February 24, 2007

The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World by John O'Sullivan

"Changed the World" is the hottest phrase in titling books these days. We have books with titles like "The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology." I'm hardly the first to notice this. Richard Adams wrote in The Guardian in 2005:


Anyone contemplating writing a book on current trends in the publishing industry might consider this as a catchy title - Book: the book about the book that changed the world about the fish that changed the world. It's the fault of American author Mark Kurlansky. In 1999 he wrote a book that set off the fashion for what Waterstone's categorises as "biographies of things", called Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world… According to the trade press, a whole army of "changed the world" titles is ready to be launched. In September we will be able to buy a book on concerts subtitled "gigs that changed the world". In June we can get our hands on a book about the sheep that changed the world. And next month there's the chance to buy a book on gunpowder, the explosive that changed the world (presumably by blowing up bits of it). The list goes on and on - anyone fancy a forthcoming text with the subtitle "the 1976 wine tasting that changed the world"?


At last, though,we have a book where the subtitled is justified: The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World by John O'Sullivan, the former editor of National Review and a long time aid to the Prime Minister in the title. It's a triple biography of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher and how they won the Cold War, with a particular focus on Poland.


O'Sullivan pays a lot of attention to the view from within the Kremlin. I hadn't realized how early the Soviets had felt the cold wind of doom blowing over them. O'Sullivan argues that at the time of Solidarity's rise in August 1980, the Soviets believed their economy too weak to absorb the sanctions that would result from an invasion of Poland in the style of 1968 or 1956. So they bluffed the West into thinking that eventual December 1981 crushing of Solidarity by the Communist Polish general Jaruslewski was an act of forbearance by the Soviets, when in reality it was the best they could have hoped for.

There's lots more of interest in this fine, wide-ranging, quick paced book.


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

February 21, 2007

Pre-Oscar movie reviews

Here are some of my film reviews from The American Conservative:

Dreamgirls
Babel
Casino Royale
Bobby


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

Educational reform and friction

Every time there is a new school "reform," there turns out to be a lot of unexpected collateral damage. For example, a new required course to graduate from high school will be added, but some sizable fraction of the students won't get the class added to their schedules. The bureaucracy drops the ball, the kids drop the ball, and their parents drop the ball. So, marginal students don't graduate from high school. Military strategists have a concept called "friction" or random negative events that prevent the plan from being carried out as written. Something like that happens with school reforms, too. So, these fads like No Child Left Behind wind up having large human costs that nobody anticipates.


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

February 20, 2007

Feminism leads to more nepotism

The rise of two career couples in recent decades has increased the importance of who-you-know relative to what-you-know. The huge increase in working women has increased the opportunities for nepotism because, if you come from a well connected family, you now have virtually double the number of powerful people you are related to. The term "nepotism" originated in Italy, where the nephews of Popes tended to do very well for themselves. But now, if you come from a high ranking family, you can have not only powerful uncles but also powerful aunts as well, nearly doubling your chances of being related to somebody with pull in your field. On the other hand, if you come from a family with no connections, well, two times zero is still zero, so you are no better off.


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

February 19, 2007

Lady tennis players, Obama as post-Teenybopper idol; cousin marriage

Around the Web:

- In Slate, economist Steven Landsburg reviews a study showing that female pro tennis players choke more (make more unforced errors on critical points) than do male pros. That women tend to be more at the mercy of their emotions hardly sounds implausible, but there could be a couple of other explanations: (A): Women pros tend to be younger; and (B) There may be less competition to be a female pro than a male pro, since so many women with good muscle tone would prefer to be dancers than athletes -- so, women tennis players are subject to less selective pressure, so negative traits like choking aren't as fatal to making it on tour.

- Obama as the new Justin Timberlake: In the Nation, a 24-year-old girl plants an 800-word big wet one on the handsome kisser of the junior Senator from Illinois.

