August 29, 2007

Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study

A reader sends along this table from the Graduate Record Exam from ETS giving average scores by intended field of study in grad school. He includes an estimate of IQ from one of the popular conversion tables, although he didn't tell me which one.

One problem I saw was that the mean score for the Quantitative section is so much higher than for the Verbal section, and the standard deviation is also larger for Quant, that the combined scores were biased in favor of highly quantitative fields. So, I added three more columns on the right that show difference fro the mean in standard deviations and just take the average for verbal and quantitative compared to their separate means. That seems fair, since there's no evidence that verbal intelligence correlates lower with general intelligence, and it may well be the best surrogate for the g factor. So, that's how I sorted it, which moves philosophy up into second place behind physics.

That reminds me of how I wrote a review of a book by David Stove in 1999 making gentle fun of philosophy (well, maybe not that gentle: I referred to the "uselessness of philosophy"). I received a number of superbly articulate and intensely argued emails telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. You'll notice I've drawn in my horns on this topic ever since!

This table may not be fair to business students since perhaps the better ones tend to take the GMAT to apply to MBA schools.

Graduate Record Examination Scores






Mean

465

584






Standard Deviation

117

149







Verbal

Quant

Sum

IQ

Verbal SD

Quant SD

Avg. SD

Physics & astronomy

533

736

1269

133

0.58

1.02

0.80

Philosophy

590

638

1228

129

1.07

0.36

0.72

Mathematical Sciences

502

733

1235

130

0.32

1.00

0.66

Materials Engineering

494

727

1221

129

0.25

0.96

0.60

Economics

503

706

1209

128

0.32

0.82

0.57

Chemical Engineering

485

726

1211

128

0.17

0.95

0.56

Other Engineering

493

714

1207

128

0.24

0.87

0.56

Mechanical Engineering

469

724

1193

126

0.03

0.94

0.49

Other Humanities & Art

563

599

1162

124

0.84

0.10

0.47

Physical Sciences

486

697

1183

125

0.18

0.76

0.47

Engineering

468

719

1187

126

0.03

0.91

0.47

Electrical Eng

459

726

1185

126

(0.05)

0.95

0.45

Banking & finance

467

711

1178

125

0.02

0.85

0.43

Chemistry

486

680

1166

124

0.18

0.64

0.41

Computer & Infor Sci

466

701

1167

124

0.01

0.79

0.40

Civil Engineering

457

700

1157

124

(0.07)

0.78

0.36

Religion & Theory

541

589

1130

121

0.65

0.03

0.34

Industrial Engineering

440

707

1147

123

(0.21)

0.83

0.31

Earth, Atmos & Mar. Sci

495

636

1131

121

0.26

0.35

0.30

English language & lit

560

553

1113

120

0.81

(0.21)

0.30

Humanities & arts

545

566

1111

120

0.68

(0.12)

0.28

Arts-History, theory, crit

539

572

1111

120

0.63

(0.08)

0.28

Biological Sciences

491

631

1122

121

0.22

0.32

0.27

Political Science

524

588

1112

120

0.50

0.03

0.27

Foreign languages & lit

531

574

1105

119

0.56

(0.07)

0.25

Anthropology & Archeology

533

569

1102

119

0.58

(0.10)

0.24

History

542

557

1099

119

0.66

(0.18)

0.24

Library & Archival Sciences

536

542

1078

117

0.61

(0.28)

0.16

Architecture

475

610

1085

118

0.09

0.17

0.13

Natural Sciences -Other

474

598

1072

117

0.08

0.09

0.09

Secondary

485

578

1063

116

0.17

(0.04)

0.07

Social Sciences

487

565

1052

115

0.19

(0.13)

0.03

Agriculture

458

592

1050

115

(0.06)

0.05

0.00

Arts-Performance & studio

488

553

1041

114

0.20

(0.21)

-0.01

Life Sciences

462

581

1043

114

(0.03)

(0.02)

-0.02

Sociology

488

545

1033

114

0.20

(0.26)

-0.03

Other business

444

599

1043

114

(0.18)

0.10

-0.04

Business

442

592

1034

114

(0.20)

0.05

-0.07

Psychology

472

545

1017

113

0.06

(0.26)

-0.10

Higher

464

548

1012

112

(0.01)

(0.24)

-0.13

Communications

470

533

1003

111

0.04

(0.34)

-0.15

Curriculum & Instruction

459

546

1005

111

(0.05)

(0.26)

-0.15

Health & medical sciences

447

552

999

111

(0.15)

(0.21)

-0.18

Other social Science

465

527

992

110

0.00

(0.38)

-0.19

Business admin & mgmt.

