Why did he settle for just "Sir Allen Stanford"? Were "Lord Alec Harvard" and "Prince Alexander Princeton" already taken?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 17, 2009
February 16, 2009
The next big thing in movies
Watching the Keira Knightly vehicle "Duchess" about the Princess Di of the late 18th Century, the Duchess of Devonshire, it occurred to me that pretty soon a filmmaker is going to take this kind of English period porn (much of "Duchess" is filmed at Chatsworth House, which makes Castle Howard, used in the various "Brideshead Revisiteds," look like my house) and resusciate the genre by filming all that sumptuous pomp and circumstance with cheap handheld digital cameras pseudo-reality style, like an episode of "Cops."
Stately Manor meets Shakey Cam -- that's what today's audiences want! They want to see ye olde princesses filmed with an iPhone.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Nothing ever changes, redux
The country is very slowly waking up to the realization that we need to become more competitive. One obvious luxury that hurts America's economic competitiveness are quotas. But this logic is hardly obvious to the punditariat. One problem is that most quotas are secretly imposed by employers themselves to prevent "disparate impact" lawsuits, as Daniel Seligman explained more than two decades ago in his Keeping Up column in Fortune
April 27, 1987
Brennanism
Everything about the latest Supreme Court decision on affirmative action -- lumpily labeled Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara County, California, et al. -- seems totally unastonishing. Possibly this is because all the principal actors have become so predictable. In the wake of Johnson , there was the American business community professing as usual to be delighted with an opinion guaranteeing still more quotas in employment. The Reagan Administration was as usual looking like a loser. The union of liberal commentators, led by the New York Times , was as usual enthusing over the court's murky reasoning. ("On Giving Women a Break" was the smarmy headline atop the Times 's editorial.) The Supremes themselves were as usual divided, but the nose count revealed still another majority in the grip of a certain idea.
The idea is this: All people are inherently equal in ability and motivation, and so inequalities in employment and income must stem from inequities in our social arrangements. The idea is never stated explicitly in the court's opinions, and its empirical foundations are rather wobbly; indeed an avalanche of research in biology and psychology has been demonstrating more and more human differences to be innate. Yet the idea continues to sustain Justice Bill Brennan and the court's other instinctive egalitarians, and it enables them to keep finding that we have a problem needing to be solved any time some ethnic group or sex is "underrepresented" in various jobs. The unstated ideal is proportional representation; The Brennanites' usual way of attaining it is via reverse discrimination.
They have long since made clear that they will not be deterred by the plain language of the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 unambiguously states that you cannot require preference "on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race . . . (or) sex . . ." In the 1979 Weber case, which is the main ancestor of Johnson , Brennan nevertheless upheld a quota plan designed to rectify long-standing imbalances. How did he do it? No sweat: He argued that, sure, the law didn't "require" any such reference, but it "permitted" Kaiser Aluminum to set up preferential plans voluntarily. (In fact, the voluntariness of the plan was a bit of a charade: Kaiser had entered into the plan because its arm was being twisted by federal regulators.) The court also labored to make Weber more palatable by saying that any such plans had to be temporary. This created a difficulty in Johnson, because Santa Clara county had labeled its goals "long range." This time Brennan got around the difficulty by arguing that they couldn't really be long range because they envisioned only that the county would "attain" a certain balance (the figure for women was 36.4% of all jobs), not "maintain" it. Pretty smooth, eh?
Not dealt with in Brennan's opinion was another logical difficulty about those goals. In moving mindlessly toward proportional representation, the county had looked around to see who was in the local labor force and then come up with the following goals for minorities: blacks, 1.6%; Hispanics, 14.8%; Asian-Americans, 2.9%, American Indians, 0.4%, handicapped individuals, 6.5%. But unlike the women, who were underrepresented in most job categories, several of these groups were over represented. Blacks, for example, were overrepresented in five out of the seven job categories for which the county was hiring. By the logic of the court's decision, whites should be given preference over blacks in these positions. The American civil rights establishment managed to ignore this awkward fact; both the Urban League and the NAACP expressed delight with Johnson .
