September 27, 2006

More Advice

A married woman writes:

I have a 40 year old never-been-married brother who spends much of his free time mountain biking and rebuilding vintage tractors. Not exactly hobbies loaded with potential female mates. My unmarried 37 year old sister in law's big hobby is ice skating. My other, twenty-something sister in law spends most of her time with her horse. Neither of these activities is loaded with eligible guys either. I don't have much hope for any of them to find mates.

What did my sister and I do to find a guy? First, we chose a profession loaded with men: engineering. Second, we moved to locations loaded with young, single people: me: Los Angeles, her: the greater Portland area. Third, we took up hobbies and activities that have abundant men: me: the company softball team, downhill skiing, golf. Her: mountain biking, wind surfing, and rock climbing. We both married fellow engineer employees (me at the advanced age of 33) but sharing the same hobbies as them is what sealed the deal.

I've told my brother many times to try taking some cooking or photography classes, join Habitat for Humanity, the Sierra Club, or Catholic Singles but he is unwilling to exit his comfort zone and make the effort. He is also unwilling to look at someone who isn't really good looking. I've tried to tell him that a slightly overweight, 30-ish woman whose clock is ticking would see him as a great husband but he won't bend his standards.

From a NY Post article by Reed Tucker about the upcoming comedy "School for Scoundrels," in which Billie Bob Thornton teaches Jon Heder What Women Want:

- Never pay a woman a compliment: All guys whisper sweet nothings to pretty girls. You want to be different. It will grab her attention. [In his autobiography, physicist Richard Feynman claimed this worked.]

- Parallel her values: If she's a vegetarian, you're a vegetarian. If she thinks Jon Heder will never be as good in any movie as he was in "Napoleon Dynamite," so do you. The goal is to make it seem like you're kindred spirits. [I suspect that my readers are especially vulnerable to the mistake of thinking that opinions should have some basis in fact and logic. Women don't care about stuff like truth when it comes to public issues. Opinions just serve as fashion statements. If she likes you, she'll later on adopt your opinions - until she stops liking you.]

- Be dangerous, it's cool: No chick wants a boring guy. They want the bad boy who'll do wild things - like wearing a vial of blood around his neck. [Well, maybe not that.]

- Wherever you are, the place is lame: Your goal is to get the girl alone, so no matter where you are, suggest the two of you take off. Preferably on your Harley.

- Lie, lie and lie some more: Pretty self-explanatory, and without this rule, the other previous rules wouldn't be possible. Just make sure you don't get caught in your lies...

- When all else fails, give her a sob story: Nothing warms her heart like that yarn about how you were born a penniless orphan in Serbia.

A reader writes:

The plain fact is online dating services don't come anywhere near the same level as a face-to-face meeting, there's tons of information they don't provide, and it's a lot easier for people on both sides to reject contact on the flimsiest of reasons (where a personal interaction would get you past that and maybe show it isn't such a big deal) - and it's entirely based on the photo and numbers. Looking like Brad Pitt is a big help. The chemistry of personal interaction is entirely nonexistent until you meet, and you have to convince them to do so based on other factors. The sheer number of women's ads I've seen who insist that a man be at least a head taller than them while they're wearing high heels ... it makes sense, but it also doesn't work. Average height is somewhere around 5'8 for men I think? It's equivalent to my insisting that the only women I look at have D-cup breasts. I'd like that, but I also know it ain't gonna happen.

Past few years, I've been doing a sort of experiment with various online personal services, answering every single ad that looks even vaguely appropriate (not with form letters either) and seeing what kind of results I get. Not much better than when I pick just the ones that actually look interesting. Response rate somewhere in the 2%-5% range, I think, of which the vast majority aren't of further interest. Maybe I just really overrate myself.

I'd like to see some reliable statistics on how well they work. I don't think that exists though - all I have are anecdotes.


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

September 26, 2006

More conceptual tools for understanding how the world works

Here are some reader suggestions for ideas that journalists (or anybody else) should keep in mind:

- Perhaps the most important one: When someone proposes an explanation or description of reality, you should try it out--see if its predictions make sense. Don't let the use of computers, math, technical jargon, or the reputation of the person proposing it keep you from asking "what if" and playing with the model a bit.

- "The plural of anecdote is not data"

- The logic of collective action--analyzing organizations based on the incentives and knowledge of the individual decisionmakers. (My favorite reference for this is Sowell's _Knowledge and Decisions_.)

- The difference between individuals and distributions, so that you don't get idiocies like "How can you say women are weaker than men? Andrea here is a lot stronger than Bob." [This is also known as the Overlap Means Equality fallacy: "A and B have some overlap, hence A and B are equal."]

- The way that unthinking processes can lead to apparently organized results, where no individual decisionmaker is trying to get the results to come out that way. This has implications from economics to evolution to politics to the dynamics of computer networks.

- The ways in which a poll can be skewed by the way the questions are asked, how the responder is primed for question X by question Y, etc. Similarly, the importance of specifying exactly what a result means--not just "53% of Americans are literate readers" but "and that means they read at least one book, short story, play, or poem in the last year".

- The iterated prisoner's dilemma and its implications for competition vs. cooperation.

- Revealed preference.

- Confirmation bias, and the related tendency to notice flaws in your enemies you don't see in your friends, and virtues in your friends you don't notice in your enemies.

- The importance of asking the question "how would you know if this idea was wrong?"

