A better idea

Since the Obama administration doesn't seem to have any good ideas for solving the financial crisis, let me put one of my old ones forward again.

We have two problems:

One, we're a lot poorer than we thought we were two years ago. Only years of hard, smart work are going to get us out of that problem. The most obvious ways government can help are too get off the backs of productive enterprises -- lift anti-discrimination regulations, the more extreme environmental regulations, and the like.

The other problem is something the government might possibly be able to help with. And that is that it's currently prudent to assume there is a high probability that any financial institution you might want to deal with could be broke because their books are black boxes, especially the mortgage-backed securities they own. So, you don't want to invest in them or lend them money because you don't understand their financial position. This uncertainty over the value of financial instruments linked to mortgages can make things even worse than they really are -- All we have to fear is fear itself, etc.

So, it's time for the government to open up the black boxes by requiring all parties to mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and derivatives tied to mortgage-backed securities to post everything on line. Privacy be damned.

Then, let Wikipedia or something else like that start accumulating information pertaining to the value of each mortgaged property in America: connect to Google Maps street shots, Zillow price estimates, how much comparable homes in the neighborhood are renting for, Census data on local demographics, you name it. This info on each mortgage could then be linked to the mortgage-backed securities that hold slices of that mortgage. From that, informed market prices for mortgage-backed securities (and related derivatives) could emerge.

This process of wide-open public price discovery would no doubt lead to some pretty appalling discoveries about what prices for these financial assets ought to be, but so be it. It's better than not knowing how much gigantic assets are worth.

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

Obama's bank bailout lays an egg

S&P 500 Index closes down 4.8% after Treasury Secretary waves hands around for awhile.

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

LA in winter

Yes, that's what it looked like Monday. Granted, I wasn't sitting on my yacht at the marina, but that's the same general view I had from my minivan on the Santa Monica freeway.

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

1990s FHA mortgage default rates by ethnicity

Thanks to reader Tino, who found this HUD document, here are the mortgage default rates by ethnicity for three vintages of 1990s FHA-insured mortgages. The sample size is 240,901 loans.

The Federal Housing Administration insures smaller-sized mortgages of low and moderate income folks upon appraisal, so this is roughly an apples to apples comparison of fairly similar borrowers. In other words, we're not comparing rich whites to poor minorities, at least not as much as if we were looking at the population as a whole.

Moreover, the FHA seems to have been somewhat more responsibly managed than most other sectors of the mortgage industry. And this data is from the 1990s when housing was a more boring sector of the economy than in the 2000s.

So, we're looking at representative, long term ethnic differences.

As you'll recall, late 1992 was when the Boston Fed, under the leadership of Richard Syron, published a warmly welcomed study claiming that mortgage lenders discriminated against minorities and should be loaning more to minorities. As Peter Brimelow asked in Forbes at the time, doesn't that mean minorities should have lower default rates?

But nobody in politics cared, and the study helped Syron get the top job at Freddie Mac, where he earned $38 million while piloting Freddie onto the rocks.

Default rates for 1992 vintage FHA-insured mortgages after 7 years:
White: 4.27%
Black: 10.81%
Hispanic: 13.18%

Default rates for 1994 vintage FHA-insured mortgages after 5 years:
White: 4.10%
Black: 9.14%
Hispanic: 9.47%

Default rates for 1996 vintage FHA-insured mortgages after 3 years:
White: 3.34%
Black: 6.93%
Hispanic: 6.99%

The source is

Analysis of FHA Single-Family Default and Loss Rates
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Office of Policy Development and Research
Prepared by:
Robert F. Cotterman
Unicon Research Corporation
March 2004

Even when adjusted for FICO scores and other objective factors related to credit risk, minority default rates still look worse. Cotterman concludes:

Blacks, Hispanics, and those in judicial foreclosure states and underserved areas have higher conditional loss rates, other things the same.

So, the changes in policy and worldview that led to the gigantic increases in mortgage lending to minorities seen over the last decade (with total mortgage dollars written per year increasing 691% for Hispanics and 397% for blacks from 1999 to the peak of the Housing Bubble in 2006) unsurprisingly led to world-historical levels of mortgage defaults in 2007-2009. After all, blacks and Hispanics were still defaulting at very high levels when they weren't getting as much mortgage lending. The law of diminishing marginal returns suggests that throwing more mortgage money at them wasn't going to improve their credit worthiness.

