"Gattaca"

From my new VDARE.com column on Jim Manzi's National Review cover story "Escaping the Tyranny of Genes:"

From Manzi’s vague article, it's difficult to figure out what he fears. But I would guess it is something like the silly 1997 eugenic dystopia sci-fi flick Gattaca. (Tagline: "There Is No Gene for the Human Spirit.")

Weirdly, Manzi argues that it would be okay to establish a scientific totalitarian state:

"Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably, so that we can live in Woodrow Wilson's 'perfected, co-ordinated beehive.'"

Nevertheless, we shouldn't, yet, because science hasn't become accurate enough:

"Until then, however, we need to keep stumbling forward in freedom as best we can."

Well, that's a relief!

Although Manzi can't seem to find any living human beings who advocate converting American into a dictatorial scientocracy, he still spends much of his article laboriously (but pointlessly) documenting that the human sciences aren't advanced enough at present to implement Gattaca. It's a "straw man argument" raised exponentially to the point of self-parody.

My main memory of "Gattaca" is that astronaut training in the future will apparently consist of long rows of well-groomed young men dressed like extras from Brideshead Revisted typing away under the direction of Gore Vidal. That's what I remember -- lots and lots of typing.

Here's some of the film's screamingly repressed typing-centric dialogue:

Gore Vidal: "You keep your work station so clean, Jerome."

Ethan Hawke: "It's next to godliness. Isn't that what they say?"

Gore Vidal: "Godliness. I reviewed your flight plan. Not one error in a million keystrokes. Phenomenal. It's right that someone like you is taking us to Titan."

The filmmakers must have pitched "Gattaca" like this:

"It's like a gay version of 'The Right Stuff' crossed with "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing."

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

"Escaping the Tyranny of Steve Sailer (and a Few Other People You’ve Never Heard of Either)"

I have a new VDARE.com column responding to Jim Manzi's "Escaping the Tyranny of Genes" cover story in the June 2, 2008 National Review. I write:

Software executive Jim Manzi warns darkly of powerful (yet unnamed) "genetic maximalists" who threaten human freedom in ominous (but unspecified) ways.

That's because these “popularizers” unscientifically ride the sociobiological "reigning presumption of academic America" in a climate in which "mass media are inundated with this biology-explains-all ideology."

Unfortunately, Manzi never identifies what planet in what year he's describing: Htrae in the year 8002 D.A. maybe?

Manzi proclaims:

"If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social Darwinism."

Manzi then recounts the stereotypical litany of early 20th Century horrors from eugenics to the Holocaust. ...

Who, exactly, are these dangerous proponents of "geneticism" who are currently running amok? National Review gives Manzi 3000 words, but he doesn't come up with any names more recent than Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was born in 1841.

Perhaps Manzi is alluding to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who indeed mentioned "the linkage of race and IQ" last year. Yet, as you will recall (although Manzi and the NR editors seem to have forgotten), Watson was not immediately elected Big Brother. Instead, in our world, he was subjected to a Two Minute Hate and kicked to the curb by the medical research laboratory he had built up for four decades.

[MORE]

Over at The American Scene, in the comments, I have a lot of fun at Manzi's expense as I slowly pin him down to explaining exactly what his article is supposed to mean. I keep asking him, Who are these tyrants-in-the-making?" After a three-day-weekend, I've finally extracted an answer from him that's hilarious enough that it may be worth your time reading through 60 comments.

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

Razib on Crotty's cow-centric theory of history

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon on Google Books part of When Histories Collide by the late Irish farmer turned economist Raymond Crotty. This book, unfinished up on the author's death in 1994, presents a cattle-centered history of the world, with an emphasis on the deep roots of individualistic capitalism in Western Europe. It's of particular interest because it marks an early milestone in including divergent recent evolution in history -- Crotty focuses closely upon the vast consequences of the emergence of a mutation for lactose tolerance, allowing adults to drink milk in some parts of the world. At GNXP, Razib has summarized the book -- it doesn't quite live up to its ambitions, but it deserves to be much better known in the U.S. than it is.

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

"Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"

My review in The American Conservative from a few months ago:

Although the dialogue in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is widely considered the funniest of any American novel of recent decades, the movie business has never been able to get its act together to film it. Yet, Confederacy's 28 years (and counting) in Development Hell pales beside the limbo in which languished Winifred Watson's 1938 novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a Bertie Wooster and Jeeves-style farce for two female lead characters.

