July 24, 2006

The Word of the Decade: "Elites"

The first time I can recall anybody using the plural form of "elite" was at a December 1999 Hudson Institute conference. Since then, it has become omnipresent.

I've used it a lot myself, but I must confess that I have never been sure exactly what it means. It has two possible meanings: as a collective noun for collective nouns (e.g., elite groups) or as a collective noun for individuals who are elite.

The former is the more traditional use of the term, since "an elite" has normally designated a group of individuals: e.g., "Navy SEALs are an elite." In the past, you wouldn't have said, "A Navy SEAL is an elite." You would have said "A Navy SEAL belongs to an elite." Or you would have used "elite" as an adjective when referring to an individual: "A Navy SEAL is an elite fighting man." But, now, it appears that "elites" can mean the plural: "Navy SEALs are elites." Yet, you still don't see "elite" used very often to refer to a single individual: "A Navy SEAL is an elite."

I tend to weasel-word my sentences so "elites" could mean either. For example, if I write "Elites favor mass immigration," I could be referring to various elite organizations and groups, such as, say, the Business Roundtable, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the like. This would be the more traditional use of the term.

But I could also mean individuals who have elite status in some fashion. That would be a more novel use of the word.

So, what exactly is the meaning and status of the Word of the Decade?

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

My new VDARE.com column on voting rights

Voting Rights For Everyone—Whether or Not They Speak English
By Steve Sailer



"[S]ome Congressmen probably would vote for a declaration of war against Canada if it were contained in a bill with the words `civil rights' in its title." ['Civil Rights' That Can Lead to Civil War, By Thomas Sowell, New York Daily News, April 24, 1990), p. 30, quoted in Paved With Good Intentions, p. 151]

President Bush's speech to the NAACP on Thursday was strikingly lacking in any sort of "Sister Souljah moment"—chiding that venerable but now notoriously corrupt and ineffectual black organization for even one of its numerous faults.

Instead, Bush made the climax of his speech a demand that the Senate pass a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act without amendment.

The Senate instantly complied by a vote of 98-0 (following the House's passage by the margin of 390-33).

As a substantive bill, the VRA extension was notable for insisting that foreign language ballots be provided to voters who need them.

Yet, to become a U.S. citizen, immigrants are legally required to prove that they are literate in English.
So the need for a non-English ballot would appear to be prima facie proof that an immigrant either fraudulently became a citizen or that he is a noncitizen attempting to vote fraudulently.

But President Bush and the solons of the Senate aren't concerned about mere logic when they can revel in one of the more popular rituals of 21st century political theatre: pretending that Southern white racism is omnipresent, a pervasive threat to blacks' right to vote.

Apparently, the only thing that can divert this tidal wave of Southern white bigotry from washing away the gains of the 1960s is a unanimous vote of the Senate, including all the Southern white Senators, in favor of the new VRA.

This 25-year VRA extension , which President Bush swore to the NAACP that he would sign, requires nine states, seven of them Southern, to get the Justice Department's approval for any change in voting rules to make sure that "the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect."

Thus, the mark of Cain will officially be upon the South into the 2030s for evils that disappeared by the 1970s.

In reality, as Thomas Sowell pointed out back in the pre-Internet days, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the most quickly successful of the civil rights era landmarks. [More]


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

Latest American Conservative issue online

July 31, 2006 Issue of The American Conservative (including my cover story, which many of you readers helped out with):

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
By Steve Sailer
They’ve left middle America behind and can’t pander to one minority without alienating another.

New Deals & Old Answers
By James P. Pinkerton
Can the Democrats recover the ideological energy of William Jennings Bryan or FDR? Not on their current course.



Our Dangerous Times
By James Bovard
In accusing the NYT of treason, the Right displays greater loyalty to the president than to their old principles.

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers
By Sen. Byron L. Dorgan
Low prices come at a high economic cost.

Borrowed Empire
By Paul Craig Roberts
Don’t worry about what currency oil is denominated in—worry about the deficit.


Afghanistan on the Edge
By Stewart Nusbaumer
Why we’re losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan

Mother Russia No More
By Pavel Kohout
State subsidies won’t reverse Russia’s demographic decline.



Hell on Heels
By Steve Sailer
Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”

Acoustic Feedback
By R.J. Stove
Performing Music in the Age of Recording
by Robert Philip

Absent at the Creation
By James Bowman
The Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson


Disappearing Democrats

By Bill Kauffman
Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy by Jeff Taylor



Kim Jong Il’s Independence Day
By Patrick J. Buchanan

National(ist) Pastime
By Taki
World Cup, National Sport



Fourteen Days: Court Reins in Bush Gitmo Tribunals; A Pat on the Head for Social Conservatives; The Devil Defeats Immigration Reform

Deep Background:
Terrorists Scoop Times on Financial Surveillance; TSA Is Making a List—and Not Checking It Twice


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

Smarter women become later mothers

More General Social Study data: A reader, perhaps inspired by Inductivist and Half Sigma, has fallen in love with the GSS database of in-depth interviews of thousands of Americans. The GSS includes a 10 question vocabulary test, which is often used as a crude approximation of IQ. So, he sent me the average age at first birth by mothers in the sample by number of vocabulary words correct (0 to 10). I worked out approximate IQs for the mean member of each group and whipped together a graph in Excel. So, age at first birth is fairly flat for the left half of the bell curve (the blue line), then rises steadily for the right half. So, smarter women not only are having fewer babies (I assume), but they are starting later in life so their generation times are longer as well.