In 2004-2007, minorities received half of subprime mortgage dollars handed out. A new 2008 Boston Fed study shows minorities in Massachusetts getting foreclosed on subprime loans at twice the race of whites, suggesting that minorities accounted for a sizable majority of subprime dollars defaulted.

To the extent that we've had a debate over minority mortgage lending policy in the 18 months since the cratering of the subprime market (which we've barely had at all), it's been along the ideological lines of More Regulation vs. Less Regulation.

And yet, when we look at the federal policy over the last four Presidential terms, what we see is more aptly explained by a different paradigm than Regulation vs. Deregulation:

Who? Whom?

The Clinton Administration both strengthened some mortgage regulations and loosened others, all in the name of increasing minority homeownership. In complete contrast, tThe Bush Administration loosened some regulations and strengthened others, all with the intention of closing the racial homeownership gap.

The results of all this "affordable housing" social engineering was to first make housing unaffordable, and then, when the world finally woke up to the fact that it wouldn't be getting paid back on its mortgage lending, to smash the global economy.

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

The American media is concerned about violent illegal immigrants' impact ... on Mexico!

From the Chicago Tribune:

Home countries frustrated as U.S. deports criminals
Influx creates challenges for residents, civic groups

—Antonio Olivo and Oscar Avila

February 9, 2009

JUAREZ, Mexico — When he crossed illegally into the U.S. in 2002, Cesar Sanchez didn't plan on stabbing a girlfriend's estranged husband eight times.

Yet there he was, a convicted murderer dropped at the Texas border last month—one less worry for U.S. officials but a source of concern for the cities in Central America receiving thousands of freed convicts.

"I crossed like so many others; for a dream," said Sanchez, 25, wondering how he'd make it back to his family in Veracruz. "And, then ..."

U.S. Immigration officials are escalating efforts to put some 450,000 illegal immigrants serving prison time in the U.S. on planes back home. In 2008, about 113,000 such convicts were deported.

Perhaps the establishment press should have been more concerned about criminally-inclined foreigners coming to this country in the first place.

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

LA Times features John Hawks

U. of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks's views on accelerating human evolution are written up here by Karen Kaplan in the LAT. Hawks has the mathematical, verbal, and even artistic skills to be a big name in the Human Sciences / Meaning of It All business. But can you do that from Iowa, or do you have to be at Harvard like Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson? Steven Pinker said Harvard's a much better base for that than MIT, so where does Wisconsin rank?

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

I, for one, welcome our new Canadian retiree overlords

Who might buy foreclosed Sand State mcMansions?

The Canadian economy is now being dragged down by the U.S. collapse, but Canadians aren't as burdened by debt as Americans are. The Canadian government has been running surpluses, and there wasn't much of a housing bubble up there. There are a lot of Canadian baby boomers reaching retirement age, and the idea of buying or renting a cheap winter home in California, Nevada, Arizona, or Florida has to sound appealing.

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

Flynn: Flynn Effect has reversed among British teens

For several years, I've been pointing out that something is going wrong with the British, at least among younger British males. And it's not just immigration -- the white working class in Britain has become a lot drunker and more petty crime-inclined than their distant cousins in the U.S. white working class. And the British upper classes are dropping their traditional elite interests for the same prolefeed -- the telly, footer, and binge-drinking -- as the lower orders.

From the London Telegraph:

British teenagers have lower IQs than their counterparts did 30 years ago
Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert.

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.

Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.

The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.

Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having "stagnated" or even dumbed down.

He used data gathered in IQ tests on UK children to examine how the country's cognitive skills have changed over time.

He found that while children aged between five and 10 saw their IQs increase by up to half a point a year over the three decades, teenagers performed less well.

"It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers," said Professor Flynn. "While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched.

"Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents' influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age.

"Up until the age of nine and ten, the home has a really powerful influence, so we can assume parents have been providing their children with a more cognitive challenging environment in the past 30 years.

"After that age the children become more autonomous and they gravitate to peer groups that set the cognitive environment.

"What we know is that youth culture is more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations."

He added that previous studies have shown that IQ increases as teenagers move into adulthood, entering university or starting work.

Professor Flynn also believes that the larger drop in IQ among the upper half of the ability range could be due to effects of social class.

He said: "IQ gains are typically correlated by class, but the results in this case are very mixed. Maybe the rebellious peer culture of the lower half of British society has invaded the peer culture of the upper half.

