October 10, 2006

More on Martin Scorsese

From my review of "The Departed" in the upcoming American Conservative:

Although Scorsese is a favorite of intellectuals, his films, when they work, leave the critic without much to analyze other than why they work so well. A quarter century ago, staggering out of Scorsese's most awe-inspiring effort, "Raging Bull," a friend turned to me and, overwhelmed but genuinely puzzled, asked, "But … what was that about?" You could say "Raging Bull" was "about" masculinity, but Scorsese didn't present a theory of it for you to argue over. He simply showed you the distilled essence of masculinity.


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

"Diversity Our Strength"

I, Ectomorph keeps getting better and better. Here's his musings on the new city seal of Toronto:

Toronto, where new residents arrive every minute from all over the world, is professedly in love with "diversity". The city's motto is actually "Diversity our strength". This sounds like a lot like the United States' motto "E pluribus unum" (Out of many, one) or the City of Winnipeg's motto "Unum cum virtute multorum" (One with the strength of many), except that it's dumbed down into English and, more importantly, it leaves out any mention of a "one". In this town, it's basically E pluribus whatever...or, perhaps (at best) E pluribus ethnic restaurants.

In case you don't believe me, here's Toronto's recently devised device:

The various elements of the design are intended to symbolize our diversity in various respects, although (curiously) the old colonialist coat of arms that was junked in favour of this actually dared to depict diversity in human form, represented 50% by women in non-traditional roles (Britannia militaristically bearing her shield) and 50% by visible minorities (an impressive native Indian warrior). But for now we'll have to make do with the diversity of a beaver and a bear, drawn the same size to symbolize the modern Torontonian's unfamiliarity with animals other than raccoons, pigeons and shih-tzus. [More]


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

Robert D. Putnam solves all the problems caused by diversity

From another Financial Times article about Harvard political scientist Robert "Bowling Alone" Putnam's study on the correlation between ethnic diversity and lack of trust in American locations:


That is a depressing picture. But Prof Putnam, a liberal who sometimes seems to shrink from the impact of his own findings, insists there are ways of avoiding it.

To illustrate, he tells the story of his eight-year-old granddaughter, Miriam, whose father is Puerto Rican and who was brought up for the first few years of her life in Puerto Rico, then moved to an American school. She came home one day to ask her mother “what’s a Hispanic?” Told it was some one of Latin American origin, she asked, “am I a Hispanic?”

Prof Putnam says: “Miriam was learning how US society draws lines. Not for any sinister reasons, it just creates a category called Hispanic to describe people. But it’s a social construction, and it can be deconstructed.”


The Hispanic category was quietly invented by Nixon's OMB in 1973, but disinventing it would be vastly more difficult since large amounts of affirmative action goodies come with it, and thus the beneficiaries have financial incentives to smear as "racist" anybody who calls for ending it. Is Putnam calling for elimination of the Hispanic category and the end of preferences for ex-Hispanics? If he is, he's not doing it very loudly.


He points to the “melting pot” period of early 20th century America, a time when all kinds of people came to the US – Irish, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews. “The picture that they all, after a little friction, got on and that Jews taught the Irish how to dance the hora, was mainly wrong,” he says. “It was more like "Gangs of New York”. It changed very slowly, but it did change.


It changed mostly during the long period after the mid-1920s when mass immigration was cut off.


“I think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. The US military is one example. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the Vietnam war. Now, polls show that US military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than civilians. And that was deliberate. If officers were told they wouldn’t make colonel if they were seen to discriminate, they changed.”


So, to increase trust across ethnic lines, Putnam is calling for imposing martial law? That's flippant, but I'm tired of people pointing at the military and saying, "Look, everybody gets along there so everybody should get along outside the military," without ever examining exactly what the military does to achieve a reasonable level of racial harmony. I explored that question in some detail in a 1995 National Review article "Where the Races Relate," but I don't see anybody has learned anything from it over the last decade. And, in 1995, I missed the single most important tool the military uses: IQ tests to determine who is eligible for admission. By keeping out low IQ individuals, the military has closed much of the Bell Curve gap among the races.