- The fallacy of composition -- [this is assuming that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts, like assuming that the U.S. Olympic basketball team is the best because it has the best players, although I can't find many examples of this that are particularly pernicious in the modern media climate]

- Agency costs

- Rational Ignorance

- Dispersed costs vs. concentrated benefits

- ad hoc hypothesis

- communal reinforcement

1- difference between a necessary and sufficient condition
2- demographic momentum
3- difference between national debt and budget deficit
4- difference between nominal and real economic variables
5- difference between birth rate and fertility rate.
5- ecological footprint
6- carrying capacity
7- fallacy of composition
8- fallacy of distribution
9- difference between short-term and long-term effects
10- demographic investment
11- difference between per capita economic growth and total economic growth
12- difference mark-up and profit margin
13 - purchasing power
14- the notion that every price has a payer and a receiver
15 -difference between nation and state
16- difference between citizenship and nationality
17 - dependency burden
18 - difference between tax rates and total taxes
19- difference between value added and gross sales
20 - difference between Bush and a statesman


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

Declare war on Iran?

It's safe to predict that Congress won't vote to declare war on Iran. It's also safe to predict that Congress won't vote against declaring war on Iran. That decision will be left up to the President in direct contradiction of the Constitution vesting the decision to go to war in Congress. Here's what several of the Founding Fathers said about this central Constitutional issue:

James Madison: ". . . The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature . . . the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war." (1793.) "The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature." (Letter to Jefferson, c. 1798.)

Alexander Hamilton: 'The Congress shall have the power to declare war'; the plain meaning of which is, that it is the peculiar and exclusive duty of Congress, when the nation is at peace, to change that state into a state of war. . . ." (c. 1801).

George Washington: "The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure." (1793.)

But, we all know George Washington was an America-Hater, so who cares about his opinion?

According to Rep. Ron Paul, Congress hasn't declared war on anybody since Germany on Dec. 11, 1941. The reason, of course, is that members of Congress don't want the responsibility because war or peace is such an important issue that their constituents might actually notice how they voted and, if they don't like it, vote them out of office, if you can imagine.

That kind of voter impudence is simply not to be tolerated. Just look at how most of the big name Washington pundits were shocked that Connecticut Democrats voted against Sen. Joe Lieberman -- a former Veep candidate! -- merely over a little thing like being the leading Democratic cheerleader for the Iraq War.

A reader writes:

The only sane people in our government these days seem to be the high-ranking military. They should insist that Congress authorize a nuclear attack on Iran before they execute it. This would not be a coup. It is living up to their sworn duty to uphold the constitution, not their commander in chief.

On another note, a drawn-out Iran war would certainly increase the possibility of a military coup in Washington D.C. down the road. The two main scenarios are opposite in motivation, but both plausible:

1. The France 1958 scenario in which the French army in Algeria, feeling under-supported by the politicians in Paris, in effect overthrew the Fourth Republic (fortunately, the Army's choice for dictator, Gen. DeGaulle, preferred to be an elected monarch).

2. The Portugal 1974 scenario in which the Army rebels against the endless wars to preserve the African empire, overthrowing the senescent dictatorship, which almost led to a Soviet-aligned military dictatorship.

A reader writes:

"Congress declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania on June 5, 1942. It also declared war on Italy the same day as Germany."


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

Declare war on Iran?

It's safe to predict that Congress won't vote to declare war on Iran. It's also safe to predict that Congress won't vote against declaring war on Iran. That decision will be left up to the President in direct contradiction of the Constitution vesting the decision to go to war in Congress. Here's what several of the Founding Fathers said about this central Constitutional issue:

James Madison: ". . . The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature . . . the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war." (1793.) "The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature." (Letter to Jefferson, c. 1798.)

Alexander Hamilton: 'The Congress shall have the power to declare war'; the plain meaning of which is, that it is the peculiar and exclusive duty of Congress, when the nation is at peace, to change that state into a state of war. . . ." (c. 1801).

George Washington: "The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure." (1793.)

But, we all know George Washington was an America-Hater, so who cares about his opinion?

According to Rep. Ron Paul, Congress hasn't declared war on anybody since Germany on Dec. 11, 1941. The reason, of course, is that members of Congress don't want the responsibility because war or peace is such an important issue that their constituents might actually notice how they voted and, if they don't like it, vote them out of office, if you can imagine.

That kind of voter impudence is simply not to be tolerated. Just look at how most of the big name Washington pundits were shocked that Connecticut Democrats voted against Sen. Joe Lieberman -- a former Veep candidate! -- merely over a little thing like being the leading Democratic cheerleader for the Iraq War.


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

Dating and Mating

In response to my latest posting on the travails of Lonelyguys15million (here's my original item), a reader writes:


A further comment on the dating problem for modern men. The fundamental difficulty has been created by the over-zealous harassment laws adopted by most American companies, forbidding employees from dating one another.

Women need to see men in action, being competent, reliable, and in charge. The only place where they will see them this way is at work. Thus Americans spend a very large amount of their time at work only to have it ruled moot for dating purposes. Without these cues to effectiveness and strength men are forced to compete where none of their better qualities will come through, and women are thrown back on picking up the most striking looking men in bars. When these then turn into one-night stands it should come as a surprise to no-one, but apparently it does, time and time again.

It is true that feminists (along with lawyers) have created this barren nightmare, because they have tried to pretend that when women find men in authority attractive (i.e. in positions that reveal their marriageable strengths) this means that the men are somehow abusing their position. But they aren’t necessarily: they are simply demonstrating those qualities that women most look for in a mate. Women will gravitate to them—but the men are forced to ignore them if they want to keep their jobs.


Another reader writes about the decline of dances attended by all generations, which were a big part of finding a spouse in, say, Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind. Nowadays, wedding receptions are just about the only surviving examples.

