May 15, 2006

Warren Buffett on taxes

During a Q&A at the recent Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, the world's second richest man said:


The tax breaks for the wealthy that have been enacted are extraordinary. Most members of the Forbes 400 pay a lower portion of their income in taxes than the receptionist in our office does. That wasn’t true 30 years ago—and it should not be true in a rich society. In 2004, my tax rate was the lowest of anyone among the 15 or 16 people who work in our office. And that wasn’t because of any tax shelters I invested in (I don’t own any tax shelters) or any special tax advice I got. It’s crazy.

The media hasn’t conveyed the extent to which the typical individual hasn’t shared in the prosperity of the past 10 years as much as the wealthy have.


It's too bad that Warren Buffett has never showed much interest in financing any opinion journalism. It would be nice to have a patron who is both insanely rich and sane, rather than vice-versa, which is closer to the truth for a lot of the moguls who currently subsidize opinion journalism.


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

Why multicultural societies are less creative

Conventional wisdom holds that the more ethnically diverse a society is, the more "vibrant" its cultural creativity.

This sounds plausible in theory, but down through history, the opposite is more likely to be true. Periclean Athens wasn't as cosmopolitan as Alexandria or Rome, and Fourteenth Century Florence was full of Italians but not much else, and so forth. Right now, America is more diverse than ever, but it sure doesn't seem as creative as it was for most of the 20th Century.

So, what's wrong with the standard theory that cultural diversity increases creativity by making it easier to borrow good ideas from other cultures?

Well, perhaps cultural diversity makes it too easy to borrow. Why go through the hard word of creating when you can just borrow? Necessity is the mother of invention, and diversity reduces the necessity of inventing your own amusements.

Consider racially homogenous Liverpool, England in the early 1960s. Some Liverpudlian youth loved this new-fangled rock 'n' roll music invented in the Mississippi River Valley in the 1950s. If there had been an African-American community in Liverpool, the white kids would have employed the black Americans to play music for them to dance to. But there weren't any African-Americans in Liverpool, so the white kids had to make their own.

Consider everybody's favorite slam-dunk case for diversity: cuisine. And, yet, what's never mentioned is that all those wonderful foreign cuisines themselves evolved in conditions of relative cultural homogeneity and isolation. The problem is that if you have a lousy cuisine, you can do one of two things: improve it or borrow somebody else's. The more easily you can borrow, the less incentive you have to fix.

Or, how about excellence in basketball? For the second straight years, Steve Nash, a white Canadian, just won the NBA Most Valuable Player award, while Dirk Nowitzki, a white German, once again finished third in the voting. Yet, no white American has even finished in the top 10 in the MVP voting since John Stockton way back in 1995. Shouldn't playing against African-Americans make white basketball players better? Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. Apparently, it's more conducive for the development of talent for young white basketball players to grow up in white countries where they don't have to compete with so many black players when they are starting out.


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

May 14, 2006

Species Do Not Exist!

One of the common arguments made for why race supposedly does not exist is that unless there's a race for everyone and everyone in his race, then the entire concept of race is useless and fallacious. An yet many of the same problems exist with the concept of species.

There are approximately 22 different proposed definitions for the species, with the most prestigious being Ernst Mayr's: "groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” And yet, it turns out that this definition has problems (besides not working for asexual species and being useless for paleontological purposes: lots of animals that are reasonably considered separate species can interbreed if they are in the mood.

You can breed lions and tigers together in the zoo to get ligers and tigons, but there is a lack of hard evidence that they've ever existed in the wild.

But now there is interesting news of a formidable wild hybrid. National Geographic reports, with a picture:

DNA analysis has confirmed that a bear shot in the Canadian Arctic last month is a half-polar bear, half-grizzly hybrid. While the two bear species have interbred in zoos, this is the first evidence of a wild polar bear-grizzly offspring.

Jim Martell (pictured at left), a 65-year-old hunter from Idaho, shot the bear April 16 on the southern tip of Banks Island (see Northwest Territories map), the CanWest News Service reports.

Wildlife officials seized the bear after noticing its white fur was interspersed with brown patches. It also had long claws, a concave facial profile, and a humped back, which are characteristic of a grizzly.

Now the genetic tests have confirmed that the hybrid's father was a grizzly and its mother was a polar bear.

"I don't think anyone expected it to actually happen in the wild," said Ian Stirling, a polar bear expert with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton.

Polar bears and grizzlies require an extended mating ritual to reproduce, Stirling said. Both live by themselves in large, open habitats.

To prevent wasting their eggs, females ovulate only after spending several days with a male, Stirling explained. "Then they mate several times over several days."

In other words, the mating between the polar bear and grizzly was more than a chance encounter. "That's what makes it quite interesting," he added.

Stirling says the hybrid has no official name, though locals have taken to calling it a "pizzly" and a "grolar bear."

These kind of hybrids raise important legal issues under the Endangered Species Act.

These conceptual conundrums with the concept of species are one reason I tossed out the top-down idea of race as "subspecies" and invented the bottom-up concept of a racial group as a "partly inbred extended family." In this framework, then a species is a "virtually wholly inbred extended family," but it's all relative. See my article: "It's All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective."


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

Great White Defendants Galore! Why stop with Great White Defendant (a term coined by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities) when you can go all the way to a Great Albino Defendant, as in Paul Bettany's villain in the upcoming The Da Vinci Code? A reader points us to the the Wikipedia page on the "Evil Albino" in popular culture.