Universal once planned to film it with Billie Burke (Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz") as Miss Pettigrew. Then, Pearl Harbor scrambled the schedule and the adaptation was shelved (as was Watson's writing career when her house was lost in the Blitz). "I wish the Japanese had waited six months," Watson said in 2000 at age 94, when Miss Pettigrew was republished to enthusiastic reviews.

If Watson had survived to 101, she could have finally seen her concoction on the screen, with long-faced Frances McDormand (who won the Oscar as the pregnant sheriff in her husband Joel Coen's "Fargo") as the dour and dowdy servant Miss Pettigrew. Amy Adams (who, after last summer's Disney musical "Enchanted," has finally arrived at age 33 as the starlet of the moment) plays her ditzy employer, a gold-digging nightclub chanteuse named Delysia Lafosse.

Guinevere Pettigrew is the anti-Mary Poppins, a London governess who has been fired so many times for trying to impose her Victorian morals on her 1930s streamline moderne employers, that, half-starved, she descends to finagling a job she's utterly unqualified for as the social secretary to the ambitious American actress. Delysia has 24 hours to decide among three men: her gangster boss in whose lavish art deco flat she's living, a star-making theatrical producer with whom she's sleeping, and a true-hearted but flat-broke pianist whom she's still loving.

Within hours, Miss Pettigrew is surprised to find herself stage-managing Miss Lafosse's complicated love life so adeptly that the rest of the smart set, such as salon-owner Shirley Henderson (doing an impression of Jennifer Jason-Leigh's impression of Dorothy Parker), is turning to the servitor for advice on their romantic entanglements.

Of course, this plot only makes sense if you assume that all of these characters straight out of P.G. Wodehouse's novels have had their expectations of what to expect from the hired help molded by reading Bertie and Jeeves books. Miss Pettigrew, however, is not a Spinoza-reading superman like the beloved butler, but a troubled soul whose heart has never recovered from the fiancé she lost in the Great War. Fortunately, some musical comedy plotting of the kind that Wodehouse churned out when he wrote the stories underlying many early Broadway shows ensues, and everybody winds up with her true love.

The BBC director Bharat Nalluri, who was born in India and grew up in Newcastle, might seem like an odd choice to direct this period piece, but nobody loves Wodehousian trifles more than Indians. Back in 1992, before the World Wide Web, I was involved in starting up a Usenet discussion group, alt.fan.Wodehouse. Possibly half the Wodehouse fans had Indians names.

Nalluri borrows the entire visual and musical style of his film from the overlooked but dazzling 2004 comedy "Bright Young Things," an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies by Stephen Fry, who played Jeeves in the delightful 1990s BBC series. Farces, however, need superb timing and Nalluri never quite gets "Miss Pettigrew" firing on all cylinders. And because the setting -- café society London between the Wars -- is so familiar from the grand masters, Wodehouse and Waugh, the screenplay needs a little more expertise than it musters.

Fortunately, the movie's shortcomings don't matter when Amy Adams is on screen. McDormand chooses to underplay her role, leaving space for the All-American strawberry blonde Adams, who received an Oscar nomination as the over-enthusiastic country girl in 2005's "Junebug," to scene-steal nonstop.

On paper, the amount of energy Adams puts into her role doesn't seem that remarkable: she's on-screen for one or two minutes per day of shooting -- nice work if you can get it. And yet, in contrast to stage-acting where actors are propelled along by the audience's appreciation, film-acting is an excruciating ordeal of hurry-up-and-wait. It's precisely the glacial pace of shooting a movie that's the reason so few people can deliver on celluloid the star power of Amy Adams.

Rated PG-13 for some partial nudity and innuendo.

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

Brazil v. Russia

It's interesting to compare the number of famous individuals born in two vast peripheral countries, Brazil and Russia. Charles Murray's 2003 tabulation of the 4002 most eminent names in the arts and sciences up through 1950 lists 135 individuals born in Russia versus only one born in Brazil (composer Villa-Lobos).

The two countries aren't really that comparable, though -- Brazil's population in 1900 was 17 million, compared to Russia's population of around 130 million.

On the other hand, there really weren't many famous creative figures in Russia before Pushkin's emergence in the 1820s, and then there were many world-famous writers; then, a little later, composers; and, finally, painters.

So, perhaps we're about to enter a new golden age of Brazilian artists and scientists. Stranger things have happened in the history of culture.