Another reader notes:


It wasn't the electric guitar that killed off multigenerational socializing; it was the explicit sexuality of the music. If you're getting the generations together for the purposes of making a new one, you have to have plausible deniability that that's what you're doing and you can't enflame the passions of the young men. Otherwise lots of people are going to be too embarrassed to show and the ones that do are going to end up jumping the gun out back.

I have been involved with some social groups centered around electronic dance music, and while there are babies and young children present, there is a general consensus to exclude the nubile and marriageable, because the adults don't want to deal with the drama.

Making marriages happen used to be a huge part of what leisured women did; preparing young women for the season in London, for example, was an enormous undertaking and something that was generally understood as worth doing. Young people at risk for heartbreak are a burden, and only a group that wants to perpetuate itself will take on that burden.

I started my children playing traditional Irish music because it's inherently valuable, but also I expect them to meet their wives in this context. Very few people think like this. It's a pity.


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

Ah, the Music Industry:

It's gotten ridiculously expensive to go to a rock concert, in large part because of monopoly power wielded by Paul Allen's Ticketmaster, which bought out its main rival Ticketron and local rivals, and, perhaps, by concert promoters. As computers have gotten cheaper, the ticket agency fees have skyrocketed. This has a depressing effect on the rock concert industry, which was far more dynamic when I was young, and on rock music in general. It's always been hard to make money selling records, but now with fees often running to a 43% surcharge, lots of kids can't afford to see concerts. That's why the big concert draws these days are senile acts like The Rolling Stones and The Eagles.

From the LA Times:


Concert Giant Sees Cutting Prices as Ticket to Success
Live Nation blames high entry fees for turning off fans. But Ticketmaster poses a big obstacle.
By Charles Duhigg,

The nation's largest concert firm and the industry's ticketing powerhouse may be headed for a behind-the-curtain tussle.

At issue: control over the spiraling cost of show admissions that are turning off many music fans.

On one side is Live Nation Inc. Chief Executive Michael Rapino, who has vowed to drive down prices that last year soared to an average of $57 per ticket for the most popular shows. On the other side is Ticketmaster, which dominates music ticket sales through its thousands of outlets and Internet sites.


Great name for a music industry executive: Rapino.


"Seventy percent of people didn't go to a concert last year, and even the average concert fan only attends about two shows a year," Rapino said. "We can grow this industry by lowering prices."...

But to make good on his promise, Rapino must wrest power from Ticketmaster, a near-monopoly that built its empire locking up exclusive rights to sell admissions to major concerts and other live events. Last year, Ticketmaster reaped nearly $1 billion in fees and surcharges. Rapino began renegotiations with the company this month.

For some fans, those charges are boosting already expensive ticket prices by one-third or more. Los Angeles rock fan Eugene Kang bought six passes last month to see the Killers at the Wiltern LG theater, forking over $210 for the tickets and $90 more in fees, he said...

But picking a fight with Ticketmaster would be Rapino's boldest move yet. Ticketmaster built an empire giving venues and promoters — including Live Nation — a cut of its fees and establishing a powerful network of retail stores and phone banks that were too expensive for any one promoter to replicate. Last year, Ticketmaster sold tickets worth about $6 billion through the company's Internet sites, 3,500 retail outlets and 19 international call centers.

Fans for years have complained about Ticketmaster's fees. Now, the migration of ticket purchasing to the Internet has created more options.

"You don't need thousands of storefronts anymore because most tickets are bought through the Internet now," said Larry Magid, a Live Nation executive who operates the Electric Factory, a venue in Philadelphia. "There is an impression that Ticketmaster has gotten too comfortable and arrogant. You have to be more responsive to fans nowadays."

Alternatives include Irvine-based Paciolan Inc., which sells software that allows venues to manage their own ticketing. Recently, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Philadelphia Flyers — all previous Ticketmaster clients — have switched to Paciolan.

"The history of the ticketing business was about barriers to entry, which kept Ticketmaster protected," Rapino said. "That has changed."

People close to Ticketmaster say that other concert companies have made similar comments about the ticketing company, only to sign new Ticketmaster deals once they got the terms and upfront payments they demanded. They question whether Rapino's musings are a negotiating tactic.

Other industry insiders note that Live Nation pockets about 50% of the fees Ticketmaster collects, and if Rapino really wanted to lower ticketing costs, he could rebate those funds back to concertgoers.

Live Nation's real goal in challenging Ticketmaster, say some, is to keep the other 50% of fees.


In other words, if you buy a half dozen tickets for The Killers over the Internet, the face value of the ticket is $35, but Ticketmaster gets and additional $7.50 (21.4% extra) and Live Nation, the concert promoter, gets an additional $7.50 (21.4%).

Ticketmaster plays blatant monopolist hardball to keep these fees so high, as they showed by destroying the 1994 tour of the then top rock band in the country, Pearl Jam, for trying to keep ticket prices under $20. (Here's Pearl Jam's Congressional testimony.


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

Conceptual tools

Mark Kleiman offers a "list of concepts journalism students should be exposed to:"


- Institutional culture
- Regression toward the mean
- Moral hazard
- Expected value (of an uncertain outcome)
- Present value (of a stream of gains and losses over - time)
- Statistical control
- Correlation v. causation
- Benefit-cost analysis and willingness-to-pay
- Cost-effectiveness
- Separation of powers
- Mill's "harm principle" [more of a moral assertion than a conceptual tool, however]
- Rent-seeking
- Opportunity cost
- Cognitive dissonance
- Milgram experiment


Off the top of my head, I'd add:

- Occam's Razor
- Law of supply and demand
- Ceteris paribus -- all else being equal
- Selection (e.g., natural selection, kin selection, a self-selected sample, etc.)
- Importance of who your relatives are
- Nature vs. Nurture
- Nepotism vs. neposchism
- Relative vs. absolute
- Direction vs. magnitude

The confusion over the direction vs. magnitude comes up all the time these days in the comparisons of Iran in 2006 to Nazi Germany in 1938. See, Nazi Germany didn't like America and Iran doesn't like America, so, since the direction of their dislike (against us) is the same, the threat they pose must be the same. Right?