- Stanley Kurtz on cousin marriage in the Middle East in National Review: Here's Part 1:


So to understand the kinship structure of a traditional society is to make sense of a good deal of life there. Unfortunately, our contemporary thinned-out notion of kinship has made it tough to recognize just how profoundly societies are shaped by variations in marriage practices. That’s why we’re far more comfortable making sense of the war on terror through the lens of a familiar phenomenon like religion, than in the light of something alien, like cousin marriage.


Part 2:


If we want to change any of this, it will be impossible to restrict ourselves to the study of religious Islam. The “self-sealing” character of Islam is part and parcel of a broader and more deeply rooted social pattern. And parallel-cousin marriage is more than just an interesting but minor illustration of that broader theme. If there’s a “self-sealing” tendency in Muslim social life, cousin marriage is the velcro. In contemporary Europe, perhaps even more than in the Middle East, cousin marriage is at the core of a complex of factors blocking assimilation and driving the war on terror.


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

"The Lives of Others"

When the Soviet submarine film "The Hunt for Red October" appeared in 1990, a magazine headline described it with a sigh of relief as "The Last Cold War Movie." And that proved largely prophetic. While the movie industry continues to mine the Third Reich's dozen years, the much longer era of Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe has seemingly disappeared down the media memory hole.

In Germany, "It's forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis," observes historian Hubertus Knabe, "But it's almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison." Hence, a huge hit in Germany was "Good Bye, Lenin!" -- a sweet comedy inspired by the misbegotten Ostalgie fad (nostalgia for the East).

The German drama "The Lives of Others" shows what we've been missing. Perhaps the best movie of 2006, this debut by a 33-year-old, 6'9" writer-director with the heel-clickingly Teutonic moniker of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts life in 1984 under the eyes of the Stasi secret police. They employed one percent of the East German workforce directly and two percent as secret informants.

In a masterful opening segment, Wiesler, a thin-lipped, middle-aged Stasi functionary, conducts a textbook interrogation of a hapless citizen accused (and, in effect, already convicted) of not snitching on a neighbor planning to escape to the West. When the prisoner protests his innocence, Wiesler replies, "If you believe we arrest people on a whim, that alone is enough to justify your arrest." The secret policeman is played with charismatic restraint by East German actor Ulrich Mühe (who had discovered in his Stasi files in the 1990s details about himself reported by his wife). [More in the issue]

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

February 18, 2007

Latest VDARE.com column: NCLB

Why “No Child Left Behind” Is Nuts
By Steve Sailer

A reader who teaches math in a public high school in northern Orange County, California recounted the following dialogue with one of his students:

Student: "My mom is 28 years old."

Teacher: "How old are you?"

Student: "Fifteen."

Teacher: "So, your mother had you when she was thirteen?"

Student: "Wow! You can do that in your head that fast?"

Teacher: "Uh, well, uh, don't worry about it. That's why I'm a math teacher!"

And his student went away happy, self-esteem reassured by knowing that only nerdy math teachers can quickly subtract 15 from 28.

Meanwhile, America's Great and Good carry on making plans for America's schools based on assumptions that wouldn't survive an hour in an average classroom. (Not that they would ever send their kids to a typical school.)

The Aspen Institute's bipartisan Commission on No Child Left Behind, co-chaired by former governors Tommy Thompson and Roy E. Barnes and paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (among others), has just issued 75 recommendations for improving the NCLB legislation when it comes up for renewal by Congress this year.

Despite the many small reforms advocated in the Commission's report "Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation’s Children" (222 page PDF), not one word of criticism is uttered against the original legislation's most important and implausible requirement: "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014" in math and reading. The report declares this goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 to be "audacious … morally right … and attainable."

What they don't mention about this demand: It's nuts. [More]


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

February 17, 2007

Request:

Can anybody think of a movie that has had much impact in America made since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that has depicted life under the Communists in Eastern Europe?