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

No, I think Stephen Jay Gould would have been

angry, resentful, and abusive ...


And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer Monday,
July 24, 2006; Page A07

Stephen Jay Gould would have been pleased.

No, not about his mug shot at the endpoint of evolution in the illustration above, but about the growing evidence that evolution is not just real but is actually happening to human beings right now.

"From 1970 to 2000, there was a widespread view that although natural selection is very important, it is relatively rare," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist at the University of Chicago. "That view was driven largely because we did not have data to identify the signals of natural selection. . . . In the last five years or so, there has been a tremendous growth in our understanding of how much selection there is."

That insight has only deepened as scientists have gained the ability to read the entire human genome, the chain of "letters" that spell out humanity's genetic identity.

"Signals of natural selection are incredibly widespread across the human genome," Pritchard said. "Everywhere we look, there appears to be very widespread signals of natural selection in many genes and many processes."

Pritchard helped write a recent paper that identified some of those changes. The paper was published in the public access journal PLoS Biology.

The research offers a fascinating snapshot into how the human genome has continued to change as humans adapted to new circumstances over the past 10,000 years. As people went from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies, for instance, there is evidence of genetic adaptations to new diseases and diets.

Europeans seem to be adapting to the increased availability of dairy products, with genetic changes that allow the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose in milk, to be available throughout life, not just in infancy. Similarly, East Asians show genetic changes that affect the metabolism of the sugar sucrose, while the Yoruba people in sub-Saharan Africa show genetic changes that alter how they metabolize the sugar mannose.

Where starvation was once widespread in humans' evolutionary history, making it genetically advantageous to conserve calories as much as possible, the abundance of food in many countries today has led to the opposite problem -- risk factors and diseases related to metabolic overload, including obesity and diabetes -- suggesting these could be areas in which natural selection may currently be active, as genetic variations that help protect against such disorders gain selective advantage.

There are also a host of changes at the genetic level that scientists do not yet understand -- they are probably useful, but it is not clear how.

Several changes seem related to fertility and reproduction, areas of very high relevance to natural selection. The basic protein structure of sperm may have changed in East Asians and the Yoruba; East Asians also show genetic changes related to sperm motility; and Europeans show genetic changes related to egg viability, fertilization and the female immune response to sperm.

Pritchard said his research does not speak directly to Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" hypothesis that suggests that evolution progresses in leaps and starts. That is because Gould focused on large changes in form or structure, whereas Pritchard studies subtler changes at the genetic level.

"If you met a human from 10,000 years ago," Pritchard quipped, "they may look a little different, but if you dressed them right, they would probably blend in. Gould's talking about changes in body plan and broader changes."

To spot natural selection at work, Pritchard and Bruce Lahn, also a geneticist at the University of Chicago who has conducted independent research in the same area, first look for places along the human genome to identify sites that show changes in some people but not in others. Then they look at the genetic material surrounding the changed part.

If the surrounding area looks very different from one person to the next, the particular change probably occurred a long time ago, because the general area has had time to accumulate other changes in the DNA. If there are not many differences in the surrounding genetic sequence, that indicates the particular change is relatively new.

Then scientists figure out how widespread that particular change is in large populations. Changes that are both new and widespread reveal the hand of natural selection -- since advantageous genetic changes will quickly spread through the population.

Next, scientists try to guess what the genetic change is accomplishing. If the change is in a part of the genome known to be involved in the immune system, the change may have something to do with responding to new diseases. Other changes may have to do with brain functioning or skin color.

Europeans, for example, show strong changes over the past 10,000 years in genes that affect skin color -- as humans moved into northern Europe, where there was less ultraviolet light, there was a strong evolutionary advantage to having lighter skin to allow in more ultraviolet light, which is needed to synthesize Vitamin D.

Lahn found changes in two genes, dubbed ASPM and MCPH1, that are known to be involved in brain development. He published his results recently in the journal Science.

While genetic changes, especially related to the brain, may prompt people to think different populations are evolving different mental abilities, both Lahn and Pritchard pooh-poohed this idea. For one thing, they pointed out, biology is complex, and the same genes often play multiple roles in the body. A gene that affects brain development may also play a role in the immune system, so it is not possible to say with certainty that natural selection has favored the change because of its effect on the brain.


Well, that's persuasive! I guess the Marxist Gould would have had nothing to worry about this new research puncturing his favorite dogmas ...


Besides, Pritchard added, scientists found about the same number of changes in all three groups they studied, suggesting that evolution is taking place everywhere, adapting different groups to the particulars of their ecological niches.


Note to WaPo reporter: that fact doesn't imply what you think it implies. Instead, it implies the exact opposite.


Come to think of it, the late Stephen Jay Gould might have been upset with the above illustration. Contrary to the popular imagination, evolution is not a linear process that culminates in the triumphal ascent of humans at the top of the genetic heap. The process is analogous to a bush, where twigs and leaves push out in every direction.

When biologists talk about evolution and the survival of the fittest, they do not necessarily mean the strongest, fastest or smartest. Fitness is whatever works in a particular environment, and the new research shows that as environments change, notions of fitness change, too.


