A car salesman's secrets:

A reader wrote last February:

I sold cars on assorted lots during my summers off from college. What you're saying [in debunking Malcolm Gladwell's theory that car salesmen are unconsciously offering higher prices to blacks and women] is true.

As a matter of fact, because of this phenomena of black men wanting to appear to be big spenders, I reflexively used what is called a "negative sell" approach. When a black man would tell me what car he was interested in, I'd "try" to dissuade him. "That's kind of an expensive model. Not everyone can swing that. Maybe you should take a look at a Ford Focus? Obviously, it isn't like the car you're interested in, but they're easier to finance."

Most often, he would say, "Oh no! I can afford what I want, no problem." I'd reply with plenty of enthusiasm, and show his car of choice. Back in the office, if he gave me any objections, I'd remind him that I told him it might be a little too expensive for him to handle, and he told me it would be no problem. That usually squelched any lowballing efforts.

Where did I learn this? Through experience, and the advice of mentors who had been selling cars for decades. Nothing unconscious about it. We all just wanted to make money. What race a fellow was being irrelevant except as it may pertain to getting them out with one of our cars under their butts. If I'd been told blacks enjoy English tea and crumpets, and I found it to be true, all my black customers would be sipping Earl Grey.

Race did not matter to me. Making the sale did. Matter of fact, professional sales is all about psychological self-discipline. Generally for a professional salesman, being a racist is not cost effective. Being observant of human behavior, and accurately identifying how to exploit it... is.

It's striking how often those who denounce me for noticing some racial difference so often assume that I must be saying it's 100% genetic in origin. For example, to my mind, where a group falls on the urge to drive a hard bargain vs. to be seen as a big spender appears to be far too variable over time, place, and situation to be purely genetic. Earlier this year, I quoted one of America's most insightful social observers on his own tribe's cheapness:

"We're talking about an ethnic cultural trait. And the simple fact is that the urge to drive a hard bargain famously varies between ethnic groups. As Dave Barry notes in his new book Dave Barry's Money Secrets (Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?):

"I'm the world's worst car buyer. I come from a long line of Presbyterians, who get their name from the Greek words pre, meaning 'people,' and sbyterian, meaning 'who always pay retail.' … My idea of an opening tactical salvo is to look at the car's sticker price and say to the salesperson, 'This looks like a good deal! Are you sure you're making enough profit on this?'"

Quite true today, but I suspect that a few centuries ago, Barry's Scottish Presbyterian ancestors were viewed by English Anglicans as tight-fisted cheapskates.

Groups can change. The point, however, is that change is frequently slow enough that clear patterns can be discerned and exploited by the knowing.

It doesn't do black car buyers any good for Malcolm Gladwell to tell them that car salesmen are not consciously trying to get them to pay higher prices. Blacks are better off knowing the truth -- that they are being intentionally discriminated against by dealers who use their own typical behavioral patterns to extract more money from them.

Blacks should get mad at this situation and take steps to end it. Buy Saturn's that come with a no-haggling single price. Practice not falling for dealers' playing tricks on delicate egos about their financial situations. Complain. Criticize other blacks who fall for gimmicks like the ones described above. Do something.

The truth shall set you free.

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

Sometimes racial similarities are just skin deep

From the NYT:

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found. The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome.

It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.

Throughout most of human [pre]history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant. Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.

Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.

A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on. [More]

Similarly, the mutation for fair skin color is different in Europeans than in Northeast Asians.

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

Malcolm Gladwell strikes back!

Yesterday, Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker was calling me a "racist" from "the lunatic fringe" because, bizarrely enough, I believe that car salesmen intentionally discriminate against blacks and women. Today, his big complaint about me on his blog is, in effect, that I started iSteve.com way back in 1996 and haven't kept up with the times technologically. Because iSteve.com is an old-fashioned Front Page website, it can't display comments, for which he calls me a "chicken."

I do, however, use Blogger for archiving my blog entries, so I have now turned on Comments on my archive site, www.iSteve.blogspot.com. So, knock yourself out and comment away, Malcolm.