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

Dept. of How Stupid of Me Not to Have Thought of That Before

John Tierney of the NYT blogs about an academic conference on the drop in crime, but I just came up with a theory I've never heard before (although somebody must have articulated it before me):

What device that spread throughout society in the 1990s made it radically easier for witnesses to report street crimes to the cops while they were happening, thus discouraging young people from making a career of being a street criminal?

Right: the cell phone.


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

February 16, 2007

The paradox of majoring in economics

Getting a BA in economics is widely considered the appropriate major for ambitious young people who want to become corporate executives, Wall Streeters, or consultants. It's thought much classier than majoring in business administration, but much more germane to business success than majoring in, say, history or philosophy.

Econ is, like, scientific, but it's also about, like, money! (That was essentially my chain of thought many decades ago as I majored in econ, among other things, then got an MBA.)

This logic has made the econ major one of the most popular on Ivy League campuses, especially among male students.

The funny thing, however, is that if you took your economics courses seriously, they would cripple your drive to make a bundle in the business. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, for example, really does inspire the old joke about the two University of Chicago professors walking down the street who see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. They think about picking it up, but keeping walking because it's much more likely that they are both suffering mutual simultaneous hallucinations than that the free market would be so inefficient as to leave a $20 bill lying around.

In contrast, a successful businessman's essential prejudice has to be that his competitors in the market are inefficient knuckleheads who leave money lying around everywhere for him to snatch up.

Fortunately, the vast majority of econ majors pay little attention to the implications of their courses, so America's economy continues to hum along.

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

February 14, 2007

"Little Miss Sunshine"

is one of the less likely Best Picture nominees ever. If the prototypical Best Picture winner is, say, "Return of the King" -- magnificent-looking, three hours long, you need to see it in a theatre rather than on TV -- "Little Miss Sunshine" is at the opposite end on most dimensions. If it wasn't for the swear words, you'd figure it was a TV movie.

The key to understanding "Little Miss Sunshine" is that it's a movie for moms. Mothers are an underserved audience segment in film (as opposed to television), so "Little Miss Sunshine" is rather refreshing in a business where most films are aimed either at males or single women. (One downside of this, however, is that Toni Collette, who has been brilliant in other character roles, is given little to do in this film full of quirky characters because, as the mom, she is the target audience's surrogate.)

"Little Miss Sunshine" offers two messages to moms:

1. Other people's families are just as crazy as your family.

2. No matter how dysfunctional your family is most of the time, it can still pull together in a crisis.

The now famous scenes of the whole normally squabbling clan push-starting the old VW microbus, then helping each other clamber onto the moving vehicle visually summarizes the second message.

I've tried to come up with a cynical objection to these messages, but, ultimately, I like them: they are a good combination of satirical realism and sentimentality.

I just wish the movie was better. For example, there's a key scene about sixty percent of the way through the movie where a character discover that he's red-green colorblind, with heartbreaking consequences. It's unrealistic that he wouldn't know already, but, worse, there's nothing that prefigures that discovery in the film. It would have been easy to write in an earlier scene where, say, the character wears a red shirt with green pants (which colorblind golfer Jack Nicklaus accidentally wore to a tournament early in his career), and the other characters assume he's intentionally doing it to be obnoxious.


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

Economist Greg Clark's exciting new book

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

"He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind" --Samuel Johnson

The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple. Indeed it can be summarized in one diagram: figure 1.1. Before 1800 income per person – the food, clothing, heat, light, housing, and furnishings available per head - varied across societies and epochs. But there was no upward trend. A simple but powerful mechanism explained in this book, the Malthusian Trap, kept incomes within a range narrow by modern standards. …

World Economic History in One Graph

Since the economic laws governing human society were those that govern all animal societies, mankind was subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian Era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution. The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution that transformation of hunter-gatherers into settled agriculturalists, but continued indeed right up till the Industrial Revolution.

For England we will see compelling evidence of differential survival of types in the years 1250-1800. In particular economic success translated powerfully into reproductive success. The richest men had twice as many surviving children at death as the poorest. The poorest individuals in Malthusian England had so few surviving children that their families were dying out. Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the Malthusian economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy. The craftsmen’s sons became laborers, merchant’s sons petty traders, large landowner’s sons smallholders.