Okay, but magnitude counts as well, or as Greg Cochran writes in the upcoming American Conservative issue: Size Matters.

Most pundits think about public policy issues the same way I think about singing on key. If I succeed in getting the direction of the change from one note to another right, if I remember that in "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," the pitch of my voice is supposed to go up, not down, between "Some-" and "where," well, hey, I'm doing pretty doggone good. Only fancy pro musician nerds like Randy the judge on "American Idol" care about the magnitude of how much I'm supposed to go up between "Some-" and "where." Do you think Paula Abdul cares? Even when she sobers up?

What other handy conceptual tools would you recommend?


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

September 25, 2006

"All the King's Men"

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

At the 2005 Oscars, host Chris Rock asked,

"Who is Jude Law? Why is he in every movie I have seen the last four years? Even the movies he's not acting in, if you look at the credits, he made cupcakes or something. He's gay, he's straight, he's American, he's British. Next year he's playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar."

In response, an even more than usually pompous Sean Penn defended Law on TV as "one of our finest actors." This ensured a slagging by film critics of the new version of "All the King's Men," in which Penn plays the Huey Long-inspired populist demagogue Willie Stark and Law his enervated aristocrat press secretary Jack Burden, who can never quite decide whether that's a gleam or a glint in his boss' eye.

Surprisingly, after endless editing, "All the King's Men" turns out to be an intelligent, serious film with memorable dialogue, which writer-director Steven Zaillian (who wrote "Schindler's List") largely lifted straight from the book. The famous 1946 novel by poet Robert Penn Warren tends toward the lyrically overripe when Burden narrates, but comes alive when Stark opens his mouth, furnishing as many superb lines as we're likely to hear in a 2006 movie.

While the new film is not as effective as the 1949 Best Picture version (with an Oscar-winning turn by Broderick Crawford), it is more artistically ambitious. Its flaws are frustratingly numerous, but not fatal.


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

Lonelyguy15million replies

A reader responds to my observation "Meanwhile, the lack of effort millions of males [today] put in to finding females is similarly striking:"

Speaking as a 29-year-old single nerd, I don't think that's it. I think it's that women in this country simply aren't as interested in marriage for long-term goals as opposed to marriage as a _result_ of short-term euphoria, and the guys have no idea how to get around that.

Why this is, could be discussed. I think it is a combination of feminist brainwashing and the fact that women have far more options available that in the short term are far more attractive.

I've read _Pride and Prejudice_. Good book. Good manual, actually. The problem is, the women for the most part haven't read it, and don't seem to understand the very concept of what it's about. Dating today is about hooking up, which is to say random sex (which the women then get depressed about, and then feel frustrated with being depressed about it); love is defined as having fun, usually with some connection to alcohol. At the same time, the women seem to want to force the emotional component, to accelerate it, when it doesn't even exist to start with. I can't and won't pretend an emotional interest that doesn't exist, particularly on the first date.

But the environment for building contact and relationships doesn't exist anymore, particularly with the increased mobility and social fluidity everywhere - contacts don't last, communities don't include singles, everyone moves all the time. I made a point of introducing myself to my neighbors when I moved into my most recent apartment; a year later, every single one had been replaced by new tenants. In some cases, twice.

As an example of the helpful structure that's missing from contemporary middle class American life, there's a Turkish nightclub down the street from me, and every Saturday night, three generations of the small local Turkish community show up. So, if you are a young Turk in LA, you are constantly being put into proximity with other young Turks, and your elders are keeping track of eligible bachelors or bachelorettes for you.

I wonder if the invention of the electric guitar doomed this kind of multi-generational socializing in middle class white America by making the kind of music the kids (boys, at least) like physically painful to their elders.

Women today are very confused creatures. I don't know what to do about it.

I am about ready to put some serious money into one of those mail-order bride services myself. What I've been doing for the past 10-15 years - being myself, being polite and nice, living life as it comes, waiting and looking for opportunity to knock - just is not working and shows no signs of doing so. Going to art galleries is sorta good advice but doesn't overcome the most basic obstacle, which is that I simply find it very difficult to strike up conversations with complete strangers for no reason. Art is something I have particularly little to say about

Finding a conversational pretext is a big problem for millions of shy guys who would make good husbands. Travel is one possible palliative: It gives you an excuse for remarking on the view or the lovely tropical weather or whatever. Standing in your local bar, it's awfully inane to say, "So, how about this weather?" But on a Hawaiian beach, it's surprisingly serviceable.

I've received some advice from family to the effect that I should be looking among partners in sporting activities for a mate. That's the sort of advice that is fine in theory but absolutely useless in practice; I am in reasonable physical shape (not overweight, capable of a 10-hour hike in the mountains and no cramps or blisters the next day), have zero interest in cutting out a significant chunk of my time to put into physical activity (particularly since I tend to find exercise for exercise's sake extremely boring - I've tried to force myself past that but it doesn't work so well), and the sort of physical activity I _do_ find enjoyable - artistic roller skating and European-style swordsmanship - is of rather limited interest to the general population.