*

A reader points out Law & Order's conversion to Great White Defendants was prefigured in the 1890s:

A couple weeks back you wrote an article about how news stories and fiction about crime involving white and/or rich people gets a lot of attention and/or sells well, whereas crime that involves only poor blacks and Hispanics, i.e. most crime, doesn’t. You gave the example of the Law and Order series. Early on, the writers tried to be realistic, placing the crimes in the black and Latino parts of Manhattan where it most often occurs. However, the ratings of the early shows weren’t very good, and so they changed the show to focus on crimes in more prosperous neighborhoods and well-off defendants.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of a lecture an English professor gave on Conon Doyle in a class on 19th century literature that I took while at Columbia. He pointed out that the first two of Doyle’s novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, have their crimes taking place in the seedy parts of London. Like the early Law & Order episodes, these novels didn’t sell well. It’s commonly noted that when Doyle switched to the short story format in his subsequent Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Memoirs, his sales greatly improved. What’s not as often noted, that my professor observed, is that Doyle also changed where the crime occurs: from the seedy working class areas to the posh West End and lavish country estates.

Doyle also changed the profiles of his criminals. In the early novels, they weren’t respectable people. In A Study in Scarlet, they were a hit squad of Mormons whose job it was to hunt down and murder apostates. In The Sign of the Four, it they were convicts from India, only one of whom was white. In the later works, by contrast, they were mainly people of privilege.

It appears that there’s nothing new under the sun. Crime that happens where you wouldn’t expect it, and committed by people who don’t fit the common criminal profile, is out of the ordinary and therefore interesting. Crime among the poor committed by ruffians is a commonplace, and therefore boring.

*

Mark Holmberg of the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes:

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts suggested the Duke case would've blown up even worse if the racial tables were turned.

"Imagine if the woman were white and reported being raped by three black members of the basketball team. You'd have to call out the National Guard."

Really?

"That hyperbole isn't born out by the facts," said Richmond-area attorney Jeff Everhart.

He's representing one of the four Virginia Union University students indicted last week for allegedly raping a University of Richmond coed on Jan. 21.

All four of the accused are black, two who had ties to the football team. One was a star quarterback as a freshman. All four were considered good kids, attending a historic black university.

The victim is white, an out-of-state student attending the posh University of Richmond, which has Duke-size tuition.

She reportedly left a party at a UR campus apartment with the four. Police say she was assaulted in some woods in western Henrico. Police found her and two of the suspects after neighbors heard a woman's screams.

Alcohol is a factor, as it is in the Duke case. Similarly, DNA tests will play a starring role.

But not a peep about the VUU case in the national media. The indictments played on Page B3 of this paper, while the Duke case started in our Sports pages and eventually made our front page.

*

On the VDARE.com blog, James Fulford takes issue with my suggestion that the #1 Hot White Defendantte on the LAPD's 220 Most Wanted list is "felon Vanessa Lanza Etourneau, a French girl with serious cheekbones." Instead, he nominates Corinna Kowalsky, a strawberry blonde ingĂ©nue, who turns out to be an illegal alien call girl from Germany, who “befriended the victim and then later burglarized his residence taking various items of art, silver and porcelain."

You be the judge!

*

Occam's Razor is not so popular in England these days: An excess of Boring Black Defendants captured by colorblind remote control monitoring systems is posing a spin problem for the PC PC of the London Bobbies:

Cameras set racial poser on car crime
Dipesh Gadher, Transport Correspondent

BRITAIN’S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black.

Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force’s traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

The technology allows car registration plates to be scanned and automatically run through databases to determine whether a vehicle is stolen, uninsured or has not had its road tax paid.

Each number plate is also checked with the police national computer, where vehicles suspected of links to crimes such as robberies are flagged up.

The Met has deployed six mobile ANPR camera units in the capital, primarily in areas with high levels of street crime. When a suspect vehicle is identified, police officers are sent to intercept the driver.

Although ANPR technology is impartial, the disproportionate number of blacks being arrested has prompted the Met to investigate.

The arrests have been broken down by ethnicity in a report sent last month to the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), to which the force is accountable.

It reveals that between April 2005 and January this year the units generated 2,023 arrests. Of these 923 were black suspects, while 738 (36%) came from white backgrounds. Asians accounted for just over 9% of arrests.

The report tacitly appears to address concerns among ethnic minority communities who believe they are unfairly targeted by the police through stop and search powers. Black people are up to six times more likely to be stopped than whites.

The report says: “It is worth stating that out of all our activities, this is the one area where the officer has minimal discretion as they respond to an electronic matching process.”

Last week the Met attempted to explain the high number of arrests among blacks by the fact that they make up a higher proportion of the population in areas such as Southwark and Lewisham in south London, where the ANPR units operate.

However, statistics from the 2001 census show that the highest black population in any borough is no greater than about 25%. The proportion of black people across the capital as a whole is about 11%.

Peter Herbert, an independent member of the MPA and spokesman for the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “The Met really wants to avoid any allegation of disproportionality so they will seek to explain these figures by whatever nuance they can. The targeting of certain boroughs might be justified in terms of some crime, but it’s certainly not justified in terms of all crime.”

Captain Gatso, of Motorists Against Detection, the anti-speed-camera group that uncovered the Met figures, said: “All this does is create a new problem for Sir Ian Blair, the politically correct PC, as ANPR cameras and the databases they are linked to are colour blind.”

It is more than a decade ago that Lord Condon, the former Met commissioner, caused controversy when he suggested that young black men were likely to be responsible for most muggings.