Another anecdote: “From the 1920s onwards, almost all American humour was Jewish humour. And it was referred to as such. Now, you wouldn’t think of describing Woody Allen as a Jewish comedian. It’s just humour. It’s become American”.


Nobody thinks to describe Woody Allen as Jewish? Huh?

More subtly, it's incorrect to describe American comedy since the 1920s as "almost all" Jewish. While the Jewish influence is very large, Woody Allen's hero Bob Hope immigrated from England when he was four. The dominant comedians of late night television -- Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno -- aren't Jewish.

Here's an English list of 50 top comedians to provide some date from a 3rd party view of the subject. The 18 Americans on the list (including English immigrants Hope, Charlie Chaplin, and Christopher Guest and Canadian immigrant Mike Myers) are made up of 10 gentiles and 8 Jews. (Chaplin, by the way, probably wasn't Jewish. He was likely Gypsy on his mother's side. Robin Williams is from a wealthy WASP family -- his father was a high-ranking auto company executive. Myers is English, not Jewish -- "Coffee Talk" is based on his mother-in-law, not his mother.) That proportion sounds about right, with Jews having a plurality but not a majority in American comedy.


In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”


More generally, it's annoying to me that the level of intellectual discourse about diversity remains so insipid. For over a decade, I've been writing about (A) How to ameliorate the problems caused by diversity and (B) How amelioration is costly, unpopular, and far from 100% effective, so we should not aggravate the problems with more mass immigration. Yet, as this issue becomes ever more pressing, the quality of discourse is declining, precisely because of the increasing political power of "the diverse" means that accurate discussions of the topic are punished.


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

Fun with Statistics!

From the comments section on Greg Mankiw's blog, a true believer attempts to refute Robert D. Putnam's research that ethnic diversity correlates with lower levels of trust:


This paper claims that the correlation between trust and homogeneity disappears once you control for democracy, corruption and equal protection.


What's next? Perhaps:


This paper claims that the correlation between mortality and bubonic plague disappears once you control for sudden death.


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

Gideon's Blog on war with Iran

Noah posts only rarely, but it's worth the wait. Here's an excerpt:

2. China. The United States has a massive interest in integrating China into an international system, in enabling China to emerge as a great power without feeling the need to become a "revisionist" power. We failed in this regard with Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, with consequences that are well-known. If we fail with China, the consequences could be considerably worse. The Chinese leadership has for some time been consciously stoking Han nationalism as a way of building support for a regime that no longer espouses socialism in any meaningful sense of the word, and that has been tainted by massive corruption. We have to maneuver carefully between the Scylla of making the regime feel threatened from without and the Charybdis of making the regime feel like there's a power vacuum for it to occupy. Right now, I fear our foreign policy is achieving the worst of both worlds: making China worried about our intentions and unimpressed with our abilities. War with Iran would substantially increase Chinese perceptions of America as a threat. If the war achieved success levels similar to our Iraqi adventure, it would also deepen their contempt for our abilities.

Moreover, precipitate American action in Iran would lead to a reassessment in a variety of minor Asian capitals as to the relative dangers of American or Chinese patronage. Who would want to be the Turkey of East Asia when America decides to target North Korea, or Burma, or some other state? That's going to be a question asked in Bangkok and Seoul and Jakarta and Manila, and China is poised to reap the benefit any time the answer is, "not us!" [More]

A reader replies:

If I were Chinese, with one of those famously hefty North Asian IQs, I think I would reach exactly the opposite of Gideon's conclusions from the Iraq war. I think I would notice that 1) the high tech American military can slice like butter through much larger formations of more primitive militaries, but 2) America is not very competent at transforming non-Western societies into democracies and 3) America is far too gentle to put down violent resistance of even a tiny number of rebels and 4) the American people have no stomach for occupying a country against the resistance of even a small minority of its people.

Now, 1) means that if China is thinking of any aggressive moves, they could be in for some nasty surprises, and 3, 4, and 5 mean that there is no chance, zip, nada, phi, the null set, of America ever trying to invade or occupy even a sliver of so massive a country as China.

All of which is, I think, what we want them to understand.

But then I am not Chinese.