"It could be the classes in the upper half were insulated from this rebellious peer culture for a time, but now it is universal."

His research, which is presented in a paper published online by the journal Economics and Human Biology, also refutes the commonly held belief that increases in IQ over time are a result of improving nutrition. [Well, British teenagers in 1980 were pretty well-fed compared to 2008, so I don't think you should generalize from these two data points to rule out nutritional improvements as raising IQ in other times and places.] ...

Professor Flynn's study was conducted using a respected IQ test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices. Questions involve matching a series of patterns and sequences, so that even people with no education can take the test.

(By the way, here's my review of Jim Flynn's last book, What Is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect, which Flynn liked a lot.)

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

My review of "The 10,000 Year Explosion"

Here's the opening:

This Thursday, February 12, 2009, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, author of the 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

(I guess Darwin didn’t get the memo about race not existing. You’ll see vast heapings of praise in the press for Darwin this week. Keep in mind, though, that if he were alive today, the same people now lauding the dead Darwin would be denouncing the living one the same way they demonized James Watson in 2007.)

I’m pleased that a new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, demonstrates that Darwin has two worthy 21st Century successors of comparable insight and ambition: co-authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. (They’ve set up an official website for The 10,000 Year Explosion here).

On a rather less epochal note, the publication of The 10,000 Year Explosion marks the tenth anniversary of my invitation-only Human Biodiversity email group, which I started in 1999.

And that’s where Greg and Henry got to know each other! Peter Brimelow recently called to my attention that the inscription on the Westminster Abbey tomb of concert impresario J.P. Salomon reads, "He brought Haydn to England …" Perhaps my gravestone will read, "He introduced Cochran to Harpending."

Henry Harpending, a professor at the University of Utah and member of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the few field anthropologists (he lived for 42 months with hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, such as the tongue-clicking Bushmen) with the mathematical skills to grapple with the current deluge of genetic data.

(Here’s Henry’s hair-raising tale of going hunting with Bushmen for the most lethal African game animal, the Cape buffalo.)

Greg Cochran, a physicist turned evolutionary theorist, is a polymath who might be the most ferociously brilliant idea man of his generation in America.

Obviously, I’m biased about their The 10,000 Year Explosion. Over the last decade, I’ve spent perhaps a thousand hours talking to Greg Cochran on the phone. Or, to be more accurate, listening to Greg, which is how I’ve gotten a sizable fraction of my best ideas. (My worst ideas are all mine.)

Cochran the conversationalist is at his acerbic best in a five part interview on the 2Blowhards blog: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and Day 5.

On the first page of The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending quote the reigning conventional wisdom about humanity:

"There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain."— Stephen Jay Gould

The co-authors then announce that they will undermine this standard presumption:

"We intend to make the case that human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years, rather than slowing or stopping, and is now happening about 100 times faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of our existence. The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history. Sargon and Imhotep were different from you genetically as well as culturally."

As Greg quips, "The past may never be the same again."

More here.

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

Yet another NYT editorial denouncing "nativists!"

Here's the third (or maybe the fourth) editorial in the last week from the NY Times about the horrifying Nativist Menace:

'The Nativist Lobby'

By The Editorial Board

The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday released “The Nativist Lobby,” a report examining the connections among the three Washington-based organizations that have led the charge for restricting immigration to the United States.

They are the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA — a lobbying group, think tank, and grassroots organizer, respectively.

All three groups are well known — you have probably come across their leaders denouncing immigration “amnesty” in news articles and on TV. The groups have the ear of conservative politicians all over the country, and their efforts have inspired many of the hard-line federal, state and local initiatives cracking down on immigrants and immigration. Numbers USA even took credit for a storm of blast faxes and phone calls to Congress that helped to kill a major immigration bill in 2007.

What is less well known, the report says, is what the groups have in common: histories connecting them to a retired Michigan eye doctor with a long-held interest in eugenics, racial quotas, and white nationalism.

The groups insist that they do not hold racist or extremist views. That’s good.

But the report argues that people should know about the groups’ history, something they and their allies don’t usually like to talk about. It calls them “fruit of the same poisonous tree.”

Many people who want stricter policies on immigration are not racist or extremist. Many care about seeing the law enforced, or are worried about overpopulation. But it’s also true that there are racist and extremist elements in the movement, and it is important to call them out.

Kudos to the S.P.L.C. for shining a light.

