywood Hills. But at least the LA Times will have stuck it to conservative white people! And isn't that what ultimately matters in the great status war among white Americans?

My impression is that Mexican immigrants assimilate more readily into white Texan culture, with its populist animus against high-falutin' high-brow norms, than they do into Blue State cultures.


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

Cynthia Tucker notices real life

As opinion editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a syndicated columnist, Cynthia Tucker is one of the more important black women in the pundit business. Her 4/16/06 column is interesting because she actually notices that there is a connection between daily life and political issues, which is extraordinarily rare among the chattering classes. Of course, the question of how she could grow up to reach this position in life without having previously noticed the world around her is worth asking:


Idle black men, tragically, aren't just a stereotype

The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers.

Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or enthusiasm for hard labor.

My younger sister, an architect, appointed her Mexican-born father-in-law, an experienced carpenter (and American citizen), the new general contractor. I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother's church and men standing on nearby street corners.

The experience brought me face to face with every unappealing behavior that I'd heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype. One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did.

This story is hardly an academic overview. The evidence is anecdotal. But it jibes with the treatises I've read that portray a permanent underclass of black men with criminal records and low educational attainment, with multiple children and little cash.

These are men who can no longer count the military as an option because it doesn't want them. The armed forces seek high school graduates with decent reading and math skills to operate high-tech gizmos. By some estimates, the unemployment rate among black male high school dropouts in their 20s is 72 percent, while the comparable rate among young, uneducated white men is 34 percent, and among Latinos, 19 percent.

How did this happen? I cannot remember seeing such large numbers of idle black men when I was growing up. (Indeed, the unemployment rate in my hometown is higher than it used to be.) Is this the consequence of a dying manufacturing base that has stranded men who otherwise would have had jobs with decent wages and good benefits? And does the wave of illegal immigrants further marginalize uneducated black men?


Go to any construction site and count the black men among the menial laborers. You won't see many. [More]


Every adult American thinks about real estate a lot. And real estate is intimately connected with issues like crime, race, immigration, education, IQ and so forth. Yet, it's quite unusual for a pundit to mention connection between his or her personal experience with real estate and social issues.

To reach a high position in American life, it doesn't pay to waste time associating with a wide range of your fellow human beings. You are much better off spending as much time as possible schmoozing other ambitious people who can help you out. It pays to adopt whatever conventions they exhibit in terms of what you are supposed to talk and write about. And, for highly verbal people like journalists, it's safest if you train yourself never even to think about anything you aren't supposed to express.


The amusing thing is that most people in the academic and media elites, in the rare moments when they notice the profound disconnect between how they live their lives and the ideas they profess in print, feel not guilt over their hypocrisy, but self-satisfaction over their high-mindedness. As I wrote in The American Conservative about the debate over illegal immigration:


"How do they keep winning? The articulate and affluent who profit from illegal immigration look down their noses at anyone who wants to reduce it. They don’t debate dissenters; they dismiss them. Their most effective ploy has been to insinuate that only shallow people think deeply about immigration. The more profound sort of intellect, the fashionable imply, displays an insouciant heedlessness about the long-term impact of immigration.

"Yet the well-educated and well-to-do aren’t expected to subject their own children to the realities of living among the diverse. They search out homes removed by distance or doormen from concentrations of illegal aliens—although not so far that the immigrants can’t come and clean their houses tax-free. As our Ascendancy of the Sensitive sees it, that their views are utterly contradicted by how they order their daily lives is proof not of their hypocrisy but of how elevated their thinking is."


Somewhat similarly, I once noticed when talking to a famous scientist who had decided to write academic articles about race that this person essentially never noticed anything about reality that didn't appear in a refereed academic journal (i.e., something that could be cited in one's own papers). This is an extremely efficient attitude for generating papers of one's own, but it seemed a tad limiting.


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

Rigging Polls on Immigration

My new VDARE column: Predetermined Polling Results on Amnesty


For decades, voter surveys have consistently shown that the public is outraged by the extent of illegal immigration. For example, in a CBS News poll last October, 75 percent said the government was “not doing enough” to keep out illegal aliens, while 15 percent were satisfied and merely 4 percent thought efforts were too restrictive.

Obviously, this is not a satisfactory result from the point of view of the Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista coalition. Fortunately for them, when it comes to specific mechanisms for enforcing this broad consensus, there is ample room to confuse and mislead the public by torturing the poll questions.

I spent over a decade and a half in the marketing research industry, and I've learned how hard it is to conduct a survey that elicits honest answers on any topic, much less one where the media routinely denigrates one side as "yahoos"...

The liberal Los Angeles Times has gotten a lot of publicity lately for its April 13th poll, which strikes me as a classic example of writing questions to get the responses you wanted. In the marketing research business, you'd lose clients by doing work so shoddy, but this poll suits the Times' agenda.