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

Tom Wolfe's Jefferson Lecture:

The great journalist/novelist explains his point of view. An excerpt:

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a "fiction-absolute." Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world--so ordained by some almighty force--would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to "the intellectuals" also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly.

The human beast's belief in his own fiction-absolute accounts for one of the most puzzling and in many cases irrational phenomena of our time. I first noticed it when I read a book by Samuel Lubell called The Future of American Politics. Lubell was a political scientist and sociologist who had been as surprised as everybody else by the outcome of the 1948 presidential election. That was the election in which the Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman, was a president whose approval rating had fallen as low as 23 percent. Every survey, every poll, every pundit's prediction foresaw him buried by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey. Instead, Truman triumphed in one of the most startling upsets in American political history. Lubell was determined to find out why, and so he set out across the country. When he reached a small Midwestern town that had been founded before the turn of the 19th century by Germans, he was puzzled to learn that the town had gone solidly for Dewey despite the fact that by every rational turn of logic, every economic motivation, Truman would have been a more logical choice. By and by Lubell discovered that the town was still predominantly German. Nobody had ever gotten over the fact that in 1917, a Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson, had declared war on Germany. That had set off a wave of anti-German feeling, anti-German prejudice, and, in the eyes of the people of this town, besmirched their honor as people of German descent. And now, two World Wars later, their minds were fixed on the year 1917, because like all other human beasts, they tended to champion in an irrational way their own set of values, their own fiction absolute.

The 2004 election came down to one state: the state of Ohio. Whoever won that state in the final hours would win the election. Northern Ohio, the big cities of Cleveland, Toledo on the Great Lakes, were solidly for Kerry. But in southern Ohio, from east to west, and in the west was the city of Cincinnati, Ohio went solidly for George Bush. And the reason? That great swath of territory was largely inhabited by the Scots-Irish. And when the Democrats came out in favor of gun control, the Scots-Irish interpreted this as not merely an attack on the proliferation of weaponry in American life but as a denunciation, a besmirching, of their entire way of life, their entire fiction absolute. Guns were that important in their scheme of things.

More recently, I returned to Washington and Lee for a conference on the subject of Latin American writing in the United States. The conference soon became a general and much hotter discussion of the current immigration dispute. I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn't have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States. And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation. [More]

I suspect this this is true most of all of the kind of professional Latinos/as who attend conferences on Latin American writing in the United States. But, they are the most articulate ones, so they can drag lots of others with them.


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

The Catholic Church versus The Da Vinci Code

Mean Mr. Mustard writes:

When someone tells an outright, bald-faced and easily demonstrable lie about you, do you simply point out that the other guy is full of s---, or do you defend yourself by claiming offense?

Apparently, the Catholic Church and other critics of the Da Vinci Code take the latter tack.

It's so very depressing, because it reveals much more than just the Church's inadequate response to slander. It puts on display the level to which our society has descended into full-blown solipsistic narcissism.

Of course, if you ask them, they'll also point out eventually (I hope) that Brown's claims to historicity and scholarship are the stuff of below-average conspiracy theory which he didn't even have the common decency to himself invent, but had to lift nearly whole from another untalented writer's ravings.

But that kind of appeal to objective truth really just won't do these days. For one thing, it's simply not emotive enough. All it does is describe what is rather than whether or not it makes me want to cry. For another, it does have quite rude implications, doesn't it? One side being correct implies the other sides' incorrectness, and that kind of thing puts you on the short road to mandated sensitivity training.

In describing how dreadfully hurt and offended they are over Dan Brown's low-brow crap, Church spokesmen are shamefully but not surprisingly taking a cue from the modern, feminized and self-absorbed approach to discourse. One would hope for more spine from an institution that purports to reveal and explicate divine, unalterable truth, but at the same time you have to admit that they're merely using the most powerful weapon currently available in the public sphere, the ultimate trump card in all disputes: an expression of personal hurt feelings.


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

May 13, 2006

The Great Pundit Meltdown of 2006

A reader comments:

You wrote: "Do you get the feeling the WSJ op-ed boys aren't on their game right now?"

It strikes me that a lot of pundits seem to be off their game lately, and some of them are in full-fledged meltdown mode, like Richard Cohen bashing Stephen Colbert for being mean to Bush or Mark Steyn writing the same columns he wrote in 2002.

In a way, the implosion of the Bush presidency has been worse for the pundits than for Bush. Sure, Bush would rather be popular than not, but no matter what his poll numbers are, he's President and no one can take that away from him (except by impeachment and nobody's going to do that), and he cares more about just being President than actually doing anything worthwhile. But the pundits look like complete fools: the conservative pundits who decided to become Bush cultists in 2002-4 are now forced to grapple with the fact that they've been defending a complete failure, and the milquetoast "liberal" pundits -- the ones who wrote that Bush was basically a good guy, beloved by all, and the Democrats needed to go along with the Iraq war but pledge to do it more competently (the TNR/Washington Post type of "liberals") -- are also looking like idiots.


Among the mainstream punditariat I'm now seeing a certain amount of incoherent rage, usually directed at the "isolationist right" (if the pundit's conservative) or the "angry left" (if the pundit's liberal). It's the rage of bubble-dwelling pundits who can't forgive the "extreme" left and right for having been right all along while they were busy writing about what a swell guy Bush is.