Just as people were shaping economies, the economy of the pre-industrial era was shaping people, at the least culturally, perhaps even genetically. The arrival of an institutionally stable capital-intensive pre-industrial economic system in England set in motion an economic process that rewarded middle class values with reproductive success, generation after generation. This selection process was accompanied by changes in characteristics of the pre-industrial economy that seem to owe largely to the population displaying more “middle class” preferences. Interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, and numeracy and literacy spread even to the lower reaches of the society.

The book proposes a variant of these evolutionary ideas, along the lines suggested by Oded Galor and Omar Moav. The Neolithic Revolution which established a settled agrarian society with massive stocks of capital changed the nature of selective pressures operating on human culture and genes. Ancient Babylonia in 2,000 BC may have seemed superficially to be an economy not dissimilar from that of England in 1800. But the intervening years had profoundly shaped the culture, and maybe even the genes, of the members of English society. These changes were what created the possibility of an Industrial Revolution only in 1,800 AD not in 2,000 BC.

Other scholars have recently posed the challenge of “Why an Industrial Revolution in England as opposed to China, Japan or India?” The speculation here, and it is just a speculation, is that England’s island position and its highly stable institutions, which resulted in a surprisingly orderly and internally peaceable society all the way from 1066 to the present, advanced the process of preference evolution more rapidly than in the more turbulent agrarian economies.


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

February 12, 2007

The message whites hope to send blacks by electing Obama President:

A Rolling Stone article, quoted in The American Scene, reveals that Barack Obama's most important supporters are white women:


"Then, running preliminary polls, his advisers noticed something remarkable: Women responded more intensely and warmly to Obama than did men. In a seven-candidate field, you don't need to win every vote. His advisers, assuming they would pick up a healthy chunk of black votes, honed in on a different target: Every focus group they ran was composed exclusively of women, nearly all of them white.

"There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama's autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. "More than once," he recalls, "my mother would point out: 'Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.' " What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama's political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man.""


My mom was a big fan of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier back in the mid-1960s. To her, they embodied an admirable combination of black masculine charisma and white gentlemanliness. (In contrast, she thought Muhammad Ali an uncultured blowhard.)

It sorely disappointed her that the blacks who burned down Watts in 1965 were not following the fine example for their race set by Harry and Sidney.

She would have liked Barack Obama, too, and for the same reasons.

Now, nobody would use the term "example for their race" anymore. Today, we say "role model." And, what an awful lot of whites hope, deep down, to accomplish by electing Barack Obama President is to make him the supreme king #1 role model for all African Americans, utterly eclipsing deplorable examples such as Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent.

In other words, the message white America hopes to send to black America by electing Obama is:


Stop Acting So Black!
Start Acting More Ba-rack!


Perhaps this explains why blacks haven't been all that enthusiastic about Obama?


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

February 11, 2007

How the college prestige racket works

Here's my new VDARE.com column:


Dr. Faust at Harvard
By Steve Sailer

In January 2005, mistaking a feminist pep rally for a serious academic conference, Harvard President Lawrence Summers, the former Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary, committed a notorious "gaffe" (i.e. he told an unpopular truth).

Summers was no doubt expected to lay on the sonorous soft soap demanded from such an august personage about how we must all redouble our efforts to overcome the persistent plague of discrimination. Instead, Summers, a brilliant but socially maladroit economist, offered a sophisticated data-driven analysis of why women are fairly rare on the science, engineering, and mathematics faculties of Ivy League colleges …

Desperately trying to keep his job, Summers quickly appointed female historian Drew Gilpin Faust, head of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study, to lead Harvard's Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering. …

Dr. Faust brought back a $50 million wish list of payoffs to feminist interests, which the beleaguered Summers immediately agreed to fund. Hey, the money wasn't coming out of Larry's pocket, so why not?