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

Cheap labor is expensive for America in the long run

As Ben Franklin pointed out in 1751, the social basis for the superior American way of life -- what later became known as the American Dream of a vast middle class of prosperous home owners -- has been based on high wages and cheap land, which are due to America's enduring lack of labor relative to the abundance of land.

This had the side effect of encouraging American inventiveness. Clever farm boys who were good with their hands, such as Henry Ford, eventually made America the world's industrial giant.

In recent years, though, it has become a journalistic cliché that cheap labor is "good for the economy." The truth is that cheap labor discourages inventiveness.


New machines alter agriculture's future
By Dennis Pollock / The Fresno Bee
(Updated Sunday, October 1, 2006, 7:05 AM)

In a green bean field near Fowler, hundreds of metal fingers on a machine are doing what 66-year-old Joe Santellano's fingers did decades ago when he harvested beans in the San Jose area.

They're picking the beans and sending them into a box — their first stop before being hauled to Sunnyside Packing in Selma.

Santellano and Todd Hirasuna, field representatives with Sunnyside, watch the machine make its way through the field. It's the first time they have used it.

They sort through the harvested beans and wince at those that have snapped.

Broken and misshapen beans will be culled from what is sold to retailers.

A broken bean," Hirasuna says, picking one up. "That's a necessary evil."

But most are in perfect condition.

Plagued by rising costs for labor and worker shortages, the packinghouse bought the $28,500 harvester this year.

The irony: Bean harvesters have been in use for about 30 years elsewhere in the United States. Simple geography — the proximity to a huge, low-cost labor force in Mexico — virtually had kept them out of California fields until now. [Emphasis mine.]

Severe spot-labor shortages, crackdowns on illegal immigration and planned increases in the minimum wage have opened California's doors to existing machinery, fostered research and development to meet niche agricultural needs and taken talk of orchard robots out of the realm of science fiction...

Growers shied from the expense in days past, Stich said.

"But now, there is a serious question of whether the labor will be there," he said...

This year's raisin harvest is nearly 70% complete, and for the first time in years, labor needs did not become an issue, said Glen Goto, who heads the Raisin Bargaining Association. He cited two reasons: At least 40% of the crop is mechanically harvested, and grape yields may be down as much as 30%...

Countries where low-cost labor is in short supply have been in the machine-farming vanguard. Australians and Italians, for example, pioneered using machines to prune grapevines, said Maxwell Norton, a University of California farm adviser for Merced County...

Selma grower Bill Chandler said he saw pickers in apple orchards standing on moveable platforms instead of ladders in Spain.

The practice could be spreading into California. For the second time this year, a grower of pears used the platform technique in Lake County, where thousands of tons of the fruit were left to rot this year because of a worker shortage.

Rachel Elkins, a UC farm adviser for Lake and Mendocino counties, said the self-propelled platform, which rolls through the orchard on wheels, is being evaluated by the Agricultural Ergonomic Research Center at UC Davis and others for productivity, fruit quality, costs and other matters.

An advantage of the platform approach, Elkins said, is that it could broaden the pool of workers, adding some who are unable or unwilling to wrestle with long ladders in the orchards. Moreover, it may cut down on workers' compensation claims.


In other words, fewer injured workers.

Agricultural economist William Bailey points out in Farm Week:


"American agriculture faces intense global competition. The effect of encouraging the continued use of inexpensive immigrant labor may have the unintended consequence of reducing the competitiveness of American agriculture."


This is especially true for the ultra-labor intensive farms of California, a state second only to Hawaii in cost of living in this country. To compete with overseas growers, it doesn't make much sense for California farms to follow a labor intensive strategy because the cost of living in California is so high.


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

"The most disturbing piece of research I have read about recently"

says Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who must have rather tame research reading habits. (Via ADC and Mangan's). From the Financial Times, an article about the "Bowling Alone" guy:


Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity
By John Lloyd in London

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that”.

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human history”, but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where “diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnic”.

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”


Oddly enough, although Putnam claims he suppressed publishing his research for years, I wrote about his study in VDARE.com way back in 2001:


I lived in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, which is on the lakefront about six miles north of the Loop. Uptown boasts of being the most linguistically diverse square mile in America. Supposedly, 88 different languages are spoken there (or maybe 110, depending on who is telling the story).