Let's look in detail at the three proposals offered: ...

Allow undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in the U.S. for a number of years, with no criminal record, to start a path to citizenship.”

Support: 66%

Oppose: 18%

Don't know: 16%

  • You'll note that the word "amnesty" is nowhere mentioned. For over two years now, President Bush has been trying to redefine "amnesty" to mean the only thing about the whole cave-in that he claims he's against: starting illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. So, this is "amnesty" even by Bush's absurdly narrow definition. But, for some reason, the LA Times forgot to include the word "amnesty" in the proposal.

  • One notorious problem with survey research is that a sizable fraction of respondents try to be nice to pollsters and tell them what they want to hear. Some of the politically savvier participants in the poll will realize that the pollster's use of the euphemism "undocumented" for "illegal" is a dead-certain giveaway that they are supposed to answer "Support".

  • But lots of other respondents aren't terribly familiar with the term "undocumented". They don't realize it means "illegal". They reason: "If the question was about illegal immigrants, well, then it would ask about ‘illegal immigrants.’ And if they were illegal immigrants, they'd, by definition, have a criminal record, right? So, these are innocent people who, apparently, have misplaced some documents. And we don't want to waste time harassing them. It's the illegal immigrants we've got to concentrate on doing something about!"

  • Exactly where do the "undocumented" get to "start a path to citizenship"? Here? Or back home in their native countries? It doesn't say. You know and I know that "start a path to citizenship" is a euphemism for "immediately get the privilege of living in America forever, bring in their spouse and children, and get to start bringing in their siblings and parents, and if they feel like it, they eventually get to vote too." But that's not what it says.

  • The phrase "start a path to citizenship" has been carefully crafted to mislead, to make it sound like the beneficiaries are embarking on some arduous journey of the soul that will mold them into true-blue Americans. And who could be against that? The reality, of course, is quite different.

[More]


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

Does Illegal Immigration Lower Wages?

The Uselessness of Economists on Immigration:


Economic View

Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye
By Eduardo Porter

CALIFORNIA may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal immigration on the prospects of American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004.

But before concluding that immigrants are undercutting the wages of the least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent.

As Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, several economists and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that illegal immigrants are causing harm to Americans in the competition for jobs.

Yet a more careful examination of the economic data suggests that the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.


An accompanying graphic shows that a high school dropout in California, where supposedly 6.9% of the population are illegal immigrants, averages $8.71 per hour in wages versus merely $8.37 in Ohio, where only 1.0% are illegal immigrants.

Case closed!

Well, no, not exactly. What about the cost of living difference between California and Ohio? Don't they tell you in Econ 101 and in Journalism 101 to always adjust for the cost of living?

According to the data gathered by the nonprofit organization ACCRA, which measures cost of living so corporations can fairly adjust the salaries of employees they relocate,
California has the highest cost of living in the country with an index of 150.8 (where 100 is the national norm). Ohio is below average at 95.4. So, relative to the national average cost of living, high school dropouts in Ohio average $8.77 versus $5.78 for the equivalent in California. That means they are 52% better off in Ohio.

So, the Law of Supply and Demand hasn't been repealed after all...

One obvious cause of this huge difference in the cost of living is that during the same 1980 to 2004 period, housing inflation in California was 315% versus 155% in Ohio, according to the Laboratory of the States.

Even failing to adjust for the striking disparities in the inflation rate between Ohio and California, one obvious differences is that high school dropouts used to be paid a lot more in Ohio, probably due to greater unionization. In contrast, Southern California was traditionally anti-union. The 1980 wage in Ohio was $12.13 versus $10.49 in California. Obviously, the decline in unionized heavy industry jobs hit rust belt Ohio harder than growing California, which had fewer unionized heavy industry jobs to lose.

Here's the data from the NYT's graphic, in which 9 states were cherry-picked to make it look like the higher the percentage of illegal immigrants in a state's population, the better off high school dropouts are. I've added the two right hand columns to adjust for the big cost of living differences. We then find a negative correlation of r = -0.46 between the percentage of illegal immigrants and the cost-of-living-adjusted median wage for high school dropouts:



Illegal Immigrants Dropout's Wage Cost of Living Index Adjusted Wage
Nevada 7.5% $ 10.05 111.8 $ 8.99
California 6.9% $ 8.71 150.8 $ 5.78
Florida 5.2% $ 8.99 100.3 $ 8.96
Maryland 4.5% $ 9.84 125.8 $ 7.82
New Jersey 4.1% $ 9.03 134.2 $ 6.73
New York 3.3% $ 9.02 123.5 $ 7.30
Nebraska 2.3% $ 9.08 93.3 $ 9.73
Ohio 1.0% $ 8.37 95.4 $ 8.77
Kentucky 0.9% $ 8.73 91.2 $ 9.57


The point that is constantly overlooked is that American citizens ought to be compensated with higher wages for moving from their native state to fast growing states to meet the demand for labor. But, instead, illegal immigrants are beating them to the boomtowns, driving down wages.