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

"Mission: Impossible III"

Excerpts from my review in the upcoming American Conservative: (subscribe here):

With Tom Cruise, the glass is always about five-eighths full. Sure, as an actor he's memorable merely as the personification of youthful energy, and as a celebrity, the Scientologist has turned into a pest as his once-bulletproof public relations skills have broken down.

Yet, Cruise's movies are consistently better than they need to be. Since 2001, he's made the artistically ambitious science fiction films "Vanilla Sky" and "Minority Report," the silly but magnificent-looking "Last Samurai," and the limited but effective "Collateral" and "War of the Worlds." Only Russell Crowe's films have been consistently better, but offscreen he seems too, uh, tired and emotional (as the Brit tabloids like to say) to work as often as Cruise. Hollywood likes its leading men to set an example for the whole film crew. "Superstars do not get where they are by throwing temperamental fits, malingering on the set, or not following directions," a talent agent explained to reporter Edward Jay Epstein...

Since 1983's "Risky Business," the boyish Cruise has epitomized the shift in American preferences about the age of its heroes that began with the replacement of the wise Dwight Eisenhower by the vigorous John F. Kennedy. Many 1930s actors, especially hard drinkers like Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, looked older than their years, while today's health-crazed male leads (with the exception of that throwback, George Clooney) seem almost adolescent. (Cruise, however, isn't quite Dorian Gray: like many 43-year-olds, his nose keeps growing.)

Maybe you just need more energy to remain a star these days.


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

I'll be on WBAL

in Baltimore (AM 1090) from 3:15 to 4:00 EDT today, Friday, May 12, to discuss my VDARE.com column on the hunt for the Great White Defendant in the Duke Lacrosse case with Ron Smith.

You can listen live here.

Update: Good conversation. We went on 30 minutes longer than planned. Ron Smith is a big fan of my work.

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

Glaivester's thought for the day

Is Evolution Your Science or Your Religion?

Whenever [a liberal] denigrates evolutionary psychology, what they really mean is "I thought the whole point of evolution was just to deny God. I didn't think it was actually supposed to tell us anything."


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

Cochran and Parker Try to Figure Out Why Bush Hates America

Parapundit offers Greg Cochran's list of theories of why the President is trying to ruin our country ("Maybe he's a Skoptsy"), and then adds his own. Readers are invited to see if they can be more creative.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." - George W. Bush

A reader writes:

I think when he was young and crazy, he took one too many lost week-ends South of the Border. Knowing that this was the scion of a famous political family, W was captured by agents of the Mexican government. After months of torture and reconditioning he was dumped in a Houston apartment complex parking lot in the middle of the night - with no memory of the ordeal - but an unbreakable agenda burned into his broken spirit. Run for President and unite the populations of the US and Mexico.

He was to become ''The Muchacho Candidate''.


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

Great article: The genetics of nepotism and neposchism in Shakespeare's history plays

William D. Hamilton's kin selection calculus strikes again!

Study: Royal Executions Followed Pattern

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

A study of British royal executions has determined that the killings followed consistent patterns that correspond to Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory.

The study helps to explain why so many British royals killed family members, particularly over a 200-year period called The Cousins' Wars that spanned the 14th to the 16th centuries.

It also suggests that human behavior, even family murders, can be consistent with patterns of survival under circumstances in which resources are scarce, yet highly valued, life-supporting and gained only through inheritance.

According to the researchers, such conditions existed after Edward III's death in 1377. The king and his wife produced five sons and three daughters who survived to adulthood and who all had their eyes on the crown.

Richard II, Edward's successor and eldest son, proved to be a weak, despised leader. Richard's cousin, Henry IV, executed the king and began the apparently Darwinian Cousins' Wars.

"Darwin's major contribution to science was selection -- natural and sexual, which depend upon competition between individuals and their choices," explained Kathleen Heath, who worked on the study, which has been selected for publication in The History of the Family journal.

Heath, an associate professor of anthropology at Indiana State University, added, "Those who adapt best -- better than his/her competitor -- in a particular environment are favored by natural selection, that is, live longer and have a better chance of passing on their genes to the next generation."

Heath and her colleagues determined that the murdering royals never sacrificed lineal relatives. Of the 47 killed, only five were not cousins. These included one brother, two uncles and two nephews.

The researchers assigned genetic relatedness values to each individual, so that a parent, for example, is 50 percent, or .5, related to a child, while a full first cousin is .125.

Using these values, the scientists found that executioners never killed in excess of their own nuclear relatedness, meaning the total value assigned to the individual and his or her children.

If they had killed in excess of this amount, it "would have been the equivalent of evolutionary suicide," according to the researchers, since the killers would have been eliminating, instead of furthering, their genetic family line.

Finally, the study found that the longer an individual lived and served as monarch, the more people he or she killed. Elizabeth I, whose long, stable reign ended the Cousins' Wars, wound up killing five cousins, all of which were perceived threats to her life and throne.

"Some royals killed as a simple insurance policy -- the poster boy for this is Henry VIII, who would not allow anyone to come close to his son's claim to the throne," Heath told Discovery News. "As a mother is violent when her children are in danger, there is an inherent drive to protect one's offspring/lineage by whatever means -- love or murder."

She said non-royal wealthy families had to devise other means for reducing inter-family competition for resources. These tactics included sending relatives off to military service, on quests, to the priesthood or to a nunnery.

David Zeanah, graduate coordinator of archaeology at California State University, Sacramento, and graduate student Henry Lyle told Discovery News that the researchers were "ingenious" in "finding a source of data where the consequences of human behaviors for reproductive success can be evaluated."