For someone like myself who is fascinated by human biodiversity, Uptown is wonderfully educational. Just don't call it a community. Being an unneighborly sort myself, that was OK with me. Fortunately, most people are less anti-social.

When my wife and I first moved in, she helped start a neighborhood drive to repair the ramshackle little park across the street. To get the City of Chicago to agree to help, we'd need to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers. This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed civic activity proved strikingly difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity.

The most obvious problem: it's hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don't speak the same language as you do.

The second problem: the high crime rate. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the adjoining Little Saigon district on Argyle St. had scant interest in sending their kids to play in a park that would also be used by black kids from the local housing project. The Asians were generally scared of the much bigger and more raucous African-Americans.

Third problem: inter-immigrant hatreds. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are slender, elegant-looking dark brown people with thin Arab noses. They appear identical to the American eye. But their compatriots back home in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.

Fourth problem: a lot of the immigrants came from countries where only a fool trusted his neighbors, much less the government. If the South Vietnamese had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the greater good from 1965-1975, as their militaristic North Vietnamese enemies did, they'd be lousier restaurateurs. But they'd probably still have their own country.

Fifth problem: the fundamental difficulty in making multiculturalism work, namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is not impossible. Yet it's certainly far more work than fostering consensus among people who all have the same picture in their heads of what a park is for.

For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But Latin American women want to stay in the shade, since their culture discriminates in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?

In the end, the middle class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with plenty of black-white couples) did the bulk of the work.

And, after that struggle, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic betterment.


Here's the LA Times article I noticed five years ago:


Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.
Community: Angelenos are among the least trusting, according to a national survey by a Harvard researcher.
By PETER Y. HONG, L.A. Times Staff Writer

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

October 9, 2006

Those Damn WAMs

White American Males make up about 1.6% of the world's population, but they are 6 for 6 in the Nobels this year. They just keep coming up with lots of good ideas, undermining the self-esteem of everybody else. Don't they know how insensitive that is?

Physiology and Medicine: Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello
Physics: John C. Mather and George F. Smoot
Chemistry: Roger D. Kornberg
Economics: Edmund S. Phelps


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

An Automation PAC?

A reader writes:


What is the pro-immigrant segment of business? Restaurants, hotels, farmers, mortgage lenders, etc. Who are low-IQ immigration's natural enemies? Companies that make labor-saving machines, or products and services that are in higher demand when unskilled labor is expensive. Roomba, you mentioned automated car washes, I don't know any of the manufacturers, I really don't know who else, but maybe they should organize a PAC, it'd be in their long-term interest to increase the demand for machines. Any company that makes agricultural machines must be hurt by immigration. Talk-up turning jobs Americans "won't do" into jobs that no one will have to do. It sounds progressive, not racist. After all, better to make people think that everyone will have either a machine (like a dishwasher) or easy access to a machine (like an automatic car wash) on days without mexicans than feeling they'd have to do it themselves, or even more terrifying, have to deal with black people going in and out of their neighborhoods


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

"The Departed:"

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

As American filmmaking has hit the doldrums, the best Chinese-language movies, such as "Hero" and "2046," have come to rival in quality anything recently made in America. Now, the most critically-celebrated American director, Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver" and "The Aviator"), has directly taken up the Chinese challenge. "The Departed" transplants to Boston the subtle, laconic 2002 Hong Kong cops-and-gangsters thriller "Infernal Affairs" about a crook who infiltrates the police while an undercover detective worms his way into his mob.

I'm proud to report the Americans have won the face-off. As fine as "Infernal Affairs" is, "The Departed" is an order of magnitude more entertaining. Our boys triumph the same way we did in World War II -- by throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, into the fray. The loquacious "Departed," which ends up a sort of brutal action tragicomedy, might be overstuffed, but it's certainly overwhelming.