You know, Malcolm, instead of trying to come up with these brilliant chess moves like today's, maybe you should just go back to quoting me out of context and calling me the R word a lot.

The ostensible subject of Malcolm's ire lately has been the criticism Judge Richard Posner and I made of a section in Malcolm's bestseller "Blink" in which Gladwell, ever the loyal lackey of multi-culti capitalism, claims that the reason car salesmen offer higher prices to blacks and women is not because they are money-grubbing sons-of-guns out to extract every penny they can from every customer, but because the salesmen are innoncent victims of their own "unconscious prejudices." They just didn't realize "how egregiously they were cheating women and minorities."

Judge Posner and I were unimpressed with that line of reasoning, to which Malcolm fired back on his website about a year ago: "Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen."

You can read the whole spat here. You might find it amusing.

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

Malcolm Gladwell is holding a vote

on whether or not to excommunicate me as a "racist" of "the lunatic fringe" over on his blog. Drop by and check out the proceedings.

To smear me today, Malcolm is completely distorting the argument with Judge Richard A. Posner and myself on one side and Malcolm on the other over the morals of car salesmen.

Malcolm _defended_ the conscious moral innocence of car salesmen when they charge blacks and women more than they charge white men. Judge Posner and I laughed at that.

Gladwell is baffled and offended that both Judge Posner, the distinguished leader of the Law and Economics school of thought, and myself had scoffed at his theory that, as he puts it, the reason "car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don't realize what they are doing. But buried prejudices are changing their responses in the moment."

Posner and I had pointed out that auto dealers aren't tragic victims of their own hidden bigotry. Instead, they are relying on their years of experience at milking different kinds of customers for the highest possible price. Thus, they make higher offers to blacks and women because they've found they can often manipulate them into paying more.

In a scathing review of Blink in the The New Republic, the celebrated Judge Posner explains: "It would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman's discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the "rapid cognition" that he admires… [I]t may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. An individual's characteristics may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more so. Economists use the term 'statistical discrimination' to describe this behavior."

I concluded: "Statistical discrimination is a troubling phenomenon, because it chips away at the libertarian assumption that competitive markets eliminate racial discrimination, as they do away with most things that are irrationally costly."

In response, Gladwell sniffed: "Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen."

Now, that's a killer comeback!

Today, when I pointed out that he was misleading his readers, he immediately deleted my comment. You can read the whole debate of Gladwell vs. Posner & Sailer over car dealers' motivations here. It's pretty funny. And you can comment on Gladwell's ban of me here.

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

Charles C. Mann replies about 1491

I read your blog fairly often so was quite surprised to see you talking about my book. I'm sorry you thought I was being "slippery" in not specifying more often when I was talking about the area north or south of the Rio Grande. You probably saw an artefact of my struggle with terminology. Problem is, the way we divide things up now (splitting the area north of Colombia into North America and Central America) doesn't fit very well with how things were then, when you had a bunch of related, highly urbanized societies in a region extending from about the Honduras-Nicaragua border to the American SW, and then everything else. In earlier drafts I tried saying when referring to the not-as-urbanized places something like "the area north of the Rio Grande except for the Southwest," but this was shouted down by my editors. I tried not using that kind of label as much, and hoping the reader would catch on to what area I was talking about, but obviously that didn't work for you. My apologies .

No, I should apologize. I was rushing to feed the blog beast after a spell of computer troubles and I posted something quick and dirty about an impressive book that Mr. Mann had clearly worked on for years, a topic where experts hold conflicting views, which he rightly refused to oversimplify.

I would say, though, that you're not quite right about Cahokia. Cahokia was by far the biggest of the mound cities of the SE and Mississippi Valley, but there were many thousands of these places--ten thousand is the estimate I've heard most often. Most of them probably held 3-10,000 people, so they weren't huge places. It's as if the moundbuilders went straight past urbanization to suburbanization, skipping the cities and going right to the strip malls. A lot of these places are just a few miles apart, and presumably would have had maize fields between, exactly the sort of situation that most urban historians think would have led to cities.