Despite his craven surrender to Dr. Faust's demands, it didn't save him. Last year, Summers resigned under pressure from the faculty. …

So whom did Harvard pick last week as its new President? A prophetic clue appeared back in January 2005 in the Harvard Crimson: "Radcliffe Institute Dean Drew Gilpin Faust said Friday that the fallout from University President Lawrence H. Summers’ remarks on females in science had generated 'a moment of enormous possibility' for the advancement of women at Harvard."

Yes—Larry's little miscue has indeed proven "a moment of enormous possibility" for women at Harvard, such as, oh, to pick a totally random example, Dr. Faust herself…who has just been named the new President of Harvard University!

Apparently shaking down the last president for $50 million can help you build your political base for becoming the next president…

You might wonder: how Harvard can risk its reputation by dumping a social scientist for telling the truth and appointing a self-serving feminist apparatchik in his place?

Don't be silly. Colleges are among the least competitive institutions in this country. Their reputations are almost foolproof.

If you want to understand status and power in modern America, you need to grasp how the college prestige game works. …

The point of getting into Harvard is to be able to say you got into Harvard. … In effect, Harvard is hard to get into because everybody knows it's hard to get into. So, no matter what embarrassments happen on campus, it will remain hard to get into for, roughly, ever. [More]


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

My choices for best movies of 2006

American Film Renaissance asked for my choices in the following categories:

Best Time at the Movies in 2006: "The Science of Sleep"

Best Hero: Mark Wahlberg's cop in "The Departed"

Best Narrative Film: "Something New" (okay, it's a stretch to call it "the best," but it was a good picture that was undeservedly overlooked)

Best Documentary: "Idiocracy"


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

February 10, 2007

The personality differences between gays and straights

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution comes around on the question of why there is so little evidence for a lot of male homosexuals in most sports to my position that the fundamental reason is that there aren't a lot of gays in sports:

"Having read through 110 plus comments, I am now more inclined to see genetic correlations -- rooted in the human mind rather than the body -- with athletic achievement …"

(I think it's premature to attribute male homosexuality to "genetic" causes as opposed to the broader category of "biological" causes.)

A reader writes:

When I was going to university, I worked as a bouncer at clubs. I was from a hick blue-collar town called O****** and worked in strictly "straight" bars. After 2 years I moved to downtown Toronto and worked in "night clubs" for 2 years- generally straight but with a significant amount of gay males or clubs that had a "mixed night (gay and straight night)" or "gay night" (it's the big city).

Bouncers all noticed that gay males don't cause problems that are violent in nature (drug OD's and sex in the washrooms are another matter). I remember other managers/head bouncers all agreeing after I commented that gay males are unusually very orderly at coat checks (it's on the order of several orders of magnitude of difference).

My girl friend lived at Church and College, on the edge of the gay area of Toronto. During Pride week we would comment at how polite the crowds were when I went to park in her apartment's underground garage. They'd all stop, sort of smile and make way for us to proceed - all very orderly and non-confrontational.

Gay males are not as aggressive and more polite - traits that put gay males at a disadvantage in competitive straight dominated sports.

If primatoligists can observe aggressive interactions among primates in the wild, I’m sure they could do the same comparing gay males and straight males at night-clubs.
I guess you'd have to control for drugs, especially alcohol, but my guess (invoking Occam's razor) is that gay males are more co-operative and more averse to conflict.

Frank Salter conducted a Jane Goodall-type study of bouncers, which I wrote about here.

Another reader writes:

I think that sometimes rules that work in America, might not transfer well into Europe. I recall a segment on SNL in the 80s that showed pictures of people and asked "Straight, Gay or European?" It was funny because things that only gay men would do in America, were done by heterosexual Europeans. Writing poetry, painting, opera, etc are all seen as gay in America, but not in Europe.