As I wrote in 1999 in "Darwin's Enemies on the Left:"


The left fears Darwinian science because its dogma of our factual equality cannot survive the relentlessly accumulating evidence of our genetic variability. Gould, a famous sports nut, cannot turn on his TV without being confronted by lean East Africans outdistancing the world's runners, massive Samoans flattening quarterbacks, lithe Chinese diving and tumbling for gold medals, or muscular athletes of West African descent out-sprinting, out-jumping, and out-hitting all comers. No wonder Gould is reduced to insisting we chant: "Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow: … Human equality is a contingent fact of history" -- like Dorothy trying to get home from Oz.


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

The NYT on two IQ studies, one good and one dubious

Idea Lab
After the Bell Curve
By DAVID L. KIRP

When it comes to explaining the roots of intelligence, the fight between partisans of the gene and partisans of the environment is ancient and fierce. Each side challenges the other’s intellectual bona fides and political agendas. What is at stake is not just the definition of good science but also the meaning of the just society. The nurture crowd is predisposed to revive the War on Poverty, while the hereditarians typically embrace a Social Darwinist perspective.

A century’s worth of quantitative-genetics literature concludes that a person’s I.Q. is remarkably stable and that about three-quarters of I.Q. differences between individuals are attributable to heredity. This is how I.Q. is widely understood — as being mainly “in the genes” — and that understanding has been used as a rationale for doing nothing about seemingly intractable social problems like the black-white school-achievement gap and the widening income disparity.


"Widely"?

Earth to New York Times: As a close reader of your newspaper, I'm having trouble recalling a single article in this decade that paid serious attention to the possibility that genetic differences might partly account for the black-white school achievement gap.

Does this imply that the NYT knows that the politically correct verbiage that they print isn't supported by the scientific consensus?


If nature disposes, the argument goes, there is little to be gained by intervening. In their 1994 best seller, “The Bell Curve,” Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray relied on this research to argue that the United States is a genetic meritocracy and to urge an end to affirmative action. Since there is no way to significantly boost I.Q., prominent geneticists like Arthur Jensen of Berkeley have contended, compensatory education is a bad bet.

But what if the supposed opposition between heredity and environment is altogether misleading? A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience. “It doesn’t really matter whether the heritability of I.Q. is this particular figure or that one,” says Sir Michael Rutter of the University of London. “Changing the environment can still make an enormous difference.” If heredity defines the limits of intelligence, the research shows, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached. And if this is so, the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.


This is a confused way to get to a reasonable point. There's nothing in this article that suggests that the nature-nurture distinction is invalid. In reality, what the studies cited in this article suggest is that the heritability of IQ is less than 1.00, especially in poor environments.

Kirp cites two studies. I posted about the more interesting one, a French adoption study, back on June 20. The definitive analysis was done by Darth Quixote at GNXP two days earlier.

It's a very intriguing analysis because it tries to overcome the usual restriction of range problem in American adoption studies, which typically have shown almost no impact of home environment on adult IQ. The methodological problem is that most adoptions these days are made by affluent couples of the biological offspring of couples of lower status. If you are, say, Bill Gates's kid, you probably won't end up being adopted by some meth head couple in a trailer park. That's good for the kid, but not for the science.

Capron and Duyme came up with eight cases of children who are the biological offspring of highly educated parents being adopted by poorly educated parents (along with ten cases of the other three alternatives: high nature - high nurture, low nature - high nurture, low nature - low nurture, for a grand total of 38 kids in the study. But it's still a good first step.


Regardless of whether the adopting families were rich or poor, Capron and Duyme learned, children whose biological parents were well-off had I.Q. scores averaging 16 points higher than those from working-class parents. Yet what is really remarkable is how big a difference the adopting families’ backgrounds made all the same. The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 — 12 points lower. The same holds true for children born into impoverished families: youngsters adopted by parents of similarly modest means had average I.Q.’s of 92.4, while the I.Q.’s of those placed with well-off parents averaged 103.6. These studies confirm that environment matters — the only, and crucial, difference between these children is the lives they have led.


It strikes me as plausible that the nature-nurture balance could be in the 60-40 range, as the French found, at least when sizable environmental differences are possible. A study with a sample size of 38 is not conclusive, but I personally find this more likely than the idea that adoption would have zero impact on IQ.

Also, there is evidence that IQ is malleable before puberty, but that people generally revert to their genetic level as they mature. (Sandra Scarr's Minnesota Transracial Adoption study followed this pattern, with the hopeful early IQ results of black children adopted by upper middle white parents being dashed by their scores falling to an average of 89 when they were retested at 17.) The French study tested the adopted children at age 14, which is fairly late, although probably not late enough to settle this question.

I suspect that having a higher IQ as a child has long term benefits even if you revert back to your long term norm as an adult. Somebody with a long term IQ of 80 who had a good upbringing that raised it to 90 as a child is much more likely to learn how to read and how to be a functioning adult than somebody with the same genes who had a bad upbringing. But I haven't seen any direct studies of this.

Kirp contends that the French study supports his pet project of "universal preschool," although a less biased reading probably suggests that if adoption can work to raise IQs, then little children being raised by high status moms are better off staying home with mom than going off to some run-of-the-mill government preschool.