The other thing is... ten thousand of these places. If you do the math, 3K x 10K = 30M = far more than the total number of people supposed to be north of the Rio G (<20m).>

Another interesting topic would be the population of California Indians -- how dense can a population in a pleasant climate but fairly dry get without agriculture? We know the Northwest Indians were pretty thick on the ground due to fish, even without farming, but California Indians didn't leave a lot of relics behind.

I would argue with you a little that urban life was MORE feasible in the New World than the old because of the lack of pathogens. A lot of archaeologists think that it was LESS feasible because of the lack of draft animals, which made communications and infrastructure-creation much harder. It seems to me that the situations were so different that it's hard to make useful comparisons. Mesoamerica was almost freakishly urbanized, with some geographers claiming it was the most urbanized place on Earth in 1000-1400. But the second most urbanized place was China, which was absolutely swimming in disease. You can look to Africa for insight, as you do, but the situation is muddy. In Sub-Saharan Africa you certainly had major cities--Great Zimbabwe, Ingombe, Mbanzakongo, Loango. But there weren't as many packed in as Mesoamerica, that's for sure. A good book on this is Chris Ehret's Civlizations of Africa.

The Yucatan Peninsula is a horrible place -- not just hot and humid, but the limestone soil means that water sinks into the ground almost immediately. It's completely flat, with no rivers or lakes, and covered with low scrubby trees about 15 feet tall. Looking out the back window of a hotel room on a beautiful beach in Cozumel, I had a hard time shaking the feeling that I was an astronaut in some Twilight Zone episode who had landed on a planet where the beach was wonderful, but the rest of the planet was just a cheap backdrop slapped together in some alien movie studio. And yet the Mayans built extraordinary urban centers like Chichen Itza and Tikal on this unpromising landscape, while North American Indians, blessed with a temperate climate and rich soils, rarely created cities.

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

"Casino Royale:"

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

James Bond is the most popular English fictional character since Sherlock Holmes, the hero of 23 movies raking in four billion dollars at the global box office. The essence of his screen appeal has been the paradox embodied in the medieval word "gentleman:" an individual of refined manners, educated in the arts of conversation, dress, and cuisine, whose profession is violence.

The English gentleman was the outcome of a project lasting a millennium and a half to mold the anarchic barbarian chieftains who conquered Dark Ages Europe into the upholders of civilization. Like the Japanese samurai, they were gentled by learning aristocratic culture, without, of course, demeaning themselves so low as to have to get a job that didn't involve killing people.

Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale introduced a rather grim Bond. The charming but deadly gentleman Bond who had such an impact on popular culture was largely invented in 1962 by the director of "Dr. No," Terence Young. A public school boy, Cambridge grad, twice-wounded WWII officer, wit, bon vivant, and ladies' man, Young had everything except directing talent. He ended his career helming the seldom-seen epics "Inchon" for the Rev. Moon and "Long Days" for Col. Gaddafi.

What he did excel at, however, was teaching a young Scottish proletarian, a former milkman and coffin polisher named Sean Connery, how to act like Terence Young.

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

"Apocalypto"

Mel Gibson's upcoming movie about the collapse of Mayan civilization in pre-Columbian times, with an all-Mayan cast speaking Mayan, looks from the previews like nothing in Hollywood history. (Here's a review of an unfinished version.) Perhaps it was inspired by the Eskimo movie "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner"? (Here's my review of that 2002 film made by Inuits.)

As usual, my concern with Mel's movies is that his great theme -- pain -- is one where a little goes a long way with me. I suspect he became interested in Pre-Columbian Indian civilizations because pain was such a central theme in their cultures too.