The formal posture of business toward the decision was equally ecstatic. The National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the Chamber of Commerce were all for Johnson , and the press printed encomiums to the decision by spokespersons from General Electric, Du Pont, Campbell Soup, Champion International, Eastman Kodak, Philip Morris, and many more. Also weighing in on the side of proportional representation was the American Society for Personnel Administration, a kind of trade association for the human
resources folk, which filed an amicus curiae brief that sought to help the court justify group preferences over merit. Laboring to prove that merit isn't all that important, and that it was okay for Santa Clara county to choose a woman over a man who had scored higher on the relevant exam, the ASPA came up with a doctrine that your correspondent had not previously heard of. Said the brief: "It is a standard tenet of personnel administration that there is rarely a single, 'best qualified' person for a job." Somehow one senses that, if the U.S. has a problem with "competitiveness" (see Competition), it is not going to be solved by the personnel department.
Why is American business in this posture? Partly, we assume, because all large corporations now have huge affirmative action bureaucracies representing an insistent internal pressure to support quotas. And partly, we sense, because a lot of C.E.O.s have been sold on the doctrine of corporate social responsibility and actually believe they are doing good by enforcing quotas.
The posture of the Reagan Administration is even harder to make sense of. In one case after another, we sit here watching Ron's solicitor general go before the Supreme Court and get clobbered when he tries to make a case against reverse discrimination. The suits in question typically involve large principles but, as in Johnson , only a few employees. Meanwhile, Reagan has steadily refused to lift up his fountain pen and, with a stroke thereof, rescind the executive order that now requires all federal contractors to have goals and timetables -- and that represents the major source of employment quotas in the U.S. We gather that the President is in this weird position because he just can't bring himself to resolve the dispute between Labor Secretary Bill Brock (who thinks the present system is fine) and Attorney General Ed Meese (who wants to end it). Looking back in dismay, a lot of Reaganites are now telling themselves that the time to have acted decisively against quotas was in the Administration's first few months, when Ron seemed irresistible. They had their chance, and blew it, and the logic of proportional representation is now set in concrete.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 15, 2009
CRA Commitments in 2003-04 = $2,350,000,000,000
You’ve heard over and over about how the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) could not bear any blame for the mortgage meltdown that began in 2007 because the time lag was too vast. As the New York Times editorialized on October 15, 2008: “First, how could a 30-plus-year-old law be responsible for a crisis that has occurred only in recent years?”
That seems like a good question. Three decades is a long time.
Last Thursday, though, I found an eye-opening graph of cumulative Community Reinvestment Act promises by banks from 1977 through 2005. According to the September 2005 report CRA Commitments by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), which bills itself as "the nation's economic justice trade association of 600 community associations:”
As the chart below shows, $4.2 trillion in CRA dollars was committed from 1992 through 2005. In contrast, $8.8 billion was negotiated from 1977 through 1991.
When measured in terabucks, the Community Reinvestment Act was negligible until the 1990s. And it was still small potatoes until the Clinton “reforms” of 1995 and the rise of well-organized pressure groups of the kind affiliated with the NCRC.
But the biggest flood of CRA assurances came during the presidency of George W. Bush, who repeatedly called in 2002-2004 for 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010. Cumulative bank pledges (typically doled out over ten years) grew from $1.85 trillion in 2002 to $4.20 trillion in 2004.
Indeed, total CRA commitments increased by $1.63 trillion in 2004 alone, the first year of the Housing Bubble.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
And so it begins ...
From a writer's perspective, the late Daniel Seligman's Keeping Up column in Fortune was a print forerunner of the blog in that it generally consisted of multiple items of variable length. The items presumably had to add up to a fixed number of word for each issue, but the individual postings didn't have to be of any length, and sometimes consisted merely of a quote from somebody else with a funny title.