So, now we know what the NYT's Two Minutes Hate of three editorials screeching about "nativists" was all about: it has been a marketing campaign for this new proclamation by the money machine that is the Southern Poverty Law Center ("Dedicated to Wiping Out the Last Vestiges of Poverty, Southern or Otherwise, in the Lifestyle of Direct Marketing Association Hall of Famer Morris Dees").

When denouncing the "ties" of immigration realist groups, shouldn't the New York Times Editorial Board at least mention its own ties to the SPLC? For example, Editorial Board member Adam Cohen's "Professional Profile" on Spoke.com reads:

"Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was [among other things] ... a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala."

Thanks to Nicholas Stix on VDARE.com for finding that. (Here are summaries of some of Cohen's essays. And here, Hans Bader says, "If Adam Cohen did not exist, the Onion would have to invent him...")

As the SPLC blog "Hatewatch" complacently commented when congratulating the NYT editorial board on its denunciation of Marcus Epstein (of all people) as a "white supremacist:"

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Indeed.

It's also easy to see why the Editorial Board had to keep banging the gong, rather than have the News department at the NYT write up this latest SPLC press release about that terrifying "retired Michigan eye doctor:" it's not news. The SPLC has been flogging the same story about Dr. John Tanton since at least 2002.

Here is part of Tanton's March 11, 2002 reply to 18 bullying questions from the SPLC:

Here are several questions of my own:

1. I would like some assurances from an analysis of your staffing patterns that you do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or national origin. Please supply a list of your staff and governing board complete with an analysis for these four pillars of non-discrimination, and correlated with salary level. In your opinion, to avoid the charge of discrimination, should the makeup of your staff mirror the city of Montgomery, the state of Alabama, the United States - or perhaps the world? What groups are over- or underrepresented?

2. Please give me your reaction to the Harper's exposé (November 2000) on the SPLC, charging your colleagues with veniality and hypocrisy, among other items. What is the social justification for your absolutely enormous endowment? These monies were evidently obtained from donors under false pretenses of actually doing something about Southern Poverty. Granted, based on your IRS 990 report, the SPLC has rescued its governing board and top staff from poverty. What have you done for the average impoverished Southerner, whose plight you have appropriated into your organization's name?

3. Finally: there is an old maxim that what we say about others tells more about ourselves that it does about others. In this connection, SPLC is given to accusing others of racism and hate crimes. Exactly how would you describe the emotion that motivates you? Is it Love for those who are different or who you perhaps perceive as "enemies?" Or is it more akin to Hate on your part? My analysis is that it comes much closer to the latter than the former. Certainly SPLC is chief among the hate-mongering groups in the United States, if not the world.

John H. Tanton

That's just a bit of it. It's a great read.

And here's a summary of a Pulitzer-finalist investigative report into the abyss of abuse that is the SPLC.

By the way, a commenter recently offered an intriguing explanation for the otherwise baffling presence of the word "Poverty" in the name of the Southern Poverty Law Center: it's there to make the acronym "SPLC" almost indistinguishable from "SCLC," the famous acronym of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that was once headed by Martin Luther King Jr. If true, then Morris Dees, a master direct marketer, has been more or less practicing mail fraud on elderly, easily confused donors for decades.

Finally, we can see once again how much good it's done FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA to try to be as respectable as all get out on immigration and never talk about race: you still get denounced as white supremacist hate groups by the New York Times!

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

Daniel Seligman, RIP

Dan Seligman, my role model as a quantitative journalist, has died at 84. Dan was the Bill James of public policy journalism.

I can recall sitting up all night in 1981, when I was supposed to be writing an MBA term paper at UCLA, with a shelf full of bound volumes of Fortune, reading years worth of his Keeping Up column.

The first time I ever spoke about becoming a professional journalist was 15 or 20 years ago when I mentioned to my wife that if Seligman ever retired from writing his "Keeping Up" column for Fortune, I'd make a good replacement.

Dan was the one of the first people I invited to join my Human Biodiversity email list ten years ago, and I was proud when he became a regular participant.

From the NYT:

Daniel Seligman, Longtime Fortune Columnist, Dies at 84
By DENNIS HEVISI

Daniel Seligman, who with gentle wit, ornate syntax, statistical acumen and a decidedly conservative bent engaged readers of his “Keeping Up” column in Fortune magazine for more than two decades, died Jan. 31 in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 84.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his daughter, Nora Favorov, said.