You can see one source of pro-Russian bias in that there are eight writers listed who were born before Pushkin, yet I haven't heard of any of them. I suspect that they get mentioned a lot in the reference books that Murray used to build his lists because scholars want to mention the predecessors of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov in order to make a coherent story out of the history of Russian literature by providing the big names with predecessors who influenced them. In contrast, since there aren't any Brazilian writers who have made themselves world famous, there is no need to clutter up references books with the names of lesser earlier Brazilian writers who influenced them.

Fame breeds fame and obscurity breeds obscurity.

In case you are wondering, there are only 11 Portuguese on the list of 4002, one scientist and 10 writers, mostly of the wealthy 16th Century, with Camoens being the best known.

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

Now on DVD: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

Here's my review from earlier in the year in The American Conservative of the Oscar-nominated film about the quadriplegic who dictated his autobiography to his secretary by blinking in code. I believe I was the only American movie reviewer to mention the controversy in Europe over whether or not the film was based on a fraud. I'm certainly the only film critic to create a model in Excel to test the plausibility of the plot.

Despite deserved Oscar nominations for Best Direction, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Cinematography, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," a sophisticated Triumph of the Human Spirit movie, hasn't yet been able to break out of the art house ghetto. Its ponderous title, which is both too literary and too literal (and mistranslated to boot), can't have helped help.

The film is based on a charming memoir written, incredibly, by a man able to move only his left eyelid. Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 43-year-old editor of the fashion magazine Elle, suffered a massive brain stem stroke while test-driving next year's model BMW. When he awoke from his coma, he was informed that he suffered, permanently, from "maladie de l'emmuré vivant," or "locked-in syndrome."

The unfortunate title (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon in this subtitled film's original French) comes from Bauby's metaphorical contrast of his body, which felt like it was encased in one of those vintage pressurized diving suits -- not a "diving bell," which is an open-bottomed structure -- with his mind, which could float like a butterfly through his luxurious memories. He could even relish new sights and (being French) smells. Indeed, The Diving Bell is an ode to the French genius for enjoying small pleasures.

"Blink" would have been a simpler, more evocative title because his speech therapist taught him to communicate using his eyelid. She would repeat the alphabet (re-sorted in order of frequency of use in French) until he blinked his one good eye to stop her at the right letter.

Director Julian Schnabel, the New York artist turned moviemaker, employs prodigious imagination to liven up the proceedings, filming much of it from Bauby's perspective. Nevertheless, "The Diving Bell's" pace is necessarily languid. With time on my hands, I wondered if Morse Code, which POW Jeremiah Denton used to blink "t-o-r-t-u-r-e" when displayed on North Vietnamese television, wouldn't have been faster.

Bauby composed his text in his head each morning, memorized it, and then dictated it to a secretary for three hours per day for two months. His short book of about 25,000 words was published in 1997 to rapturous reviews two days before his death.

It's a wonderful story, but is it true? Reporter Susannah Herbert has raised doubts in The Times of London, pointing out that Bauby's "secretary," the self-effacing Claude Mendibil, is a professional ghostwriter who refused to show her the original notebooks.

I calculate that to complete a first draft in two months, Bauby would have had to dictate 135 words per hour (or one letter every five or six seconds). That would be difficult, but not impossible, because Mendibil would often correctly guess many words' endings. So, I won't reject the movie's authenticity, especially because I want to believe it's true. (Certainly, though, Mendibil deserves the credit she's never claimed for the sheen of the final draft.)

One irony of the film is the attitude of veteran screenwriter Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") toward his hero: "But there was something about him and his lifestyle that I didn't like: He was indifferent to the mother of his children, and that whole glamorous Elle magazine lifestyle … is not so admirable, is it?" To emphasize the scurrilousness of Bauby's abandonment of his old mistress for his new mistress, Harwood adds a third adorable small child to the two he actually left behind.

Perhaps Harwood suspects Bauby's stroke was brought on by the favorite hobby of skinny fashionistas, but I can find no evidence online for cocaine use. Similarly, when I had cancer in 1997, acquaintances who didn't smoke would ask my wife if I did. When she'd reply, "No," they'd go away looking pensive. Everybody deep down wants to believe that the sick brought their illnesses on themselves, because that means that, if you're careful, you'll never die.

Harwood had to invent for Bauby an emotional arc from initial suicidal depression through recovery of his will to live, because his book portrays him as remarkably chipper throughout his ordeal, espousing a Nabokovian delight in the visual details he could espy from his bed and wheelchair. The film rather misses the point that as a man of fashion, and French fashion at that, Bauby believed in the moral duty of sustaining a classy facade. Thus, he insisted on being dressed each day in his own stylish clothes, noting, "If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere."

