December 9, 2006

"Diversity without Community"

My cover story "Fragmented Future" in the January 15, 2007 American Conservative is a long one. Here's an excerpt:


As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions.

Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only one out of three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third carefully straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the stripes were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever the hell they felt like.

The next year I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s.

That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans's beach, instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hard-working and ambitious as we were. Mexico's economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn't seem to team up well beyond family-scale.

In America, you don't need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, "Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power."

Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. "Mexicans need few friends," Riding observed, "because they have many relatives."

Mexico is a notoriously low trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, "Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population."

Jorge G. Castañeda, Vicente Fox's first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexico's disparities in 1995: "The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years)… By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians …"

Castañeda pointed out, "These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. … The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is … simply a retargeting."

And these deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why in Harvard professor Robert D. "Bowling Alone" Putnam's "Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey," Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie "Crash."

Of course, the winner-take-all entertainment industry contributes to Angelenos feeling wary around each other. I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens ("Fargo"), Wachowskis ("The Matrix"), Farrellys ("There's Something About Mary"), and Wayans ("Scary Movie"). "Who else can you trust?" he shrugged.

Still, what primarily drove down LA's rating in Putnam's 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of LA's whites said they trusted other races "only a little or not at all," 37 percent of LA's Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.

Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from the Latinos' failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet, the LA survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of cooperativeness and social capital among Latinos. As op-ed columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the LA Times: "In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity."

Due to the rapid national growth of the Hispanic population, America as a whole will become, like Los Angeles, a less trusting, less cohesive society, sapping political, economic, and cultural life.


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

December 7, 2006

Swivel

For a long time, there has been a need for a Wikipedia of Data.

Back in 2004, the Laboratory of the States website showed the value of the concept by inputting several hundred sets of numbers for the 50 states and then allowing users to try any correlations they wanted. I found it very useful in devising my Affordable Family Formation theory of Red State-Blue State voting. For example, that's where I discovered that housing inflation by state from 1980-2004 was very closely correlated with voting in the Bush-Kerry race.

Laboratory of the States lacked the glossy interface necessary to catch on with the public, however. A snazzy-looking website called Gapminder ("Our Vision: Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!") came along recently loaded with data by country and with some excellent graphics for analysis.

My first thought was, "Man, we have got to load the Lynn-Vanhanen IQ by nation data into this." But, I've never found a way to add data to Gapminder.

Now, a new website called Swivel.com is positioning itself to be the Wikipedia of data, allowing the public to load in their own data sets, then produce correlations and graphs versus other data already in Swivel.

Meanwhile, Swivel will be automatically checking the correlations of all the data it has, thus producing a few new valuable insights and, no doubt, a boatload of false positives, some of which will turn into new examples of conventional wisdom of the abortion-cuts-crime ilk. For example, today Swivel is featuring a graph showing that the crime rate in America has been negatively correlated with the popularity of wine. So, Steve Levitt was wrong -- it wasn't abortion that drove down crime in the 1990s, it was the resurgence of wine-drinking!

A reader writes:

Swivel won't exactly be the new youtube, but it is very fun and could be useful. Right now though, it's a bit hard to operate. They're going to need to figure out how to find a good way to search through the various graphs. Also, I couldn't get the graph mashing function to work on the few I tried. So there are still kinks.

Note: From Swivel's Terms Of Service:

According to their TOS, if you submit anything, you grant to Swivel, its affiliates and their assignees a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, royalty-free right to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, make derivative works of and otherwise exploit such User Submissions in any form and for any purpose, including without limitation, any concepts, ideas or know-how embodied therein.

So, bye-bye to your intellectual property rights in anything you post there.


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

The bizarre reigning definition of "racism:"

A reader comments, in response to Malcolm Gladwell expressing the elite conventional wisdom, "To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites:"

I've wondered many times why social scientists always define racism as the belief in innate racial differences. Even when I was a liberal, I used to think things like, "Racism is supposed to be about hatred. Ordinary people constantly talk about how hating others is so terrible, but when it comes to scholarship, the topic is always framed in terms of nature versus nurture. What about the situation where a guy loves blacks, but thinks they are naturally faster sprinters than others. We want to get worked up about this guy? We want to call him a racist?"

Now, I wonder if there is something else going on. One thing I do know about social scientists (since I am one) is that, as the disciplines have gotten more specialized, they know nothing about biology. Perhaps they have feared that if the connection between biology and behavior were allowed to be studied, the day would arrive when they would look like phrenologists. By delegitimizing the field, they could always be looked to as the experts. Their reputations and jobs would thus be preserved. I don't know if I'm right, but something smells fishy to me. Or maybe defining racism in terms of nature-nurture is simply designed to provide more direct arguments for affirmative action programs.