This feature of blogging -- no minimum or maximum length per post -- helps many people overcome the writer's block associated with the feeling that you'll never be able to come up with enough words on a topic to justify a column or that you'll never be able to get your point across in few enough words to fit in a column.
More still timely Seligmania:
This feature of blogging -- no minimum or maximum length per post -- helps many people overcome the writer's block associated with the feeling that you'll never be able to come up with enough words on a topic to justify a column or that you'll never be able to get your point across in few enough words to fit in a column.
More still timely Seligmania:
December 2, 1991
MORTGAGE MOONSHINE
Confess! According to Barney Frank, the irredeemably liberal Massachusetts Democrat -- with a solid 94% rating from Americans for Democratic Action -- that is what the bankers of America must now do. They should penitently acknowledge they done wrong, and not react to the news "in a wholly defensive, negative way."
As to what the bankers should confess to, opinions vary, but politicians with high ADA ratings seem unanimous in believing that their mortgage-lending departments must now plead guilty to racial discrimination. Evidence of their bias is said to lie in the recent Federal Reserve study showing that mortgage applications are disproportionately turned down when the applicant is black or Hispanic. Even when you control for income level, these groups did far worse than whites applying for mortgages. In the highest income category examined -- one in which the applicants had incomes at least 20% above the average for their metropolitan statistical area -- 21.4% of black applications were turned down, vs. 15.8% for Hispanics and only 8.5% for whites.
Among the Congresspersons screeching loudest about these data have been Bay Stater Joseph P. Kennedy II (ADA rating: 89%) and Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas (100%). "It matters not whether the discrimination is intentional," says Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee. "Discrimination by ignorance is just as . . . destructive as discrimination by design." Gonzalez and Kennedy introduced the legislation requiring the Fed to compile mortgage-rejection data with breakouts for race and income, which is possibly why they think the figures are so compelling.
The babble over the Fed study has been bizarre on two counts. First, you need a lot more than income data to establish whether mortgage applicants are creditworthy. At a minimum, you would also want data on their credit histories, employment records, and savings. (A 1983 survey by the Fed showed that on average white families have four times the assets of black families.) One hilarious undercurrent at the marathon October 21 press conference announcing the findings was the effort of Federal Reserve Governor John LaWare and others onstage to (a) keep reminding the assembled media folk of these critical omissions while (b) still earnestly trying to represent that the final report was somehow or other quite useful.
Weirder still has been the deafening silence in the media and Congress about another matter: the data on Asian-Americans, whose mortgage applications were also studied by the Fed. It turns out that rejection rates for Asian-Americans were lower than those for whites. Taking together applications at all income levels for mortgages to buy homes, we find that whites had rejection rates of 13.8%, Asian-Americans of 12.9%.
How does that fit into a discrimination-based explanation of the different rejection rates? We called Gonzalez's office demanding (politely) an answer to this question. His office said he is still studying the data. The young lady from Kennedy's office got back to us with a formal statement incorporating the thought that "Asians are repeatedly rejected for mortgage loans at higher rates than whites." We noted that the data said otherwise, at which point she began yalking about certain metropolitan areas where Asians did worse than whites. We were on the verge of pointing out that this implied the existence of still more areas in which they did better than whites but sensed that she might not be able to sell this thought to her boss, as it could only serve to depress him, not to mention his ADA rating.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Nothing ever changes
The older I get, the more it seems like nothing in American social mores has really changed since the 1964-1973 turning point. Thus, the late Daniel Seligman's Keeping Up columns in Fortune from two decades ago seem like they could have been written yesterday:
March 2, 1987
The Dream Girls
A reader has sent in a clipping from Broadcasting magazine and suggested we comment on same. We are delighted to do so as the subject affords a long-awaited opportunity to mention what we consider the single most fascinating social-science finding of the latter 20th century. Pretty big buildup, you say? Just wait and see.