Zeanah and Lyle added, "This not only offers tremendous potential benefits for Darwinian approaches to studying human behavior, but promises new insights into the ultimate, Darwinian causes of historical events that have previously been understood in terms of proximate causation alone."

Not surprisingly, Dr. Heath got her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the U. of Utah, the department that is home to Henry Harpending and many other independent minds.

By the way, awhile ago I asked readers to coin a term for exactly this flip side of nepotism, this tendency to struggle most with one's own kin for resources, what I'd been calling "sibling rivalry writ large." Ideally, the terms would form a handy pair like Galton's "nature and nurture."

I particularly liked one suggestion: nepotism vs. "neposchism".


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

Birthday bias in the the National Hockey League: Nature vs. Nurture

World Cup soccer players (typically the top 20 or so players from each of the top soccer countries) are born in equal amounts in the first half and last half of the year (although misreported in the New York Times by guess who?). Yet, there is a birthday bias among NHL hockey players, currently running at 59-41 for those born in the first half of the year compared to the second half.

Let me try to sum up the implications of the hockey example and relate them to Dr. Levitt’s ambitious statements about the relative importance of nature and nurture.

To be drafted by the NHL at age 18, a Canadian youth must pass through an ever narrowing funnel of selection. In particular, he must distinguish himself in youth hockey competitions at the national and world levels that are restricted to 17-and-under players. This gives an advantage to those 17-year-olds who are almost 18 compared to those 17-year-olds who have just turned 17.

Let’s assume for the moment that this 59-41 difference in first half versus last half of the year birthdates in the NHL reflects a genuine difference in mature performance level rather than a market inefficiency, and that it stems solely from the early-born people getting better nurture than the late people.

So, does this fact settle the nature vs. nurture debate inaugurated so long ago by Sir Francis Galton?

Well, the nature glass is part full and part empty, just as the nurture glass is part full and part empty. But, what are the proportions?

Very roughly speaking, one in every ten thousand Canadian males between 18 and 40 is playing in the NHL.

One factor influencing who gets into the NHL appears to be the luck of the birth date. Somebody born in January is about 1.7 or so times more likely to make the NHL than somebody born in December. So, the odds for somebody with the good luck to be born early in the year might be 1/7,500 versus 1/12,500 for somebody born late in the year. (These are just back-of-envelope estimates of relative magnitude.)

So, that is a significant role for nurture, but not an overwhelming one, since in a national sport like hockey in Canada subtle opportunity effects matter mostly to the far right edge of the bell curve for athleticism.

I'm sure there are a huge number of other nurture factors like quality of coaching, parental fanaticism, and so forth. But, let's take a rough swing at estimating the magnitude of nature and nurture in the chances of a Canadian making it to the NHL.

I think it’s safe to say that nobody in the NHL is less than one standard deviation above the mean in natural hockey athleticism, which eliminates 84% of the population. The best training in the world will never make a mediocre or below average athlete into an NHL player.

Further, I would guess that almost nobody in the NHL is less than two standard deviations above the mean (although I could be wrong), so that would be 97.7% of the population that doesn’t have a chance.

Among the remaining 2.3%, however, I would imagine that nurture is highly important.

This is not to say somebody at the 99.9999th percentile in natural talent has no better chance than somebody at the 97.3rd percentile. For example, here is Wikipedia's profile of the early years of The Great One, Wayne Gretzky. Although Gretzky was born January 26th, that made little difference in his youth career since he constantly played against older athletes.

Taught by his father Walter, Gretzky was a classic prodigy. At age 6 he was skating with 10-year-olds. At age 10 he scored 378 goals and 139 assists in 85 games, and the first story on him was published in the Toronto Telegram. At 14, playing against 20-year-olds, he left Brantford to further his career and signed with his first agent.

He played a season in the Ontario Hockey League at the age of 16 with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds...

He became the youngest player to compete in the World Junior Championships, when he participated in Montreal in 1978 at age 16. Despite being the youngest player in the tournament by far, he finished as the tournament's top scorer, was voted to the All-Star team and Best Forward of the tournament.

That year (1978-79) he signed with the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association (WHA) as an underaged player. The National Hockey League (NHL) does not allow the signing of players under the age of 18, but the WHA had no rules regarding such signings. Racers owner Nelson Skalbania signed the 17-year-old to a personal contract worth between 1.12 and 1.75 million dollars US over 1 to 2 years.

While I was living in Houston in 1979 or 1980, a college roommate told me that everybody in Canada knew that this teenager named Wayne Gretzky was going to be the the greatest hockey player of all time, and the only question was whether he was already the great player.

Keep in mind, though, that ice hockey in Canada is of course one of the most competitive selection environments in the world. In less popular sports, however, flukes of environment matter far more. The chance of an American kid making it to the NHL is much more driven by things like geography (e.g., a Minnesotan is a lot more likely to make it than a South Carolinian).

To take an extreme example of the dominance of nurture over nature, in the 1970s an American college student read that Team Handball would be an official sport at the 1976 Olympics. So, he convinced his fraternity brothers to take up the game and practice it for a few years. The fraternity qualified en masse to represent America in Team Handball in Montreal, and presumably had a blast (at least while they weren’t getting thrashed on the court by countries that actually cared about the sport).

The mean natural athleticism of those fraternity brothers was probably only slightly above average, but in the utterly non-competitive environment of Team Handball in the USA 30 years ago, they were able to leverage their nurture advantage to become the best in America.