Rated PG-13 for nudity, sexual content and some language.

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

National Review on "The Fallacy of Genetic Determinism"

Blogger and software executive Jim Manzi (who, to my surprise, is not the software executive Jim Manzi who headed Lotus Development back in the days of the 1-2-3 spreadsheet) has a cover story in National Review rehashing the conventional wisdom, "Undetermined: there is danger in assuming that genes explain all." Unfalsifiability, eugenics, the Holocaust, etc etc

There's much in it that's true (e.g., "Correlation is not causality"), and maybe a thing or two that is new, but I didn't see anything significant that's new and true, and quite a bit that will be misleading to people who haven't thought hard about the issues.

I'll respond at length elsewhere.

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

Nigerians are the most educated nationality in America -- If you don't believe me, just ask them!

Somebody sent me this via email, so it has to be true:

In America, Nigerians' education pursuit is above rest
Whether driven by immigration or family, data show more earn degrees

By LESLIE CASIMIR
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Nigerian immigrants have the highest levels of education in this city and the nation, surpassing whites and Asians, according to Census data bolstered by an analysis of 13 annual Houston-area surveys conducted by Rice University.

Although they make up a tiny portion of the U.S. population, a whopping 17 percent of all Nigerians in this country held master's degrees while 4 percent had a doctorate, according to the 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 37 percent had bachelor's degrees.

To put those numbers in perspective, 8 percent of the white population in the U.S. had master's degrees, according to the Census survey. And 1 percent held doctorates. About 19 percent of white residents had bachelor's degrees. Asians come closer to the Nigerians with 12 percent holding master's degrees and 3 percent having doctorates. …

Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University who conducts the annual Houston Area Survey, suspects the percentage of Nigerian immigrants with post-graduate degrees is higher than Census data shows.

Of all the Nigerian immigrants he reached in his random phone surveys 1994 through 2007 — 45 households total — Klineberg said 40 percent of the Nigerians said they had post-graduate degrees.

"These are higher levels of educational attainment than were found in any other ... community," Klineberg said.

There are more than 12,000 Nigerians in Houston, according to the latest Census data, a figure sociologists and Nigerian community leaders say is a gross undercount. They believe the number to be closer to 100,000.

There are plenty of worthy Nigerian-Americans, but when your countrymen have blanketed the world with faxes and emails for 15 years with accounts of embezzled funds just waiting to be smuggled out of Lagos, well, you do pay a price in credibility.

Consider that the Swiss made money off their reputation for honesty (if you put your money in a Swiss bank, they'll let you have it back), while Nigerians have tried to make money off promoting the stereotype of Nigeria as so corrupt that there are piles of stolen money lying around ripe for the taking.

Skepticism aside, African immigrants to the U.S. are the cream of the crop, a big crop of 770 million people, much like Indian immigrants. A friend of mine from Cameroon came from a family in which eight of the nine children had earned advanced degrees from European or American universities. So, many of them are solid performers.

Also, as Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates have frequently complained, there's a big demand from American universities for blacks for quota purposes, and so long as you look at least part African, the admissions committees don't care whether your ancestors were slaves in America or whether your ancestors got rich selling slaves to the Europeans. Moreover, Africans tend to have less attitude than African Americans, so it's all good from the point of view of colleges desperate for "diversity" but who don't actually want to put up with African-Americans from the 'hood.

That said, I don't see much evidence that African immigrants are making the same kind of mark in the upper reaches of American academia and business that Indians are, or even that South Koreans, with only 40 million people, are.

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

Good fences make less homicidal neighbors

From the Washington Post:

Despite peace, Belfast walls are growing in size and number
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
The Associated Press

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Lee Young, 8, and Cein Quinn, 7, live barely 200 yards apart, but they have never met, and maybe never will.

Lee is Protestant, Cein a Catholic _ and their communities in Belfast's west inner city are separated by a wall called a peace line. It's nearly 40 years old and 40 feet high.

Ten years after peace was declared in Northern Ireland, one might have expected that Belfast's barriers would be torn down by now. But reality, as usual, is far messier. Not one has been dismantled. Instead they've grown in both size and number. … Instead, for dozens of front-line communities of Belfast, fences still make the best neighbors.

"The Troubles" began at these sectarian flashpoints in the late 1960s, and survive today in a legacy of mutual fear and loathing. The rate of sectarian killings has fallen to virtually zero thanks to cease-fires underpinned by IRA disarmament, and the feeling on both sides is that the barriers help keep that peace. …

In this city of 650,000, roughly half Catholic and half Protestant, only the university district and upper-class streets, chiefly on the south side, bear no clear-cut tribal identity.