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

October 6, 2006

An experimental physicist complains that theoretical physics now consists of "theological speculation:"

Stanford's Burton Richter says:

"To me, some of what passes for the most advanced theory in particle physics these days is not really science. When I found myself on a panel recently with three distinguished theorists, I could not resist the opportunity to discuss what I see as major problems in the philosophy behind theory, which seems to have gone off into a kind of metaphysical wonderland. Simply put, much of what currently passes as the most advanced theory looks to be more theological speculation, the development of models with no testable consequences, than it is the development of practical knowledge, the development of models with testable and falsifiable consequences (Karl Popper's definition of science)."

I'm certainly not qualified to arbitrate this dispute among physicists, but it does remind me of how narrow is the expertise of the various biologists who are strident atheists, most famously "Darwin's Pit Bull," Richard Dawkins, who assumed that the theory of natural selection answers all possible questions about the universe. As I pointed out back in 1999, the Biological Imperialism of Dawkins, the philosopher Dennett, and so forth rested on their being strikingly uninformed and uninterested about some strange developments in 20th Century cosmology.


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

October 5, 2006

The New York Observer notices Malcolm Gladwell has jumped the shark


Passing the Gladwell Point
By Tom Scocca

The Malcolm Gladwell Piece was an identifiable and successful form of its own: a closely reported portrait of a person or phenomenon, stretched to billboard significance on an academic or conceptual framework. It made something make sense.

So why, lately, has the Malcolm Gladwell Piece become irritating? Why does a reader flap the magazine in agitation on the subway, or go onto a blog and start castigating the author for elementary errors of fact and interpretation? Why does spending a weekend with Mr. Gladwell’s best-selling books, The Tipping Point and Blink, lead to unhappiness and a pathological fixation on writing in rhetorical questions?...

The problem with the Malcolm Gladwell Piece, in part, is that it always seems to contain phrases like “the problem with the Malcolm Gladwell Piece.” Something has happened to Mr. Gladwell’s style of argumentation over time—it has become more self-referential, till the framework dominates the portrait. Here’s Mr. Gladwell, writing recently on the question of Allen Iverson’s basketball ability: “In order to measure something you thought was fairly straightforward, you really have to take into account a series of things that aren’t so straightforward.” On pit-bull attacks: “Another word for generalization, though, is ‘stereotype,’ and stereotypes are usually not considered desirable dimensions of our decision-making lives.” On pension policy: “This is an important point.”

Meanwhile, the specifics are sliding around. Mr. Gladwell has blamed the University of Oklahoma for irrationally kicking the quarterback off its football team, when it was actually obeying an official NCAA rule. He has been caught reversing the meaning of remarks by Albert Speer on the efficacy of Allied bombing. He has been dragged into an online brawl with an Economist writer about whether or not he understands pension policy. At times, lately, Mr. Gladwell sounds like someone trying to tell other people about something he read once in a Malcolm Gladwell piece, after a few rounds of drinks...

The Tipping Point, published in 2000, was a sort of apotheosis or self-immolation of Gladwellism: It was Mr. Gladwell’s own tipping point, and it made it impossible to describe that particular phenomenon in any other way. Before the book came out, Mr. Gladwell was a well-respected byline; after, he was a full-on literary celebrity and, more impressively, a business guru...

The job of the business writer is to supply answers. So the ineffable and the absurd give way to case studies and classificatory jargon, with capital letters (Paul Revere’s ride, Mr. Gladwell writes in The Tipping Point, succeeded because of “a few Salesmen and a man with the particular genius of both a Maven and a Connector”).

Even the sentence structure has gone flat, the playful strings of clauses snipped into tidy lengths. The latter-day Gladwell uses the second person the way Mr. Rogers does, to make sure that you, the audience, are never confused about what your host is telling you. What he is telling you is this: You can understand the world, if you follow along with Malcolm Gladwell....

But the more authoritative Mr. Gladwell sets out to be, the less persuasive he is. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, his 2005 book about unconscious cognition, draws on a variety of studies about the ways that people make snap judgments, wisely and unwisely.

“Next time you meet a doctor … if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you with respect, listen to that feeling,” Mr. Gladwell writes, summing up one study of snippets of doctor-patient conversations. Yet that study, by the book’s own account, was prompted by the discovery that patients filed malpractice suits based on their feelings about their doctors, rather than the doctors’ error rates. [More]

As a writer gets more popular, his audience gets broader, stupider, and more worshipful. That's good for the wallet but not for the work.