So, this comparison reflects a general principle that the the more meritocratic and competitive a competition becomes, the more nature outweighs nurture.


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

May 12, 2006

Diversity Doings at the University of Chicago

A reader writes:

I thought you might be amused by an event I recently attended here at the Univ. of Chicago. I'm gay ... I recently went to a gay student meeting where a new student center was being discussed. The U. of C. is building a new and expensive minority center, for blacks, gays, latinos (the most expensive construction per square foot on campus, we were told, even after including the advanced nuclear research facilities we have).

The meeting, thrown by a university bureaucrat, and apparently the nth meeting on this subject, was at first obscure to me as to its purpose because the language was so indirect, pc, and esoteric. Eventually it came out: the blacks don't want the gays in the same building with them...

It took fifty minutes for the word "homophobia" to be raised in connection with "persons of color."

An uncomfortable pause.

Then an immediate backtrack: perhaps it's only that a few individuals failed to see how their actions could be perceived to be homophobic. There was also some unpleasant ruminations as to why the black student association did not raise objections until after the project and funding had been approved. Could it be that they calculated they'd be more likely to win approval for the project that way--but that they never had any intention of sharing the building? (gasp). No, it couldn't be.

Long disquisitions on the difficulties of being black, and how what is making them uncomfortable is losing their safe space--with their people, people of color: sharing it with queers is not the issue, but once again not having a safe space (i.e. it's not that you're gay, but that you're a cracker).

Some unpleasant discussion of floor plans followed: But we'd be confined to the third floor--wouldn't they be okay with that? (Apparently not.)

Somehow this hasn't made it into the press, and as the bureaucrat said, this is "not one of those issues that would be helped by a vote."

Also, one has to have some respect for the virtues of the bureaucrat in steering through this minefield. At one point he said, people of the two communities need to talk with one another, and of course there are a wide variety of views in each group, it's not monolithic, and there are many who belong to both communities, and he looked around. Unfortunately, there were no persons of color in the room. I think that took some face to pull off.

I wonder when this thing will finally get so ridiculous donors will stop giving money, but South Park hasn't caught up with the donors yet.


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

Levitt: "Maybe the World Cup Wasn’t the Best Example"

On their Freakonomics blog, Levitt and Dubner step back from their claim in the New York Times that World Cup soccer players are mostly born in the first six months of the years. They offer some persuasive data that NHL hockey players, however, tend to be born in the first half of the year by a 59-41 ratio. A good discussion ensues.

A reader sent me the following showing a 58-42 bias toward first half of the year births in the NHL's top ten draft picks.

He wrote:

You had asked if anyone had any data on Hockey players. Well, I did some non-scientific research of Birthdays of the Top Ten drafted players from each of the last 10 drafts. And this is what I found:

Jan 11
Feb 14
Mar 8
Apr 14
May 6
Jun 5
Jul 3
Aug 7
Sep 14
Oct 7
Nov 7
Dec 4
Sum 100

A few pieces of trivia about Hockey players that might have some affect on who gets drafted.

- Few players get drafted after the age of 18. A few players get overlooked and then shine in college or elsewhere, but this is not often.

- You can not be drafted before the age of 18.

- Three leagues/tournaments play a huge role in who gets the most attention:

* The Canadian Major Juniors (OHL, WHL and QMJHL)

* The Under-18 Tournament (U-18)

* The World Junior Championships (WJC)

If you do not make a major showing at one of these places, you will not be a top draft pick. The only exception would be a European/Soviet-Bloc player who plays in one of their Elite leagues but was injured for the WJC.

I should also note that I did not factor for NHL success. That is, there are plenty of players who are drafted in the top ten who never make it in the NHL because they never mature/improve. With some more time this could be done though. Simply go to HockeyDB.com and view each draft, the site has their career stats with total number of games played. This is not that helpful for recent picks, but would be helpful for player drafted in the late 80’s early 90’s.

Anyway, here is where I got my data: http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/draft/index.html (warning: lots of pop-ups)

So, in hockey, both in Canada and abroad, there appears to be a severe bottleneck to advancement at roughly ages 17-18, which gives a big advantage to boys who were born in January and thus are 11 months older than boys born in December.

We see a lot of the same thing in horseracing, where the Kentucky Derby is restricted to 3-year-olds. I recall watching a fictional TV show as a kid about horsebreeders with a mare going into labor on New Year's Even, so they trucked her across the time zone line so she would give birth in the right year so that her foal would be 364 days more mature when he was eligible for the Kentucky Derby.

So, the question I raised on Levitt's blog is: Is this bias in the NHL a self-esteem effect as Levitt theorized, or a market inefficiency?

David Kane posts on Freakonomics:

The more that I look at this, the more it seems clear that, while Dr. Levitt is correct that more NHL players are born in the first half of the year, this has nothing to do with the stars-are-made-not-born thesis of the article. In other words, the reason that there are more early-births is not that early-births get more practice against better opponents. Instead, early-births are more likely to get high profile spots which give them exposure for the NHL draft. They are more likely to be drafted than a similarly talented late-birth because the coaches and GMs have seen them play as (more highly developed) teenagers.

In other words, the hockey draft is inefficient. Teams should draft fewer early-births and more late-births.

How might we test this? Easy. The better the cohort of players, the less inefficient the market will be. Among the best players (those who get lots of ice time for several years in the NHL), there will be no meaningful difference in early-versus-late births. These players are judged accurately on their adult skills.

