April 20, 2006

A much-needed blog

Economist Dean Baker has started Beat the Press to critique economics reporting, which has been particularly awful during the immigration debate. He writes:

One of the great absurdities in the debate over immigration policy is the frequently repeated claim that the U.S. economy is generating more “low wage” jobs than can be filled by the domestic workforce. This line has been endlessly repeated in news stories on the issue.

Quick trip back to econ 101: recall the concepts “supply” and “demand.” What makes a job a “low wage” job? In econ 101 world, a job will be a “low wage” job if the supply is high relative to the demand. When there is insufficient supply, then the wage rises. My students didn’t pass the course if they couldn’t get this one right. Econ 101 tells us that there is not a shortage of workers for low wage jobs; it tells us that there are employers who want to keep the wages for these jobs from rising.

Immigration has been one of the tools that have been used to depress wages for less-skilled workers over the last quarter century. Many of the “low-wage” jobs that cannot be filled today, such as jobs in construction and meat-packing, were not “low-wage” jobs thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, these were often high-paying union jobs that plenty of native born workers would have been happy to fill. These jobs have become hard to fill because the wages in these jobs have drifted down towards a minimum wage that is 30 percent lower than its 1970s level.

In response to this logic, the “low wage” job crew claims that if the wages in these jobs rose, then businesses couldn’t afford to hire the workers. It’s time for more econ 101. Businesses that can’t make money paying the prevailing prices go out of business – that is how a market economy works. Labor goes from less productive to more productive uses. This is why we don’t still have 20 percent of our workforce in agriculture.

So the economic side of the debate over immigration is a question about employers wanting access to cheap labor.


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

Request for advice:

A reader writes:


"One thing many conservative websites discuss is the lack of military history taught to young people nowadays, and I agree. What's a good place to start for those of us who are victims of the modern educational system? Can you or one of your many readers recommend a good introductory text?"


A reader responds:


I currently teach AP European history, and have taught AP US in the past. The military-free content described is pretty accurate, although battles are fair game so long as they have a significant political or diplomatic impact, or if they served as the turning point (Waterloo, Stalingrad, Midway, etc.) of a particular war. However, you will never find questions on the exam about a particular general's tactics or the fine details of a noteworthy battle. Consequently, textbooks which are popular for use with AP courses (although all are "college-level", some seem to be more used at the high school AP level than in college survey courses.) often reflect that tendency. John Merriman's History of Modern Europe is one exception; its excellent WWI and WWII chapters are amongst the lengthiest in the entire (1,400+ page) book, and the book is replete with interesting military anecdotes. I don't necessarily think the lack of military history is a conscious decision on the part of the College Board, as they develop the course to reflect the predilections and attitudes of the equivalent courses taught in colleges, which are themselves the ones that are often consciously anti-military. I would also hasten to add that state standards on the teaching of history reflect the same tendencies.

As for your reader's question as to book suggestions: I would recommend Archer Jones' The Art of War in the Western World, Millet and Maslowski's For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War, and essentially any book John Keegan has ever written.


AP teachers are judged more rigorously than most teachers because the percentage of their students who pass the AP test is fairly public knowledge, and the parents of their students tend to be the wealthiest, smartest, and most demanding parents at the school. So, they teach to the test. AP classes can be rather joyless experiences since teachers often worry they don't have time for classroom discussions. AP teachers would prefer not to go into detail about any one battle because if they choose the wrong battle and it never shows up on the test? Yet, battles are the hinges of history and nobody should be able to claim to be educated in history without having studied at least one battle in detail.

So, it's really up to the College Board to pick a single battle and make that The Battle for the purposes of the AP test and thus of AP classes. Fortunately, for the study of U.S. History, there's really only one reasonable contender for the role: Gettysburg.

For European History, there are several possibilities, but Waterloo would seem like the best choice. The main worry I have about studying Waterloo is that it's too benign, too much like an Ali-Frazier heavyweight championship bout rather than part of a war: Europe's two greatest generals finally meet, for one day on one square mile of battlefield, commanding armies armed with exactly the same technology, with virtually no civilian casualties, and then everybody goes home for 99 years of peace.

Others suggest:


- I'd suggest The Reader's Companion to Military History. It's a reference work, but it's very readable, has top-notch contributors, and you can learn quite a lot just by randomly opening it and reading entries.

- Good beginner text: The Wars of America by Robert Leckie.


When I say beginner, I mean beginner. The text is directed toward the "young adult" market--my uncle gave it to me as a Christmas present when I was in 9th grade. Written from a traditional and patriotic perspective (i.e. the central hero of the Revolutionary War is George Washington---not some unknown black man or harpy).

Just about anything by John Keegan, though my favorite is The Face of Battle.

Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture is very, very, good.

- It's odd that the two best contemporary military writers (for newcomers at least) are each others archnemesis-- Victor Davis Hanson and your old friend The War Nerd.

Vic Hanson is sort of like a nonfiction version of Mark Helprin--- writes wonderful books and idiotic columns. He has a couple of books that in several chapters per campaign, break down famous battles. Good stuff.

- Your reader might try Churchill's best book, his biography of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, which is terrific military and political history. I'm not a military man, but for me this book crystallized a far-reaching point: In whatever arena, intelligence consists of seeing clearly what confronts one, rather than being guided by common opinion, prejudice, mere caution, etc. (But beware that the book starts slowly. I suggest skipping the first volume if one grows impatient.)

- For a good introduction to military history go to Osprey Publishing website. Choose a book that interests you and start reading. I have a bias for British Military History but Osprey Publishing has books on every country and era of military history.