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

"Hideously white:"

When I quoted below the parody "New Report Finds Britain is 'Hideously White'" from the brilliant Joy of Curmudgeonry website, I didn't realize that Deogolwulf hadn't made up the phrase "hideously white." From the BBC News in 2001:

BBC director-general Greg Dyke has described the corporation as being "hideously white". Mr Dyke did not say the corporation was racist but acknowledged that, like the Metropolitan Police, it had a problem with race relations. He admitted the organisation's management structure was more than 98% white. And he said it was unable to retain staff from ethnic minorities and questioned if they were made to feel welcome. ... Mr Dyke said: "I think the BBC is hideously white."

The situation is similar in American media enterprises that aren't so big and rich that they have to have an affirmative action plan.

Steve Gilliard points us toward an article in the New York Observer by Lizzy Ratner called "Vanilla Ceiling" on the editorial and writing staffs of New York glossy magazines:

Still, the results of the survey revealed a world that looks little like the streets of New York, where nearly 65 percent of the population identified itself as nonwhite in the 2000 census.

Of the 203 staffers and contributors listed on the Vanity Fair masthead, six—or less than 3 percent—are people of color.

At Condé Nast Traveler, the swank travel monthly, 11 of the 85 staffers and contributors listed on the masthead are people of color. Of those 11 staffers, three hold editing positions and two are contributing editors, while six hold lower-masthead positions as researchers and assistant editors.

The New Yorker doesn’t publish a masthead, but based on conversations with sources and available published information, the magazine has a pool of some 130 editors, critics, copy editors, fact checkers, editorial assistants and outside contributors—of whom 11 are people of color.

At Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, four members of the magazine’s 73-person editorial staff are people of color.

Six members of New York magazine’s 90-person team of editors, writers, contributors and editorial assistants are not white. ...

At Forbes, an estimated seven people out of a pool of 116 editors, writers, reporters, editorial assistants, copy editors and bureau correspondents are people of color.

And the non-glossy Nation lists eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows.

Awhile back I tried to explain to Jared Taylor that his white ethnocentrism wouldn't fly in the U.S. for the paradoxical reason that whites remain so dominant in many of the top jobs in the more desirable industries that no sense of white solidarity could emerge because the top people see themselves as engaged in clawing their way to the top over other whites (for example, 99% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 94% of Hollywood screenwriters are white), and so they look upon minorities merely as tokens or as props they can use to engage in a little moral one-upmanship over their white rivals.

Of course, some media outlets, especially big city newspapers, have strict affirmative action plans. This means that their staffs instantly become hostage to the minority editors and reporters if they even dream about deviating from the line of political correctness.

In either case, honesty about race is the worst policy for the self-interested.


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

December 6, 2006

Hawk repellent?

This evening, shortly after dark, I was stepping into the enclosed backyard where Fred, my older son's large white rabbit, lives, when a gray shape suddenly swooped down out of the night sky and a white shape shot across the lawn inches ahead of it and took refuge in the dense star jasmine bush.

The hawk (or perhaps an owl, but it looked more like a hawk) landed on the roof of the house behind us. I threw lemons at the predator, but when it took flight again, it landed on the telephone pole in the backyard and peered down hungrily. Eventually, it tired of the lemons flying past and took off for parts unknown, but I fear it will be back for Fred.

I can't imagine anything smaller than an eagle could carry off Fred, who weighs several pounds. A few years ago, I saw a hawk struggling to lift a squirrel it had killed off a San Fernando Valley sidewalk, and certainly a big bunny weighs multiple times more than a squirrel. (That hawk finally gave up carrying off the squirrel after about 100 crows came from all around to squawk menacingly at the hawk's encroachment on their suburban turf.)

In a fair fight, face to face, the bunny would stand a good chance against the hawk, using the claws of its powerful hind legs to slash downward at the bird. Still, the hawk could do a lot of damage to Fred with its talons in one of its dive-bombing runs. The rabbit, who has pink eyes not suitable for bright conditions, spends sunny days deep in the bushes, but at night he likes to come out and frolic on the lawn. I had never heard of local hawks attacking at night, but this one clearly does.

So, tonight Fred is in the house, but he chews through all the lamp cords and aggressively poops in front of the door of his mortal enemy, Whopper, the little bunny who lives in my younger son's room. I want him back outside soon.

So, does anybody have any advice for preventing bloodshed in the backyard?


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

December 5, 2006

The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Dennis Mangan points us to a website where "Deogolwulf" delivers aphorisms in the style of G.C. Lichtenberg:


A Little More Lichtenberg
“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”


Here are some of Deogolwulf's own:


Fewtril #140 It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverising the already smashed idols of another.

Fewtril #126 It is hardly to be hoped that one can speak with knowledge and insight without being accused of ignorance and bigotry.

Fewtril #122 In the great scramble to be offended, it is essential that one might find any innocuous thing utterly vile and offensive, lest one be outdone by more inventive souls.

Fewtril #117 The principle that controversial or objectionable views ought not to be suppressed, but rather shown to be wrong through reasoned debate, is usually defended only when a man is under the impression that those views have little reason in their favour. So much for magnanimity!