My working-class Detroit friends often make fun of me for my liking classical music. But it's the best when they say that waltzing and tangoing with women all evening is "gay" but sitting on a couch with a bunch of guys, watching a bunch of guys in tight pants slap each other on the butt and grunt, with no women in sight, is not. In modern America, "gay" is synonymous with "aesthete" (though they would probably have to look that word up.

A big example of this is dance. I have been involved in ballroom dancing for a couple of years and, at the top, the male ranks are completely dominated by Russians. In Soviet times, playing chess, dancing ballet, doing gymnastics were not seen as gay at all. So, parents make sure that their sons (and daughters) learn to dance and sing and appreciate the finer things.

I think the difference is class. In Europe, opera, ballet, waltz, etc are markers for the upper class. If your son studies ballet, that signals that you are wealthy and cultured. In contrast, in America, we don't have class markers of that type. What seems upper-class there seems soft and effeminate here. Americans strive for middle class (albeit, comfortably upper middle class) and there is then no place for opera or ballet. Football is a proper middle class activity for a boy. Ballet may be a good thing for a young aristocrat, but in America, there is no aristocracy. If your son studies ballet in America, that signals that you are trying to "turn him gay" or that something isn't quite right.

Another example you gave is articulateness. That is a marker for an elite education more than being gay (as seen in Idiocracy). But perhaps there is a connection after all. Only a man of leisure, an aristocrat, could actively be homosexual because he had the resources to be discreet and could avoid having a family.

Of course, the question remains, why does masculinity seem to be opposed to culture and civilization? Are those "womanly pursuits"? But if so, it seems that that is a very recent trend, as most of the best poetry, painting, literature, etc was created by men. Indeed, civilization was in large part created by men. Then why is it seen as unmanly to enjoy it?

For an answer to these questions, see my 2003 article in The American Conservative, "The Decline of the Metrosexual."


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

February 9, 2007

It's all in the head

I've never seen persuasive evidence that homosexual men have less muscularity or athletic ability than straight men.

If ballet was considered a sport, it would be one of the most physically demanding. If the three greatest male ballet dancers of all time were Nijinsky, Nureyev (died of AIDS, and Baryshnikov, well, you have one flagrant heterosexual and two who were either homosexual or bisexual.

Similarly, I've always wondered how the wonderful Broadway tap-dancer and choreographer Tommy Tune, winner of nine Tonys, who is 6'-6" and gay, would have done as a small forward in basketball back in the early 1960s. I suspect that if he cared about sports, he would have been a star. Instead, he cared about dancing.

So, while sex hormones (and/or sex hormone receptors) likely play a role in influencing whether a man is homosexual or heterosexual, it must be a tightly-focused effect, probably prenatal or in early childhood. It's probably not a case of how much testosterone you have in your bloodstream as an adult. For example, blogger Andrew Sullivan has been taking prescription testosterone boosters since the 1990s, and while they've made him more muscular, they certainly haven't made him straight!


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

Retired NBA journeyman comes out of the closet ...

and he turns out to be exactly the kind of player you'd expect to be gay.

As I've been pointing out for years, male homosexuals are quite rare in most professional sports, except, tellingly, for the dance-like sports such as figure skating, where gays are common.

You can tell by counting all the athletes who died from AIDS in the 1982-1994 era: many figure skaters, but only about one in each of the other major sports (except boxing, where heroin addiction, perhaps to ease the pain, is more common among washed-up fighters).

And, of course, no AIDS deaths in golf, which has almost zero appeal to male homosexuals.

So, now the media is all excited that an obscure former NBA center named John Amaechi is publishing an autobiography in which he announces he is gay, only the sixth male athlete in the history of any of the big four professional team sports. (Economist Tyler Cowen wonders, rather cluelessly, why that number is so low at Marginal Revolution. I try to educate his readers in the comments.)

What's interesting about Amaechi is that he exactly fits my model -- that sports are most obsessively interesting to the most masculine little boys, who are the ones least likely to grow up to be gay -- of what kind of gay would be most likely to wind up a highly paid pro athlete: a gigantic basketball player.