Instead, the effect will be much greater in the bottom of the NHL pool. Younger players with not a lot of ice time are more likely to be judged and retained on the basis of their (inaccurately measured because of birth-month issues) performance in youth leagues.

If I am correct, the effect will be smaller and/or non-existent among older, better players. Alas, I can’t get any of these data sources to provide a clean test of this hypothesis, but I was able to split the Sportsnet.ca data into two portions: Jan-Jun and Jul-Dec birthdates. When you do this, the default sort is by points scored.

I picked 30 points as a reasonable threshold. Turns out that, among the 174 NHL players who have scored at least 30 points this season, 140 were born in Jan-Jul and 134 in Jul-Dec. (Of course, points scored is not the best measure. What about goalies and defensemen? And so on.)

But, big picture, there is no birth-month effect among the top 1/3 of NHL players. This suggests to me that the birth-month effect is much more likely to be a draft inefficiency. You don’t see this in other sports because the draft process is better.

A very interesting analysis. We know now that there were a number of market inefficiencies in baseball, as identified by Bill James from 1975 onward. So, this is at least theoretically possible. But I don't know anything about hockey statistics. I wouldn't say Kane's tabulation is terribly definitive (after all, there is a small effect in the direction of Levitt's theory), but this is a good example of what blogging can accomplish.

UPDATE: Kane adds:

Using the Sportsnet.ca site, it seems that the birth-month effect is just as strong among older players as it is among young players. For example, of the 284 players who are 30 years old or older, 161 were born in the first half of the year and 123 were born in the second.

Hmmm. I would have guessed that older players would be evaluated more efficiently than younger players and so we should not see a birth-month effect. Then again, a different way of looking at the problem is to note that all 30+ year olds had to go through the same inefficient draft.

As I said, I don't know how this will shake out empirically. I suspect there is a bottleneck effect that varies by sport and by position. For example, if you have potential to make it to the major leagues as a baseball outfielder, you are almost certain to get a lot of playing time in high school, since very, very few high schools have four outfielders with major league potential .

On the other hand, only one quarterback can start at a time. The most famous quarterback bottleneck of all time was on the San Francisco 49ers from 1987-1992, when they had both Joe Montana and Steve Young, who just might be the two best quarterbacks ever. If Montana had been more durable, who knows if Young would ever have gotten a chance to show what he was capable of?

So, there's a definite "opportunity effect." For example, the younger brother of a friend of mine was a standout high school quarterback, and got a scholarship to Stanford. But Stanford had a quarterback named John Elway, so he sat on the bench for three years. Finally, Elway graduated, so he became the starter for Stanford his senior year ... and didn't deliver. So, the NFL didn't show any interest. He went into minor league baseball when he got drafted in the 14th round by the SF Giants. Maybe he never really was that good at quarterback. But maybe he just needed a year to stink up the joint and learn from his mistakes, so if he'd gone to, say, a Utah St. and been able to start as a sophomore, he would have been pretty good as a senior.

If you want to be an NFL quarterback, it can seem like a good idea to attend a quarterback factory high school like mighty Hart H.S. in Southern California. (Here's an extremely objective Wikipedia article on Hart grad and NFL quarterback Kyle Boller.)

But, that’s a more severe bottleneck because you might very well end up sitting on the bench throughout your entire high school career because another NFL potential quarterback is starting ahead of you. And if you don't start in high school, it's hard to get a scholarship to a football factory college, which makes it really hard to get to the NFL.

Thus, it can be very helpful if your parents redshirt you as a child, making you spend two years in preschool, so you'll then be a year older than your classmates for your entire childhood. For example, this year's most hyped high school junior QB, Jimmy Clausen of Oaks Christian in Westlake, CA, who just signed with Notre Dame, "started kindergarten at six and repeated sixth grade, "to gain maturity," says his mom, Cathy."

This raises the related issue of whether you are best off having less competition or more when growing up. For example, Jimmy Clausen is both older than other high school quarterbacks, and his parents sent him to a small school that plays only other small high schools. So, comes out and throws four or five touchdowns in the first half, then sits out the second half. This is great for his self-esteem, but is it toughening him up enough? When he's at Notre Dame and playing USC and with three minutes left in the game he's completed only 11 of 29 for 122 yards with three interceptions and he's got to drive the Fighting Irish 80 yards for a touchdown, is all that self-esteem in high school going to do him a lot of good? Well, ND coach Charlie Weis seems to be more focused on Clausen's Dan Marino-like release than such issues. So, talent matters.

Here's my 2002 article "Redshirting: A Kindergarten Arms Race" on the trend toward American upper middle class parents trying to give their kids a leg up on the competition by holding them back for a year.


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

May 11, 2006

South Korean birthrate hits 1.08 babies per woman:

South Korea's birth rate has fallen to its lowest level on record in 2005, sparking concern about a shrinking population and aging society.

The birth rate, which represents the average number of children a woman is expected to have during her reproductive lifetime, stood at 1.08 in 2005, down from 1.16 in 2004, the National Statistical Office (NSO) said Monday.

The rate is the lowest in the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of leading democracies, it said.

The NSO said more women were putting off marriage to a later age, with many reluctant to have children.

Despite incentives from the government to boost the birth rate, young South Koreans regard children as an expensive burden on their lifestyles and careers.

The striking thing about this horrific number is that South Korea is not one of those effete, lazy Eurotrash countries that Mark Steyn is always going on and on about. It's the home of the Work Hard, Riot Hard ethos. In 2001, South Koreans worked 500 hours more per year than Americans, and we work long hours compared to Europeans or even Japanese.