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

Polygamy

Polygamy: Gary Becker vs. Nicholas Wade: A common theme here at iSteve is how intellectually Aspergery so many economists are. The thinking of a lot of famous economists seems to be vaguely autistic in the sense that they seem disconnected from so many obvious facts about human nature. Here, for example, is Gary Becker, who, oddly enough, won his Nobel for is work on family life, making a case for polygamy:

"While the ferocious opposition to polygamy seemed strange even in the 1970's when I first wrote about this practice, it is much stranger now in light of developments during the past couple of decades. These developments include a successful movement to legalize contracts between gays that allow them to live as married couples, even though there is ongoing emotional debate about whether such couples can legally be considered "married". ... If modern women are at least as capable as men in deciding whom to marry, why does polygyny continue to be dubbed a "barbarous" practice?

In other words, Becker just doesn't get it about why people don't like polygamy, even though the real reason is easily expressed in economics terminology: Monogamy is a cartel formed by males to reduce male vs. male competition for wives to more of a matter of quality than of quantity. The ability of a culture's males to cooperate with each other is correlated with the overall quality of life in that culture. But Becker doesn't seem familiar with that common argument.

Here it's expressed by the NYT's genetic reporter Nicholas Wade in his book Before the Dawn:

"The novel arrangement of pairing off males and females creates a whole new set of social calculations. Most males in the society now have a chance to reproduce since they possess socially endorsed access to at least one female. So each male has a much greater incentive to invest in cooperative activities, such as hunting or defense, that may benefit the society as a whole.

The pair bond takes much of the edge out of male-to-male aggression. It also requires that men trust one another more, and can have some confidence that those who go hunting won't be cuckolded by those to stay to defend the women."

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

"Stranger than Fiction"

Will Ferrell plays a boring IRS auditor who does everything by clockwork, always taking the 8:17 bus every morning to work, never showing any emotion or thinking about anything besides his dull job.

One day, he notices a well-spoken lady's voice in his head narrating what he's doing. When she (Emma Thompson, playing a prestigious author of literary fiction who has been trying to write her novel "Death and Taxes" for a decade) announces that he's unaware of his impending death, he goes to see a professor of literature (Dustin Hoffman), who has no problem accepting that his visitor is a character in somebody else's story. Eventually, with Hoffman's help, Ferrell tracks down Thompson, who admits she's about to kill him off in her ending.

In the only funny scene, Ferrell gives Thompson's unfinished manuscript to Hoffman who reads it and enthusiastically tells him that it's a masterpiece, and that any other ending would ruin it, so he'll just have to die for the good of literature.

One obvious challenge in any story where a character is supposed to be a literary genius is, as Nabokov argued, that the author must present persuasive evidence that the genius really is a genius. This is hard to do when the actual author isn't a genius, which, unfortunately, hot young screenwriter Zach "The-New-Charlie-Kaufman" Helm most evidently is not. The prose style of the lengthy narration from the novel by Thompson is deeply mediocre, and the plotting is singularly lacking in invention.

For instance, Thompson struggles throughout the film to come up with an inspired way to kill off poor Ferrell. Eventually, she achieves a breakthrough, which turns out to be that Ferrell will be ... hit by a bus. Hit by a bus? That's the most hackneyed form of death in the English language at present. Google lists 365,000 examples of "hit by a bus." In one of them, a reader asks, "Why do managers always say something like 'In case you get hit by a bus, I want to make sure you and Fred are inter-changeable'?"

Second, the movie, directed by Marc Forster, the man behind such mediocrities as "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland," is intentionally lifeless. It was filmed in Chicago, a great-looking town with many idiosyncratic landmarks, but the settings were so generic and lacking in local color I thought it was another one of those productions where Toronto is supposed to stand in for Chicago to save on the exchange rate.

This was a "creative" decision on the part of the filmmakers to emphasize how boring and uncreative Ferrell's IRS agent is. But the film just ends up looking phony. For example, there is no "8:17 bus" in Chicago. You simply go down to the corner and wait. Some days, depending on the vagaries of the weather, traffic, and politics, three buses show up one right after another, and other days, no bus comes until 8:45, and then it's full. In the real Chicago, stuff happens.