- The movie Zulu is a good introductory "text".

-The US Marine Corps has long had an official reading list and requires all members to read a set of books at their "intellectual" (rank) level. Kind of a great books program for the military. It's considered the core cannon. Google for "Commandant USMC reading list":

Official USMC list


Heinlein's Starship Troopers used to be the first book for privates but not anymore.


- By J.F.C. Fuller is one of the best general histories of warfare. He always includes the political, social, and economic reasons behind the wars. Sophisticated but highly readable. His highly un-PC political views may be the reason this three-volume series doesn't get more mention. But it's still in print.


Jerry Pournelle highly recommends Edward S. Creasy's Victorian classic Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.


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

April 19, 2006

The feminization of high school

I've been pointing out that the College Board severely underemphasizes military history on the AP U.S. history, which reflects a feminine bias in our high schools. Jay P. Greene of the Manhattan Institute has a new report out, Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates, showing that only 70% of 9th graders graduate from high school within the expected four years, 65% of males, 72% of females. For whites, the graduation rates are 74% for boys and 79% for girls. For blacks, it's 48% for boys and 59% for girls. For Hispanics, its 49% and 58%.

Boy, that overall Hispanic graduation rate of 53% sure makes you feel good about our current immigration system and the plans that the American ruling class has to speed up even more our intake of Latin American peasants.

Here's an NYT article with a little bit about the controversy over dueling methodologies for calculating graduation rates, although not enough to come to a conclusion about which is better.


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

More on the AP U.S. History Test:

A reader writes:


Your correspondents are absolutely right about AP history. I took both AP history classes that were offered in my high school--AP American and AP European--and I don't remember learning about one battle. It was all political and social history, with scant references to actual battles. Of course this bored me and my friends silly. We wanted blood, honor and steel and they gave us the progress of women's rights in the nineteenth century. Waterloo? What's that? Let's talk about universal suffrage instead. Most teenage boys are War Nerds but they gave us Home Ec. on a global scale.

I cannot help think about how this affects our current ability to run the new American empire in the Middle East. Our best and brightest kids are educated without any knowledge about how wars are fought and won. How on earth are they supposed to understand the Iraqi insurgency much less develop a way to deal with or defeat it? I'm 33 years old, so it's not as if this is a new thing. We have a couple of generations of Americans who are ignorant about the real wars our country fought.


Another reader points out the Princeton Review appears to be exaggerating in its know-it-all smart-aleck style when it says "no military history:"


There might be a little exaggeration in the tales of "no military history" APs I took mine in 99 and although I cannot say that our education was especially rigorous in this area I remember taking DBQ questions based on the island hopping strategy against Japan in WWII and another in a practice exam about the immediate and long term foreign policy effect of our atomic bombs on Russia. We didn't cover strategy in regards the Civil War but we learned to associate slogans and catchphrases with certain battles - "turning point" etc... etc.


In the official 54 page College Board guide to the Advanced Placement U.S. History test, the word "war" comes up 42 times, but "battle" zero times.

At Everything2.com, there are a couple of pertinent comments by recent test-takers.


- What they won't be about: Military history will never be the subject of a multiple-choice question. (Caveat scholasticus: On the 2002 AP exam, one of the questions asked which Revolutionary War battle convinced the French that the rebels were deserving of French aid. This is military history, but it's military history in a greater context, so they thought it was fine. You have been warned.)


- There might be one or two military history questions, but they'll be fairly obvious, asking you to explain why Washington won the war (He kept his army intact) or what we did during Vietnam.


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

"When Diversity Adds Fairness" or "When Blacks Help Blacks:"

The LA Times writes:


When diversity adds fairness


The question still plagues many Angelenos: Would the verdict of the racially charged Rodney King trial have been different if the jury had not been predominantly white?


The question that still plagues me is would O.J. Simpson be in prison rather than on the back nine if clueless feminist prosecutor Marcia Clark hadn't tried to pack the O.J. jury with women, thus allowing wily defense attorney Johnnie Cochran to pack the jury with black women.


Although social scientists say juries usually manage to produce defensible verdicts, researchers have now found that more diverse juries — specifically ones that include black and white members — are more likely to share information, make fewer errors in evaluating the facts and perhaps reach fairer verdicts than all-white juries. The study, conducted with mock jurists, was published in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology...

The mock jurors were then shown a 30-minute video summary of the trial of a black defendant charged with sexual assault. The prosecution presented testimony from two victims, neither of whom could identify the assailant's face, though one could describe a scar on his torso. The core of their case was forensic evidence from semen and hair at the crime scene that were consistent, but not a definitive match, with the defendant. The defense focused on the lack of eyewitness evidence and unreliable methods used by the lab that did the DNA analysis...

In addition, 50% of the participants on the all-white juries said the defendant was guilty before deliberations, while only 34% of the whites in the diverse groups made that judgment.


In other words, this study proves that if you are black, the more blacks you have on your jury, the better the chance you have of beating the rap. I think we all already knew that from the O.J. case, and from common sense.


Sommers' study did not include an all-black jury. That was partially due to the racial makeup of the area, he says, but also because he chose to focus on the most common categories of jury composition. "In most jurisdictions in the country, black jurors are the minority," he said. "That is the typical experience for black jurors."


Nor did Sommers' study include a case where the black defendant was clearly guilty, as in the O.J. case. I wonder why?


What this test was definitely designed not to consider was if you are white, how much worse are your chances with more blacks on the jury? That's a crucial question in the Winston-Salem DA's hunt for the Great White Defendants on the Duke lacrosse team. (La Shawn Barber is providing close coverage of the case.)


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

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