Fewtril #107 The scepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realisation.

Fewtril #105 It is good to spend an hour or two wondering how many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.

Fewtril #79 I often get the feeling that many of those laymen who profess to be Darwinists have hardly the foggiest understanding of the theory of evolution through natural selection. It is as if the belief in it comes to them not through its scientific role in helping them to understand the natural world, but rather through its social role in helping them to appear no-nonsense and hard-headed at dinner parties.


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

So, why isn't Van Nuys "vibrant"?

Van Nuys es very nice,
But it´s not paradise

En Van Nuys court celebrities can plead no contest or guilty,
A student steals his teacher´s car for prom but didn´t get too far,
A strip mall fire rages on Valerio, while Letty bumps la raza on the stereo,
"20 pegaditas, no corridos!"

Los Abandoned

The screening for Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" that Disney invited me to wasn't until four days after the film goes into the theatres on Friday, so I tracked down the Latino marketing firm that Gibson hired to promote his film to Hispanics. They kindly sent me an invitation to a screening last Thursday at a small multiplex in a Hispanic section of South Central LA.

Driving around South Central, I started mulling over again why Mexican-American neighborhoods in Southern California are so dreary. Why aren't they fun? Sure, there's lots of private drama, like the song lyrics above depict. One reason journalists call Mexican-American neighborhoods vibrant is because they often have warm memories of Spring Breaks in Mexico, and assume that Mexican-American parts of town must be like that. Granted, Cancun isn't exactly representative of Mexico, but Mexico isn't an unfun place. So, what's wrong with the vast Mexican-American swatches of SoCal?

Suddenly, traffic slowed, pedestrians were everywhere, cops were directing traffic, people were waving signs trying to entice me to park in their yards for only $10, there were beautiful girls on every corner, and a brass band was playing an exciting fanfare. "Hey, now this is pretty doggone vibrant!" I thought.

Then I figured out what was going on: I was at the University of Spoiled Children and it was the night of USC's annual "Beat UCLA" pep rally in preparation for the #2 ranked Trojans polishing off the Bruins on their way to the national championship game.

Well, that didn't work out for the Trojans any better than the "Apocalypto" screening did for me, which was postponed a week due to a defective print.

But I did figure out one reason why Mexican-American neighborhoods are so dull: Mexican culture and Anglo town planning just don't jibe at all. Social life in Mexico traditionally revolves around the plaza, the town square, the zocalo, or whatever you want to call it, with a bandstand, places to walk around, and cafes under the arcades of the encompassing buildings.

In contrast, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, the problem with Los Angeles from a Mexican point of view is that there's no there there. There's no focal point. Downtown LA has a pleasant little plaza next to the Olde California touristy Olvera Street. But, the scale is miniscule -- it's the same plaza that has been there since the mid-19th Century. There's nothing like Times Square in the rest of LA, and the San Fernando Valley is worse, with zero focus.

In many Mexican villages, the big weekly social event is where the boys line up around the edge of the plaza and walk around clockwise, while the girls walk around counter-clockwise (or vice-versa), and everybody gives everybody the eye. Back in the 1970s, this was reproduced in cars on Cruise Night every Wednesday on Van Nuys Blvd. and was popular among both Hispanic and white teenagers, just like in George Lucas's Modesto, as depicted in "American Graffiti." (This is another bit of evidence that whites and Hispanics were less culturally separate in the past in LA than at present.) But the Van Nuys merchants complained and the cops shut it down.


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

The War Nerd in The American Conservative

Gary Brecher reviews Showdown with Nuclear Iran by Michael D. Evans and Jerome R. Corsi in the new Dec. 18th issue of The American Conservative (not on line).

On the claim that Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon is a "proxy army" for Iran, Brecher unloads:


If there's anything that recent military history shows clearly, it's that nobody, not even a superpower, can create a proxy army that will really fight -- and Hezbollah proved pretty clearly that they can fight.

America and the USSR tried creating proxy armies all through the Cold War years. The only time it worked was when the locals had their own reasons to want to fight. In those cases, it's just a matter of sliding the cartons off the C-130's and cracking 'em open. Local warlust will do the rest.

But when the locals are only fighting because some foreign power pays them, they're worthless. I hate to bring up painful memories, but anybody remember our old pal ARVN -- the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, aka South Vietnam? We poured so much blood and money into the South Vietnamese Army that it still hurts to think about it. …

The Soviets tried the same technique in Africa and Afghanistan, with the same results. It's hard to believe now, but back in the 1970s people thought the USSR was going to take over Africa because those Soviets were funding so many proxy wars. All those African safaris got the Russians were tropical diseases and a huge cash drain. …

That's exactly what happened to our worst-ever proxies, the Contras. They were supposed to be our Latin American version of the Colorado kids in "Red Dawn" -- freedom-loving rebels who would overthrow the Sandinista commies. Instead they spent your tax dollars on fast boats and clothes -- they were the only insurgents in history who dressed like extras on "Miami Vice." And as for how they behaved, it was more like Tony Montana, who would happily talk about how "I keel a Commyunis' fo' fun!" but then lose interest after the coke money started flowing.