Mr. Seligman, who later wrote for Forbes magazine and other publications, was an editor and writer at Fortune from 1950 to 1997 and wrote more than 400 “Keeping Up” columns in his last 21 years at the magazine. Among the array of subjects Mr. Seligman poked fun at were political correctness, affirmative action, overbearing bureaucrats and what he considered loony leftists.

He also disputed those who doubted the value of I.Q. tests, a topic he fully examined in his 1992 book, “A Question of Intelligence: The I.Q. Debate in America.”

Many of Mr. Seligman’s opinions were grounded in his own application of mathematics, and while he was an ardent anti-communist in his early years, he sometimes used statistics to criticize the right, as well. In a 1992 column he tweaked a fictitious Conservative member of the British Parliament who wondered why so many of his colleagues had been ensnared in sex scandals.

“Imagine,” Mr. Seligman wrote, “a jar filled with 600 marbles, 331 of them blue and 269 red (these being, respectively, the numbers of Conservative and Labor MPs last fall, before the wave of scandals broke).”

“An observer wearing a blindfold — this would be the media,” he continued, “reaches into the jar and pulls out six marbles. What is the probability that all six will be blue? The answer is 2.76 percent, meaning there is only one chance in 36 of the Tory monopoly on parliamentary sex scandals being attributable to chance.”

Statistical analysis laced Mr. Seligman’s writings about genetics, the link between mortality and socioeconomic status, the efficacy of using horse-race betting as a means of money laundering, and whether there is correlation between the income of lawyers and their physical attractiveness.

For 12 years, starting in 1966, Mr. Seligman held several high-level editing positions at Fortune. In 1988, he stepped down as associate managing editor, but continued to write “Keeping Up.”

Marshall Loeb, the managing editor at the time, wrote in the magazine that Mr. Seligman “uses elegance and trenchant wit to wage his never-ending battle against fustian thinking.”

Born in Manhattan on Sept. 25, 1924, Mr. Seligman was a son of Irving and Clare O’Brien Seligman. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, the former Meg Sherburn; his son, William; his brother, Paul; his sister, Susan Cohn; and four grandchildren.

After serving in the Army in World War II, Mr. Seligman earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University. He wrote for The American Mercury, Commonweal and The New Leader before joining Fortune.

After leaving Fortune, Mr. Seligman became a contributor to Forbes magazine. Sometimes, based on his assessment of their statistical inaccuracies, he spoofed fellow journalists.

“After many years of observing media colleagues at work,” he wrote in 2002, “I would say most of them were standing behind the door when quantitative skills were handed out. They quote T. S. Eliot but are babes in the woods when it comes to correlations or the basic laws of probability. Even when the math is simple, they get bollixed up.”

In the early 1990s, when I got a Nexis account at work, I downloaded years worth of his columns. I thought I had had to delete them all at some point in the 1990s when my 300 meg hard disk ran out of room, but I just found a hidden-away copy on my hard drive. I will dig some up over the next week to show how much of my work is just an updating of what Dan was doing in the 1970s and 1980s.

Here's Peter Brimelow's 1993 interview with him. And here's Charles Murray's 1992 review of Dan's IQ book, A Question of Intelligence, in Commentary.

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

"Frost/Nixon"

Here's the beginning of my review of the Best Picture nominee from The American Conservative:

One of the oddities of the movie business is how films for grown-ups, such as “Frost/Nixon,” are now held hostage by that rather adolescent competition, the Academy Awards.

If “Frost/Nixon,” Ron Howard’s adroit rendering of Peter Morgan’s intelligent stage play about English TV personality David Frost’s 1977 interviews with deposed President Richard Nixon, had come out in April or August, it would have served as a refreshing break from the dreary fare of those off-months. Released at the end of the year to impress Oscar voters, however—along with seemingly the all the other non-superhero movies of 2008—“Frost/Nixon” has gotten lost in the box office crush, even after snagging Oscar nominations in five major categories (Best Picture, Directing, Acting, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay). Having spent the summer listening to my sons debate Iron Man versus Batman, the Oscar race leaves me perturbed that I’m now wondering whether Frank Langella’s Nixon could beat up Mickey Rourke’s Wrestler.

Unsurprisingly, Morgan’s persistent metaphor of the interviews as a boxing match between an untested lightweight and a battered ex-heavyweight champ doesn’t quite stand up to the scrutiny that a Best Picture winner should withstand.