438

561

999

111

(0.23)

(0.15)

-0.19

Education

449

534

983

110

(0.14)

(0.34)

-0.24

Accounting

408

585

993

110

(0.49)

0.01

-0.24

Evaluation & Research

450

530

980

109

(0.13)

(0.36)

-0.25

Public Administration

453

515

968

109

(0.10)

(0.46)

-0.28

Other Education

439

532

971

109

(0.22)

(0.35)

-0.29

Elementary

442

526

968

108

(0.20)

(0.39)

-0.29

Administration

426

522

948

107

(0.33)

(0.42)

-0.37

Home Economics

435

501

936

106

(0.26)

(0.56)

-0.41

Special

431

502

933

106

(0.29)

(0.55)

-0.42

Student Counseling

427

500

927

105

(0.32)

(0.56)

-0.44

Early Childhood

418

497

915

104

(0.40)

(0.58)

-0.49

Social Work

428

466

894

103

(0.32)

(0.79)

-0.55

***Permalink/Comments***

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

August 28, 2007

What's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?

The famous sunk cost fallacy is a particularly popular justification for throwing good money and blood after bad in a war like Iraq. But the U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam during Watergate and its aftermath is a clear example of of the lesser known converse to the sunk cost fallacy.

In 1974, it was clear that
South Vietnam's survival hadn't been worth the sunk cost we had expended during 1961-1973. Yet, sunk costs are sunk. What we needed to think about were marginal costs. The events of 1972, in which American airpower (finally made effective by the mass use of laser-guided smart bombs) and South Vietnamese manpower had turned back a massive North Vietnamese mechanized invasion (which, in itself, showed that we had finally largely defeated the indigenous guerilla movement) at the cost of only 300 Americans killed in action for all of 1972 would seem to show that the marginal cost to America of giving South Vietnam a fair shot at surviving the next North Vietnamese offensive. Yet, being sick of Vietnam, we failed to focus on the affordable marginal cost and got hung up emotionally on the catastrophic sunk cost.

The NVA tried a tentative offensive in December 1974, following the Democrats midterm election triumphs, found that the
US wouldn't provide air support, so launched a massive offensive in March 1975. The South Vietnamese collapsed about as quickly as France in 1940.

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

A job Americans just won't do!

It dawns on Matthew Yglesias that if border enforcement succeeded in driving up wages for the unskilled, some jobs wouldn't be economical to do anymore. But, he doesn't go far enough:

An early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" takes place in the office of an English colonial administrator in India. To stay cool, he had a big fan over his head flapped by a servant via a string attached to the sitting servant's toe. That's pretty awesome! If wages weren't so damn high here in America, I could have my own Untouchable toe-fanning servant too, instead of having to use my boring, totally unawesome electric fan. I could impress all my friends. (Well, maybe not the friends I already have, but if I had enough servants, I could assign some of them to get me new friends who would be impressed.)

Think of all the other hundreds of millions of jobs that could be created in America if wages fell to 19th Century Indian levels!

Of course, I couldn't actually afford to pay my toe-fanning flunky the full cost of what it would take for him and his family to live in America, but I believe the externalities of my servant's cost of living should be borne by the public at large, not by me. Thus, my worker's kids should get free schooling, the whole family should get free health care at the emergency room, his tenement should get fire and police protection, he should drive without car insurance, etc. Why shouldn't I cost shift my conveniences on to everybody else?


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

August 27, 2007

Law School Affirmative Action

Gail Herriot writes in the Wall Street Journal:


Affirmative Action Backfires
Have racial preferences reduced the number of black lawyers?

BY GAIL HERIOT
Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.

Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you--or anyone else--to know.

Take William Kidder, a
University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for these data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens--university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders--have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.

If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know. ...

As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.

Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.

The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.

Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true--that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.

Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.

Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.

The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.

Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.

Mr. Sander has his critics--some thoughtful, some just strident--but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.

Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash--neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.

Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?

A friend of mine wasted a decade of his life going to law school and working as a hospital orderly while flunking the bar exam nine or ten times before giving up. If he'd become a salesman out of college, he might have been making six figures by then.

For blacks, the 43% of black law students who never pass the bar exam represent a well-above average group who could have used their 20s to do something more productive.