You might expect that economists will write in to the New York Times en masse to protest this fiasco of an "Economic View" article. But you would be wrong, because professional standards mean nothing when the topic is immigration.

Interpreting these numbers sensibly doesn't require a mastery of quantum mechanics. It's all just Econ 101, but the American upper middle class so despises the American working class today that self-evidently shoddy thinking deleterious to the welfare of the American working man is routinely trumpeted in both conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and liberal newspapers like the New York Times.


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

April 14, 2006

AMT

A tax accountant reader takes time out to write:

AMT = Alternative Minimum Tax. It is huge this year, nailing many, many folks on their 2005 tax return. The little bit of relief was allowed in 2003 & 2004 sunsetted in 2005. It will really be hitting Blue Staters (without going into excruciating detail, basically it is due to higher income and higher taxes) hard. Of course, personal exemptions are preference items and can cause AMT to hit large families. This is a political issue that is going to have to be addressed soon.

Personally, the AMT definitely hasn't affected me. That reminds me of my financial self-help book that will be coming out in time for the 2007 tax season: The New Surefire Sailer Strategy for Paying Less in Taxes: Have a Low Income!


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

The Economist on race-specific medicine

It reviews new evidence that (surprise!) people of different races sometimes tend to have different genes. Then it issues this common caveat:


"This sort of work raises another question, with its own set of sensitivities: how, scientifically, do you define someone's race? In studies such as Dr Cohen's this question is fudged, because people defined themselves. That is a reasonable starting point. But America's population is descended mainly from immigrants and those ancestors have been meeting and mating for centuries. Few native-born Americans trace all of their ancestors back to the same part of the world, so how closely are genes affecting disease linked to genes affecting racial self-identification?"


But that's getting the issue backwards for the purposes of understanding relationships between race and medical conditions. In reality, if researchers were using more accurate measurements of patients' racial backgrounds, they would get even higher correlations between ancestry and various medical statuses. Why? Because if they were using DNA admixture tests to group, say, the Halle Berrys and Henry Louis Gateses in a mulatto category instead of in their self-identified black category, they would be reducing the random noise in their studies, and thus likely increasing the correlations.

You see the same mistake with many critiques of Lynn and Vanhanen's finding of a high (r=0.73) correlation between national average per capita GDP and national average IQ. Critics point to all the noise in the IQ data (e.g., Are the samples really nationally representative? What is the effect of using different IQ tests given by different researchers in different years on different ages?), and triumphantly claim that the noise invalidates the high correlation with GDP. No, actually, the opposite is more likely true. If you had more reliable IQ measures, you'd most likely get an even higher correlation with per capita GDP. You are already getting an awfully high one using just a grab bag of IQ studies.

That would only not be true if there was some biasing factor that made the noise systematically push the scores in one direction based on GDP. That's a possibility, but I haven't been able to imagine one.

Levitt and Donohue similarly argue that the looooong time lag between abortions in a state and then crimes committed a generation later, which causes a huge amount of noise in the data by people moving from state to state, means that the real correlation between abortion and reduction in crimes must be higher than their data indicates. The problem, though, is that there is an obviously biasing interplay among crime, abortion, and interstate migration -- one of the big reasons people move is to find a different moral environment in terms of crime and sexual morality.

I don't know what the net effect is. My guess is that people who feared their children were in danger of becoming criminals tended to flee the high abortion / high crime big cities like New York and Los Angeles, while sophisticates who didn't have to worry about such lower class problems as their kids turning into thugs flocked to the culturally progressive cities from the retrograde hinterlands. The impact of these flows of at risk young people from the high abortion states to the low abortion states, combined with the reverse flow of well-educated, law-abiding people from the low abortion states to the sophisticated high abortion cities thus artificially made it look like high abortion rates reduced crime a generation later. But that's just a plausible guess. Levitt and Donohue are certainly making a heroic assumption that all the effects net out to zero. But, more likely, they haven't even thought systematically about this problem.

By the way, ABC's "20/20" will devote an entire hour to Levitt and Freakonomics on Friday night, 4/14 at 10pm Eastern time. (Levitt and Dubner are under contract to ABC so ABC is, surprise, hyping their own hired talent. On the other hand, 20/20's John Stossel is a cut above most everybody else on TV in brains and honesty, so it might not be the usual complete corporate conflict of interest travesty.) You can watch the webcast preview here. Economist Ted Joyce gets about 7 seconds on the preview to say the data don't support Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory. When Stossel's people emailed me, I recommended they interview blogger La Shawn Barber. I don't know if they did. Here's La Shawn's run-in with Levitt.