Third, the movie is redolent of the smug contempt that people with creative jobs have for people with non-creative jobs, whom the creative types imagine must be automatons.

"Stranger than Fiction" isn't an awful movie, but Zach Helm sure isn't Charlie Kaufman.

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

"Teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day:"

The New York Times Magazine runs another article about how to achieve the mandate of the No Child Left Behind act by closing the race gaps in American schools. In "What It Takes to Make a Student," NYT staffer Paul Tough visits some of the handful of charter schools where black or Hispanic students score above average and makes a list of what they need to succeed. My favorite: "Teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day." That sounds like something Mao would have called for during the Great Leap Forward: "My plan for backyard steel furnaces is guaranteed to succeed if the peasants work 15 to 16 hours a day!"

I don't doubt that a handful of superstar principals and teachers can make a big difference, just as a great basketball coach can win with fairly short players. In 1964, after many years as an also-ran, UCLA's John Wooden won the NCAA championship with a team with nobody over 6'-5." So, did Wooden resolve to continue to shatter the stereotype that height matters in basketball? No, he then took his prestige as a coach who could win with a small team, went all the way to New York City, and landed the best big man of the decade, 7'-2" Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

In contrast, Adolph Rupp of Kentucky won four national titles while recruiting 80% of his players from his home state. "Rupp's Runts" in 1966 were so short that they had to use 6'-4" Pat Riley, the future NBA coaching legend, for the opening center-jump. Rupp believed a good coach could win with undistinguished talent. But in this year's movie "Glory Road," Rupp is the bad guy who loses in the title game to the wave of the future, coach Don Haskins, who scoured the country to bring talent to El Paso.

Similarly, schools also routinely transform their flash-in-the-pan reputations for working wonders in to the long term capital of better students.

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

Charter Schools:

A reader writes:

As you know, I'm on the board of a new charter school in XXX, so this is an issue close to my heart.

High-performing charter schools are frequently accused of achieving their success by taking only the cream of the public-school student crop. But in NYC at least, that's not an option: students are assigned by lottery. There is a degree of self-selection, since you don't get *into* the lottery unless you apply. But there's no qualification for entry other than city residence; from that pool of applicants, the actual enrolled students are chosen strictly at random. The school I'm involved with is 25% special ed, and most of the school is reading well below grade level. I don't think that's the cream of the crop.

There's a bunch of charter schools that have achieved remarkable results with underperforming student populations. So: how do they do it? My own view is that the lion's share of success is due to three factors:

- Disciplined environment. High-performing charter schools take discipline seriously. As a consequence, they don't have the cultures of disorder and even violence (property crime, stabbings, even rapes) that you read about in some regular urban public schools. It's kind of obvious that an atmosphere of chaos makes pedagogy difficult if not impossible. This is a relatively low bar to clear in that what it takes to impose discipline isn't that complicated - it just requires willpower and a relatively free hand.

- Longer school day and year. At our school, the day starts early, ends late, there are classes many Saturday mornings, there's a shorter summer, and there are fewer holidays. That adds up to roughly 50% more class time than at regular public schools. It also means less time for the kids to be getting into one kind of trouble or another. Again, it's kind of obvious that more time in class should get better academic results, particularly if you're dealing with students who start out behind.

- Committed, competent staff. High-performing charter schools have the flexibility to hire and fire pretty much at will, so they can get rid of time-servers and incompetents, and they have school cultures that get teachers to put out a lot of extra (largely uncompensated) efforts. Again, we're talking about clearing a low bar: getting rid of worthless teachers is easier than hiring superstars, and may result in a comparable benefit in terms of better instruction.

On top of all this, each charter layers its own "special sauce" - one school has an "east Asian" theme, and teaches all the kids Chinese and karate; another has a music theme, and has all the kids in an orchestra; another has a purportedly afro-centric curriculum; another teaches Latin; the head-of-school at the school I'm involved in is big on civics and debate - but the particularities of the special sauce don't seem to matter much in terms of outcomes; the sauce is really there to create a sense of identity and mission for the school, which makes it easier to get staff and students to put out more effort for the sake of the team with which they identify.