Speaking of academic affirmative action, a reader writes regarding Barack Obama's fluctuating personality:



I would be willing to bet a small amount of money that Obama's book was an outgrowth of his college and grad school admissions essays rather than a reflection of reality and hence of cognitive issues. However, I also agree that if you do not take into consideration the fascinating warping of reality that the college admissions process engenders, he might seem like a basket case.


That makes a lot of sense. That reminds me of an earlier reader's comment on Obama's book:


Everyone who gets into Harvard Law School has to have The Rap.

They have to have the story of teen angst, commitment to healing the world, good deeds, and preferably a healthy dose of some sort of conflict in the real world that gave them some special insight into human nature that makes them unique and diverse. Not TOO conflicted, however, since a felony conviction will prevent you from becoming a lawyer.

In my class, a year after Obama arrived, there was The Photojournalist from
Nicaragua, who saw human suffering and experienced Life and Death first hand. There was also The Fly Fisherman, a guy who graduated from college and fly fished across the USA for a couple years, hitchhiking, living in the wilds, experiencing Water and the Land closehand and coming to a more true and full appreciation of Man and Nature.

Obama's autobiography is a book-length
Harvard Law School Rap. It has the manufactured conflict, the manufactured struggling, the manufactured multiculturalism with a smidgen of Tragic Mulatto and Man Torn Between Two Cultures, etc. Of course no one in the admissions office ever challenges any individual's Rap since no one has the time, energy or enthusiasm. Think of it the same way you think of a fifty word High Concept movie pitch, like those studio scenes at the beginning of The Player.

Having expanded his Rap with more local color to make his book, all he has done is dig himself a deeper hole of deceit. Harvard won't fact-check student admission essays, but reporters will.


Let's try to re-engineer the getting into the Ivy League process from Obama's point of view. He wants to get into all these fancy colleges with affirmative action programs, such as Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School. But is he really authentically African-American enough to get a boost from the Admissions Committee?

Although everybody talks about diversity in general all the time, the only kind of diversity that really interests white people are blacks. Look at the faltering Presidential campaign of Bill Richardson. He's a governor, he has a resume a lot like the first George W. Bush's, and he's 3/4ths Mexican (the other 1/4th is upper crust WASP) and grew up in Mexico City for the first 13 years of his life. And nobody in the media cares because he's not black like Obama.

If Obama was growing up today, he'd figure out that although the elite colleges talk about diversity as if they mean they're lifting up out of the ghettoes the great-great-grandchildren of the slaves, the truth is that they've pretty much given up on urban African-American males who aren't athletes, as -- as Harvard's Jamaican and Jewish Lani Guinier (who herself looks like the late Gilda Radner's half-sister) has documented. Ivy Leagues blacks are increasingly West Indian or African or European or mixed race or all of the above. For example, when
Princeton decided to boost their African-American studies reputation, they expensively raided Harvard for philosopher Anthony Appiah, who is the grandson of the famous 1940s British Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps. But, hey, he's sorta black (via his Ghanian prince father), so that's good enough!

But back then, Obama might well have worried that he wasn't really "black" enough to impress the admissions committees. First, his Mom was white. Second, his Dad wasn't the descendent of slaves, he was the son of a prosperous Kenyan landowner. Third, his Dad abandoned him as an infant and he was brought up by white relatives and a little bit by an Indonesian guy. (Now, you might think that
Indonesia is really diverse, but, trust me, nobody in America cares about Indonesia at all.) Fourth, he was a preppie from paradise. Hawaii is one place where the one-drop rule of determining race doesn't apply, so -- horrors! -- Honolulu Obama might actually think of himself more as being mixed than as being black!

So, you could imagine the thoughts going through his head when sat down to write his
Columbia and Harvard Law application essays.

On the other hand, he really did walk the black activist walk, moving to
Chicago for a few years to try to organize inner city blacks to get more goodies out of the government. And he has spent 20 years sitting in a pew at a leftist Afrocentrist church listening to the Rev. Wright stick it to whitey in his sermons. I've never seen much evidence that Obama, who spent his early 20s reading Nietzsche, believes in all that "I am the redeemer and the life" business. He's pretty upfront about his having to join a church because blacks don't trust ambitious atheists. And, he genuinely seems to get a major charge out of the racial exclusiveness and solidarity that he finds at his racialist church.


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

Did Obama undergo Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

A reader has sent me a theory about why Sen. Barack Obama's personality seems so different today than when he wrote his first autobiography in 1995. While highly speculative, his idea sounds not implausible.