There's something quite similar in Beirut, where the one street open to all ethnicities runs by the American University.

A lot of ethnic struggles aren't driven so much by mass hatred as by thugs, most of them young, who get into scrapes with the other side. In the meritocratic uplands, it all seems irrelevant. But down in the lowlands, where social ties are less determined by having unusually high IQs or particular talent, but by blood and neighborliness, the young thugs are nephews and cousins and neighbors' nephews and cousins. While they may be sons of bitches, they're our sons of bitches.

Catholic colleagues on occasion have invited him across the wall for an after-hours pint at their pub. He won't go. "You'd be afraid that they might recognize you're from the other side. Am I too tight in the eyes?" he said, referring to a stereotype of Protestant eyes supposedly being closer together.

That's the first stereotype I've heard of Belfast Prods and Taigs being even theoretically distinguishable by sight. I've always described the Northern Irish troubles as a classic racial struggle between two partly inbred extended families. They haven't been separated long enough to undergo much selection for different looks, but so what? Thinking of them like this helps you understand the situation better.

People tend to look at me like I'm crazy when I say this because everybody knows that race is only about skin color. So therefore, the Troubles have to be about religion (even though most of the active participants in the Troubles are too hung over to make it to church on Sunday morning).

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

Do Brazilians hate reading because they are so bad at it or are they so bad at reading because they hate it?

Tyler Cowen points out that in the Nation of the Future:

"Most Brazilians do not read. I don't mean they can't read, I mean they don't read for leisure so much. I was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for seven hours and did not see a single person reading a book, not once."

Various commenters chime in with similar stories.

Let's do a test to see if I have more Brazilian or Finnish regular readers. There are 192 million people in Brazil and 5 million in Finland. If you were born in Finland, post a comment with the word "Finn." If you were born in Brazil, post a comment with the word "Brazilian." But if you were brought to this particular item by a link and don't routinely visit this site, please don't participate.

Here are some amazing statistics from the big PISA international achievement test of 15 year olds in 2000 (Figure 2.3):

In Brazil, only 4% of the youths read at one of the two highest levels on a six point scale, versus 33% in the USA and 50% in top-rated Finland. Brazil is even worse than Mexico, where 7% can read at a strong level.

Brazilians, however, seem to enjoy themselves.

I suspect the future will look more and more like a combination of Brazil and the old Ottoman Empire.

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

Higher education as a pyramid scheme.

From The Atlantic, an anonymous article by a Professor X, who teaches English 101 at a couple of unselective colleges to people who can't learn to form coherent paragraphs:

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.

Much of modern higher education today has many of the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme -- Elite English professors were paid by Professor X. (via grad school tuition) to get his Ph.D. which is only good for teaching the unteachable -- except that nobody's getting rich.

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

Updated: Latest IQ brouhaha

Update: Here's Bruce's article.

Okay, everybody, it's time to all act as if we're shocked, shocked to hear that rich kids have higher IQs than poor kids on average. From the U.K. Guardian:

Student union rejects academic's IQ claims

· Paper suggests class is key to academic ability

· Findings dismissed as wrong and irresponsible

Polly Curtis, education editor

Elite universities are failing to recruit working-class students because IQ is, on average, determined by [I think they mean "correlated with"] social class, according to an academic.

Bruce Charlton, a reader in evolutionary psychiatry at Newcastle University, claims that the greater proportion of students from higher social classes at highly selective universities is not a sign of admissions prejudice but rather the result of simple meritocracy.

Student union leaders responded angrily to his claim, which was also dismissed by a minister.

Charlton's paper, reported today in Times Higher Education, says: "The UK government has spent a great deal of time and effort in asserting that universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, are unfairly excluding people from low social-class backgrounds and privileging those from higher social classes.

"Evidence to support the allegation of systematic unfairness has never been presented. Nevertheless, the accusation has been used to fuel a populist 'class war' agenda. Yet in all this debate a simple and vital fact has been missed: higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes."

He argues: "The highly unequal class distributions seen in elite universities compared with the general population are unlikely to be due to prejudice or corruption in the admissions process. On the contrary, the observed pattern is a natural outcome of meritocracy. Indeed, anything other than very unequal outcomes would need to be a consequence of non-merit-based selection methods."

The National Union of Students described the paper as "wrong-headed, irresponsible and insulting".