All that said, I should also note that my sister seems to have the same problems I do in finding suitable candidates, and not because she's feminist or not looking. She's still in grad school though, and she likes computer games and biochem and science fiction, so may have better luck. It worries me though. If her luck's the same as mine, I don't know what she'll do; there aren't any mail-order husband services.

You'd think the market would respond in some way to this gaping lack. But all there is right now is jury-rigged substitutes to a real solution.

A reader responds:

As a geek, I certainly share the impression of your correspondent in that the meatspace dating scene (if it may be called that) is very difficult these days. Without churches, in particular, as meeting venues, singles today have a lot of problems. In the early years of the sexual revolution it seems like sex itself could have been used to "meet people", but that option went away with resurgent feminism and AIDS fear.

But... when your correspondent writes: "You'd think the market would respond in some way to this gaping lack", I am wondering what internet he used to send you that? The market has generated match.com, eharmony.com, and all the other dating services out there. Not to mention friendster and myspace, and perhaps many other services for making friends that I don't even know about.

Who do I have the most pity for? Me! I am 41, meaning, during my 20s I had all the dating woes of a geek in modern meatspace society. But until I was in my 30s there was no good way to use the internet to meet women. (I realize one could have used usenet, in theory, even back into the 80s, but it was a very limited venue both in total number of people using it, and in men:women ratio.)

Frankly, I don't know that geeks have ever had it this *good*. That we hear so many complaints may well be sampling bias: the internet certainly *can* empower your dating, but it empowers complaining about dating even more certainly.


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

Picking a college

In response to a new study offering more sophisticated measurements of how good a job colleges do of actually educating their students (which found evidence that unknown UT-Permian Basin might be doing a better job than prestigious UT-Austin), a reader writes

Your social circle in college is likely to be the one you stay in for life - not doing the same things with the same people, but probably remaining within the same broad social class. I don't have any numbers to prove it, but I would bet that social upward mobility is a lot less AFTER college than it is DURING college and graduate school. Sending your child to a prestigious university is the single best thing you can do to ensure that they remain in or climb into the upper middle class. Upper middle class people rarely marry straight out of college nowadays, but a degree from an elite university virtually guarantees entree into the prestigious jobs and professional schools where they can eventually meet socially suitable partners. Why else would so many conservative but affluent parents send their children to the little red schoolhouses of the Ivy League? I'm a bit surprised that you - one of the very few writers willing to talk honestly about social class in America - dismiss the overwhelming importance of that factor in the college selection process.* (Class being relevant from both perspectives - that of the prospective student and his parents and that of the institution; of course, neither side would dream of admitting it publicly.)

A further example: In the report itself, the authors of try to show the fallacy of USNWR-type rankings by demonstrating that they are dominated by the following factors: fame, wealth, exclusivity. Uhh, right ... who the heck wants any of THOSE things for their kids?

It's a bit naive to imagine that a good education, in a quantifiable, knowledge-poured-into-brain-and-processed sense, is the most important factor in deciding where to go to college. For those with a choice, the social factors described above will surely outweigh the education itself in most cases, with ample justification.

None of this even gets into the question of how one compares educating students with the intelligence and preparation of Harvard freshmen to educating students who barely finished public school in a marginal district ... mainly because I haven't had time to read the whole article yet. I will, I promise.

In other words, who cares whether UTPB teaches better than UTA? It's a nice thing to know, and I'm always in favor of more data rather than less, but, honestly, would send your child off to Odessa (not even Midland, mind you ... Odessa!) if Austin was an option?

A historian writes:

I'm sympathetic to the idea of having a better set of college rankings than presently available. It would be helpful to see what "value added" schools provide. There's an important caveat, however, that comes from my experience with several varieties of institution as a faculty member and graduate student.

Having a critical mass of engaged, capable students really matters because it sets a tone that raises the level of instruction. Part of this involves IQ and raw ability; working with the wrong side of the bell curve is hard at a certain level. But there's also preparation--students who aren't comfortable with reading or writing by age 18 or 20 don't do well a serious humanities course--and a sense that learning matters for its own sake. Self-selection and the admissions process at selective institutions, especially at liberal arts colleges like Pomona, Swarthmore, and the University of the South, guarantee that most students are intellectually engaged. Those who aren't face pressure to become so.

At non-selective institutions, the reverse process operates as faculty teach to the mean. For a humanities course, subtract the high IQ students in sciences or engineering who don't care in literature, history, or art plus the bulk of the population who treat college as five years of beer and circuses. That makes the course a conversation between the instructor and three or four students. Everyone else is just there.

Students who want to learn find this painful. A freshman girl once cried in my office because she had been accepted to two elite liberal arts colleges--Rhodes and the University of the South--but her mother made her attend the local state university that gave a full scholarship. She was the only student in an introductory Western Civilization class who wanted to learn, and all her classes were taught by necessity at a level below her own. We can dismiss this as a sob story, but I've often heard similar laments about students frustrated with the lack of engagement among their peers. Another student who did two years at community college before transferring spoke bitterly about what a fraud many of her classes were. Now she plans to go to graduate school for the education that should have been available to her as an undergraduate.

Even if UT Perminan Basin improves its student's ability more than prestige schools, I'd still want my child to be with other bright engaged students at a school where the apathetic and unprepared are weeded out. Yes, Virginia, there is a difference.


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

You learn something new every day

I didn't know that landlocked Bolivia, which lost its coastline to Chile in 1879's Saltpeter War, has a 5,000 man navy. According to the NYT:

The current navy, though ensconced in society, is a relatively recent creation. In a fit of nationalism in 1963, President Víctor Paz Estenssoro decreed it back into existence.

Military officials were sent on educational exchanges to naval schools in Argentina, Brazil and the United States, institutionalizing Bolivia’s wish for a coastline...