So let's drop the nonsense that Hezbollah is just a stand-in for Iran. You can tell stand-ins by the way they fight, or rather don't fight. …

It wasn't Iran that made the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon so tough. It was Israel. Before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon were the quietest, most peaceable tribe in the whole crazy country. There's no faster way to turn submissive peasant-types into kamikazes than by grabbing their land, and that's what Israel did, declaring a "security zone" in southern Lebanon. It was Israeli occupation that turned those Shi'ite peasants into the best soldiers in the Middle East, not Iranian cash. Cash just makes Contras; occupations make fighters.

If you want an ultra-painful example of that, just compare the Iraqi army before we occupied Iraq -- a bunch of cowards who were surrendering to news crews -- to the hardened insurgents we have to deal with now.


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

The "R" Word

Malcolm Gladwell asserts a viewpoint that I think is pretty common among the media elite today:


Defining A Racist

… I propose three criteria:

1. Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targetted [sic] claim is worse than calling a name.


Let me propose two criteria. You are more likely to get smeared as a "racist," the more your statement is:

1. True.
2. Important.

As you know, the white-black intelligence gap has been studied to death over the last several generations. Legitimate questions remain about whether it's changing in size, and how big a role, if any, genetics plays in it. But there is no scientific question whatsoever about its existence.

The most comprehensive investigation of the size of the white-black IQ gap was carried out by Philip L. Roth of Clemson and colleagues in a 2001 article, "Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis," in the academic journal Personnel Psychology. They looked at 105 different studies covering 6,246,729 individuals and found an overall average difference between whites and blacks of 16.5 IQ points, or 1.1 standard deviations. The 95 percent confidence interval runs merely from 1.06 to 1.15 standard deviations (in other words, there is strong agreement among the 105 studies).

As for its importance, the white-black IQ gap is highly relevant to a broad range of social issues, such as education, voting, and much else that you aren't supposed to think about.

There is a lot of hate in this world, and, increasingly, much of that hate is getting directed at people who tell the truth.


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

David Lynch's "Inland Empire"

The popular surrealist director David Lynch ("Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," "Mulholland Drive") is back with "Inland Empire," a film noir nightmare in which Laura Dern is "a woman in trouble."

The basic structure of the film is promising, resembling the setup for a complicated Tom Stoppard play. Dern plays a classy Hollywood actress married to a jealous Polish millionaire. She lands a big role in a Southern Gothic film about adulterous lovers and the husband who will kill them if he finds out. Her leading man is a Colin Farrell-type star notorious for sleeping with all his leading ladies, especially the married ones. Not surprisingly, you soon can't tell whether the love scenes depict the characters in the film-within-a-film, or whether the stars are rehearsing a little too realistically in their spare time.

Considerately, Lynch has characters clue the audience in on what will happen, such as a sinister Polish hag who visits Dern in her LA mansion and tells her that her upcoming romance film is actually about murder, or maybe she just forgot, but who can remember, she asks, what comes before what, whether it's today, yesterday, or tomorrow?

The director (Jeremy Irons) reveals that the new movie is actually a remake of a Polish movie, based on a Polish Gypsy folktale, about adulterous lovers that was begun in the 1930s but never finished because the two stars were murdered, presumably by a jealous husband. And there's suppose to be a Gypsy curse on the whole proceedings.

Then, Dern somehow becomes, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, unstuck in time (or maybe she's just crazy) and is soon encountering scenes both from the unfinished Polish movie and from the private lives of the doomed Polish actors.

So far, so good. A half hour into the film, my hopes were high. But then … the story never develops any momentum. And it just goes on and on and on forever and a day. You know the last ten minutes of "2001," where the astronaut keeps walking into strange rooms, staring in puzzlement at different versions of himself? Well, multiply that by 18 and you'll grasp what this three-hour disaster is like: Laura Dern walking into scores of rooms and staring in horror at what she sees. But there isn't much that's all that horrible to look at, so the film doesn't even offer the amusements of a horror film. The soundtrack consists of endless minor key chords and thump-thump heartbeat-like percussion, which is pretty creepy for awhile, but gets old eventually.

Lynch himself seems to get bored with this, and keeps introducing characters that don't fit into his already overstuffed four-level structure. Dern re-emerges as a foul-mouthed skank who apparently lives in Pomona, in the "Inland Empire" east of LA, and is married to a man from Poland (which was an inland country, except for the controversial Danzig corridor, when the original movie was made between the wars -- see how the Pomona-Poland Inland Empire theme all fits together!), who runs off to join a Baltic circus because he's good with animals. And then there are scenes from a Polish sitcom starring a stiffly dressed bourgeois family with the heads of rabbits, which I guess is tied into the recurrent theme of being good with animals, which also pops up in the ten minute monologue by a Chinese homeless lady sitting on the star-engraved sidewalk of Hollywood Blvd., who talks at vast length about her friend in Pomona who is retiring from turning tricks to stay home with her pet monkey.