Anyway, the effects of preschools were intensively studied directly in the 1960s through 1980s, and the results in terms of boosting IQ were unimpressive, unless the expenditures were so vast as to approach adoption. On the other hand, Head Start seems to have some good effect on reducing delinquency later on. IQ ain't everything.


When quantitative geneticists estimate the heritability of I.Q., they are generally relying on studies of twins. Identical twins are in effect clones who share all their genes; fraternal twins are siblings born together — just half of their genes are identical. If heredity explains most of the difference in intelligence, the logic goes, the I.Q. scores of identical twins will be far more similar than the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. And this is what the research has typically shown. Only when children have spent their earliest years in the most wretched of circumstances, as in the infamous case of the Romanian orphans, treated like animals during the misrule of Nicolae Ceausescu, has it been thought that the environment makes a notable difference. Otherwise, genes rule.

Then along came Eric Turkheimer to shake things up. Turkheimer, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is the kind of irreverent academic who gives his papers user-friendly titles like “Spinach and Ice Cream” and “Mobiles.” He also has a reputation as a methodologist’s methodologist. In combing through the research, he noticed that the twins being studied had middle-class backgrounds. The explanation was simple — poor people don’t volunteer for research projects — but he wondered whether this omission mattered.

Together with several colleagues, Turkheimer searched for data on twins from a wider range of families. He found what he needed in a sample from the 1970’s of more than 50,000 American infants, many from poor families, who had taken I.Q. tests at age 7. In a widely-discussed 2003 article, he found that, as anticipated, virtually all the variation in I.Q. scores for twins in the sample with wealthy parents can be attributed to genetics. The big surprise is among the poorest families. Contrary to what you might expect, for those children, the I.Q.’s of identical twins vary just as much as the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. The impact of growing up impoverished overwhelms these children’s genetic capacities. In other words, home life is the critical factor for youngsters at the bottom of the economic barrel. “If you have a chaotic environment, kids’ genetic potential doesn’t have a chance to be expressed,” Turkheimer explains. “Well-off families can provide the mental stimulation needed for genes to build the brain circuitry for intelligence.”


This theory is plausible. It's comparable to the argument I made back in 2002 that comparing the average African IQ of 70 to the 85 average of their African-American cousins suggests that the bad environment in Africa is keeping Africans from reaching their genetic potential.

On the other hand, the connection between this theory and Turkheimer's actual findings seems tenuous.

Unfortunately, Turkheimer's paper isn't terribly persuasive because it seems disingenuous. It's particularly frustrating to read because, as far as I can tell, it refuses to tell us what were the average IQs of the children tested, or most of the other most interesting basic facts about the data.

A few years ago I emailed Turkheimer asking him to reveal these numbers, but he never responded. Later, I got an email from a friend of Turkheimer's chiding me for criticizing his paper. When I explained that I needed to know these basic facts about the study, he agreed, and offered to ask Turkheimer for the numbers, but then I never heard anything more.

This is important because psychometrician John Ray has put forward a plausible-sounding alternative suggestion:


Full publication of the study has not been done as yet but from what we know so far it seems that what they found was in fact much simpler than that. They found that if you separated out low income respondents (mostly black) and studied them alone, the role of heredity was less important in explaining IQ differences. That does sound like a real finding but it is in fact what statisticians would call a “restriction of range effect”. In other words, if you take ANY group and select out a subset that is relatively homogeneous with regard to some variable, differences in that variable will tend to have less importance in explaining other differences. Since socioeconomic status and race are substantially correlated with heritable IQ, that is precisely what these researchers have done: Selected a group that is relatively homogeneous in genetic inheritance for IQ and then said: “Hey! Differences in genetic inheritance are not so important here!” Statisticians would call the finding an “artifact” -- i.e. something created by the research procedure rather than a genuine finding about the world.


But, Turkheimer won't tell us the numbers, so everything is just speculation.


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

10 Questions with Charles Murray on GNXP

An excerpt from the interview conducted by Matt McIntosh:

9. [Matt McIntosh]: Any scholar with a sincere devotion to seeking the truth is bound to have their own beliefs, expectations and prejudices falsified on occasion. Can you tell us about occasions on which you've discovered something which profoundly altered your beliefs?

My epiphany came in Thailand in the 1960s, when I first came to understand how badly bureaucracies dealt with human problems in the villages, and how well (with qualifications) villagers dealt with their own problems given certain conditions. I describe that epiphany at some length in In Pursuit. The turnaround that led to The Bell Curve occurred in 1986, when Linda Gottfredson and Robert Gordon asked me to be on an American Psychological Association panel discussing their two papers on the relationship of IQ to unemployment and IQ to crime respectively, both of which discussed the B-W difference. The bibliographies astonished me--I had no idea that so much scholarly work had been done in these fields that so decisively contradicted what I had assumed (taught by the New York Times) to believe. If you want to see how far I moved: in Losing Ground, published in 1984, I cite [Stephen Jay Gould's] The Mismeasure of Man approvingly.

My other movement has been less dramatic, but has been intensifying--and will not please the founders and probably most of the readers of Gene Expression. I have been an agnostic since my teens. But I am increasingly drawn to the proposition that of all the hypotheses about God, simple atheism is the least probable. That to be a confident atheist is the silliest of intellectual positions. That thinking about spiritual issues, despite all the difficulties, must be part of being a grown-up. [More]


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

July 23, 2006

Latest hopeless Google ad on iSteve.com:

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Guaranteed Same Day Local Delivery 100's of items to choose - Save $10
www.11Flowers.com/Lebanon

See below for more about Google's surprisingly dim-witted ad strategy.