Gemma Tumelty, NUS president, said: "Of course, social inequality shapes people's lives long before they leave school, but the higher education sector cannot be absolved of its responsibility to ensure that students from all social backgrounds are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential ... many talented individuals from poor backgrounds are currently not given the same opportunities as those from more privileged backgrounds. This problem will not be addressed as long as academics such as Bruce Charlton are content to accept the status quo and do nothing to challenge the inherent class bias in education."

So, it's all Bruce's fault. Him and James Watson's.

Sally Hunt, of the University and College Union for acedemic [They don't call it The Grauniad for nothing!] staff, said: "It should come as little surprise that people who enjoy a more privileged upbringing have a better start in life. However, research has shown that students from state schools outperform their independent contemporaries when they reach university."

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, told the Times Higher Education that Charlton's arguments had a definite tone of "people should know their place".

Here's Bruce's homepage. I don't think his article is online yet.

Here's something Steven Pinker told me when I interviewed him in 2002 and it's truer than ever:

Q: Aren't we all better off if people believe that we are not constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose?

A: People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

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

Russian capitalists -- Doing their best to make Trotsky look prescient

From Bloomberg News:

It was the 26 toilets that triggered alarm among residents of Greenwich, Connecticut. "Who needs that many toilets?'' asked Charles Lee, who lives across the street from where Russian millionaire Valery Kogan proposes building a 54,000-square-foot (5,000-square- meter) mansion with that much plumbing.

Kogan, chairman of East Line Group, which operates Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport, plans to raze the 20,000- square-foot home on the site, which he bought in 2005. Kogan and his wife, Olga, seek to erect a house with two wings and extensive subterranean space, including room to park 12 cars.

``It looks like they want to duplicate the Winter Palace here in Greenwich,'' said Leslie McElwreath, 45, who lives one street over. ``It'll be an eyesore.''

McElwreath, Lee and other opponents are urging the Greenwich Zoning and Planning Commission to deny a permit when it votes this evening on what would be the largest single-family home built since the town began reviewing plans in 2001. A hundred and seventy-five people signed a petition against the project.

Greenwich, 27 miles (43 kilometers) north of New York, is the hedge-fund capital of the U.S. More than 60 funds occupy 80 percent of its commercial property, according to real-estate broker CB Richard Ellis. The Greenwich Association of Realtors puts the average price of a home in the town of 65,000 at $2.8 million.

Here in Los Angeles, the Executive Director of the city's Los Angeles World Airports department, which manages both the vast LAX and the lesser Ontario airports, makes $305,000 annually. I don't think she can afford to build a 54,000 square foot house in a foreign country. And yet, LA's airports somehow continue to operate without the boss being paid enough to build a palace. If only we had privatized LAX, then the owner of the company that would run LAX could be building colossal homes around the world to flee to when angry Angelenos finally come after him with pitchforks and torches.

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

Is Webb the solution to Obama's Scots-Irish problem?

Obama continues to do very well in Puritan-descended states, such as Oregon (with the exception of Massachusetts, where the bloom is off the David Axelrod / Deval Patrick rose), but yesterday he got annihilated in another Scots-Irish state, Kentucky. So, that makes Virginia Senator and hillbilly intellectual James Webb all the more plausible as a running mate. It would certainly be the ticket with the best writers on it in a long time.

On the other hand, the idea that Barack Obama might put Jim Webb on the path to being President someday is pretty funny, although probably not to Barack Obama. (What would Rev. Wright say?) So it probably won't happen.

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

English rules the multiplex abroad

It's a little frightening to contemplate how similar movie tastes are all over the world. It's like some Tooby & Cosmides theory come to life. Aren't there any cultural differences? Does Hollywood really have the formula for what people everywhere want to see? Or do they just want to see it because Hollywood makes it?

The extent of English-language dominance of the movie market is quite extraordinary. I looked up the top 150 movies in 2007 in terms of box office outside of North America, and 93% of the revenue came from English language movies. The top 30 grossers outside of the American/Canadian market were all English language films.

Not all of these Top 30 movies were American: "Mr. Bean's Holiday," which only made $33 million on this side of the pond but earned $196 million in the rest of the world, is basically a British movie. And some of the others might be considered Anglospheric rather than American, such as the latest "Harry Potter." And lots of the talent involved, such as many cameramen, are from non-English-speaking countries. Still, all of the top 30 earners abroad were made in the English language.

The top of the overseas box office list (the top four were the latest sequels of "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "Spider-Man," and "Shrek") is very similar to the top of the domestic rankings. "The Golden Compass" did much better overseas ($302 million) than in North America ($70 million), but there weren't many exceptions like that.