This isn't as random as it sounds because every damn thing in the movie is foretold earlier. For example, in Dern's second incarnation, as the whore, she delivers a long monologue to a Hollywood private eye (who looks kind of like, rather improbably for a shamus, Matthew Yglesias) in which, in the course of talking about some guy she once knew, she mentions that he had a one-legged sister. About an hour later, as I was walking out early, about 170 minutes into this ordeal, up on the screen -- well, what do you know! -- there's suddenly a one-legged woman.

To be honest, I'm often a big admirer of films constructed in this manner. I imagine that if I sat through "Inland Empire" again, I could explain why, say, "Repo Man" is art while "Inland Empire" is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare / snoozeathon, but no way in hell am I going to subject myself to it another time.

Like Peter Jackson's interminable "King Kong," what's being debuted in the theatres is the three-hour Director's Cut. Hopefully, someday there will be a two-hour Editor's Cut of "Inland Empire."

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

November 29, 2006

How the printing press made nationalism feasible

From Nick Szabo's Unenumerated blog:

Before book consciousness there had been no national languages, but only a range of often mutually incomprehensible dialects and in Western Europe the language of the tiny literate elite, Latin. With newly unified national vernaculars, organizations were able to coordinate and grow in an unprecedented manner. A much larger group of people, raised on the same written language, increasingly also came to look and speak similarly and become far more mutually trusted. It was the birth of national loyalty and nationwide webs of trust. The "tribe" to which we are instinctively loyal vastly increased in size.

The pool of already somewhat trusted "same tribe" people from which a bureaucracy could recruit new members vastly increased. National polities and militaries were able to coordinate political, economic, and battlefield strategies in an unprecedented manner. The 16th century saw the first major growth of the joint-stock corporation, enabling far more capital to be invested in the enlarging organizations that engaged in mining and manufacture as well as government and conquest. This development is probably a response to the new ability to form larger organizations, since the basic ideas (corporate law, shares of stock, etc.) had already been in use in Europe for quite some time.

Going along with this was the emergence of "national bards," beginning with Dante, who made the Florentine dialect the national version of Italian.

Europe ended up with a bunch of mid-sized nation states united by language, which proved about the right size for many tasks. Unfortunately, Europe's nation-states proved most effective of all at self-sacrificial war, and mutually exhausted themselves in WWI, discrediting nationalism, which had otherwise proved the most effective framework for human progress. (Similarly, the Chinese progressed the fastest during the Warring States era, which ended with the formation of the Empire 2200 years ago.)

In contrast, the Arab world shunned printing presses for hundreds of years. And, due to the sacred nature of the Arab language, the rise of national languages was largely prevented. So, the Arabs didn't really develop the nation-state. The pan-Arab or pan-Islamic caliphate remained attractive in theory, while, in reality, tribal and family struggles occupied their energies.


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

Dog Bites Man

From the New York Times:

Lawyers Debate Why Blacks Lag at Major Firms
By ADAM LIPTAK

Thanks to vigorous recruiting and pressure from corporate clients, black lawyers are well represented now among new associates at the nation’s most prestigious law firms. But they remain far less likely to stay at the firms or to make partner than their white counterparts.

A recent study says grades help explain the gap. To ensure diversity among new associates, the study found, elite law firms hire minority lawyers with, on average, much lower grades than white ones. That may, the study says, set them up to fail.

The study, which was prepared by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was published in The North Carolina Law Review in July, has given rise to fierce and growing criticism in law review articles and in the legal press. In an opinion article in The National Law Journal this month, for instance, R. Bruce McClean, the chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a major law firm, took issue with the study’s “sweeping conclusions” but not its “detailed data analysis.”


This is all utterly predictable from even a cursory knowledge of how the IQ bell curve works.

In the tournament to become a partner in a lucrative law firm, there are five hurdles, two of which have been corrupted by affirmative action and three of which are more meritocratic. Admission to law school and hiring by big firms is driven by quotas (just don't use the word "quotas," as the Supreme Court, in its majestic wisdom ruled in the Bakke law school admission case of 1977). In contrast, graduating from law school and making partner are less influenced by racial preferences, and passing the state bar exam remains, so far as I know, wholly objective.

In other words, there are some goodies the white elite is comfortable handing out using quotas, and others they feel are just too important to mess with.

Not surprisingly, affirmative action at the admissions and hiring levels lure in blacks who are less likely to make it over the meritocratic hurdles. Sander has shown that 53% of the black students who enter law school fail to become lawyers, versus 24% of white students. This is a really stupid way for society to misdirect and abuse its scarce resource of intelligent young black people.