Amaechi is 6'-10" and 270 pounds. There are so few men in the world that size that the NBA will take even a gay Englishman as a project and try to turn him into a productive player.

Amaechi is an interesting Barack Obama-type: born in Boston but raised in Manchester, England, his father was a Nigerian who abandoned his white mother, a doctor, when he was three. And, yes, Amaechi is … articulate. His sole distinction as an NBA player was being named to the 1999-2000 NBA All-Interview First Team. He's now pursuing a Ph.D. in child psychology and has donated lots of money and time to child charities.

Fitting my model beautifully, Amaechi was completely bored by basketball, and was only in it for the money, "earning" $9.6 million over five seasons.

He told Nigeria World that he had never played basketball until he was stopped on the street as a 6'-9" 17-year-old in England: "I wasn't really a sports fan and I didn't like sweating, or anything that puts physical pressure on me, but I just said yes. Maybe, it's because I'd played Rugby before then and I didn't like it and anything else-apart from Rugby-would do."

Basketball Digest enthused during his playing career:


Erudite Orlando center John Amaechi relishes his standing as the most unique player in the NBA

He reads books on child psychology. He visits art galleries and museums. He looks for seminars to attend when his team has an off-day on the road. He writes poetry--and he writes it well. Yes, John Amaechi plays basketball in the NBA, but he isn't really a basketball player. He is a Renaissance Man. The Orlando Magic have uncovered a real breath of fresh air.

Amaechi is bidding to become one of the better centers in the Eastern Conference this season, yet basketball actually bores him. … He would rather be sipping tea in his favorite coffee shop than scouting one of his rivals on television. His life is too short to be consumed by a game. There is little passion to his play, but a wonderful love for his life. "Basketball does not define me," he says. "It's my occupation for now, but it's not my definition." …

Although the NBA is peppered with players who are there only because it's a very lucrative profession, Amaechi might be the only one who openly admits it. "I'm going to be a better child psychologist than I ever could be a basketball player," he says, matter of factly. … Hey, I don't even like to sweat." … "I'm really not a fan of the game, and I'm not keen on this NBA lifestyle. I'm part of the NBA, but I've never been part of the NBA psyche," he says.


Not surprisingly, Amaechi's teammates were less impressed by his basketball-phobic attitude. The Salt Lake Tribune reported:


"[Teammate Jarron] Collins' memory, though, is that Amaechi wasn't just indifferent toward his job, but irritated by it and the pro sports atmosphere. "He just wasn't interested in basketball, period," Collins said. "I never knew someone who just disliked the game. I would say that everyone has different motivations to play the game of basketball. John was very clear that money was his. But it really was like, he didn't like the game. It's kind of hard if you hate it."


Nor is it surprising that, hating basketball the way he did, he was awful. Salt Lake Tribune columnist Steve Luhm explains:


"That's because John Amaechi remains one of the worst players in franchise history. … So on July 19, 2001, the Jazz signed Amaechi to a four-year, $12 million contract. Over the next two seasons - before being traded - the young Brit redefined the cliche, "Take the money and run." Amaechi took about $6 million of Larry Miller's money and didn't run . . . didn't shoot . . . didn't rebound. Looking back, the price tag for his astonishingly unproductive layover in Utah is mind-boggling. …

Oddly, Amaechi suggests the Jazz should have known his level of play might drop after he secured his first big-money million-dollar contract. "Why does the performance of so many players decline after they sign multiyear guaranteed deals?" he wrote. "It's a little thing called human nature. Plenty of guys - Karl Malone and John Stockton are the obvious examples - play hard no matter how much they make. Other guys lack the discipline. Predicting which player falls into which category is the key to scouting."

A few paragraphs later, Amaechi explained: … "The truth is Sloan and Jazz management hadn't done their research - otherwise known as scouting. They could tell you all my court tendencies, how I played the game and why I should fit into the system. But they knew nothing of my character."


Indeed.


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