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

Nuclear-tipped ABMs

One of my more experience readers, who fought in WWII, then was a major league professional athlete, and then worked in high tech defense projects, including ABM, responds to my idea that we should practice perfecting a hit-to-kill ICBM interceptor, but then, if we ever are attacked, arm the interceptors with nuclear warheads (kind of like practicing skeet shooting with a rifle but then going bird hunting with a shotgun) responds:

That is a super idea. A not-so-short narrative to explain why we no longer have 'em. When we began serious work on ABM (anti-ballistic missile) systems, they were all nuclear. The first attempt at defenses was the Nike-Zeus system deployed around some of our cities in the 60's to intercept Russian bombers. There were citizens' uprising against upgrading this system to be capable of missile intercepts. The thing that really bothered the people was the idea that there would be nuclear-tipped interceptors underground near their homes.

What they didn't know was that there were already nuclear-tipped interceptors deployed near their homes. Nike-X, the improved system (on which $400 million a year in 60's dollars was being spent), was specifically designed to work against ICBMs. The long-range interceptors (Spartans), out-of-the atmosphere interceptors, carried megatons of yield (yes, megatons). The short-range ones (Sprints), which had to make the intercept after the atmosphere had filtered out pen-aids were fast, agile, and carried a small yield nuclear warhead. McNamara was the steward.

The idea of deploying this system in cities was abandoned, but a bowdlerized version of this system was actually deployed around our retaliatory missile silos in the northern midwest during the NIxon administration. We gave it up for SALT, even though we were permitted to have it. Good. Because it wouldn't have worked.

A combination of political pressures and new technology which seemed to promise hit-to-kill capability resulted in adopting the idea that we would do missile defense without nuclear weapons. President Reagan, or his people, specified non-nuke for the Star Wars program. (The atomic physicists who made the A-bomb and the H-bomb have really been against nuclear weapons for decades. I assume it's a guilt complex for having been responsible for the deaths of, was it? 150,000 innocent Japanese in WWII.)

All the time I worked in and around these programs, virtually everyone agreed with your idea, but the decisions were made and we shutup. I'm relying on memory for this. More would require research.


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

World War III/IV or a penny ante game?

A number of breathless pundits have described the Iranian challenge to the U.S. as the modern equivalent of of the old Soviet challenge. So, I've been trawling for estimates of the size of Iran's annual subsidy to Hezbollah, Iran's primary foreign beneficiary, and I've come up with a range of $25 million to $200 million, with a modal guess of $100 million (and even that paltry sum is arousing resentment among Iranian voters). In comparison, the annual Soviet subsidy to Cuba alone in the 1980s is said to have run between $4 and $6 billion, or at least 20 times larger. Hezbollah is thought to have 5,000 men at arms in its home country of Lebanon, which contrasts with the 65,000 that Cuba deployed in 17 African countries at the behest of the Kremlin.

So, compared to the Cold War, this should be a tempest in a teapot. Indeed, through 9/11, Iran's regional ambitions were being restrained by two regimes, the Taliban to the east and Saddam to the west, even though they were little more than house-of-cards. The U.S. then easily toppled both, sensibly in the case of Afghanistan, more mysteriously in the case of Iraq. So, Iran now has Shi'ite allies in a belt to the west through the formerly Sunni-dominated but now Shi'ite-run Iraq, into quasi-Shi'ite-controlled Syria, and on to Hezbollah's state-within-a-state in South Lebanon. But, in terms of a threat to the West, this isn't at all like Russia controlling Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany. So, let's keep matters in perspective.

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

July 22, 2006

Please remind me again: Which ones are the Good Muslims: Shunnis or Si'ites?

For many years after the Irainian hostage crisis of 1979-1981, the American press would authoritatively inform us that there were two kinds of Muslims, the crazy radical bad Shi'ites and the calm traditional good Sunnis. Then some Sunnis blew up the WTC and so we invaded Iraq and the Sunni insurgents kept trying to kill us and the Shi'ites kept winning all the elections that we set up in Iraq, so that meant the Shi'ites were democratic and thus good, because we wouldn't have invaded Iraq just to let the bad kind of Muslims take power, right? But now some Sunnis in Iraq are asking us to stay around to keep the Shi'ite government from killing them and the Shi'ites in Iran elected Amenisaidagain and now the Shi'ites in Lebanon are at war with Israel, while the Sunni dictatorships that we were supposed to be against in 2005 are hinting that it's more or less okay with them if the Israelis whomp on the Shi'ites for a little while, so now I guess the Sunnis are good and the Shi'ites are bad. Or did I get that backwards?

Do we really know what we are doing over there?


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

An economist takes IQ seriously

Here's an op-ed economist Garett Jones of Southern Illinois wrote summarizing his 2005 paper on the usefulness of Lynn & Vanhanen's 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. (No mention if any newspaper dared publish it.)