The outcome for black lawyers hired by hotshot law firms who are in over the heads competing to become partner might be less dire, however, because affirmative action is also in operation in corporate law departments. So, if you start off working 70 hours a week at a Manhattan law firm, but soon realize that you aren't smart enough to make it to partner, well, that job offer to go work at Coca-Cola's legal department in Atlanta can start looking pretty good.


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

Polonium Poisoning Update: The Mysterious Professor Scaramella of Naples

This is getting pretty funny. Apparently, the man Alexander Litvinenko was having lunch with at the sushi bar where he was poisoned was Professor Mario Scaramella, a Neapolitan formerly of Bogota, is an expert on radioactive poisons, KGB agents, the Mafia, and who know what else…

Professor Scaramella of Naples -- is that the greatest name for a shady character in a tale of international intrigue and poison? It sounds like Arthur Conan-Doyle and Ian Fleming teamed up to create the good professor.


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

Dog and Man at Yale

A reader writes:

Nice story on NOVA last night about the evolution of Dogs and Man at Yale. Most interesting points for me were

1) how selection for tameness ended up yielding, as a surprise by-product, extraordinary variety of weird appearance characteristics in dogs, and

2) how man developed superb sniffers, hunters, runners, pointers, herders, etc., not by deliberately breeding in the modern sense, but simply by inevitably shaping the social environment, mostly food supply and mating chances, of the nearby hounds.

All implications for human evolution were passed over until a final bit on how dogs may help us identify genes for human narcolepsy and other genetic diseases.

And the Victorian invention of deliberate inbreeding for pure appearance, not performance, was characterized as "racist eugenics," of course.

Greg Cochran's theory is that just as selecting for new personality traits in wild animals that you are trying to domesticate often introduces new physical looks, the famous diversity of looks among Europeans (red and blond hair, blue, gray, and green eyes) are by-products of natural selection for new personality traits favorable to survival in Europe. Blue eyes, for example, might possibly be a by-product of selection for something like shyness.

Most theories of European hair and eye color focus on sexual selection (like the peacock's tale) rather than natural selection, but Cochran says he is averse to thinking about sexual selection on the grounds that it too often turns out to be a conceptual dead end. It's too random. Clearly, examples of sexual selection exist now and then, but Cochran believes that relying on sexual selection for explanations encourages lazy thinking, a little like in the Stanley Harris cartoon where a scientist has filled the left and right sides of the blackboard with equations but in the middle he has only written "A miracle happens here."

I'm not sure I agree, but, generally speaking, disagreeing with Cochran is not typically a winning strategy.


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

Blind kid uses echolocation to navigate

This TV news clip of a blind 14 year old African-American who listens to echoes from his tongue clicks to avoid running into things is fun to watch, especially the part where in a pillow fight he hurls a throw pillow across the room at the TV announcer man and -- bullseye -- nails him right in the crotch.

According to the movie "Ray," Ray Charles didn't need a cane because he always wore hard-soled shoes and the echoes were enough for him to avoid obstacles. Of course, it helps if your brain is wired for sound like Ray Charles's was.

Wikipedia has a short article on "Human Echolocation." The tongue-clicking makes me wonder if the famous click languages of the Bushmen, Hottentot, and two black African tribes had something to do at one time with echolocation, although I've never heard that. Perhaps it could be useful to echolocate to avoid stumbling into things while walking on moonless nights, especially in forests where there is no starlight and lots of tree trunks to run into. The Bushmen generally don't lived in heavily forested country today, but they've been around an awfully long time, so we shouldn't assume they never did. But it can be very dangerous to walk around at night in leopard country, so maybe people just stayed put.

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

November 28, 2006

More on natural selection of New World blacks

A reader writes:

According to Galenson, the mortality rate on slave ships (a little more than 10% for both Slaves and Europeans) was constant per time unit regardless of the length of the journey. That is about 2 per 1000 per day died. More would die in longer journeys, but only proportionally. The incremental difference between other stops and Jamaica should therefore be all but negligible.

The fact that the European crew died at such a high rate (ships with only whites tended to have 4-5% mortality rate) indicates it was the mixing of disease that was the main cause, not “harshness” of the journey per say. The slaves for example had enough food, so testosterone would not help the strong ones get more than the weak.

Many more slaves tended to die when the ships contained slaves from different regions. Again disease is the likely cause. I guess testosterone increases immune defence somewhat. But the direct selection for disease immunity most be vastly more important than testosterone in the selection.

Another writes:

But in the larger picture, what Aiken is pointing to is being a slave was a new evolutionary environment. He's focusing only on the flashy middle passage environment, to be sure. But it seems to me that even once they got off the boat, the slaves were facing a distinctly harsher environment (in many ways) than they had in West Africa. If it is true that being a slave in the West Indies was different in terms of what was "fit" from being a random peon in West Africa, then we should expect natural selection to differentiate the populations. A selection bottleneck which selected along the same lines would, in this case, speed the process along.