Sheer population density must be one cause: among countries with populations over 10 million, South Korea is third (behind Bangladesh and Taiwan) at 491/km. France is at 110 and the U.S. at 30.


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

Who cares about protecting human biodiversity when there is flora and fauna biodiversity to protect?

You might recall the movie "Gorillas in the Mist" with Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey, in which the villains were the local pygmies. Personally, while I like apes, I like my fellow human beings more, especially if they are only 4'6".


AFP reports:

Rwandan pygmies fight for survival in eco-sensitive times

BWEYEYE, Rwanda (AFP) - In this remote corner of southern Rwanda, Twa pygmies are fighting a losing battle against the modern realities of environmentalism that are robbing them of their traditions.

Sandwiched between the Burundian border and the edge of the dense Nyungwe rainforest, the village of Bweyeye is on the frontline of an increasingly divisive struggle between the diminutive Twa and the long arm of Rwandan law.

Forced to abandon their centuries-old hunter-gatherer lifestyle by a ban on such activity in the maze of giant tropical trees, towering ferns and tiny orchids, many Twa have descended into crushing poverty and alcoholism.

Nyungwe, home to chimpanzees and other monkey species, is a stretch of rainforest in this central African region and Rwandan officials are keen to exploit its eco-tourism potential by protecting it.

But the Twa say the restrictions are destroying their community... "This ban on setting foot in the forest is a problem because our ancestors lived from the forest, they even used to hunt elephants there," he said, adding that, once, the meat from an elephant could sustain a family for a month. "Now we will soon die of hunger," Hakizimana tells AFP.

In addition to providing food, the vast 970-square-kilometer (375-square-mile) Nyungwe forest used to provide the Twa with essential fuel and raw materials such as wood for building.

But no longer.

While the forest ban is not new -- it was first imposed by the 1973-1994 regime of president Juvenal Habyarimana that ended with Rwanda's infamous genocide -- it is now being enforced with vigor, they say....

"We used to be potters, but you can't get the clay any more now," Munyemanzi complains. "It's tempting to go out and steal." The Twa insist that if and when they do go into the forest it is simply to collect firewood, but privately some admit to catching monkeys, baboons and forest rats.

Bweyeye local administrator Octave Rukundo is well aware of the hardships the ban has caused but is adamant that the law be respected. "They say they go to get wood for fuel, but in fact they also take wood to sell," he told AFP.

"They hunt the animals," Rukundo says. "They make traps, they dig holes two meters (six feet) deep and place branches over the top so that animals fall in. "They make fires to get smoke to chase bees away and collect their honey, but those fires can then burn the forest," he said, noting there had been two forest fires so far this year...

Like other Rwandans, the Twa, who make up about one percent of the country's 8,000,000 population, used to own land, but as long as they had the forest it was of little importance and plots were sold off to their Hutu and Tutsi neighbors. It was only when the forest ban began to be enforced that they realized the importance of farming their own land and then it was too late.

When the Twa here can get work it is usually on their neighbors' land and the pay is a pittance.

"Sometimes I get work cleaning up my neighbor's plot," says Esperance Gashugi, a 50-year-old mother of five children who earns 200 francs (about 20 US cents, 16 euro cents) per day for the backbreaking labor.>>

In despair and frustration, some Twa have turned to drink.

"The real problem," one non-Twa inhabitant of Bweyeye says, "is that these people don't want farmland, they don't want development projects. What they want is to be able to go hunting in the forest again and that's not going to happen."

*

In more late-breaking hunter-gatherer news, 80 members of the Nukak Indian tribe have emerged from the jungle in Colombia and are living in a clearing outside a town, where they gnaw on such favorite dishes as boiled monkey heads.

The NYT reports:

What everyone agrees on is that the Nukak of Aguabonita must avoid the fate of the Nukak who came here in 2003 and now live in a clearing called BarrancĂłn.

Now in their fourth year in the area, the Nukak in BarrancĂłn lead listless lives, lolling in their hammocks awaiting food from the state. They do not work, nor have they learned Spanish. They also have no plans to return to the forest...

Are they sad? "No!" cried a Nukak named Pia-pe, to howls of laughter. In fact, the Nukak said they could not be happier. Used to long marches in search of food, they are amazed that strangers would bring them sustenance — free.

What do they like most? "Pots, pants, shoes, caps," said Mau-ro, a young man who went to a shelter to speak to two visitors...

One young Nukak mother, Bachanede, breast-feeding her infant as she talked, said she was happy just to stay still. "When you walk in the jungle," she said, "your feet hurt a lot."


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

May 9, 2006

Affordable Family Formation and college debt

A reader writes:


I've read your articles about the political impact of family formation costs with interest.

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes had a piece about the rising number of people who begin their adult lives with enormous student loan debt. It occurred to me that, for those living with the problem, this is probably as significant an obstacle to family formation as any, and thus would have a leftward influence on the student-debtor population.

This may help explain another political trend that’s been taking place over the past 20 years or so. Forgive me for not having the statistics handy, but I’ve read that political conservatism used to be significantly, positively correlated with education and that this is no longer the case. Could it be that it isn’t having acquired a college education that makes those with more schooling veer leftward; it’s that paying for it keeps those people from starting families sooner? Add to this the fact that net debtors of all types have historically been sympathetic to the left, and it’s possible that student debt could be quite significant in shaping political leanings.

It’s easy to make too much of such things, but there might be something there.


Can anybody think of a data source to check this hypothesis?


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