The article in Broadcasting says the Canadian government has developed "voluntary guidelines" about the portrayal of women on television. The article leaves you thinking the governing classes in the U.S.'s friendly neighbor to the north have nothing better to do than brood over the pernicious effects of sex-role stereotyping, and now they are taking action against this evil.
The Broadcasting article naturally reminded the present keyboarder of a study of TV sex roles in his own country. The study, which appeared in Public Opinion last fall, contrasted "TV's Dream Girls" in three different decades (those beginning in 1955, 1965, and 1975). It concluded that women in all three decades are depicted in ways suggesting they are not truly equal to men. The femmes come across as less important than men in TV dramas; they "are less likely to be
mature adults, are less well educated, and hold lower status jobs." Furthermore, women in the dramas tended to derive their identities from their marital status. "A majority of women are identified as either married or single, compared to about one in four men."
We are edging up on the interesting part. Even though women in dramas are stuck in fairly traditional roles, the story line always takes the feminist side of any argument. ("Characters who deride women's abilities are invariably put down by the script.") This was not always true: Before 1965, say authors S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman, "22% of the episodes . .. rejected the feminist positions." But not today -- and here comes our fascinating fact. Of the thousands of dramas studied since 1965, "not a single episode derided notions of sexual equality." Not one. Not even to break the monotony. Can Canada top that?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Ante-"Law & Order"
Another bit from the late Daniel Seligman's Keeping Up column in Fortune:
April 13, 1987
Sell or Die
An unusually compelling statistic suddenly leaped out of the TV set the other night, lodged in the present writer's cortex, and insistently demanded to be memorialized in Keeping Up. "By the age of 18," the man on the tube was saying, "the average kid has seen businessmen on television attempt over 10,000 murders."
The man was actor Eli Wallach, and his memorable line had been supplied by Manifold Productions, creators of Hollywood's Favorite Heavy: Businessmen on Prime Time TV , a documentary that was underwritten by Mobil and other anti-anti-business institutions and is now being aired on public television. The program includes quite a few film clips from prime-time drama, so you get to see lots of managers and entrepreneurs tossing off lines like "Make him disappear," "I want this guy to have an accident," and "I'm making a final offer: Sell or die," all of which seem reasonably representative of the badinage a fellow keeps coming across while flipping over to the baseball game. Still, 10,000 attempted murders is a lot of attempted murders, even for your average highly motivated profit maximizer. Could that number possibly stand up?
Having now looked at some of Manifold's sources, we rate it unproved and yet awesomely plausible and maybe even conservative. One source was a study called Prime Time Crime, published by the Media Institute in 1983. It was prepared by Linda and S. Robert Lichter -- both are scholars at George Washington University -- and based on a sizable sample of television dramas. The study persuasively develops the following propositions:
First, crime is a far greater theme on TV than in the real world: The 263 programs reviewed by the Lichters showed 250 criminals committing 417 crimes. Second, murder is heavily overrepresented in TV crime: Homicides accounted for almost 25% of the crimes in the Lichters' sample (vs. less than 1% in FBI crime reports). Third, business is wildly overrepresented among TV criminals: It was responsible for 26% of all the murders, for example. Also upping the unreality quotient was another finding of the study: that characters who are young, poor, unemployed, or nonwhite hardly ever commit violent crimes on the tube. For those seeking reality in prime time, we continue to recommend the ball game.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
That $340k 500 sq. ft. home in Compton now priced at ...
Remember that one-bedroom pre-WWII house with 500 square feet of floor space on a small lot in Compton, CA that sold for $340,000 in 2007? It's now on the market for $69,900, a price that somebody who doesn't have enough money to move straight outta Compton might conceivably be able to afford.
Fortunately, the Obama Administration has promised to announce on Wednesday a comprehensive program to prevent housing prices from falling to affordable levels like this. Bubble Forever!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Tom Friedman disses Mexicans
Tom Friedman, the Malcolm Gladwell of the New York Times, has a brainstorm in "The Open-Door Bailout:"
Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.