At bottom, what I think accounts for the success of these schools are all very simple things and are, generally, more a matter of ending really bad practices than of implementing really extraordinary ones.

I *hope* that this is most of what it takes, because if great teachers are essential to producing decent students from underperforming populations, then there's no way to scale the success of these schools, and they are much less interesting (see below). An open question in my own mind is to what degree the deterioration in the quality of education across the board in America is simply due to feminism: highly intelligent women now have many more economically- and socially-rewarding work alternatives to teaching, which in turn must have meant a dramatic decline in average teacher quality.

There are very good questions to ask about the results that these schools deliver, but I don't think the question of whether they are selecting for better students is a key one.

Here are the two that I have been focused on:

- How lasting are the effects? If you have a longer school day and year, you can spend a lot more time teaching to the test, and not have that devour *all* classroom instruction time (which over time is self-defeating), as is happening under the pressure of NCLB at some regular public schools. That will clearly deliver better test results.

Will it result in longer-term gains? More generally, students who may succeed in the highly structured and supportive environment of a high-performing charter school may not function so well once that structure and support are withdrawn, as is the case when students graduate to high school (unless they go to a similarly highly-structured and supportive charter school for high school) or to college and/or the workforce. Charter schools have probably gotten big enough as a phenomenon that we can study the high school, college and early workforce performance (GPA, dropout rate, employment rate, average income, income trajectory, etc) and compare it to similar populations educated in mainstream urban public schools. I would expect the comparison to be positive; the question is *how* positive, how big the return is once you look out 10-15 years.

- How scalable is the model? To the extent that charter schools depend for their success on excellent teachers, the model is not very scalable at all, because there is no plausible mechanism for massively increasing the supply of quality teachers. (The supply could be modestly increased by better pay and working conditions, which charters can provide - high-performing charters tend to pay a better annual salary than the regular public schools, albeit on a per-hour basis they are generally paying *less* because of the longer work day and year); even more important is the freedom from the ed-school cartel and restrictive union rules that productive people tend to chafe against.) To the extent that charters can succeed with average-but-competent teachers, scalability is more plausible, but you still have to ask the question whether charters can succeed without outstanding principals/heads-of-school. You don't need as many of those, but I'm more confident that you can't build a high-performing charter without one. Even if we have (or can obtain) an adequate supply of really outstanding people to run these schools, can the model be scaled financially? Charters frequently brag about doing more with less - achieving great results while getting less public money than the regular public schools. But anecdotally I can tell you that many of the high-performing charters I'm familiar with get significant resources from the private sector, from foundations and/or from sugar daddies with a charitable impulse.

Someone needs to do a study of how significant those resources are, to determine whether the charter model is financially scalable.

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

The Polonium Puzzle

After I mentioned the pulp fiction-sounding name of the man who lunched with the spy the day he was poisoned, Russian radiation expert Professor Mario Scaramella of Naples and Bogota, a reader points out:

The name of the villain in Ian Fleming's "The Man with the Golden Gun,” played by Christopher Lee in the 1975 James Bond movie, was “Francisco Scaramanga!”

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

The art of golf course architecture

From the Wall Street Journal:

'That Was From the Artist's Green Period'
Just because players don't wax about aesthetics doesn't mean great golf courses aren't high art
by John Paul Newport

... [Golf] architecture buffs, wisely, don't bother addressing the high-art question, even though they do occasionally throw around the A-word (as in "the art of golf course design"), and some course designers do self-consciously attempt to incorporate age-old artistic motifs into their work. I say wisely because defining art is slippery. Have you ever tried to read an article in a learned art journal? I have, several times, and can only conclude that people who write about the subject professionally are a lot smarter than I am, because I hardly understood a word.