Nonetheless, the glass is more than half-full. Ron Howard (“Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind”) is a famous director because he was a child star, but he’s less an auteur with a distinctive style than a versatile craftsman in the tradition of all those highly effective but now easily confused golden age directors such as William Wyler and William Wellman.

I go on to explain what's wrong with the movie, but for that you've got to get the magazine. (Subscribe here.)

One additional point worth mentioning is that Peter Morgan's somewhat contrived drama relies upon the contemporary audience's presumption that talk show hosts are lowbrows who are completely ignorant about anything other than celebrity culture. But that wasn't the assumption a generation ago. Big time talk show hosts back then were supposed to be middlebrows with a lively range of interests. (The pure entertainment industry talk show hosts like Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas were a tier below the top guys in prestige.)

Steve Allen, the first Tonight Show host, was a wit, a musician, and a rather earnest intellectual who wrote a shelf-full of books. Jack Paar's Tonight Shows were more like the Charlie Rose Show than today's Tonight. Carson's early 1970s competitors, Frost and Dick Cavett, were metropolitan raconteurs tied into the world of ideas in London and New York, respectively. They weren't deep thinkers, but they knew the deep thinkers. Carson was perhaps closer to the pure show biz model triumphant today, especially after his move from NYC to LA, but he had his outside interests, such as astronomy and population control, thus making the scientists Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich into huge celebrities.

It often wasn't hard to figure out where these guys fell on a sophisticated ideological scale. Steve Allen, for example, was clearly an anti-Communist liberal of the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. school, opposed to both Republicans and the 1960s New Left.

Today, though, celebrity culture reigns supreme on the big talk shows, and the old middlebrow aspects have largely vanished. I presume Jay Leno doesn't mind -- he's a fine fellow and a consumate professional, but his interests lie elsewhere -- but you've got to imagine a smart Harvard boy like Conan O'Brien sometimes regrets he wasn't born three or four decades earlier and could have the range of topics that a David Frost was allowed to pursue.

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

Unstimulated

One reason I'm a lousy blogger is because I get bored easily, and thus often fail to write about what everybody else is writing about at the moment. This week, everybody was blogging about Obama's stimulus bill, but I said all I have to say about it in previous months, which has migrated to the edges of conventional wisdom by now.

Conversely, I started talking about the Community Reinvestment Act's role in the mortgage meltdown in August 2007, but by the time John McCain picked that idea up in the fall of 2008, I had gotten bored with it because I couldn't figure out a solid answer to the response, "Who held a gun to the heads of these big bankers and made them make loans to deadbeats?" Now, I've finally figured out what really happened, but who wants to hear about it now?

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

NY Times readers share their fantasies about the Obamas

Here's an apparently serious column in the NYT by Judith Warner that's beyond the powers of Christian Lander, Tom Wolfe, Evelyn Waugh, or Jonathan Swift to satirize:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. ...

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him."...

I launched an e-mail inquiry. ...

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. ...

There was some daydreaming too, much of it a collective fantasy about the still-hot Obama marriage. “Barack and Michelle Obama look like they have sex. They look like they like having sex,” a Los Angeles woman wrote to me, summing up the comments of many. “Often. With each other. These days when the sexless marriage is such a big celebrity in America (and when first couples are icons of rigid propriety), that’s one interesting mental drama.” ...

There was a dream, sent from Minneapolis, about buying Barack the perfect sandwich, and a dream from Westport, Conn., about inviting Michelle and the girls over for lunch and a play date. ...

One woman wrote that when she couldn’t get to sleep at night, she “lay in bed and thought about the Obama girls in their rooms at the White House. I thought about Marian Robinson up on the third floor. And about Barack and Michelle, a couple who clearly have a ‘thing’ for each other, spooning together in bed. It helped me relax.”

I understood perfectly where these cozy dreams of easy familiarity came from. It was that sense so many people share of having a very immediate connection to Barack Obama, whether they’re black or biracial, or children of single parents or self-made strivers; or they’re lawyers or community organizers or Ivy League graduates or smokers or basketball players or Blackberry users or parents or married or Democrats. A lot of people share the fantasy that having the Obamas over for “dinner and a game of Scrabble,” as one daydreamer put it to me, is something that really could just about happen.

“This is the first president I’ve known who looks, talks and acts like a peer,” is how one Washington man explained it to me. “Notwithstanding his somewhat exotic life story, I feel like I understand what he’s like and where he’s coming from. And despite his incredible achievements, he still seems like a lot of people I know. If you stopped the clock in 2004, in fact, or maybe a couple of years earlier, he’d feel roughly like a peer in terms of accomplishments, too." ...