Meanwhile on his Freakonomics blog, Levitt responds to my recent posting about his shortcomings with this charmingly entitled post: "I will see you in hell, apparently." Poor Levitt ... it's not enough for him that he's turned himself into a brand name celebrity and zillions of people idolize him. The mere existence of one vocal skeptic is driving him to do irrational things like angrily respond to my criticism, when the smart thing for him to do would be to not publicize my itemizations of his theory's failings. He's got all mass media momentum on his side, but perhaps the failure of his abortion-crime theory to make much progress in persuading his fellow economists, as amply displayed at last month's American Enterprise Institute colloquium on it, is irking him.


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

April 13, 2006

"Friends with Money"

From my film review in the upcoming American Conservative:

"Friends with Money" is an astutely observed ensemble film about four West Los Angeles women, one single and struggling (Jennifer Aniston) and three married with children and prospering (the terrific trio of fortyish actresses Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, and Frances McDormand). The "Sideways" of chick-flicks, this low key comedy balances on a knife-edge between excellence and inconsequentiality, drawing wildly varying reactions depending on the audience's mood. My wife liked it so much she saw it twice. While Saturday's crowd roared with laughter, Sunday's gaped impassively.

In Aniston's sit-com "Friends," the question, "How they can afford that Manhattan apartment?" was seldom even raised, much less answered, but the low budget "Friends with Money" is more realistic about how wealth matters.

In real life, Aniston, the former Mrs. Brad Pitt, has, I should hope, all the money she'll ever need. So, to establish herself as a serious film actress, she worked cheap in this indie film's deglamorized lead role as a depressed former schoolteacher reduced to toiling as the last Anglo maid in LA. Her character desperately needs both money and a man. A rich boyfriend would be ideal, but she's too glum to put up with an aggressive go-getter.

Aniston is now 37. An actress' career typically peaks between 35 and 40, but that's also when her biological clock is ticking loudest. Her vastly publicized divorce from Pitt last year apparently involved, among other causes, his desiring children and her wanting to act. (So, Angelina Jolie will soon bear Pitt's first-born.)


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

Something to be thankful for

We should give thanks for a massive bullet that America has dodged. Right after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush and the media were all talking up a Great Society II to "correct the poverty born of racial discrimination." The LA Times reported on September 16th:


"President Bush, who had just returned from his fourth visit to the Gulf Coast, told an audience at the National Cathedral today that he would use the rebuilding process to correct the poverty born of racial discrimination that had left so many of Hurricane Katrina's victims vulnerable. 'The greatest hardship fell upon citizens already facing lives of struggle: the elderly, the vulnerable and the poor,' he said. 'And this poverty has roots in generations of segregation and discrimination that closed many doors of opportunity. As we clear away the debris of a hurricane, let us also clear away the legacy of inequality.'"


Obviously, another Great Society would have been another catastrophe for the country and especially for African-Americans. Today, fortunately, we can be pretty certain that that moment of madness that engulfed the Establishment last September has passed. Those of us who spoke up forcefully at the time to tell the truth about New Orleans took a lot of arrows in our hats for our troubles, but we have largely prevailed.


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

LA County median home prices surpass $500,000

The LA Times reports:


If this is a bubble, it's sure taking a long time to pop.


For the first time, the median price of a Los Angeles County home topped the half-million-dollar mark last month, data released Wednesday showed. Four years ago, the median was half that...

In March, the median hit $506,000, up 15% from a year earlier and 3% above the prior month, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla-based research firm that analyzes property transactions.

Los Angeles County thus joined Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties in crossing the half-million-dollar mark, keeping Southern California's place among the nation's priciest housing markets. Orange and Ventura counties' medians sailed through the $600,000 level in the middle of last year, and San Diego's broke through the $500,000 point last fall.

To buy a house at the median price, a household would need an annual income of at least $120,000 to qualify for conventional financing with a 20% down payment. The county's median household income: about $47,000.

And half a million doesn't exactly get you a castle. Don't even think about Beverly Hills. Try Norwalk, South Los Angeles or Panorama City [all pretty dismal], where the median price buys 1,500 square feet with three bedrooms and two baths.

Want something bigger? Head to Palmdale [in the desert, 75 miles north of downtown, and right over the San Andreas Fault], where $500,000 gets you 2,200 square feet and two stories. Want ocean breezes? There's a two-bedroom condo in Playa Del Rey [almost under airport flightpaths], built in 1971.


In general, the city of Los Angeles has poor quality housing stock, cheaply-built homes on small lots with relatively few neighborhood amenities such as parks. Most of LA was built out in a rush after the great housing shortage that followed WWII, and quality was not a high priority as it had been in much of America up through the 1920s. (The 1980s developments in farther suburbs such as south Orange County and Ventura County are quite nice though.)


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