The navy’s proudest outpost is found on the southern banks of Lake Titicaca, more than two miles above sea level.

A monument near the entrance to the Titicaca Naval Base depicts a Bolivian soldier thrusting his bayonet into the throat of a Chilean soldier beside the words, “What once was ours, will be ours once more.”

I get a deep pleasure out of contemplating examples like this of the bloody-mindedness of humanity as long as I'm confident that not even George W. Bush would get our country involved in a Second Saltpeter War.

He wouldn't, would he?


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

Better college rankings

Choosing a school is a frustrating job of buying a pig in a poke. How can you tell how good an education you or your kid will get? Nobody really has a clue, and educators, public and private, like it that way.

The famous US News & World Report college ratings mostly measure how smart the incoming freshmen are, which mostly depends upon how prestigious and wealthy the college already is. Whether the college does a good job of teaching is almost irrelevant.

For example, when I applied to Harvard many decades ago, the alumnus who interviewed me explained that he had taken classes from various superstars of the Harvard faculty such as, to the best of my recollection, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Henry Kissinger. "Wow, that must have been great!" I burbled.

"Nah," he said. "Most of them were awful teachers."

Similarly, Scott Turow's memoir One-L of his first year at Harvard Law School around 1975 recounted how blatantly dysfunctional many of that famous institution's classroom traditions were.

But that's not the point. The point of going to Harvard is to show the world you can get into Harvard and to make friends with other people who can get into Harvard.

Thus, I'm glad to see that a think tank called Education Sector has put out a detailed report "College Rankings Reformed" explaining how to create a better college ranking system, using concepts like value-added. Most of the needed data currently exists for scores of colleges, although it's now public for only a handful. For example, U. of Texas-Permian Basin appears to do a better job of improving its students' ability to write an analytical essay than does U. of Texas-Austin.

Oh yeah? Well, if going to UT-Permian Basin makes you so smart, how come you didn't have Vince Young playing on your football team? Huh? Answer me that, Mr. Analysis Guys. Hook 'em Horns!

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

Better college rankings

Choosing a school is a frustrating job of buying a pig in a poke. How can you tell how good an education you or your kid will get? Nobody really has a clue, and educators, public and private, like it that way.

The famous US News & World Report college ratings mostly measure how smart the incoming freshmen are, which mostly depends upon how prestigious and wealthy the college already is. Whether the college does a good job of teaching is almost irrelevant.

For example, when I applied to Harvard many decades ago, the alumnus who interviewed me explained that he had taken classes from various superstars of the Harvard faculty such as, to the best of my recollection, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Henry Kissinger. "Wow, that must have been great!" I burbled.

"Nah," he said. "Most of them were awful teachers."

Similarly, Scott Turow's memoir One-L of his first year at Harvard Law School around 1975 recounted how blatantly dysfunctional many of that famous institution's classroom traditions were.

But that's not the point. The point of going to Harvard is to show the world you can get into Harvard and to make friends with other people who can get into Harvard.

Thus, I'm glad to see that a think tank called Education Sector has put out a detailed report "College Rankings Reformed" explaining how to create a better college ranking system, using concepts like value-added. Most of the needed data currently exists for scores of colleges, although it's now public for only a handful. For example, U. of Texas-Permian Basin appears to do a better job of improving its students' ability to write an analytical essay than does U. of Texas-Austin.

Oh yeah? Well, if going to UT-Permian Basin makes you so smart, how come you didn't have Vince Young playing on your football team? Huh? Answer me that, Mr. Analysis Guys. Hook 'em Horns!

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

September 22, 2006

When was the last time a Muslim country invaded a Christian country?

A reader asked me this question and I've had a hard time coming up with a good answer. He suggested Indonesia's occupation of the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, which I guess would be a reasonable answer, but the scale was pretty small.

Perhaps the 1990s war between Muslim Eritrea and semi-Christian Ethiopia out in the Ogaden desert? Who invaded whom?

There have lots of civil wars with a Muslim vs. Christian angle, such as Lebanon or, to a less vivid extent, the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war, but they took place within recognized national boundaries.

The Ottoman Turks used to kick Southeastern Europe around pretty hard, twice threatening Vienna, but later the Sultanate was the Sick Man of Europe for centuries. The Turks were fighting most of the time from 1908 to 1922, but they were mostly on the defensive. Armenia was not independent in 1915, so I don't think that would quite qualify.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a small war in the early 1990s over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave within Azerbaijan, with Armenia mostly winning, but to find out whether Azerbaijan ever invaded Armenia, I'd have to read the single longest Wikipedia article I've ever seen. Judging from the effort put into this essay, I'd guess that this war still evinces a lot of passions, so (for once in my life) I'm not going to open that particular can of worms.

There are lots of examples of irregular Muslim raids on Christendom. For example, the Barbary pirates kidnapped something like one million Christians into slavery, even raiding Iceland apparently, before being put down by the Royal Navy the year after Waterloo. But it's hard to say whether that would qualify as an invasion.

The point is not that Muslims didn't want to invade Christian countries, but that for various reasons, Muslim countries (other than the Turks) tended not to be able to get their act together enough to carry out their aggressive urges, unlike Christian states, which long found preying on Muslim states fairly easy.


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

Low Asian birthrates

A reader who lived in three East Asian countries for a decade writes from China:

As with the rest of the world, young people are deserting the farms to go live in the cities. The young men who remain on the family farm cannot find wife in their home country (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). So, they go for mail order brides from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, China is no good anymore because China also has bride shortage as well. This leaves Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Indonesia is out because it is Muslim.

However, the birth rate is rapidly declining even in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the rest of South East Asia.