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

Don't Sweat It

A guy named Stephen Browne spent a year teaching English in Saudi Arabia. He didn't enjoy the experience. Via Mean Mr. Mustard, he lists 12 things he learned about Saudis:

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of "maintenance" is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets. An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, “If God wills it.” A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, “It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah.” Or, “I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah.” (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, “You are all going to pass the exam, right?” “Inshallah teacher.” “No, no!” I shouted, “No inshallah. Study!”

While we might not be terribly impressed by how they function in the modern world, the Arab Bedouin became superbly adapted to surviving as a nomad in the desert. "Don't sweat the small stuff" is a governing principle where temperatures are extreme and wells are far between.


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

Intermarriage with Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus declining in Canada

Unlike the American Census, the Canadian census asks about religion, so it has some interesting statistics about the number marriages between people of different faiths. The most striking result is that between 1981 and 2001, the percentage of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus who were married to somebody of a different religion declined. Muslims are down from 13% to 9%, Sikhs from 4% to 3%, and Hindus from 11% to 9%. Buddhists are stable at 19% and "other Eastern religions" up from 26% to 27%.

I, Ectomorph notes:

"Yet another phenomenon, I suspect, that wouldn't have been predicted by the authors of Canada's multiculturalism policy back in the late 60s and early 70s."

Immigration is making intermarriage less likely for minorities. Statistics Canada summarizes: "When co-religionists are scare, inter-religious unions are more likely."

Similarly, in the U.S. the highest proportion of blacks are in interracial marriages in states like Wyoming where there are very few blacks.

In contrast, in Canada, the percentage of Jews in mixed marriages climbed from 9% in 1981 to 17% in 2001. The Canadian government points out the assimilating effects of a low immigration rate: "Only 8% of those with a Jewish religion arrived in Canada between 1991 and 2001, so people who have the Jewish religion have a longer history in Canada than many other religious groups."

This is like the phenomenon of how the growth of interracial marriage in California is being slowed by immigration, as I pointed out in 2000. For example, several decades ago, Asian-Americans were widely scattered throughout suburban Southern California, so intermarriage for Asians was high. But recently they've clustered in the San Gabriel Valley east of downtown Los Angeles, which facilitates more Asian-Asian marriages.

As Lenin pointed out, it's useful to ask Who? Whom? A low rate of immigration leads to the assimilation of minorities into the majority through marriage. In contrast, a high rate of immigration helps preserve the cultural and genetic exclusivity of minorities while breaking down that of the majority.


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

Spengler

The Asia Times columnist is one of the more interesting of the pseudonymous foreign policy commentators that have appeared in the Internet Age -- not quite as good as the War Nerd, but better than Wretchard of Belmont Club, who specializes in discerning in every single thing that George W. Bush does some unbelievably complex triple-bankshot strategy that Bush couldn't even understand, much less conceive.

Spengler is clever and has original ideas, some of which might even be true. I'd like Spengler better if he'd use words like "perhaps" and "possibly" more. His absolute self-confidence, though, gets on my nerves, and drives me to search out evidence that he's really not the all-knowing seer he seems to think he is. This is unfortunate because my looking for reasons to think the Spengler glass is half empty gets in the way of recognizing that the Spengler glass is also half full.

For example, back in May he wrote on the paradox of how popular Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is in an America that isn't lacking in Christian faith. Spengler hasn't actually read it or seen the movie version, but that doesn't stop him from opining about it at some length. (Having seen and read it, I won't hold that against him -- he's got better things to do than trudge through Brown's 839 one-page chapters.)

After some interesting speculations about his ostensible subject, he's suddenly off to the races and is laying out his Grand Unified Theory of the Divided European Soul that is way too profound (or wrong -- I can't tell which) for me to wrap my tired brain around. So, resentfully, I start looking for reasons to believe he doesn't know what he's so confidently talking about. And, rather like in Dan Brown's bestseller, they show up:


"That is why the Renaissance offered such a short burst of creative output before the Counter-Reformation put the artists in their place and brought forth an era of religious orthodoxy and artistic mediocrity."