“Test Scores”: the blue-state term for “IQ.”
By Garett Jones

Ten years after the firestorm over Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve--which showed conclusively that, for better or worse, IQ is a major factor in determining a person’s chances in life--the mainstream media has finally found a politically correct euphemism for IQ: “Test Scores.” The Wall Street Journal noted last Tuesday that U.S. “math scores” are among the lowest of any industrialized nation--below Korea, Japan, and Germany, just to name a few. It turns out that these three countries also happen to have higher average IQ’s than Americans, too--106,105, and 102, compared to the US average of 98. And that pattern isn’t just a coincidence--overall, about 2/3 of the difference in math scores around the world can be explained by differences in a nation’s average IQ.

How can I make such a bold claim? Because I’m using data from the new book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, written by leading psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen (who, for what its worth, is the father of Finland’s prime minister). They assemble 186 IQ studies from 81 different countries, and find a very strong link between a nation’s average IQ and the productivity of that nation’s workers.

This is no surprise: Nobel Laureate economists like Gary Becker and Robert Lucas have written about the importance of “human capital,” the combination of problem-solving skills and practical knowledge that help workers to earn more and help countries to produce more. IQ is one decent measure of the problem-solving side of human capital. Though IQ is politically charged, it is still the single best predictor of a worker’s productivity you can find.

While Lynn and Vanhanen show that a nation’s average “test score”--excuse me, average IQ--has a strong statistical link to economic growth, their results raise a lot of reasonable questions. Had they controlled for all of the other factors that really matter for economic performance? What about the importance of the rule of law, capital investment, wars and coups, and free trade? Shouldn’t they have controlled for all of those factors? Maybe the link between a nation’s IQ and a nation’s productivity is just a side effect of these other factors.

The IQ-productivity link is not just a side effect. Working with psychologist W. Joel Schneider of Illinois State University, I tried out 1330 different statistical tests, controlling for 21 key factors that explain economic growth, including all the ones I just mentioned. IQ passed 99.8% of the tests--so it’s better than Ivory Soap.

What’s the take-away? First, when people run these “international student tests,” they’re mostly measuring differences in cross-country IQ. And IQ has a tremendously strong link to economic growth: ten extra IQ points--the difference between Argentina and South Korea--adds an extra 1.2% to the economy’s long-run annual growth rate.

Second, if you want to really raise living standards in poor countries, you need to focus on brain health. The World Bank’s initiative to raise the birth weight of children in poor countries is a great example. The brain is, in many ways, just another organ, and a healthy baby is much more likely to have a healthy brain and to achieve his or her full potential. Policies that promote good childhood nutrition, vitamin supplements, and a lead-free environment are examples of policies that can improve brain health, and with it, raise a nation’s IQ and its economic performance.

But finally, there’s a message here about how to talk about IQ in politically correct, blue-state America: Just say those magic words…..“test scores.”


Garett Jones, a former economic policy adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch, is assistant professor of economics and finance at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.


And here's the earlier paper by Jones & Schneider that was the basis for the op-ed.

And here's the abstract of Jones's new paper that makes good use of the table I created in 2004 that lists the details of each of the 183 studies of IQ in 81 countries included in IQ and the Wealth of Nations.


IQ in the Ramsey Model: A Naïve Calibration
Garett Jones *
February 2006


Abstract: I show that in a conventional Ramsey model, between one-fourth and one-half of the global income distribution can be explained by a single factor: the effect of large, persistent differences in national average IQ on the private marginal product of labor. Thus, differences in national average IQ may be a driving force behind global income inequality. These persistent differences in cognitive ability--which are well-supported in the psychology literature--are likely to be somewhat malleable through better health care, better education, and especially better nutrition in the world’s poorest countries. A simple calibration exercise in the spirit of Bils and Klenow (2000) and Castro (2005) is conducted. I show that an IQ-augmented Ramsey model can explain more than half of the empirical relationship between national average IQ and GDP per worker. I provide evidence that little of the IQ-productivity relationship is likely to be due to reverse causality.

*Department of Economics and Finance, Southern Illinois


I'm glad to see my table has proven useful.

Now, over at GNXP, the boys have now put together a table of 544 IQ studies summarized in Lynn's latest book, Racial Differences in Intelligence. You have to join the YahooGroup GNXPforum to have access to it, but that's free and you can just choose "web access only" if you don't want to get emails of GNXP postings.


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

Why Google is worth 100 gazillion gigabux:

A reader points out:


Your blog is currently displaying a Google ad for Beirut hotels:


Beirut Hotels Last minute, discounted hotels in Beirut. Rates up to 70% off! www.hotelbrowser.biz


I'm glad to see that they're discounting the rates. Though I think they may have to throw in free wireless internet if they want me to come to visit just now. (Maybe I can book passage on one of those ships we're using to evacuate our citizens--I'll bet there's plenty of room available heading into Beirut.) Do I get a bigger discount if the IDF drops a bomb in the courtyard?


A reader points out:


You've now got an ad up for "Drinking Game Products." This is because "beirut" is an alternate name for the drinking game perhaps better known as "beer pong."


Well, if I'd rented one of those Beirut hotel rooms, I'd probably be down in the (hopefully sandbagged) bar playing "beirut" right now.

In general, the problem with Google ads is that the assignment of ads doesn't seem to reflect past learning about what sells on iSteve.com to my regular readership. For example, I made triple my usual meager take one weekend when a documentary on evolution was advertised, which is hardly surprising considering the interests of my readers, but I've seldom seen any follow-up in my ads. Instead, ads are just assigned based on keywords in the latest blog postings. For instance, if I write about the need to restrict immigration, I often get an ad for a company that arranges phony marriages between U.S. citizens and foreigners wanting to get Green Cards.