Rather than the middle passage, what I think may be more important was the astounding death rates the slaves had even once here. Consider this:

"By the middle of the 17th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest and most brutal slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans. The death rates for black slaves in these islands were higher than birth rates. The decrease averaged about 3 percent per year in Jamaica and 4 percent a year in the smaller islands. The main causes for this were overwork and malnutrition. Slaves worked from sun up until sun down in harsh conditions and supervised under demanding masters, with little medical care. Slaves also had poor living conditions and consequently they contracted many diseases."

A 4% per year decrease in population is an impressively powerful selection environment!

Right. The sugar plantation regions of Brazil and the West Indies were much more deadly than the tobacco plantation region of Virginia. The sugar growers worked slaves to death and replaced them with cheap imports from across the Atlantic.

It was more expensive to import slaves all the way to Virginia. Plus, the climate was quite healthful for Africans -- cooler than the tropics, so tropical diseases were less virulent, but not frigid, so Africans didn't suffer as much from respiratory diseases in Virginia as they did in New England. So, Virginia slaveowners had economic incentives to make sure that the birth rate was higher than the death rate among their slaves. (By the time the deep Southern cotton belt opened up fully, the slave trade had been outlawed, so American owners still had an incentive to care for the health of their slaves.)

Off the top of my head, though, I can't see any particular traits that the sugar plantations selected for. Take sprinting ability: West Indians (sugar) and African-Americans (mostly not sugar) are both outstanding, while black Brazilians are not. Not bad, just not great.

On the other hand, a black Brazilian named Ronaldo da Costa set the marathon world record in 1998, which is almost unimaginable for an African-American or West Indian.

Why? A. There is less connection between looks and racial background in Brazil than in America due to the lack of a color line and preference for fair women. Consider two sisters in Brazil, one fair and one dark. The fairer one is more likely to marry a richer, whiter man, while the darker one is more likely to marry a poorer, black man. Repeat for 12 generations and you've substantially disconnected the genes for looks from all the other genes. (In the U.S., the color line largely prevented this process.) So, perhaps, even somebody as black-looking as da Costa could have the athletic genes of a Portuguese distance runner.

B. The alternative theory is that da Costa is largely descended from South or East Africans. Brazil got a lot of its slaves out of those regions that today produce so many fine distance runners. In contrast, the U.S. got most of its slaves from West Africa, which has the same imbalance today as African-American between outstanding sprinters and virtually non-existent distance r


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

Black athletes and testosterone

From the Jamaica Gleaner:


The athletic prowess of Jamaicans
by William Aiken
Dr. William Aiken is the head of Urology at the University Hospital of the West Indies and president of the Jamaica Urological Society

The sprinting prowess of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people in general and Jamaicans in particular is legendary and is demanding of serious scientific enquiry and research. It cannot be coincidence that over the years the fastest men and women in the world were born in Jamaica. Herb McKinley, Arthur Wint, Donald Quarrie, Linford Christie, Donovan Bailey, Ben Johnson, Bert Cameron, Michael Frater, Asafa Powell, Merlene Ottey, Sherone Simpson, Veronica Campbell, Deon Hemmings, Bridgette Foster-Hylton and Sanya Richards come readily to mind...

While it is clear that good sport administration, excellent coaching, proper nutrition and adequate funding and facilities are vital to achieving athletic greatness, in the absence of raw athletic sprinting ability this will not occur.

I wish to propose a hypothesis that addresses not only the aspect of Jamaica's raw athletic talent, but also encompasses an explanation of seemingly diverse phenomena as our high incidence of prostate cancer (one study found it to be by far the highest in the world at 304 / 100,000 men / year), our high crime rate (murder capital of the world status earlier this year), our high road traffic accident and fatality rate, and our alleged high levels of promiscuity.

What do these seemingly disparate phenomena, characteristic of Jamaican life, have in common? On close examination these phenomena are manifestations of high levels of aggressiveness and drive, high libidos, highly efficient muscles from persons of lean body mass and black ethnicity.

On closer scrutiny all of these phenomena are either related to high circulating levels of testosterone or alternatively to high levels of responsiveness of testosterone receptors to circulating testosterone. It has already been shown that the testosterone receptors of blacks are different genetically to those of whites and this difference confers increased responsiveness to testosterone.


I've long felt that Occam's Razor points in the same direction. Differences in average levels of male and female sex hormones and in function of sex hormone receptors can parsimoniously account for many of the racial patterns that can't be accounted for by differences in IQ.

I'm not as persuaded, however, that Dr. Aiken's specific theory attributing differences to the Middle Passage is as plausible.


I propose that Jamaicans of primarily African descent have even greater testosterone responsiveness than blacks anywhere else.