“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.” ...
Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter
Hmmhmmhmm ... "Indians, Chinese, and Koreans..." What's missing from this list of would-be immigrants?
At The American Scene, Dara Lind complains:
The bigger problem is that a lot of Americans really do believe that natives of East and South Asia who come to the United States are uniquely skilled and hardworking in a way that natives of Mexico or Guatemala who come to the United States aren’t. The United States has a long history of distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants ... At the moment, Mexican immigrants appear to be saddled in popular culture with the assumptions that they a) have entered illegally and b) are less intelligent or hardworking than their (particularly Asian) peers. Friedman’s invocation of a “culture” that requires fiscal responsibility helps reinforce the stereotype that an immigrant family from another region wouldn’t work 18 hours a day to pay off a mortgage. His complete omission of Latin America, when Mexico alone sent twice as many legal immigrants to the U.S. as China did from 2005-07, feeds into the assumption that such a family wouldn’t be able to get the mortgage to begin with.
Of course, Friedman actually is right about Mexicans not doing high tech: Mexican immigrants don't make the Top 20 list of source countries of immigrants getting American patents, even though there are far more immigrants from Mexico than any other source.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 13, 2009
Rise of the New Mulatto Elite -- Even in the NBA
For a couple of years, 
I've been pointing out that because African-American culture has become so narrow and inward-looking, it's now having a harder time producing high achievers outside of Officially Black fields such as basketball, football, and some forms of entertainment. Thus, the black race is increasingly represented at the top of many categories by half-black individuals (typically raised by white mothers or white maternal grandparents). Barack Obama is only the most obvious example of the rise of this New Mulatto Elite. (In contrast, the Old Mulatto Elite, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, generally had white ancestors in the paternal line.)
Battier has good literary taste, too.
I've been pointing out that because African-American culture has become so narrow and inward-looking, it's now having a harder time producing high achievers outside of Officially Black fields such as basketball, football, and some forms of entertainment. Thus, the black race is increasingly represented at the top of many categories by half-black individuals (typically raised by white mothers or white maternal grandparents). Barack Obama is only the most obvious example of the rise of this New Mulatto Elite. (In contrast, the Old Mulatto Elite, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, generally had white ancestors in the paternal line.)Now, Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball on the impact of Bill James-style statistics on baseball) has a New York Times Magazine article, "The No-Stats All-Star," on Shane Battier, a Houston Rockets NBA player whose contributions to winning only appear in the newest and most sophisticated basketball statistics. In all the old basketball statistics, he just looks like a slow, not very springy player with a white mom. (Here's a video of Battier singing a country song in a karaoke bar.) But the Rockets brain trust gives him (and nobody else on the team) all their super-sophisticated stats and he digests them before each game to understand how to shut down the opponent's best player, such as Kobe Bryant of the Lakers.
Lewis's article is a bit contrived in that he skips over mentioning that Battier is different from most NBA stars in that he spent four years in college, at Duke, learning how to play from Coach K. Also, in college he was a superstar by his senior year, winning all the awards as player of the year, so the new stats weren't necessary to distinguish his contributions at the college level. As Yogi Berra said, "Sometimes you can observe a lot just by watching." The question was always whether his lack of athleticism would prevent him from playing an important role in the NBA. That's where the new stats help.
Lewis writes:
In 1996 a young writer for The Basketball Times named Dan Wetzel thought it might be neat to move into the life of a star high-school basketball player and watch up close as big-time basketball colleges recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then spent five months trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered high-school basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids — really every single prominent high-school basketball player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like Shane Battier.”
Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and Michigan State — and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set out to minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere with his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him. These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. ...
Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School [tuition = $24,240], watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.)
Battier has good literary taste, too.
When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he ... was also the only kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough, the school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of the problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the black A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,” Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop. I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”
Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”
Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,” Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a mistake to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or ambition, or even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me the story of this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber won three state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the Naismith Award. I won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the Naismith Awards. All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I was in the eighth grade.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Pretty much everyone,” he said.