Since I don't watch television news, I'd never seen Barack Obama on video until after I read his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Thus, I developed a rather different perspective on Obama's personality than the multitudes whose opinion was molded by seeing him on TV. Rather than seeing him as "comfortable in his own skin" (a phrase common among those who know him from TV), his memoir showed a supremely uncomfortable 33-year-old who was "a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. ...Obama has a depressive’s fine eye for the disillusioning detail. ... The book’s chief weakness is that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless flavor.)"

Now, Waugh was an infinitely more interesting person than the man who was Prime Minister three times during Waugh's early career from 1925-37, yet who is barely remember today. (Can you name that Tory PM? Waugh is now mentioned about 3.5 times more on the Internet than that Prime Minister.) Waugh was a man of near genius, but I've never heard of anyone ever considering him as a potential Prime Minister. The idea seems ludicrous. And that's about the same impression I took away from Obama's first memoir -- a talented and highly interesting man, but not at all what you'd look for in a President.

Lots of people who hadn't read Obama's autobiography were outraged by my article about his book. They'd seen him on TV, where he looked very Presidential, so his book couldn't possibly be like I said it was.

Kevin Drum of the liberal Washington Monthly, however, plowed all the way through Obama's first book and reported back similarly, although Drum was less sympathetical and more distrustful than I was, but we seemed to be in agreement that twelve years ago Obama hadn't portrayed himself as the kind of emotionally stable individual you'd want in the White House. Drum wrote:


Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply making the beginning writer's mistake of thinking that the way to convey emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going on?...

There's just something very peculiar about the book. I can't put my finger entirely on what it is, but for all the overwrought language that Obama employs on page after page, there's very little insight into what he believes and what really makes him tick. It was almost as if Obama was admitting to his moodiness and angst less as a way of letting us know who he is than as a way of guarding against having to really tell us. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than before.


But, clearly, Obama isn't today the person portrayed in his first book. For one thing, he now has a mild sense of humor. Perhaps he never was who he claimed in 1995 to be -- we now know his depiction of his Hawaiian days was quite distorted.

Or, perhaps he has changed. One possibility is that he goes through moderate hypomanic and depressive cycles. This is quite common among high achievers. The secret to winning your place in history is often to have an up cycle coincide by luck with a time when intense action is needed.

But, another possibility is that he's done something to improve himself. A reader writes:


You should catch the Daily Show at 11. Not so much what Obama has to say, but just watching how comfortable he is in his own skin. I thought about you when Stewart showed him the headline, "Angry Obama the Pothead Is Not How They Remember Him In Hawaii", his reaction was deep and genuine laughter, with no sign of self-consciousness or defensiveness.

From use of a throwaway use of the phrase, "push back against the habits of thought", I think I know why "Angry Obama" seems so mellow, he's gone through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I'd guess) and I think his shrink did the trick.

Habits of thought is a buzzword that you'll hear from CBT and Positive Psychology terms just as (to put it in California terms) someone talking about Thetans is probably a Scientologist. …

As for "habits of thought", here's how the CBT folks use the term, "But Dr. Seligman believes that explanatory style can be changed. In a recent study of depressed patients he found that cognitive therapy - a technique that identifies and corrects erroneous habits of thought -changed the style of the patients from pessimistic to optimistic, and that the change persisted one year after therapy ended."

A google of "habits of thought" and "Obama" shows he used the expression in his second book, The Audacity of Hope:


"each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws - the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip."


It seems to me that between book 1 and book 2, Barry had his head worked on and it took. In this interview, he comes across as a good guy.


CBT isn't Freudian witchdoctoring. It has a good track record of helping people with moderate emotional problems get themselves out of the ruts they're stuck in. The Wikipedia article on it says:


A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapy based on modifying cognitions, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors, with the aim of influencing disturbed emotions. The general approach developed out of behavior modification, Cognitive Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and has become widely used to treat neurosis psychopathology, including mood disorders and anxiety disorders. The particular therapeutic techniques vary according to the particular kind of client or issue, but commonly include keeping a diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting. Relaxation and distraction techniques are also commonly included. CBT is widely accepted as an evidence and empirically based, cost-effective psychotherapy for many disorders and psychological problems. It is sometimes used with groups of people as well as individuals, and the techniques are also commonly adapted for self-help manuals and, increasingly, for self-help software packages.


If Obama has been helped by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or something else, he should tell the public. His endorsement could do a lot of good by encouraging others to try it.