One writer who has boldly ventured into the art-golf waters is Steve Sailer, a blogger and film reviewer for American Conservative magazine. In a most entertaining essay last year (available at www.isteve.com/golf_art.htm2), he made the case that golf courses are one of the world's "least recognized art forms" and might even be thought of as the great WASP art contribution of the 20th century. Unfortunately, he contends, golf architecture has never received its artistic due for various cultural and sociological reasons. (One example: Cutting-edge art is usually thought of as anti-bourgeoisie, and golf is anything but.)

The article also reprised what for me has always been one of the most intriguing notions about golf's appeal, and which I think bears on the art question: namely, that at a subconscious level the game connects us (men especially, I suppose) to our evolutionary past as hunters. We stalk golf courses that themselves often resemble our primordial hunting grounds in East Africa: grassy savannahs with scattered stands of protective trees and abundant watering holes (read: water hazards) that attract prey. In one study Mr. Sailer cited, people in 15 nations were quizzed about what scenes they would most like to see in paintings; the collated responses in 11 of the countries pointed to landscapes that looked very much like golf courses, viewed from elevated tees. [More]

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

Environmental Impact of Immigration

A reader writes:

If we allow the millions of illegal aliens to remain in this country, what will be the environmental impact of this? You can not build a shopping center nor a housing development nor a dam in this country without doing exhaustive environmental impact studies. Would one way of delaying or even stopping the granting of amnesty to these illegals aliens be to file a lawsuit in federal court demanding that environmental impact studies be done on the effect of the amnesty on the environment?

Certainly laws opening the borders further would be more destructive of the American environment than just about any other law with much chance of passing. Does anybody know whether the environmental laws could be applied in this situation to force a massive environmental impact statement analysis? Certainly, the pro-open borders forces intend to use environmental impact statements to slow construction of border fences.

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

The Derb is on fire

John Derbyshire writes in NRO:

[Borat] illustrates the tremendous power of folk memory. Sacha Baron Cohen (who is an observant Jew) has said, in an interview, that he wanted to make some points about antisemitism.

Nothing wrong with that. I have expressed the opinion somewhere that we have entered an age in which antisemitism will again drive large world events. It is a great and terrible force.

But where is it located? According to SBC, it is located among East European villagers, super-genteel middle-class Americans, and redneck southern Christians. This is precisely the folk memory of the Ashkenazim. The enemies are mean, stupid, persecuting peasants of the Old Country, exclusive country-club patrons, and Klansmen.

Could anything be more wrongheaded? Jews are indeed in peril in the world today, but not from any of those sources. SBC is the Jewish equivalent of those Irish Americans I used to (and still occasionally do) get into arguments with, for whom nothing at all has happened since 1846.

He has not noticed the modern world, preferring instead to stay in the warm cocoon of his grandparents’ stories about brutish muzhiky, great-uncle Irv being kept out of Yale, and tobacco-spitting good ol’ boys sneering at pointy-head Jewish perfessors. I don’t think I have ever seen this odd phenomenon so clearly illustrated. I am sure SBC had no idea he was doing this.


Shallow Sentimentality on Immigration. One thing that you can’t help noticing about the immigration discussions is that pretty much all the real analysis — the spreadsheets, the projections, the number crunching — is on the restrictionist side.

The other side has... what? Well, it has the kind of silly feel-good twaddle illustrated to perfection by James Poniewozik’s essay in last week’s Time magazine. The piece is supposed to make some contribution to the immigration debate, but what does it actually tell us? “Here is a Hispanic person. Her father was an illegal immigrant! Yet she is really nice!” Well, that's great; but how does it help us in sorting out a sensible immigration policy? I don't doubt for a moment that America Ferrera is a wonderful person. Here is a different story, about an illegal immigrant from Ecuador who is not so wonderful. Here is a story about the fiscal problems here in my home county, twelve hundred miles from the Mexican border, caused by illegal-alien criminals. These are my property-tax dollars being spent, and I don’t have a lot of dollars.