“White people?”
“No,” he said. “The street.”
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders banned from visiting U.K.
A friend calls to mind Wordsworth's sonnet "London, 1802:"
MILTON! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Seligman's passion: playing the odds
The late Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented the kind of heavily quantitative journalism I practice, loved gambling. (Here's his 1997 City Journal story about the regular poker game he'd been in for 43 years.)
In this 1989 column, he makes an important point about hiring discrimination by invoking his favorite hobby:
April 10, 1989
BIAS IN THE CASINO
Although generally loath to talk up the competition, we find ourselves again recommending instant acquisition of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, last plugged here on August 3, 1987. This scholarly bimonthly has brought forth another blockbuster special issue on employment testing. For those predisposed to think of this subject as not too sexy, we should add that certain themes elaborated in the Journal are rousing animal passions along the Potomac.
A thought you could take away from the special issue is that policymakers will soon be driven to choose between two competing values in the workplace. Value No. 1 is economic efficiency. Value No. 2 is increased opportunity for minority workers. Under the gun nowadays is the U.S. Department of Labor, which seems reluctant to admit there is any tension between those values.
The Labor Department's problem begins with the fact that its U.S. Employment Service (USES) is the country's leading impresario of job testing. The service has developed the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), a quasi-IQ test used to predict workers' performance. The subtests that make up the battery are widely used by state employment services in deciding which workers to refer to employers with job openings. But there is a large embarrassment about the results: the black-white gap. On one major subtest, for example, the average white is a bit over the 50th percentile, the average black around the 35th.
For the past 20 years or so, the public-policy response to such data has been to assume, or possibly the word is "pretend," that the tests are flawed or biased. The assumption is built into guidelines adopted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: These state firmly that group differences on employment tests constitute prima facie evidence of bias. The same assumption is also discernible in the adoption by USES of "race norming," which means putting white and minority testees into separate pools and ranking each individual only in relation to other members of the pool. Race norming is intended to raise minority scores, and does.
The Labor Department is in a somewhat anomalous position here. In supporting race norming, it seems to be implicitly admitting that the GATB is indeed biased. In fact, however, USES strongly endorses the tests and denies they are biased. Obvious underlying reality: USES wants to do as much employment testing as possible but thus far, at least, senses a political need for its tests to generate more minority hires.
The logical case for race norming is meanwhile getting weaker all the time, as the case for the tests' validity gets stronger. Researchers at USES and academic scholars have lately poured forth an avalanche of data supporting "validity generalization." That clunky phrase refers to several interrelated propositions: that tests of cognitive ability like the GATB are superior predictors of job performance, that they work equally well for whites and blacks, and that they predict better than job-specific aptitude tests. The new support for validity generalization is not just academic. Employers charged with adverse impact have recently been winning cases in which they rebutted the presumption of discrimination by pointing to their use of cognitive tests. The Journal includes an article by James C. Sharf of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management pointing up a string of wins for validity generalization in federal courts.
Now about the animal passions. These too are in evidence in the special issue, which features a presentation by Richard T. Seymour of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Seymour derides and excoriates the experts supporting validity generalization and puts forward data to support his claim of boundless test bias. His claim is shot down (on our scoring, anyway) elsewhere in the issue, in a statistical argument unfortunately impossible to render
unless the management around here gives us another 100 lines. [Forget it -- The Management.]
Perhaps Mickey Kaus grew up on Keeping Up too?
However, we do insist on noting one small corner of the argument.
Seymour makes much of the fact that observed correlations between test scores and worker performance are not terribly high. In general, the correlations run around 0.3 (on a scale where 0 means no relationship at all between the two variables and 1.0 means a perfect relationship). With a correlation of 0.3, the test scores "explain" only 9% (the square of that number) of the variability in performance. Seymour argues that this percentage is far too small to be useful and says nobody in his right mind would invest in the stock market with so small an edge.