Sometimes this sense of close identification turns a bit dark. There’s a subcategory of people who feel that they really should have true intimacy with the Obamas. Because they went to school with them. Because they used to dream like them. Because, with one or two “different turns,” they maybe could have been them.

These are not the people made most happy by thinking about the Obamas.

“They do seem to have it all together — a great marriage, beautiful children, a modern day Norman Rockwell family,” said a divorced Harvard grad with children in a top D.C. private school. “Why them, not me?”

These are people for whom the Obamas are not just a beacon of hope, inspiration and “demigodlikeness,” as a New York lawyer put it, but also a kind of mirror. And the refracted image of self they see is not one they much admire.

“I keep thinking about how I squandered my education and youth,” the New York lawyer wrote to me. “I went off to college from high school being completely community-minded, doing a lot of volunteer work for the homeless and for hunger and tutoring poor kids. Then I got to college and forgot my ideals. Barack was my year at Columbia. Why wasn’t I hanging out with him and being serious and following my ideals instead of hanging out in clubs? Same with law school. I partied my way through instead of taking advantage of all that I could have. Both Obamas were there when I was. I feel like if I’d been a better person I would have gotten to know them.”

A Washington lawyer expressed similar sentiments: “I feel like I know Barack, that I have worked grassroots and have created change in the way that he has. I [also] have feelings of a mom who had possibility but ended up running school auctions and mediating family business matters rather than having the opportunity to be out there on a national level creating change. So when I watch Barack I feel like: I can do that … and what am I doing with my life? Even though he is way smarter and more articulate than me.”

Another Washington woman, a global health care consultant, expressed her sense of Obama-inadequacy in a dream: “I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”

(“Like a lot of folks, I have anxiety about being outside of the Obama administration universe right now,” she then explained to me. “Even though I was at the ‘it’ ball of inauguration balls, I still felt like other balls were greener, or more purple, or with credentials completely out of my control — more young. I really feel like I’m scrambling internally … to deserve Obama cred and all I’ve got is this over-my-head wonder for the man that amounts to being an Obama girl.”)

For some, not knowing the Obamas has almost turned into a feeling of being snubbed or excluded. Like in middle school. It’s funny. Almost.

“Why won’t my kids be sleeping over at the White House? And as my daughter noted, why couldn’t she get to sit front and center and see the Jonas Brothers and Miley perform at the kids’ inaugural concert? If she went to Sidwell, then she might have these chances, she said …” wrote a mother whose kids are not at Sidwell Friends school with Sasha and Malia.

“Will Michelle stay down to earth? She could prove it by joining our book club,” wrote a Sidwell mom.

This is, perhaps, the price of faux-familiarity. If I were Barack Obama (or Michelle, for that matter), I’d be a little scared. After all, when people are wearing their egos on their sleeves, it’s so easy to bruise their feelings. What will happen if fantasy turns to contempt?

If I were in charge of the Secret Service, I'd be forwarding this column to all my agents with a note saying, "Stop worrying about Al Qaeda and the KKK, these are the people we really have to worry about going over the edge and shooting President Obama. New York Times subscribers are scary, scary folks."

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

Student loan default rates by ethnicity

One way to get a sense of what happened to mortgages, where the government doesn't track default rates by race, is to look at default rates for college loans. From a 2007 Education Sector article by Eric Dillon: "A Closer Look at Student Loan Default Rates:"

Black students who graduated in 1992–93 school year had an overall default rate that was over five times higher than white students and over nine times higher than Asian students. The differences for Hispanic students are not as large, but are still substantial. Hispanic students' overall default rate was over twice that of white students and four times higher than Asian students. And these differences cannot be fully explained by differences in borrowing patterns or salaries. The 1994 percentage of monthly income going to student loan payments—an indication of both how much debt a student has and their earnings—was actually lowest for Hispanic students and only slightly higher than average for black students. ...

The median monthly loan payment as a percentage of monthly income in 1994 for recent 1992–93 graduates was 6.7 percent for the United States as a whole, 7.4 percent for Asian students, 7.2 percent for black students, 5.3 percent for Hispanic students, and 6.8 percent for white students.

In other words, income didn't have much to do with default rates. (On the other hand, whites and Asians would be more likely to have relatives who could help them out repaying their loans during hard times. That's something that's overlooked in thinking about mortgages, as well.)