The 800 lbs explanation that Mark Steyn overlooks for the decline of Asian birthrates is because it is now expensive to raise kids in Asia (except in the poor parts of S.E. Asia). This is partly due to urbanization, but also to the great expectations required to properly raise kids in Asia, mainly high education. Schools (primary, secondary, and university) are even more expensive, relative to mean income, than they are in the U.S. Housing is also more expensive (relative to income) than in the U.S.

(Medical care is cheaper. That's because it is less regulated and bureaucratized than in the U.S.)

Housing in Asia does not mean single family detached housing in leafy suburbs, as it does in the U.S. Rather, it refers to the luxury 3 bedroom condominium in the fashionable high-rise. Compared to U.S. suburbs, urban high-rise living is not conducive to having kids.

The reason why even the poor people in Asia are no longer having kids is because, in Asia, it is great shame to have kids and not provide decent upbringing to them. To have kids without being financially prepared for them marks one as being "low class" and is a source of shame.

Lastly, fewer people are having kids because, in the high-rise urban environment, there is lots of fun to be had by traveling and partying a lot.


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

September 21, 2006

Mexican-American racial admixture differences by class

One of the important issues for understanding the future of American society is the correlation between assimilation and racial ancestry among Hispanics, especially Mexican-Americans. Several readers have pointed me toward the following study, which suggests that there is relationship. Here is the the abstract, but it doesn't say what the actual numbers are.

Can anybody find the original online and send it to me?

Relationship of prevalence of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus to Amerindian admixture in the Mexican Americans of San Antonio, Texas

Dr. Ranajit Chakraborty, Robert E. Ferrell, Michael P. Stern, Steven M. Haffner, Helen P. Hazuda, Marc Rosenthal, D. C. Rao

Abstract A genetic and epidemiological survey of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) was conducted among the Mexican Americans residing in three socio-economically distinct areas of San Antonio, Texas: a low socioeconomic (SES) traditional area (barrio), a middle SES, ethnically balanced area (transitional), and a high SES, predominantly Anglo area (suburb). Seventeen polymorphic markers were used to relate the prevalences of NIDDM with the extent of Amerindian ancestry of 1,237 Mexican Americans of these three residential areas. While only the RH and haptoglobin loci showed evidence of association with NIDDM, an admixture analysis of the combined allele frequency data revealed a pattern of decreasing NIDDM prevalence with increasing socioeconomic status (as approximated by neighborhood of residence) and a parallel decrease in Amerindian ancestry. The rank-order correlation between NIDDM prevalence and Amerindian admixture is 0.943 (P < .001) for the crude prevalence rate and 0.829 (P < .02) for the age-adjusted rate. Nested gene diversity analysis revealed that the heterogeneity of allele frequencies is more pronounced when individuals were classified by their NIDDM disease status as compared to the classification by neighborhood. Estimation of Amerindian ancestry of each individual did not reveal any significant change in the shape of the distributions of individual admixture proportions in diabetics as compared to the controls. Nevertheless, the results suggest that genetic factors partially explain the differences in NIDDM prevalence observed between the Mexican American and Anglo populations in the southwestern United States.

Received: 21 April 1986; Accepted: 17 July 1986

You'll note that this paper is over 20 years old. Ancestral admixture techniques have improved dramatically since then. Has anybody bothered to redo this study, or is this just one of the many things we'd rather not know?


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

16 Volts silenced by his university

The brilliant Finnish-Canadian computer science professor / blogger Ilkka Kokkarinen has taken down his popular blog, presumably to keep his job after his campus newspaper noticed his heterodox views. His skepticism about the intellectual consistency of lesbian-feminist theory and practice would appear to have been his biggest crime. The Ryerson campus newspaper reported:

CS instructor in need of sensitivity training: Chair

Ryerson computer science instructor, Ilkka Kokkarinen, is under fire after making what are being called sexist and homophobic comments on his blog, Sixteen Volts.

After being alerted by The Ryersonian, computer science chair, Alireza Sadeghian said the department neither accepts nor condones Kokkarinen’s views.

“I will personally suggest to Dr. Kokkarinen that he enrol [sic] and participate in appropriate seminars to obtain a proper understanding of human rights and discrimination,” said Sadeghian in an e-mail.

“I will arrange appropriate educational workshops, seminars or training sessions with the help of the discrimination and harassment prevention office at Ryerson.”

Groups on campus have seen Kokkarinen’s comments on his blog, and are concerned. Mandy Ridley, a RyePride co-ordinator, found his comments to be harmful.

“He’s clearly promoting hate upon women and queer-identified women.”

On April 1, Kokkarinen wrote in his blog: “The female overrepresentation is heavily concentrated on the fluff fields that ... which makes these fields suit the female mind better…basically all fields that don’t require any mathematics or logical and analytical thinking beyond the elementary school level.”

An anonymous American student alerted the Women’s Centre, mentioning that she is a computer science student and software engineer and that she had stumbled across Kokkarinen’s blog and was concerned.

The Women’s Centre responded by posting her note outside its office...

Students in his classes describe Kokkarinen as nice, helpful and intelligent.

“By far the best prof I’ve had,” said one student posting anonymously on the website, RateMyProfessors.com, that allows for students to post instructor feedback.

“I consider this guy a good prof,” said another. “Very clear, friendly, good marker and definitely loves his field.”

Is Canada still a free country? Is anywhere going to be a free country in another decade?

Will all the bloggers who are denouncing (rightfully) the Muslim threat to free speech take up Dr. Kokkarinen's case?