The answer (delivered by Robert A. Gordon of Johns Hopkins, Mary A. Lewis of PPG Industries, and Ann M. Quigley of the City of Tulsa Personnel Department) directs your attention to the economics of the casino industry. In roulette, the house edge at Monte Carlo is 2.7%. That is equivalent to a correlation of only 0.027 when a player bets red or black. And nobody in his right mind would expect the house to lose.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Question
Q. If we nationalize the banks, will we see them used in service of a nationalist economic policy?
A. Don't be silly.
A. Don't be silly.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Daniel Seligman on the origin of the gay marriage movement
From the late Dan Seligman's Keeping Up column in Fortune:
August 14, 1989
ALL IN THE, ER, FAMILYPerplexities abound when you ponder the instantly famous ruling just issued by the New York Court of Appeals. For openers, how do you parse the lead sentence of the ACLU press release enthusiastically exegetizing the ruling? Loopy lead: "In a landmark ruling for lesbian and gay rights, the [court] ruled . . . that a gay man could be considered a family member of his deceased lover."Huh?
Perplexity No. 2 is the suddenly unsettled question of what a family is. That question got to be burning in the Big Apple because of the city's rent-control laws, which have long allowed resident family members to continue expropriating the landlord's property rights upon the lessee's death. In deciding that lovers without wedding licenses were now entitled to get in on this game, Judge Vito J. Titone derided notions of familialism based on "fictitious legal distinctions or genetic history." What really mattered, he said, was a long-term relationship "characterized by an emotional and financial commitment and interdependence." Noble fellow, eh? But how will the rent-control bureaucracy gauge the emotional [commitment level]?
The deeper meaning of rent control is luckily less elusive. Here we come to an angle totally missed by the media pundits in analyzing the Titone decision. The apartment in question is a one-bedroom job at 405 East 54th Street -- one of New York's most upscale neighborhoods; it would command something like $1,800 a month if rented in a free market. (We are indebted for this estimate to a local real-estate mogul who recently occupied an identical apartment in the building.) The gay couple paid $650. So the landlord was effectively giving them $1,150 a month, which translates into a lump sum of maybe $175,000. New York tenants get these deals because the kindly legislature wished to prevent "uncertainty, hardship, and dislocation."
Students of rent control will already know how the story turns out. It seems that the "deceased lover" was Leslie Blanchard, a star of the local hairdressing scene. Having searched through 48 Nexis stories on Leslie, we depose that he was a big operator. He was Barbara Walters's exclusive hair colorer. He appeared on talk shows. He had his own salon, as well as a hair-coloring company licensed to Richardson-Vicks. He owned horses. He had an estate in New Jersey that was featured in Architectural Digest. He was interviewed by the New York Times on which kinds of weekend guests were pleasant and which kinds were a pain. Demonstrating anew the depravity of rent control in New York, he left an estate of around $5 million and a landlord who can only gnash his teeth about the injustice of it all. Or maybe he should call the ACLU.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Landlords to the rescue?
Obama says his administration will announces its home"owner" bailout package next week. Let me guess: the policy will formalize the rule, "Heads the real estate speculators win, tails the taxpayers lose."
Will we see a repudiation of the "American Dream" rhetoric, with its correlate that the racial gap in home ownership must be closed, that got us into this mess? Don't count on it.
A reader writes:
I have no idea if these tax breaks for landlords would be necessary. But I would add that being a landlord is the kind of traditional Golden Years occupation in which the first wave of Baby Boomers, whose advanced guard turn 63 this years, could make themselves useful as they get to be too old to keep taking the 7am flight to Dallas. Older people tend to have good skills sets for being landlords.
An awful lot of the foreclosed housing stocks is in Sand State exurbs, which are places that tend to be more appealing for retirees than working people. Some of these hot climate exurban McMansions might rent for considerable sums from November through April to snowbirds from the North and from Canada, but wouldn't be worth keeping open in summer, so having a local landlord who can drop buy frequently and discourage criminals from breaking in and setting up meth labs would be handy.