This seems to be close to exactly backward. The Counter-Reformation inspired, subsidized, and unleashed the Catholic geniuses of Baroque art: Caravaggio, Rubens, Borromini, and, most of all, Bernini. One of the new Pope Urban VIII's first audiences in 1623 was with the 25-year-old Bernini, to whom the Pope said:


"It is your great good luck, Cavaliere, to see Maffeo Barberini pope. But we are even luckier in that the Cavaliere Bernini lives at the time of our pontificate."


The big problem with the populist Counter-Reformation was that, instead, it (eventually) put scientists in their place, such as Galilelo.

The same combination of grandiosity and dubiousness characterizes what now appears to be Spengler's most famous theory -- that Iran must go on the warpath now to head off a demographic crisis that it will face in, oh, say, forty years. See, Iran's birthrate, which used to be quite high, dropped sharply in the 1990s and is now below America's total fertility rate. So, when all those people born in the 1970s and 1980s get ready to retire several decades from now, there won't be enough young workers to pay their pensions. Thus, it is historically inevitable that the mullahs will immediately set out to create an Iranian empire in greater Middle East right now so that the retirees of 2046 will have some plunder to retire upon.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but every few days I get an email from somebody with one of Spengler's columns on the subject. For example, he said:

"All that matters is the coming confrontation between the United States and Iran. Iran's own demographic future resembles that of Europe more than it does the United States. By mid-century, Iran's aged will compose nearly a third of its population, and its population pyramid will invert. Social and economic catastrophe threatens Iran, persuading its present leaders to establish a regional empire while they still have the opportunity."


One obvious question is: So why did the mullahs pass a family planning law in 1993 that encouraged smaller families?

And who in the world would fight a war now (and against the strongest military in the world!) to head off a pension problem in 40 years? The longest lead time I've ever heard of was the German General Staff's 1914 forecast that Russia would be stronger than Germany in 20 to 25 years, so they should fight them now. And how'd that work out for Germany?

And Muslims aren't Germans when it comes to worrying about the far future. That's why Arabs are always saying "Inshallah" -- If Allah wills it. Fate. Kismet.

Moreover, there's a general pattern of governmental decadence around the globe that is making the world more peaceful on the macro-scale as the competence of militaries declines. After the great European wars of the first half of the 20th Century and the global collapse of empires in the second half, the world is finally settling down. Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is coming ever more into play:


"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."


The Iranian Revolution is now 27 years old. It was never all that dynamic when it was young and it's pretty old now.


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

October 4, 2006

So, the GOP shouldn't have let Mark Foley be a Congressman, but the Boy Scouts should have let him be a scoutmaster?

In my Dirt Gap article in early 2005 explaining why Red States are Red and Blue States are Blue, I pointed to the ongoing persecution of the Boy Scouts by liberals as an illustration of why white adults with families are much more likely to vote Republican than white people without:


"Consider how differently one well-known issue can seem depending on your family structure: Should the government let the Boy Scouts ban gay men from becoming scoutmasters? To voters who are single, or married but childless, or have only daughters, this often appears as a purely abstract question of justice: of course, everybody should be guaranteed equal opportunity to be a scoutmaster. Yet, to citizens with sons, a ban may seem like a common sense precaution against temptation: of course, homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to lead their boys into the woods overnight."


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

Abe Foxman has historian Tony Judt's talk on the Israel Lobby cancelled

Historian Tony Judt says Abe Foxman had his lecture on the power of the Israel Lobby cancelled: Via Daniel Larison, I see that Tony Judt, the prominent historian (who is Jewish), writes:


I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGO, academics, etc, from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.

I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel.

Whatever your views on the Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.


And here's the neocon NY Sun crowing about this triumph:


The Polish decision was hailed by one of the leading Jewish defense organizations. "Bravo to them for doing the right thing," said the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris. "Tony Judt's message is the polar opposite of the remarkable surge in bilateral relations between Poland and Israel and between Poland and world Jewry."