Number 31 in overseas box office was the first non-English film, the South Korean horror flick "The Host," which took in $87 million abroad, but $65 million of that came from South Koreans, who must really, really like that film.

Next came the Oscar winning French musical drama "La Vie en Rose," the Spanish horror movie "The Orphanage," the German drama "The Lives of Others," and the Taiwanese (Chinese? Hong Kong?) arthouse sex film "Lust, Caution." There were a lot of Indian films farther down the list, but the highest ranking one was "Om Shanti Om" at #78.

Conversely, the top money-making foreign-language films in North America was the excellent German film about the East German secret police, The Lives of Others, with $11 million, followed by the French Edith Piaf biopic, "La Vie en Rose," whose star Marion Cotillard won a deserved Best Actress Oscar.

The English-language movies that do worst abroad relative to their North American performance tend to be comedies, especially African-American comedies, especially ones with the words "Tyler Perry's" in the title -- his two 2007 films took in over 98% of the worldwide revenue domestically.

On the other hand, while foreigners don't like African-American movies, they like African-American actors fine, especially if they are named "Will Smith." His "I Am Legend," a remake of Charlton Heston's "Omega Man" about the seeming last man on Earth and thus a Will Smith Actathon, took in $328 million overseas.

I was listening to an NPR story on how Bollywood producers often remake American blockbusters without paying royalties, such as a shot-for-shot ripoff of Will Smith's "Hitch." The Hollywood studios don't even bother suing. Their attitude appears to be:

Whatever happens we have got
Mister Will Smith and they have not.

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

Sons of Iraq? Or Baghdad's Sopranos?

From the LA Times:

Sons of Iraq? Or Baghdad's Sopranos?

Working with a U.S.-funded Sunni guard force can be a lot like dealing with the mob. Some of the armed men act like the dons of their neighborhood.

By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 20, 2008

BAGHDAD -- As Arabic pop songs blared from a cafe and children squealed on rickety rides, men armed with pistols and Kalashnikovs wandered through a crowded Baghdad park one recent evening, checking visitors for weapons and keeping an eye out for suicide bombers.

Eight months ago, some of them may have been planting bombs themselves, or firing rounds at passing American convoys. But on this night, they grabbed hands and stomped their feet in a traditional line dance as a U.S. foot patrol stopped to watch.

Residents credit cooperation between the American soldiers and the dancing gunmen, members of a U.S.-funded Sunni neighborhood guard force, for a turnaround in security in Adhamiya, a Sunni Arab enclave in Shiite-dominated east Baghdad that until recently was on the front line of the Iraqi capital's sectarian war.

But doing business with the gunmen, whom the U.S. military has dubbed Sons of Iraq, is like striking a deal with Tony Soprano, according to the soldiers who walk the battle-blighted streets, where sewage collects in malodorous pools.

"Most of them kind of operate like dons in their areas," said 2nd Lt. Forrest Pierce, a platoon leader with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment. They shake down local businessmen for protection money, seize rivals for links to the insurgency and are always angling for more men, more territory and more power.

For U.S. soldiers on the beat, it means navigating a complex world of shifting allegiances, half-truths and betrayals. ...

Such attacks were once a near-daily occurrence in Adhamiya. When the 3rd Squadron arrived last summer, its soldiers couldn't drive past Abu Hanifa Mosque without getting shot at. On the day they assumed responsibility for the area, the unit they replaced was struck by a roadside bomb that flipped a Bradley fighting vehicle, killing five soldiers and an interpreter.

But the number of attacks plunged to less than one a week after the military began paying local men $300 a month to protect their areas.

The U.S. military now has 843 gunmen on its payroll in Adhamiya, a once-prosperous neighborhood of retired military officers, teachers and professionals enclosed by a 12-foot-high concrete wall. ...

Last month, the number of attacks started to inch back up, leading soldiers to believe that religious extremists and the criminal gangs that thrive on chaos may be trying to stage a comeback. [More]

The problem in Iraq has always been that we've never had a side in the civil war we started there. I've always advised, from during the 2003 invasion onward, bribing Iraqis to calm down, but it doesn't solve the long term problem which is that everybody knows we're eventually going to leave and then there will be a scramble to grab the oil and whatever else is up for grabs. So, if the U.S. now wants to pay various ambitious men so they can build their power bases for the day of destiny, well, sure, they'll take the money.