America has a sumptuous housing stock at the moment, but houses decay fast if they fall into the wrong hands, so the chances of being able to leave it to the next generation are up for grabs. The right hands for preservation of housing stock are clearly long term owner-occupiers who can afford to keep them up. Since there aren't enough Jeffersonian sturdy yeomen for all the houses, however, I suspect that small-time local nosy landlords are the second best owners. They are a lot better owners than banks or fraudulent real estate speculators.
Will we see a repudiation of the "American Dream" rhetoric, with its correlate that the racial gap in home ownership must be closed, that got us into this mess? Don't count on it.
A reader writes:
I would like to briefly offer an idea for solving our nation’s financial crisis.
The only assumption I make is that the underlying problem is an over-supply of houses, such that the market cannot clear at current (let alone 2006-7) prices.
There exists a group of people in this country who are uniquely qualified to solve the over-supply problem. They are called Landlords. They already own more than one piece of residential real estate, but they need to be persuaded to buy one or two more.
Currently, a rental property can be depreciated over 21 years. I suggest that the law be changed to 10 years (or whatever it takes) for a residential rental property purchased over the next 2 years.
Income from rental property is taxed as ordinary income. I suggest that the law be changed so that income from any residential rental property purchased over the next 2 years be taxed at a maximum rate of 10% (or whatever it takes).
Landlords may choose to let property at a rate that allows them to break-even over the short term in the hope of profiting when they sell the house in the long term. I suggest that the capital gains tax on residential rental property purchased over the next 2 years be reduced to 5% (or zero, or whatever it takes), whether the Landlord sells the property in 5 years or 50.
I believe that the entire cost of this scheme would be less than $100 billion, and it would be in tax revenues foregone. I also believe that it would arrest the downward spiral of residential real estate values by creating demand for the units at the margin that now exist.
I have no idea if these tax breaks for landlords would be necessary. But I would add that being a landlord is the kind of traditional Golden Years occupation in which the first wave of Baby Boomers, whose advanced guard turn 63 this years, could make themselves useful as they get to be too old to keep taking the 7am flight to Dallas. Older people tend to have good skills sets for being landlords.
An awful lot of the foreclosed housing stocks is in Sand State exurbs, which are places that tend to be more appealing for retirees than working people. Some of these hot climate exurban McMansions might rent for considerable sums from November through April to snowbirds from the North and from Canada, but wouldn't be worth keeping open in summer, so having a local landlord who can drop buy frequently and discourage criminals from breaking in and setting up meth labs would be handy.
America has a sumptuous housing stock at the moment, but houses decay fast if they fall into the wrong hands, so the chances of being able to leave it to the next generation are up for grabs. The right hands for preservation of housing stock are clearly long term owner-occupiers who can afford to keep them up. Since there aren't enough Jeffersonian sturdy yeomen for all the houses, however, I suspect that small-time local nosy landlords are the second best owners. They are a lot better owners than banks or fraudulent real estate speculators.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 12, 2009
Terabux of Community Reinvestment Act Pledges 1977-2005
Well, I found the 2005 National Community Reinvestment Coalition report on CRA commitments in trillions of dollars, so I'm going to make it a VDARE.com article for this weekend. So, this is just a placeholder.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
"Hate Stats"
To expand up Joe Guzzardi's coinage "hate facts," now we see that the Prime Minister of Britain is on verge of an aneurysm in his rage over the publication in easily-comprehensible form of a few statistics about immigration. From The Times of London:
Statistics chief Karen Dunnell inflames row over foreign workers
ONS highlights figures on jobs for immigrants for the first time
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Obama's infrastructure stimulus already at work!
When I came out of the house today, Stop signs had been erected at the intersection at the end of my block, and big white stripes painted on the pavement. Man, President Obama doesn't waste time!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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