The speech was to have been at the consulate, but it was actually sponsored by an outside group called Network 20/20, which describes itself as an apolitical educational organization. The group's president and founder, Patricia Huntington, yesterday blamed one Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League, for the cancellation of the speech. "Apparently the Anti-Defamation League tracks Tony Judt's talks on the Internet and tries to get the talks canceled," Ms. Huntington said. "This is censorship, which is of concern to Americans who believe in free speech." She accused the Anti-Defamation League of having "forced," "threatened," and exerted "pressure" on the Polish consulate to cancel the talk.


Somehow, I don't think this will get as much publicity as the cancellation of the German opera for fear of Muslims.

Foxman denies being the cause of the Polish Consulate canceling the regular meeting of the Network 20/20 group.

Philip Weiss notes in the New York Observer:


Once again supporting Walt and Mearsheimer's point: the lobby brags about its power till you call them on it, and then it howls antisemitism.


You might think that in these days of the Internet, crushing free speech like this would be a pointless exercise because there are so many other outlets, but, yet, it's actually a very valuable tactic. The point is not to completely silence Dr. Judt but to get out the message that he is weaker than the important people who want to shut him up, so if you know what's good for you, you won't go around repeating what he says because he has powerful enemies, and you don't want to have powerful enemies, too, now do you?

P.S. Here's a longer piece by Weiss on the whole Israel Lobby quasi-debate.

P.P.S., Judt's speech is back on for October 16, but no word on where.

A reader writes:


I can't tell you how disturbing this Tony Judt business is for anyone who knows the man. Judt was one of my mentors, more like a sponsor, actually.

Although generally, and rather proudly, a lifelong "man of the left," Judt is one of the few prominent academics today who actually enjoys being around clever people who disagree with him: his Remarque Institute is a tiny little oasis of freedom of speech in American academe. At the end of my time with him, he actually told me, more or less point-blank, that I would not be hired by any university in the US in the next decade, because I was too politically incorrect in both my views and the subjects I studied; but that he would stick with me through thick and thin and go to bat for me whenever he could. A great man.

And now Judt's been blacklisted himself by the neocon lobby as an "anti-semite." How utterly absurd--aside from the fact Judt himself is Jewish, his Remarque Institute regularly hosts *Holocaust Studies seminars*, for pete's sake! It's their bread and butter!

Oh, I shudder for freedom of speech in America. Are there any oases left?


New York University's Remarque Institute, dedicated to the study of modern Europe, is named after Erich Maria Remarque, the German author of All Quiet on the Western Front. His widow Paulette Godard, who costarred with her second husband Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator" and "Modern Times," left $20 million to NYU on her death in 1990. Judt founded the Remarque Institute in 1995.


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

Pearapundit Debunks Pearanoia

Last week, I started looking into the Great Pear Picking Crisis of 2006 -- CNN had picked up an NYT sob story about how pear growers were saying there weren't enough illegal aliens to pick the pear crop this year no matter how much money they offered. Then, Senators Feinstein and Craig tried to use the Pear Crisis to wedge a Guest Peasant program into the Senate's border fence bill. Fortunately, that amendment went nowhere, so I dropped the issue.

Now, Parapundit has followed it up and finds about what you'd expect based on the fact that a good year for crops tends to be a bad year for farmers. When the harvest is abundant, prices go down and the cost of hiring enough labor to pick all the extra fruit goes up. Growers argue that whenever one of these years occurs, they should be allowed to import a bunch of extra peasants to pick their surplus crops. Of course, the peasants won't go home when the harvest is over, and after a few years won't do harvesting anymore, so then the farmers want to be allowed to bring in more peasants. Exactly why our 21st Century economy as a whole needs these injections of peasants is never explained.

This is just like the Great Nurse Shortage that I've been reading about in the newspapers since I started reading newspapers about in 1970. Funny, isn't it, how all the claims in those articles that we need to import more nurses come from doctors and hospital administrators rather than from American nurses?

Libertarian economist Arnold Kling of George Mason falls for Pearanoia hook, line, and sinker. (Don't miss the comments.) Don't economics professors teach in Econ 101 that shortages can't occur in a market economy? Oh, yeah, I forgot, the principles of economics mysteriously don't apply to immigration.

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