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

July 19, 2006

Lebablogging

Life is always full of interest in Lebanon. A reader who was in Beirut when the Civil War started in 1975 writes:

Tony Franjieh [son of the Christian President of Lebanon from 1970-1976] and his family stayed as house guests in Maine long ago with a senior pair of State officials, and they all went out to see the movie "The Godfather" at a local cinema in the Maine woods. Tony came out of the movie almost shaking and told the State Dept pair that "this movie is all about my country and my family."...

In 1978, Franjieh was bumped off Sonny Corleone-style, apparently by the rival Christian warlord family, the Gemayels.

A few more distinguished or notorious Lebanese-Americans to add to your roster: Vince Vaughn has some Lebanese ancestry, which fits with Jennifer Anniston’s Greek forebears. Reporter Helen Thomas, a dinner guest at our DC house two decades ago ... descends from Greek Orthodox Lebanese. Danny Thomas is from Maronite stock in Bcherri, where the only Cedars left in Lebanon still stand. Fmr Senator George Mitchell from Maine is half Lebanese, which helped him decipher the endless grievances in Northern Ireland. Don’t forget new arrivals to the US like Selma Hayek and Shakira, both of Lebanese descent. Finally, long ago my Greek-descended wife went out with [prominent Arab-American politician X], who told her that Lebanese and Greeks had a natural affinity. Ask Vince and Jennifer, perhaps! ...

The notorious April 1975 events were interpreted by the US Embassy Political Section as a Maronite attempt to prevent the eventual takeover of Lebanese politics by the demographically more numerous Muslims, Sunni and Shi’ite, whom everyone believed at that time comprised the majority of the population. It was strongly believed that the Maronites had received military, political and covert assurances from “Dixie,” the code for Israel in Beirut. Israel, according to the US consensus in-country, had no desire to see Lebanon succeed as a multi-confessional democracy, which was what the PLO charter outlined for a “Palestinian State”--- comprising Muslims, Christians, Druzi, and Jews all singing "Kumbayah" --- that would replace Israel and the Occupied Territories after a negotiated settlement based on UNSC Res. 242 & 338.

I liked singing "Kumbayah" at summer camp, but, then, I was an especially sappy child.

That was the Arabist view and Lebanon did collapse and the multi-confessional democratic model went up in smoke...

... Michael Ledeen and his Israeli contacts concocted a scheme to get the massive PLO arms caches captured by the IDF in South Lebanon into the hands of the Iranians, then in the middle of an endless war with Iraq, which Israel considered its chief foe in the Arab world. Iran Contra ensued as Iran received large numbers of Kalashnikovs & ammo [through Israeli channels] and a thousand TOWs from the US, who sluiced the proceeds to the Contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Israeli sale of PLO munitions has never been documented...

Here's the perspective of the Jewish Virtual Library on Ledeen's role in Iran-Contra.


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

July 18, 2006

George Will is sick of Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard:

Will writes in "Transformation's Toll:"

The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard -- voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, "neoconservatism" -- everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything.

"No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria . . ." You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says:

"We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."

"Why wait?" Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad's regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard's hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?

As for the "healthy" repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that Iraq has inflicted.

The only thing that matters to the Weekly Standard, though, is whether Rupert Murdoch gets sick of Bill Kristol. Murdoch pays something like $3 million per year to subsidize the Weekly Standard's loss. (Just about all political magazines lose money, although the leftist Nation, which is stuffed with adds, has been profitable lately.) I suspect that Murdoch, who is a level-headed businessman, must be wondering when exactly to dump the neocons. Murdoch made a lot of money off the Iraq War in 2002-2004 by promoting war fever on Fox News, and the Weekly Standard boys generate a lot of the talking points for Fox News, but I imagine Murdoch can sense that this business strategy is headed downhill. Fox News ratings have been down.

And while Murdoch's personal views are no doubt broadly conservative, I've never seen much evidence that they are particularly neoconservative. My impression is that Kristol just seemed like the Bright Young Thing of 1995 when Murdoch was looking for an editor. Murdoch told Scott McConnell, "“Well, it might not have been a good idea to create it [Israel], but now that it’s there, it has to be supported.” As Scott commented, "A splendidly ambiguous statement—perfectly consistent with a strong pro-Israel position, but not the sort of thing an American neoconservative would ever say."

Murdoch's Sun tabloid famously switched from Tory to Labour for the 1997 election (as Martin Kelly notes), so it's hardly impossible that Murdoch will shift with the wind.

By the way, I finally read how much Iran is believed to give Hezbollah annually: $100 million, which, while it would buy Iran just about every political magazine in America, really isn't very much on the scale of global geopolitics. If Hezbollah is really a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, couldn't somebody just outbid Iran? On the other hand, maybe Hezbollah isn't so much being used by Iran as it's using Iran's money for its own purposes?


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

July 17, 2006

War Fever

A friend writes:

2002-2003 is happening again in the blogosphere. I can feel it. Are there enough people to say "NO!" this time?

If, after all the hard lessons we've learned over the last three years, the United States still lets itself get dragged into a war in Lebanon or with Syria or Iran, it will be the stupidest conflict since the War of Jenkin's Ear.