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

A critique of my definition of race

From an anthropologist friend:

Steve Sailer's definition of race -- an extended family, inbred to some extent -- is as good as any, and better than many. But it's important to keep in mind that size makes a difference. Just as we see things going on in big lakes (noticeable tides, for example) that we don't see in small lakes, we also see important things going on in the large extended families known as races that we could get away with ignoring when looking at regular family-sized families.

One of the things that goes on at the scale of races is that selection affects gene frequencies over and above what you'd expect on the basis of genealogy. For example, if Al is Betty's uncle, then I can figure out right away the probability (1/4) that Al and Betty share a given allele (over and above the probability that it's shared by the population as a whole). On the other hand, if I know that Al and Betty belong to the same race, and know the average coefficient of inbreeding for that race (relative to some larger population, maybe humanity as a whole), then I can convert this coefficient of inbreeding into a coefficient of relatedness. But I have to be a lot more cautious in my guesses about how likely they are to share an allele by common descent. Because of selection, they may be much more likely to be similar at a locus for skin color, or lactose malabsorption than at, say, the ABO blood group locus.

One implication is that trying to apply Hamilton's theory of kin selection to make predictions about racial altruism is extremely dodgy. One of the assumptions that Hamilton and his successors make in deriving his famous equation B/C > 1/r is that there is no selection between the time a gene is present in a common ancestor and the time it expresses itself among two descendants. This assumption may be plausible enough in extended families -- probably not enough of Alan's siblings have died young while committing altruistic deeds to affect the probability of Betty getting an altruism allele. It's less plausible -- not really plausible at all -- that if Alan and Betty merely belong to the same race, and are genetically similar by virtue of a great many very distant genealogical connections, that selection hasn't had a big impact on any altruism genes.The implication is not that genes are irrelevant to large-scale altruism. Rather, the problem of altruism on large scales is like one of those physics problems where you relax some simplifying assumptions, and suddenly everything gets a lot messier, and you have to start running simulations, and so on.

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

Response to Crotty's lactose tolerant-centric theory of world history

A friend responds to my posting last week on Irish economist-farmer Raymond Crotty's lactose tolerantcentric theory of world history:

Raymond Crotty 's sweeping review of history (Histories in Collision, mentioned by Steve Sailer on his blog) is maybe sometimes a little too sweeping, but interesting all the same. One of the things that is going on in the book is Crotty 's attempt to explain why his own folks, the Irish, look relatively feckless compared to various other groups in Northern Europe, who seem from early in their history to be diligently beavering away, saving and accumulating property in proto-capitalist fashion. (Clark 's recent Farewell to Alms would support this for the English.)

To explore this issue, Crotty takes us from generic early Indo-European society (where, he argues, the ability to digest lactose in milk is a key adaptation) to later socio-economic evolution in Northern Europe. Crotty argues that the rural economy of Northern Europe from the Middle Ages on encouraged the development of private property and bourgeois virtues. Keeping cattle (with milk a major part of the diet) in this ecological zone ran into the problem of limited winter forage. Once populations grew past the point that cattle could be turned loose to graze on their own in winter, people needed to make major investments in barns, and in growing and storing hay, to keep a lot of their herds going through the winter.

Ireland, according to Crotty, with a relatively mild oceanic climate, didn 't have this problem, and stayed closer to early Indo-European traditions (which show some convergence with East African pastoralism, including independent evolution of lactose tolerance). In contrast, most of Northern Europe was protocapitalist well before the Industrial Revolution. This seems plausible.

On the other hand, maybe just as important is the way state formation, and the attendant decline in tribal social structure, and tribal kinship, set in on the borders of the Roman Empire, while Ireland and the remoter Slavic world lagged behind.

He's referring to Peter Turchin's theory that state-formation was strongest on "meta-ethnic frontiers," which I discussed here.

I do get an impression (no more than an impression -- it would be nice to see numbers) that Northern Europe in the last millennium was relatively capital intensive and East Asia relatively labor intensive. In the former, you really needed a well-built house, and shelter for livestock, and supply of firewood, feed, and food, and other capital stock to make it through the winter. There were times in the agricultural calendar when work loads were incredibly intense -- so much so that you needed draft animals to do a lot of the work -- and other times where there wasn 't a lot more to do than sit around the stove in the dark. On the other hand, East Asian agriculture (especially South China) seems to have involved more year round endless toil (double or even triple cropping) but maybe less in the way of capital requirements to survive. Probably both the Northern European obsession with capital accumulation at the expense of sharing with kin, and the extreme East Asian work ethic look pretty demented from an earlier tribal perspective.

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