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

Slim Times at it again

Oh, no, a sheriff in Arizona is acting as if illegal immigration is, you know, illegal, laments the Slim Times.

He who pays the piper, calls the tune.

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

Bill Gates vs. Bill Gates

Bill Gates, who supposedly scored 1590 on the SAT (which is equivalent now that the maximum has been raised to 2400 and scoring made easier, to about, oh, roughly, a million today), is, notoriously, the World's Biggest IQ Snob in his personal business (at which he's been rather successful). And yet, the Gates Foundation, the chief meddler in American public schools, is as allergic to thinking about the impact of IQ variations on education as every other spouter of the Conventional Wisdom. Not surprisingly, the Gates Foundation has been rather unsuccessful at improving public schools, according to Bill Gates.

Gates's IQ elitism in his personal life is evident even in his writing for the Gates Foundation. Here are excerpts from the first page of his 2009 Annual Letter on the work of the Gates Foundation, where he discusses his transition from Microsoft to fulltime work at the Gates Foundation:

My job at Microsoft had three magical things. ... Finally, the work let me engage with people who were smart and knew things I didn’t....

I love the work at the foundation. Although there are many differences, it also has the three magical elements. ... Second, I feel like my experience in building teams of smart people with different skill sets focused on tough long-term problems can be a real contribution. ... However, I am equally confident that our maniacal focus on drawing in the best talent and measuring results will make a difference. Finally, I find the intelligence and dedication of the people involved in these issues to be just as impressive as what I have seen before. Whether they are scientists at a university or people who have worked in the field in Africa most of their lives, they have critical knowledge and want to help make the breakthroughs. The opportunity to gather smart, creative people into teams and give them resources and guidance as they tackle the challenges is very fulfilling. [Emphasis mine]

In contrast, as the boss of the Gates Foundation, Gates argues that everybody must complete a post-secondary degree or certification. Of course, Bill Gates, himself, is a Harvard dropout.

That Gates is a dropout is not a secret, but it's just the kind of fact that's not considered relevant in thinking about school policy.

Look, lecturing kids who are struggling to graduate from high school that getting a high school degree is useless except as preparation for getting a postsecondary degree is a catastrophic strategy. It's the old Yale or Jail syndrome, which encourages a lot of youths to believe that an honest life of reasonably compensated work is hopeless for them, so they might as well drop out of high school now and start dealing drugs.

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

Bill Gates ruined my daughter's high school

A reader writes:

This may run a little long since I have intimate experience with Bill Gates' program for small schools within schools.

In 200X or so, my daughter was attending XYZ High School in the VAPAC program (Visual and Performing Arts Center), a magnet school for the city that rivaled the best FAME programs in the country in terms of great teachers and motivated students.

VAPAC was a school within a school at XYZ High. It had about 500 kids among a greater student body of 2000. The program's classes were open to all the students for plays, choir, band, etc.

XYZ High was broken up at 25% white, 25% black (ghetto) 25% asian (Hmong, Vietnamese) and 25% Hispanic. The VAPAC program had a majority of whites who helped raise the test scores for the entire school.

Then The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation raised their head. XYZ High was offered millions to transform into small learning communities where it would be broken up into groups of 500 kids or so who would matriculate together as helping and bonded communities since large schools were impersonal and made kids feel lost and adrift.

When this proposal was made to the parents of Vapac students, we protested. They were going to dissolve the small community that already was working and effective.

What came about was a lesson in racial politics. VAPAC had to be destroyed because it was too white (60% or so). The black (female) Principal and others complained that not enough black students were in the plays, musicals, choir, jazz dance, etc.

It was explained that everyone in the school was eligible to participate and win roles based on ability, but that wasn't good enough. So they set out to ruin the program.

The school district then transferred the school to the retired Phoenix Suns basketball player Kevin Johnson (now mayor), who promised to make his charter school a beacon of great test scores to send ghetto blacks to college. It hasn't happened of course. Vapac was destroyed (one of the best high school programs in the country and world), and XYZ High is now a school everyone but a few blacks avoid.

My daughter was able to graduate in the last year of VAPAC, fortunately for her.

Of course, my wife and I tried to tell others at the various "community" meetings that Gates' ideas were crackpot social engineering that wouldn't work either since improvement always depends more on discipline and parents' involvement than schemes and grant money.

We were looked on as racists, though.

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