If the Israelis decide to turn a border skirmish into a major war of their own choosing, that's their business, not ours. Israel stomping on Hezbollah might actually improve things in Lebanon -- certainly the Israeli leadership's understanding of the situation in Lebanon is far greater than our leadership's understanding of anywhere in the Middle East. Then again, the Law of Unintended Consequences could come into play for the one millionth time in the Middle East, as happened in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to throw out the PLO only to unintentionally midwife the birth of Hezbollah.

But to allow the Israeli tail -- or, more likely, the armchair hysteria of American pseudo-Sabras -- to wag the American dog would be lunacy.


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

July 16, 2006

Cochran: A lot of apparent racial similarities are only skin deep:

Was headbutting Algerian Berber soccer star Zinedine Zidane provoked by a "racist" comment? Not being a lipreader, I'll merely point out that Zidane is slightly fairer-skinned that the Italian he flattened.

Zidane looks strikingly Teutonic because the Berbers and the Germans can reasonably be grouped in a vast Caucasian racial group with common ancestors. Similarly, East Asians and American Indians display certain similarities because they shared common ancestors back before the end of the last Ice Age.

But there are also lots of other visual or functional similarities among various groups spread far apart across the globe that are more likely caused by separate convergent evolution than by unchanging descent or by acquisition of genes through intermarriage.

Greg Cochran points out that many similarities among widely dispersed peoples are not caused by them having the same genes, but instead by having different genes that evolved to do similar things. For example, some of the sub-Saharan tribes that have high degrees of lactose tolerance have mutations giving them that capability than are different than the mutations found in the lactose tolerant northern Europeans. Or, as Cynthia M. Beall of Case Western has determined, three high altitude groups -- Andean Indians, Tibetans, and Ethiopian highlanders -- have three different adaptations that allow them to thrive at 10,000 feet or more.

Unfortunately, at present we only know what a fraction of all genes actually do, although we're learning fast.

There are a lot of other candidates for this tendency that apparent racial similarities are often only skin deep.

- For example, blonde hair is found among Caucasians and a few Australian aborigines in the center of the Outback.

- The Ainu aborigines of Japan, who have as much body hair as Robin Williams and beards like ZZ Top, were long thought by physical anthropologists to be displaced Caucasians, but genetic research has rendered that idea unlikely. They're apparently just really hairy East Asians.

- A yellowish cast to skin color is found in East Asia and among the Bushmen of Southwest Africa.

- Melanesians are often black-skinned and wooly-haired, but their neutral genes are as unlike sub-Saharan Africans as just about anybody on Earth.

- The pygmies of Central Africa and the pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands and points East are probably not racially related.
The steatopygia of the Andamanese and the Bushmen / Hottentots women is likely convergent evolution.

On the other hand, some of these similarities could be left over from the original out-of-Africa group. Perhaps, originally all human women were fully steatopygous, and the Bushmen, some Pygmies, and the Andamanese are the only ones who didn't evolve away from that template.

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

Cochran: A lot of apparent racial similarities are only skin deep:

Was headbutting Algerian Berber soccer star Zinedine Zidane provoked by a "racist" comment? Not being a lipreader, I'll merely point out that Zidane is slightly fairer-skinned that the Italian he flattened.

Zidane looks strikingly Teutonic because the Berbers and the Germans can reasonably be grouped in a vast Caucasian racial group with common ancestors. Similarly, East Asians and American Indians display certain similarities because they shared common ancestors back before the end of the last Ice Age.

But there are also lots of other visual or functional similarities among various groups spread far apart across the globe that are more likely caused by separate convergent evolution than by unchanging descent or by acquisition of genes through intermarriage.

Greg Cochran points out that many similarities among widely dispersed peoples are not caused by them having the same genes, but instead by having different genes that evolved to do similar things. For example, some of the sub-Saharan tribes that have high degrees of lactose tolerance have mutations giving them that capability than are different than the mutations found in the lactose tolerant northern Europeans. Or, as Cynthia M. Beall of Case Western has determined, three high altitude groups -- Andean Indians, Tibetans, and Ethiopian highlanders -- have three different adaptations that allow them to thrive at 10,000 feet or more.

Unfortunately, at present we only know what a fraction of all genes actually do, although we're learning fast.

There are a lot of other candidates for this tendency that apparent racial similarities are often only skin deep.

- For example, blonde hair is found among Caucasians and a few Australian aborigines in the center of the Outback.

- The Ainu aborigines of Japan, who have as much body hair as Robin Williams and beards like ZZ Top, were long thought by physical anthropologists to be displaced Caucasians, but genetic research has rendered that idea unlikely. They're apparently just really hairy East Asians.

- A yellowish cast to skin color is found in East Asia and among the Bushmen of Southwest Africa.

- Melanesians are often black-skinned and wooly-haired, but their neutral genes are as unlike sub-Saharan Africans as just about anybody on Earth.

- The pygmies of Central Africa and the pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands and points East are probably not racially related.
The steatopygia of the Andamanese and the Bushmen / Hottentots women is likely convergent evolution.

On the other hand, some of these similarities could be left over from the original out-of-Africa group. Perhaps, originally all human women were fully steatopygous, and the Bushmen, some Pygmies, and the Andamanese are the only ones who didn't evolve away from that template.

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