But why should this be? I believe the answer to this lies in the slave ship routes within the Caribbean and the New World. First, let us assume that all Africans who survived the trek from the African interior to the West African coast and subsequently the middle passage would have been more or less subject to the same inhumane conditions which would have produced a severe selection pressure that enabled only the fittest slaves to survive the journey.

My hypothesis is that for each incremental increase in the journey travelled, once the slave ships entered the Caribbean, there was a corresponding selection pressure which ensured that only the fittest of the fit slaves survived and furthermore the traits which enabled survival were somehow dependent on high levels of responsiveness to testosterone. Characteristics such as aggression, determination, drive, strong bones, lean body mass, high surface area to body mass ratio, highly efficient and responsive muscles were probably all important for survival and are testosterone-dependent.


The math doesn't really work. Steven Levitt's partner Roland Fryer has revived a similar theory about African-American blood pressure problems being caused by selection for salt retention on slave ships. Greg Cochran explained to Fryer:


"The reason it wouldn't have an important effect is that you don't get a lot of genetic change in one generation unless you try _really_ hard. If they lost the bottom 15% of the people (in terms of salt retention) during the Middle Passage, a cutoff of about one std below average, the increase in salt retention would be about a tenth or so of a standard deviation, assuming a narrow-sense heritability of 50%. You'd never notice the difference."


Nonetheless, Aiken makes an interesting observation about clinal difference within the West Indies:


Since Jamaica was one of the last stops to be made by the slave ships it ensured that only the most resilient and fittest of slaves were alive to disembark in Jamaica. This hypothesis is supported by a number of observations. African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people are represented far more frequently in sprinting events than persons from Africa. Even more interesting is that as one goes westward within the Caribbean, sprinting prowess becomes more prevalent and reaches its peak by the time Jamaica and Bahamas are reached.


West Indian countries are definitely better at sprinting than West African countries, although the weakness of West Africa at sprinting is often exaggerated. West Africa would be the strongest sprinting region in the world if not for the competition from the West African Diaspora in places like Jamaica and the U.S. I would tend to assume that the West Indian superiority over West Africa is due to advantages in health, nutrition, and social organization, rather than in genetic differences.

What about the clinal difference within the Caribbean? The most striking example is Barbados, whose citizens are renown for being the best educated and most civil of all the West Indians. Barbados was the richest and most easterly of the West Indies.

An alternative theory is that the clinal pattern is due to artificial rather than natural selection. According to the PBS series The Story of English, as the first stop for the slave ships coming from Africa, the wealthy slaveowners of Barbados had their pick, and they preferred to buy slaves from tribes they had found to be the most cooperative. Then they'd send the leftovers from the Bad Dude tribes on to be sold in Jamaica and the U.S.


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

November 26, 2006

Michael Irvin on Tony Romo:

Back in the 1990s, in between getting arrested in the company of hookers and cocaine, Michael Irvin caught a lot of passes for the Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl teams. This year, a journeyman white quarterback named Tony Romo (who is half Mexican-American) has suddenly gotten red hot, throwing five touchdown passes in the Cowboy's Thanksgiving Day victory. On Dan Patrick's ESPN radio show, Irvin, who is employed as a broadcaster by ESPN, laughingly suggested that:


"He doesn't look like he's that type of an athlete," Irvin said of Romo. "But he is. He is, man. I don't know if some brother down in that line somewhere, I don't know who saw what or where, his great-great-great-great-grandma ran over in the 'hood or something went down."

Patrick tried to suggest to Irvin that he shouldn't go there, but Irvin was having none of it, continuing:

"If great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs up out of the barn, 'Come on in here for a second,' you know, and they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day."


It's common for white announcers to lose their jobs after referring to the genetic differences between black and white players, such as Paul Hornung who lost his radio job on Notre Dame games after suggesting that ND needed to lower its academic standards so it could recruit black players fast enough to compete with the Florida powerhouses.


So far there hasn't been much of a controversy over Irvin's comments. It's worth noting that it reflect the view widespread among famous black athlete that blacks tend to be genetically superior athletes. It's politically incorrect, but, hey, they're black so the usual rituals of censorship and public humiliation seldom apply to them.


Ironically, this racial self-assurance comes at a time when blacks aren't doing as well athletically as in the 1990s. Three of the four claimants to the heavyweight boxing title are Ivan Drago types from the former Soviet Union. The US. Olympic Basketball tem got beat pretty bad in the 2004 Olympics, losing to Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Lithuania. A white Canadian has won the NBA MVP award two years running. A Chinese player is the best center now that Shaq is in decline. The two best 400m sprinters are white Americans. A Chinese runner won the 110m hurdles at the last Olympics. An all white team won the World Cup.


On the other hand, blacks continue to dominate the 100m sprint (in the last six Olympics going back through 1984, all eight men who made the finals have been of West African descent, an amazing 48 of 48). African-Americans also continue to dominate at tailback and cornerback in the NFL, holding all the starting positions, last I checked. Blacks continue to dominate most of the statistical categories in the NBA.


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