Clearly, Professor Kokkarinen was naive to use his own name when he switched his blog from Finnish to English, but considering how much of his writing was based on details of his daily life, it would have been child's play for the witch hunters to track him down and crush him even if he had used a pseudonym.

Perhaps this suggests that the survival of freedom of speech in the West rests with the Finnish language. Maybe we should start studying Finnish to use as a secret language for the discussion of ideas forbidden to be mentioned in English?


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

The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers of South Korea

Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion has made a running joke out of the quite real difficulties Minnesota farmers have in finding wives. Since the 1970s, at least, Minnesota farm girls have moved to Minneapolis to be Mary Tyler Moore, leaving a lot of lonely farmers behind.

Similarly, in the Coen Bros.' "Big Lebowski," Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), formerly Fawn Gunderson, the straying hooker wife of an elderly Southern California millionaire, is being searched for by a detective hired by her parents in Minnesota who want her to come home. The snoop pulls out a black and white photograph to show The Dude:


Private Eye: "The Gundersons told me to show her this when I found her. The family farm."


A bleak farmhouse and silo are the only features on a flat snow-swept landscape.


Private eye: "Outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. They think it'll make her homesick."


In South Korea, the problem is even worse, due to extremely low birth rates (a total fertility rate of 1.1) and aborting girl babies. From Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times:


Jeong Ha-gi, 46, flew to Vietnam on a tour organized for South Korean bachelors. He was looking for a wife who would be tough enough to withstand the rigors of life on a rice farm. Trying to distinguish among all the women with the numbers pinned to their shirts, he decided the one with a bad complexion might be made of sturdy stuff. They were married three days later.

Today, they live together in sullen silence, a chasm of cultural differences between them. She speaks no Korean, he no Vietnamese. They communicate — barely — with a well-thumbed phrase book. Nguyen Thu Dong, who turned out to be only 20, doesn't like getting up at 5 a.m. to do the farm chores. She turns up her nose at kimchi.

"We have a lot of issues between us," said the burly Jeong, who in his undershirt resembles a Korean version of the young Marlon Brando. "Our age difference, our culture, our food. But I wanted a wife and she is who I got."


John Derbyshire writes to me:

I couldn't help but think of the archetypal New England farmer whose wife died after 50 yrs of marriage. A neighbor went over to offer condolences.

"Guess you'll be missing her after all them years, Zeke."

"Can't really say so. Never did get to like her much."

The LA Times article goes on:

Despite the obvious pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for life.

The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.

The phenomenon has become so widespread that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among the most homogenous in the world.


Mark Steyn goes on and on about how the low birthrate of Europe is caused by socialism, long vacations, and general decadent Eurowimpery, but how does that explain the even lower birthrate of South Korean farmers?

By the way, there's a widespread assumption that the high sex ratio of males to females in Asia will lead to massive violence by frustrated males. Yet, if we look at the most violent regions of America, the black inner cities, we see a very low ratio of males to females, due to so many males being in prison or dead. In the ghettoes, men don't have to behave like good prospective husbands to get women because there is so little competition. So, perhaps the assumption about East Asia is dubious?



The globalized wife market: A reader who lives in Japan writes:

I'm just back from the Philippines where there is no shortage of children. It's catholic and mostly poor, so people have not picked up modern values. After being the source of cheap workers for the world for decades, it now the source of cheap wives. They are exported to Japan and other Asian countries as wives for farmers. Lots of Filipinas also come to Japan to make good money working as hostesses in bars. They have a good reputation. They are fairly cute and don't make trouble. A fair number end up snagging a Japanese husband. But, the Philippines is crawling with middle aged or older men married to young Filipinas. Unattractive, divorced white men with nominal pensions can live there quite comfortably. There are also oodles of older Japanese men, who may or may not be divorced, pumping cash into the economy thru young female companions.

For some reason the Philippines is now also very popular with young Koreans. Well, it is close, cheap, and they can tell their parents they are studying English, although it looks like they are majoring in computer games. There are lots of stores and restaurants with hangul characters on the outside. The Koreans are young and don't seem to be "dating" Filipinas very much yet. There is the inevitable language barrier and there seem to be a lot of young Korean women hanging around too. Probably these are city kids, not farmers.

***

Low Asian birthrates: A reader who lived in three East Asian countries for a decade writes from China:

As with the rest of the world, young people are deserting the farms to go live in the cities. The young men who remain on the family farm cannot find wife in their home country (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). So, they go for mail order brides from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, China is no good anymore because China also has bride shortage as well. This leaves Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Indonesia is out because it is Muslim.

However, the birth rate is rapidly declining even in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the rest of South East Asia.

The 800 lbs explanation that Mark Steyn overlooks for the decline of Asian birthrates is because it is now expensive to raise kids in Asia (except in the poor parts of S.E. Asia). This is partly due to urbanization, but also to the great expectations required to properly raise kids in Asia, mainly high education. Schools (primary, secondary, and university) are even more expensive, relative to mean income, than they are in the U.S. Housing is also more expensive (relative to income) than in the U.S.

(Medical care is cheaper. That's because it is less regulated and bureaucratized than in the U.S.)

Housing in Asia does not mean single family detached housing in leafy suburbs, as it does in the U.S. Rather, it refers to the luxury 3 bedroom condominium in the fashionable high-rise. Compared to U.S. suburbs, urban high-rise living is not conducive to having kids.

The reason why even the poor people in Asia are no longer having kids is because, in Asia, it is great shame to have kids and not provide decent upbringing to them. To have kids without being financially prepared for them marks one as being "low class" and is a source of shame.

Lastly, fewer people are having kids because, in the high-rise urban environment, there is lots of fun to be had by traveling and partying a lot.

***Permalink***


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