If he had therapy, the most likely point was in the 18 months following his defeat by Bobby Rush when he challenged the Congressman in the 2000 primary. Obama's Harvard credentials had played well in the Hyde Park district he represented in the Illinois legislature, but more typical blacks in Rush's South Side district found Obama stuck up and unlikable. In his latest book, in the next sentence after mentioning "habits of thought," Obama goes on:


In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It's a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think -- endemic, too, in the American character -- and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Lyndon Johnson, who knew much about both politics and restlessness, once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly -- the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you'd planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed ...

Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.


Sounds like Obama was doing some emotional therapy -- either self-directed or with a counselor. From a Google search, it doesn't seem like anyone has ever raised the topic of whether Obama has had therapy, but it hardly seems unlikely in someone so introspective.

We have a destructive prejudice in America against politicians admitting to getting any help for emotional problems, even though roughly half of all Presidents appear to have had one kind of mental problem or another (e.g., Lincoln and depression).

Indeed, perhaps Obama's beautiful but disturbing first book chronicling his obsession with his father was written under the influence of some quasi-Freudian therapist who demanded that he obsess at vast length over his parents, while his more bland but reassuring second book is the outcome of a quick, practical course of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or something similar. This is 100% speculation, of course, but it would help answer the basic question about why Obama's self presentation of his personality changed so much from age 33 to age 42.

Obama goes on:


And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate.


Obviously, the BS meter here is running about 9.5 on a 1 to 10 scale: Obama talks about how he had come to realize one of his flaws was "restlessness," how he had learned to accept his limits and the satisfactions of his limited life ... and then almost immediately he decides to run for the U.S. Senate! And then for the Presidency! And when he's term limited out of the White House after eight years, he'll convert to Catholicism and run for Pope (unless there's an opening in the Galactic Overlord job).

But there's nothing unique among politicians about Obama's overweening ambition. They're all like that. Fifteen years ago in The United States of Ambition, Alan Ehrenhalt asked about our political leaders: Who chooses these people? His answer was: They choose themselves.

And we like that. As Gen. Patton said, Americans love a winner. We pay lip service to having our heroes lead a balanced life, but we mostly just want them to win, damn the consequences. I've seen a million movies in which the hero is striving so hard that his wife complains that he's missing all his son's Little League games. So, then, there's a montage of him playing catch with his son and cheering him on when he hits a homer in Little League, and then our hero goes back out and wins the really big prize and gets a standing ovation.

Same with Obama -- he inserts a montage in his book about spending more time at home watching his daughters grow while exercising and appreciating how the earth rotates around the sun ... and then he's off on the Road to the White House! We love that kind of hypocrisy in our heroes.

So, if Obama had help getting his head screwed on right after his depressing pratfall in 2000, he shouldn't keep it a secret. Telling us about it could help a lot of people who need help.


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

August 26, 2007

Monkey misery

Not from Across Difficult Country: Although it sounds like it's from Carter van Carter's website, this is from the BBC:


Monkey misery for Kenyan women villagers
By Juliet Njeri BBC News, Nachu, central
Kenya

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

Earlier this month, local MP Paul Muite urged the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help contain their aggressive behaviour.

But Mr Muite caused laughter when he told parliament that the monkeys had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village. But this is exactly what the women in the
village of Nachu, just south-west of Kikuyu, are complaining about.

They estimate there are close to 300 monkeys invading the farms at dawn. They eat the village's maize, potatoes, beans and other crops. And because women are primarily responsible for the farms, they have borne the brunt of the problem, as they try to guard their crops.

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

Nachu's women have tried wearing their husbands' clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

"When we come to chase the monkeys away, we are dressed in trousers and hats, so that we look like men," resident Lucy Njeri told the BBC News website. "But the monkeys can tell the difference and they don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops."

In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim. "The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Mrs Njeri.

The Kenyan Wildlife Service told the BBC that it was not unusual for monkeys to harass women and be less afraid of them than men, but they had not heard of monkeys in
Kenya making sexually explicit gestures as a form of communication to humans.

The predominantly farming community is now having to receive famine relief food.


Thank God for famine relief! Otherwise, these women's husbands would have to get off their duffs and scare away the damn monkeys. And that just wouldn't be culturally appropriate.

Considering how frequently Bono, Bishop Mugabe, Bob Geldof, Tony Blair, Angelina Jolie, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs and other worthies get together to bask in their collective celebrityhood discuss how to alleviate Africa's poverty problem, you might think that somebody, somewhere would have mentioned in the press the Sailer Solution: African men should start working as hard as African women already work. But it never seems to come up. (My wife suggests that Oprah, who has funded a school for girls in
South Africa, might eventually spills the beans.)


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