Where does any of this get us? With big social-political issues like immigration, what is needed is for us to think things through, not to swoon over happy-face stories like Ms. Ferrara’s, nor for that matter to bristle at grim-face ones like Mr. Pillco’s. Yet practically everything published by the supporters of illegal immigration is just shallow sentimental swooning of the Time variety. Perhaps sentimentality is all these people have to offer. They sure don't seem to be long on real analysis.

Most insulting of all is the subhead on the Time piece: “On TV, the immigration wars aren’t as simple as politicians make them sound.” Let’s see: Who, exactly, is reducing this vast and momentous issue to simplicities: the author of the Time piece, with his cheery little anecdote about one immigrant, or serious analysts like our own Mark Krikorian, who has spent years patiently crunching the numbers to try to find out what will be the consequences for our nation of importing 100 or 200 million third-world immigrants? The argument is not about one immigrant, this Ms. Ferrera. It’s about tens or hundreds of millions, including some Ms. Ferreras, some Mr. Pillcos, and everything in between. Can we have that argument, please?

The great English immigration-restrictionist Enoch Powell had a slogan he tried to include in everything he said or wrote on the topic: NUMBERS ARE OF THE ESSENCE. Precisely. The Time essay has given us a number of one. Its information content, as regards what are and what are not sound immigration policies, is an even smaller number: zero. Immigration policy is a branch of mathematics, not weekend work for employees of the Hallmark Card Company. [More]

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

Feminism killed the Neanderthals?

Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE Published: December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

John Hawks isn't convinced, however.

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

More from The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Deogolwulf writes:

Monday, June 06, 2005
New Report Finds Britain is "Hideously White"

All socially aware people have long suspected it, the line-up at the upcoming Live 8 concerts has highlighted it, but now a report to be released today by the Committee on Racial Affairs has confirmed it: Britain is “hideously white”. The report found that up to 91% of the population of Britain is white. “This can’t go on,” said Dr Donald Watkins, who co-authored the report. “I find it offensive that in this day and age so many people in Britain are white. It is a disgrace.”

Institutions, such as the BBC, have been reprimanded before on precisely this issue. The new report, however, makes it clear that the problem is not confined to institutions: the problem extends all the way down into wider society. Indeed, the hideous whiteness of institutions is an accurate reflection of society at large.

As Prof. Tetherton, a sociologist at the University of East Anglia, explains, “Because 91% of the population is hideously white, it means that the institutions naturally tend to take on the same horrific hue. If we are serious about tackling the problem, we must eradicate it at the root. Only this way can we create a freer, more equal society.”

Chris Martin, of the popular beat combo Coldplay, was unsurprised by the findings: “Most of my teachers at school were white, most of the people in my street were white, even my parents were white. I think it’s disgusting. [And my wife, I just noticed, is the whitest woman in the entire world.] People don’t seem to realise just how offensive it is. And when you consider that most shareholders are white, well, then we know we are dealing with the most unspeakable evil.”

The report comes after weeks of mounting pressure on the government to make known its understanding of the extent of the problem. “It seems there has been a lack of will on the part of politicians to tackle this issue,” said Emily Burton, spokeswomen for the independent think-tank Totalitas. “But now the government cannot ignore it.”

The report also places greater pressure on the organisers of the Live 8 concerts to change the racial constitution of its performers. “The thought of old white people playing guitars makes me physically sick,” said one activist. [More Joy]

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

Liberaltarian?

Everybody in the high-IQ sliver of the blogosphere is talking about Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute's call for libertarians to dump their relationship with the Republicans and team up with the Democrats as "liberaltarians."

Funny how the libertarians waited until after the election to debate whether they should jump on the Democrat's bandwagon...

Do you imagine Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixara and the other serious Democratic pollsters and electoral strategists are sitting around clinking champagne glasses together over the possibility that the tiny fraction of the electorate that is libertarian might come over to the Democrats' side? Me, neither. As Stalin might ask, "How many divisions do the libertarians have?"

Libertarians are much more prevalent in the far right edge of the Web's Bell Curve than they are in the voting booth.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer