June 23, 2009

The Power of Procrastination

One of the advantages of not getting work done on a reasonable schedule is that new material keeps popping up. For example, while I was working on my new VDARE.com article about mortgage-meister Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial last night, at midnight The New Yorker happened to post a new article on the defendant in a new SEC fraud and insider trading suit that confirmed my interpretation.

Here's an excerpt from my VDARE.com piece on Mozilo:
Over the decades, the federal government changed the entire culture of the mortgage industry from penny-pinching skeptics to politically correct pollyannas.

Nobody took less persuading, however, than Mozilo. He always felt discriminated against by the old WASP financial elite. Jeff Bailey’s 2005 NYT article about Mozilo begins:
"A touch of resentment—based on income, education, social class—motivates countless ambitious people, though few will admit to it once they become successful. An exception is Angelo R. Mozilo …

Connie Bruck’s fairly sympathetic new article, Angelo’s Ashes: The man who became the face of the financial crisis, in the June 29, 2009 New Yorker (an abstract is online here) documents just how driven Mozilo always has been by his Commitment to Diversity. Mozilo’s sister told Bruck:
"He was always this Italian guy people didn’t want to accept. When he tans he gets really dark. My mother told me that when he worked in Florida he was asked to sit in the back of the bus."

(Actually, in many photographs, Mozilo looks less brown than orange, more like an Oompa-Loompa in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or the victim of a bad spray-on tan.)

Bruck notes:
"Mozilo always saw himself as providing mortgages to many who were like him -- disenfranchised. ('So they’re not upper-middle-class white people—so what?' he would say. 'They’re Hispanics, and maybe their money is not in a bank—but they are responsible.')'

Bruck’s article suggests that Mozilo actually believes what he told Congress in 2008:
"By the early 1990s, the government had recognized the obvious truth that our housing finance system was leaving major segments of society behind. In 1992, a landmark study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston made it clear that there were systemic underwriting issues relating to the treatment of African American and Hispanic borrowers. Policymakers called upon the mortgage industry to change their practices and redouble their efforts to better serve minorities and underserved communities. While many in the industry discounted the Boston Fed study as flawed, at Countrywide, we stepped up to the challenge by creating our affordable lending initiative known as 'House America.' "

Bruck’s New Yorker article supports Mozilo’s sincerity—or self-delusion:
"… In 1992, shortly after Mozilo became chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston issued a report stating that it had found systemic discrimination by mortgage lenders against African-American and Hispanic borrowers. … Mozilo was appalled. He ordered that all Countrywide’s records on rejected minority applicants be sent to him, and he retroactively approved about half of them. …"

In 2002, a UCLA business professor named Eric Flamholtz suggested to Mozilo the disastrous strategy of trying to grow Countrywide’s share of the mortgage market from ten percent to an oligopolistic 30 to 40 percent. But to pursue its goal of market dominance, Countrywide’s marginal customers would inevitably have to be drawn increasingly from the ranks of those who had never qualified for a mortgage before: in other words, they’d be largely minority.

Result: Mozilo grew into the ultimate embodiment of the type of financial executive the federal government had been cultivating: a monster of ambition combined with a diva of diversity.

Bruck goes on:
"By 2004, Countrywide had become a leading U.S. mortgage lender to what it called ‘multicultural market communities.’ Mozilo always described Countrywide’s inclusion of minority and immigrant populations as both business and mission, and he had become perhaps the single most important advocate of those who believed in advancing homeownership as a means of achieving a more equitable society."

According to The New Yorker, my kind of thinking about origins of the Mortgage Meltdown is personally and politically offensive to Mozilo:
"Several years ago, at the Midwinter Housing Conference, in Park City, Utah, after hearing some mortgage bankers saying that minorities didn’t deserve loans, he declared in a speech, ‘Homeownership is not a privilege but a right!’ Now he abhors the idea that the retrograde view has gained credence. As the Fox Business Network anchor Neil Cavuto said last September, 'Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.'"

Sorry about that, Angelo.

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

June 22, 2009

Sonia Sotomayor: Barack Obama's ideological soul mate

Mickey Kaus points to an NYT article about Sonia Sotomayor's service on some kind of New York housing handout board a couple of decades ago, which documents both her Obama-like Who? Whom? worldview and her anti-Obama tendency to rub people the wrong way.

“She wanted lower-income people served, and that’s a good goal,” said Royce Mulholland, who represented the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal on the board. “But we also explained that the insurance program was intended to serve moderate- and middle-income apartments — and we only provided the insurance, which means we had very little leverage.”

Ms. Sotomayor did not confine her scrutiny to the balance between low- and middle-income housing.

After receiving a report about the agency’s affirmative action program in 1989, she requested a breakdown of the number of black and Hispanic workers. Later that year, when she was informed that just 8 percent of the agency’s contracts went to businesses owned by women or members of minorities, she called its performance “abysmal.”

“It was like a boys’ club when we came there,” recalled Hazel Dukes, who is black and joined the board about the same time as Ms. Sotomayor. “We knew how to be pushy. We were like bees in their bonnet.”

Fioravante G. Perrotta, a former agency board member, did not care for Ms. Sotomayor’s views. Mr. Perrotta recalls her as conscientious and knowledgeable, but he said she was an “extreme partisan” on questions of class and ethnicity.

“She made it very clear that she was very liberal and a Democrat,” Mr. Perrotta said, “and that really should have been a nonpolitical organization.”

Basically, Sotomayor is what Barack Obama would be if he had never mastered his "I have understood you" Jedi mind control shtick where he recounts his interlocutor's argument more eloquently that his conversational partner put it himself, thus persuading 99% of the people he talks to that he shares their views. After all, if he understands my views, how could he possibly not hold my views?

John Carney at Business Insider offers a more lucid explanation of what this government thing-a-mabob was supposed to do, and how Sotomayor's activism is relevant to today's mortgage meltdown.

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

June 21, 2009

Jason Malloy's latest collection

Jason Malloy of GNXP has collected a bunch of interesting abstracts from the National Bureau of Economic Research, including Ted Joyce's latest on the Steven Levitt abortion-cuts-crime theory:
1. No link Abortion and Crime US and UK
2. Genetically closer nations more likely to go to war
3. Taller people are happier
4. B-W gap narrowed b/c Southern hospital desegregation
5. Fat white women and fat black men dislike themselves
6. Educated women are having more babies
7. Latin Americans are poor b/c they have low IQ
8. People just as likely to help different races
1. Abortion and Crime: A Review
Theodore J. Joyce

Abstract -----

Ten years have passed since John Donohue and Steven Levitt initially proposed that legalized abortion played a major role in the dramatic decline in crime during the 1990s. Criminologists largely dismiss the association because simple plots of age-specific crime rates are inconsistent with a large cohort affect following the legalization of abortion. Economists, on the other hand, have corrected mistakes in the original analyses, added new data, offered alternative tests and tried to replicate the association in other countries. Donohue and Levitt have responded to each challenge with more data and additional regressions. Making sense of the dueling econometrics has proven difficult for even the most seasoned empiricists. In this paper I review the evidence. I argue that the most straightforward test given available data involves age-specific arrest and homicide rates regressed on lagged abortion rates in the 1970s or indicators of abortion legalization in 1970 and 1973. Such models provide little support for the Donohue and Levitt hypothesis in either the US or the United Kingdom.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15098

So, after a decade, we're back to where we were in August 1999 right after the debate in Slate between Steven Freakonomics Levitt and me: there's just not much convincing evidence for Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory. On the other hand, Levitt's net worth is a lot higher than in August 1999, so, from a bottom line point-of-view, why should he care about whether he was right or not?
2. War and Relatedness
Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg

Abstract -----

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15095


Dynastic marriages were often arranged in Europe to ensure piece between different countries, although they generally just caused worse problems in later generations by multiplying the number of claimants to the throne. One common type of war well into the 18th Century were Wars of Succession between rival claimants who ruled other countries to a vacant throne. For example, in 1066, William the Conqueror of Normandy first put forward his claim to the throne of England based upon three different genealogical lines of descent. Similarly, English predation on France in the Hundred Years War was justified based on various genealogical theories legitimizing the King of England's claim to the French throne. Joan of Arc was one of the first to forcibly advance the modern nationalist view that the English should just go home to their island and leave the French alone.

It would be interesting to see examples of adjoining peoples who aren't closely related to each other. The most obvious I can think of are Tibetans and lowland Indians. I suspect they haven't fought that much because they don't want each other's land. Indian women can't reliably bear children at Tibet's altitude and Tibetans suffer grievously from malaria below about 5000 feet.
3. Life at the top: the benefits of height
Angus S. Deaton, Raksha Arora

Abstract -----

According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15090

The British Tory cabinet of 1895, the last to be dominated by members of the House of Lords, averaged over six feet in height. I suspect it wasn't just better nutrition and fewer infections, but also selection for height in the mating market.

Back when Hollywood used to make femme fatale movies, the femme fatales were notable for their long legs. It was a signal to the audience that the regular guy hero was getting himself in over his head.
4. Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth
Kenneth Y. Chay, Jonathan Guryan, Bhashkar Mazumder

Abstract -----

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the U.S. military between 1976 and 1991 -- to show: 1) the 1980's convergence is due to relative improvements across successive cohorts of blacks born between 1963 and the early 1970's and not a secular narrowing in the gap over time; and 2) the across-cohort gains were concentrated among blacks in the South. We then demonstrate that the timing and variation across states in the AFQT convergence closely tracks racial convergence in measures of health and hospital access in the years immediately following birth. We show that the AFQT convergence is highly correlated with post-neonatal mortality rates and not with neonatal mortality and low birth weight rates, and that this result cannot be explained by schooling desegregation and changes in family background. We conclude that investments in health through increased access at very early ages have large, long-term effects on achievement, and that the integration of hospitals during the 1960's affected the test performance of black teenagers in the 1980's.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15078

Basically, being a black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South stunk.
5. Obesity, Self-esteem and Wages
Naci H. Mocan, Erdal Tekin

Abstract -----

Obesity is associated with serious health problems, and it can generate adverse economic outcomes. We analyze a nationally-representative sample of young American adults to investigate the interplay between obesity, wages and self-esteem. Wages can be impacted directly by obesity, and they can be influenced by obesity indirectly through the channel of obesity to self-esteem to wages. We find that female wages are directly influenced by body weight, and self-esteem has an impact on wages in case of whites. Being overweight or obese has a negative impact on the self-esteem of females and of black males. The results suggest that obesity has the most significant impact on white women's wages.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15101


Upper middle class people are least likely to be obese, but those who are obese are probably most likely to suffer low self-esteem since it's most disfavored among their class. (This is one of those abstracts where you wonder if they looked at IQ.)

6. Opting For Families: Recent Trends in the Fertility of Highly Educated Women
Qingyan Shang, Bruce A. Weinberg

Abstract -----

Observers have argued about whether highly-educated women are opting out of their careers and for families. If so, it is natural to expect fertility to increase and, insofar as children are associated with lower employment, further declines in employment. This paper provides a comprehensive study of recent trends in the fertility of college-graduate women. We study fertility at a range of ages; consider both the intensive and extensive margins, explore a range of data sets; and study the period from 1940 to 2006. In contrast to most existing work, we find that college graduate women are indeed opting for families. Fertility increases at almost all ages along both the intensive and extensive margins since the late 1990s or 2000 and this recent increase in fertility is consistent across datasets.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15074


I do have a sense that upper middle class Americans are carving out of the rubble left over from the changes of the 1960s a semi-sustainable culture based on a lot of unspoken rules (monogamy, births within marriage, intensive investment in children, etc.). Still, they're in danger of getting swamped: the birth data shows that from 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born in the United States to married women declined 0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3 percent.

7. Schooling, Cognitive Skills, and the Latin American Growth Puzzle

Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann

Abstract -----

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which Latin American countries consistently perform at the bottom. In growth models estimated across world regions, these low levels of cognitive skills can account for the poor growth performance of Latin America. Given the limitations of worldwide tests in discriminating performance at low levels, we also introduce measures from two regional tests designed to measure performance for all Latin American countries with internationally comparable income data. Our growth analysis using these data confirms the significant effects of cognitive skills on intra-regional variations. Splicing the new regional tests into the worldwide tests, we also confirm this effect in extended worldwide regressions, although it appears somewhat smaller in the regional Latin American data than in the worldwide data.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15066

Not surprising.

8. Do Race and Fairness Matter in Generosity? Evidence from a Nationally Representative Charity Experiment
Christina M. Fong, Erzo F.P. Luttmer

Abstract -----

We present a dictator game experiment where the recipients are local charities that serve the poor. Donors consist of approximately 1000 participants from a nationally representative respondent panel that is maintained by a private survey research firm, Knowledge Networks. We randomly manipulate the perceived race and worthiness of the charity recipients by showing respondents an audiovisual presentation about the recipients. The experiment yields three main findings. First, we find significant racial bias in perceptions of worthiness: respondents rate recipients of their own racial group as more worthy. Second, respondents give significantly more when the recipients are described as more worthy. These findings may lead one to expect that respondents would also give more generously when shown pictures of recipients belonging to their own racial group. However, our third result shows that this is not the case; despite our successfully manipulating perceptions of race, giving does not respond significantly to recipient race. Thus, while our respondents do seem to rate ingroup members as more worthy, they appear to overcome this bias when it comes to giving.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15064

Interesting.

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

A theory of historical cultural stagnation

One important finding in Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment is that during the rise of the West from 1500 onward, most major civilizations outside the West were stagnating culturally -- even in categories where they only compete against themselves (e.g., Arabic Literature, Chinese Literature, Indian Literature, Chinese Painting, Indian Philosophy, and Chinese Philosophy).

Only the Japanese seemed to be making steady progress on broad fronts. Not as fast as Europe, but during their isolationist period from 1601-1853, the Japanese were developing many of the features of modern Japan (geisha culture, sumo wrestling, etc.) and continued to progress in the arts. This forward movement may explain why they responded more impressively to the Western challenge when it finally arrived in 1853.

I think there may be a general historical pattern in which a culture goes through a growth phase, classics emerge, and then subsequent generations settle down to memorizing the classic books, which slowly leaches the dynamism from a society.

For example, during the competition of the Warring States era, the Chinese developed lots of ideas about politics and behavior. Subsequent generations judged Confucius, reasonably enough, to be the most sensible of the early Chinese thinkers. They then erected a meritocratic system for choosing government officials based more or less on who can memorize the most Confucius. This worked pretty well for a long time, but by, say, 1800, the Chinese have coasted about as far as they can go on Confucius and aren't prepared for the modern world. (Substitute Mohamed, Plato and Aristotle, Buddha, Aquinas, etc. for other civilizations.)

The invention of the printing press in the 1450s liberated Europe from the tyranny of memorization by making books cheap.

Here's my question about Japan: What are the classics that have dominated Japanese thought? Do they have many? Did they just pay lip service to Confucius. Is this relative lack of classics a key to their continued progress? In Modern Times, Paul Johnson says, "In a sense, the Japanese had always been modern-minded people."

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

Is Love Colorblind, Part MLXXVI

Anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages

Michèle Belot , Jan Fidrmuc

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for a taller husband, can explain a large proportion of these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Health Survey for England and the Millenium Cohort Study, which contains valuable and unique information on heights of married couples.

Yes, I'm sure height plays a role, as I wrote in 1997 (citing height along with hair length and muscularity as visible differences) but black and white men are almost identical in height in the U.S. (Non-Hispanic white men are 0.4 inches taller on average than black men.) Moreover, Asians appear to have been getting taller at a fairly fast rate, both in Asia and in America, while whites and blacks have barely been getting taller. (White men age 20-39 are only 0.4" taller than white men age 40-59.)

And yet the Gender Gaps did not shrink between the 1990 and 2000 Censuses.

Black women have seemed to be getting fatter, while black men have tended to stay in decent shape. Among blacks 20-39, women now have larger waists than men, which can't help black women in the mating market.

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

June 20, 2009

"The Persian Conquest"

With Iran much in the news, it's interesting to take a look at the most influential Iranian community in the U.S.:
The Persian Conquest
Kevin West
W

While the Persian Jews of Beverly Hills certainly make (and spend) lots of money, it's not clear if the Oriental Jews of Beverly Hills will follow their Ashkenazi Jewish predecessors into more intellectual pursuits.

I don't know whether Beverly Hills High School's SAT scores were actually the highest among public schools in Los Angeles County back before the Persians arrived, but, having spent a lot of time competing in debate with Beverly Hills students (my debate coach at Notre Dame H.S. in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley was married to the BHHS debate coach), I certainly would have guessed that was true.

Yet, in 2004-2005, Beverly Hills High School was only 9th among Los Angeles County public schools in percent of students scoring at least 1000 on the Math+Verbal parts of the SAT. The top two schools only allowed in students by examination, but BHHS was still merely seventh among neighborhood schools at 62 percent above 1000 (which is easier since "recentering" in 1995) versus 89 percent at San Marino and 80 percent at La Canada, two sedate old money / new Asian satellites of Pasadena. Even Arcadia, a quite modest-looking suburb in the flatlands of the San Gabriel Valley (where my cousins grew up) d0es better than Beverly Hills these days.

The influx since then of ultra-ambitious affluent Chinese and Koreans into the San Gabriel Valley has propelled its schools up the list, but I wonder whether the Persian influx into Beverly Hills has had a negative effect on BHHS's standing?

I do recall when the Iranians in LA first made themselves prominent: in 1978-1981's huge demonstrations in front of the Federal Building in Westwood. With LAPD mounted cops keeping the Iranians separated from each other, on one street corner would be a big mob denouncing the Shah, on another corner would be a big mob denouncing the Ayatollah, and occasionally on a third corner would be a small mob with the good taste to denounce both of them.

My mother noticed the Iranian influx before I did, about 1974-75, when they started making themselves conspicuous at LA department stores. When I got my MBA at UCLA in 1980-82, I noticed lots of Iranians working at gas stations and at valet parking, but usually at the most expensive addresses. They seemed to feel that the way to get money was to be around money.

In general, I think Persians were able to take over Beverly Hills because they can put more adults in one house than Americans are willing to do. American adults generally can't tolerate living with adults they aren't married to, but Middle Easterners can have four or five paychecks living in one house. Thus, an Askhenazi extended family might see the grandparents in Beverly Hills, the children in Calabasas, and the grandchildren in Camarillo, while a Persian Jewish family would put them all in the Beverly Hills house. I'm not sure if Middle Easterners live more harmoniously with their relatives than Americans do, or if they just enjoy domestic stress more than we do.

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

Evolutionary impact of alcohol?

It's fairly obvious that when alcohol first hits a human population, whether Middle Easterners in the time of Noah and Lot or aboriginal populations in the New World, Pacific, and Australia in more recent times, it takes a terrible toll until gene frequencies and/or cultural traditions better suited for dealing with liquor emerge.

On the other hand, could the invention of alcohol allow for more far-reaching personality adaptations? By way of analogy, consider the theory proposed by both Jerry Pournelle and Temple Grandin: that the domestication of the dog allowed humans to offload to their canine companions much of the job of sophisticated smell cognition used in tracking game, thus freeing up valuable cubic centimeters of the brain for newer purposes.

Perhaps alcohol enables one individual to display a wider range of personalities than can be achieved through solely genetic means, thus allowing personalities to evolve farther in directions suitable for making a living, while still allowing people to display different traits in the evening.

What if the invention of alcohol allowed a single genome to exhibit different personalities at different times? Germans, say, could thus evolve personalities making them tend to be intense worrywarts, propelling their society into a model of technical competence. But who wants to be around other neurotics all the time? Yet, a couple of beers after work could allow the same Germans to turn into amiable, temporarily carefree companions, making social bonding more feasible.

Or the Japanese could evolve to be so intensely sensitive to the feelings of other Japanese that their culture becomes a byword for courtesy and politely vague conversations that don't hurt anybody's feelings or convey much explicit information. Yet, after a couple of shots of sake at one of their countless boys' nights out, the salaryman might suddenly feel free to tell his boss exactly how he's screwing up next year's sales forecast.

I presume this is just another evolutionary Just So story. But, it might be worth looking into through cross-cultural comparisons.

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

June 18, 2009

A tactical suggestion for the Sotomayor hearings

When it comes to racial preferences, Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor are ideological twins, although most Americans don't realize it yet. Unlike the master politician, however, Sotomayor tends to rub people the wrong way. Still, the Republican Senators are highly unlikely to be able to stop Sotomayor. And it's not clear that they should want to, since once on the Court, the mediocre and abrasive Sotomayor is unlikely to evolve into a William Brennan-like master backstage manipulator of the other Justices.

Still, a lengthy hearing over Sotomayor would be the best opportunity for the GOP to begin the process of enlightening the public that Obama isn't the post-racial President that David Axelrod has spun him as. Clearly, the New Haven firefighter reverse discrimination case of Ricci v. DeStefano should be central to the hearings.

Yet, old-fashioned chivalry and post-modern sensitivity both dictate that a bunch of white male conservative Senators like Jeff Sessions can't be seen asking too many probing questions of a lady / minority. The GOP needs a bad guy to pound in these hearings, but Judge Sotomayor isn't a guy.

So, the GOP Senators should subpeona a witness on the Ricci v. DeStefano case. They should subpeona and then roast alive on the witness stand the defendant, beady-eyed New Haven mayor John DeStefano (seen here), who engineered cheating Ricci and company out of their promotions. This will associate DeStefano's petty political machinations to please his main black supporter with Sotomayor, Obama, and racial preference supporters in general.

For examples of the kind of questions they could flail DeStefano with, just refer to the Supreme Court's oral questioning in the case. For example, Mayor DeStefano's city attorney claimed that the city had strong evidence for discarding the test as invalid after finding out the results by race. But Justice Samuel Alito pointed out the preposterousness of that claim in a scalding rhetorical question:
"[The city] chose the company that framed the test, and then as soon as it saw the results, it decided it wasn't going to go forward with the promotions. The company offered to validate the test. The City refused to pay for that, even though that was part of its contract with the company. And all it has is this testimony by a competitor, Mr. Hornick, who said—who hadn't seen the test, and he said, I could do a better test—you should make the promotions based on this, but I could give you—I could draw up a better test, and by the way, here's my business card if you want to hire me in the future.

“How's that a strong basis in the evidence?"

This could be fun.

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

Updated: Obama's financial regulation proposal

Everybody has an opinion on Obama's proposal for revamping financial regulation. I've been busy so I have no idea what's in the plan, so I don't have an opinion.

But, let me make one guess: I bet there's not a single word in the proposal -- nor, I presume, has there been a single word in all the commentary on the proposal -- about moderating the anti-redlining push for more mortgage lending to minorities with poor creditworthiness that was so central to the Sand State subprime mortgage meltdown that set off the financial crisis.

After all, how can anybody talk about reforming this when nobody will even talk about the fact that the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database shows that 77% of subprime home purchase mortgage dollars in California in 2006 went to minorities?

Update: Well, I was wrong. The White House White Paper talks about the new Consumer Finance Protection Agency intensifying the push for more lending to minorities:
The Agency should enforce fair lending laws and the Community Reinvestment Act and otherwise seek to ensure that underserved consumers and communities have access to prudent financial services, lending, and investment.

A critical part of the CFPA’s mission should be to promote access to financial services, especially for households and communities that traditionally have had limited access. This focus will also help ensure that the CFPA fully internalizes the value of preserving access to financial services and weighs that value against other values when it considers new consumer protection regulations.

Rigorous application of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) should be a core function of the CFPA. Some have attempted to blame the subprime meltdown and financial crisis on the CRA and have argued that the CRA must be weakened in order to restore financial stability. These claims and arguments are without any logical or evidentiary basis. It is not tenable that the CRA could suddenly have caused an explosion in bad subprime loans more than 25 years after its enactment. In fact, enforcement of CRA was weakened during the boom and the worst abuses were made by firms not covered by CRA. Moreover, the Federal Reserve has reported that only six percent of all the higher-priced loans were extended by the CRA-covered lenders to lower income borrowers or neighborhoods in the local areas that are the focus of CRA evaluations.

The appropriate response to the crisis is not to weaken the CRA; it is rather to promote robust application of the CRA so that low-income households and communities have access to responsible financial services that truly meet their needs. To that end, we propose that the CFPA should have sole authority to evaluate institutions under the CRA. While the prudential regulators should have the authority to decide applications for institutions to merge, the CFPA should be responsible for determining the institution’s record of meeting the lending, investment, and services needs of its community under the CRA, which would be part of the merger application.

The CFPA should also vigorously enforce fair lending laws to promote access to credit. Furthermore, the CFPA should maintain a fair lending unit with attorneys, compliance specialists, economists, and statisticians. The CFPA should have primary fair lending jurisdiction over federally supervised institutions and concurrent authority with the states over other institutions. Its comprehensive jurisdiction should enable it to develop a holistic, integrated approach to fair lending that targets resources to the areas of greatest risk for discrimination.

To promote fair lending enforcement, as well as community investment objectives, the CFPA should have authority to collect data on mortgage and small business lending. Critical new fields should be added to HMDA data such as a universal loan identifier that permits tying HMDA data to property databases and proprietary loan performance databases, a flag for loans originated by mortgage brokers, information about the type of interest rate (e.g., fixed vs. variable), and other fields that the mortgage crisis has shown to be of critical importance.

But, of course, the HMDA database is for prodding for more lending to minorities. Using it to check up on whether minorities are paying back their loans is unthinkable.

You can take Obama out of the ethnic shakedown racket, but you can't take the ethnic shakedown racketeer out of Obama.

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

Insider's explanation of racial quotas at Naval Academy

Here's a strikingly detailed explanation of the U.S. Naval Academy's racial quota system for admissions by an English prof at Annapolis who serves on the school's Admissions Board. It's rare for an insider to spill the beans about how quotas work this explicitly.
Published 06/14/09

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy. ...

The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority.

Sounds good, only this comes with a huge price tag. It's taxpayers who bankroll the military. Yet nobody has asked us if we're willing to pay this price. Instead we're being told there is no price to pay at all. If you believe that, you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.

A "diverse" class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can't be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments).

It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I've taught for 22 years, Asians.

Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them "qualified." Athletics and leadership also count.

A vote of "qualified" for a white applicant doesn't mean s/he's coming, only that he or she can compete to win the "slate" of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine "qualified" white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of "not qualified" for white applicants.

Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our "number one priority." For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of "qualified" for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They're in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.

Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

By using NAPS as a feeder, we've virtually eliminated all competition for "diverse" candidates: in theory they have to get a C average at NAPS to come to USNA, but this is regularly re-negotiated.

All this is probably unconstitutional. That's what the Supreme Court said about the University of Michigan's two-track admissions in 2003.

Once at Annapolis, "diverse" midshipmen are over-represented in our pre-college classes, in lower-track courses, in mandatory tutoring programs and less challenging majors. Many struggle to master basic concepts. (I teach some of these courses.)

Of course, some minority students are stellar, but they're the exception. Despite being dragged toward the finish line, minorities graduate at about a 10 percent lower rate than the whole class, which of course includes them (so the real split is greater).

Full column here.

I wonder if Professor Fleming had to swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States to get his job at the Naval Academy, and he took his oath literally. Perhaps the higher-ups forgot to clue him into the secret Fingers-Crossed Clause in the Constitution about how that all equal protection of the laws stuff doesn't apply in the case of Diversity.

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

June 17, 2009

Larry David: Alice in Blunderland

Here's my new culture column in Taki's Magazine. I offer a novel perspective on on the seemingly well-worn topic of: What are Larry David's Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm actually about?

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

June 16, 2009

The Iranian Election

As a pundit, it's my sworn duty to have an opinion on the Iranian election.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Iranian psephology, and it would no doubt take a huge amount of time to learn enough to formulate an opinion worth expressing, so I have no opinion to offer.

I'm sorry that I have failed in my obligations.

In my defense, I did mention several times back in 2006 that I was suspicious that the party of the left got ripped off in the Mexican election. But very few other people in the American press acted at all concerned about the validity of the Mexican election, so I guess that's no defense for me and my lack of an opinion on Iranian vote-counting. After all, Mexico is only our neighbor while Iran is obviously much more important, what with it being on the other side of the world and all.

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

A hilarious "oversight" in Nisbett's "Intelligence"

On the VDARE.com blog, I have a posting up about a striking omission in Richard E. Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It.

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

June 15, 2009

Racial Gaps Drive School Policy, Part CMXXVII

In the wake of the Sputnik wake-up call in 1957, two of America's most distinguished technical managers, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the nuclear submarine navy and chemist James Conant, President of Harvard, debated how to improve schooling. Rickover advocated that America imitate the European system of separate schools for academic and vocational students based on ability testing. Conant countered by suggesting that rather than have separate schools, we should have large comprehensive schools with intensive tracking by ability within them. Conant won the debate (although one must wonder how much the advantage of large schools at winning football games played in the outcome). See historian Raymond Wolters' book Race and Education, 1954-2007 for details.

By the late 1960s, however, Conant's solution of tracking was coming under attack as concern shifted away from maximizing the individual potential of students and toward equalizing outcomes of racial groups.

The New York Times reports on one of the last vestiges of old-fashioned honest tracking:
Connecticut School District that Clung to Tracking Is Letting Go

STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.

But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.

So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.

Yeah, but who cares about helping high-performing students live up to their potential? What have smart, well-educated people ever done for the human race?

The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)

More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two.

Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels.

But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.”

Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).

Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.

Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said.

In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.

This is obviously an utterly unique situation in Stamford. I've never ever heard of any other school district in the country where Asians do best, whites second, Hispanics third, and blacks fourth. I'm baffled by the rank order of these results. Maybe there's something in the water in Connecticut because the only similar test I've ever heard of producing results like this was the New Haven firefighter's test that Sonia Sotomayor so rightly threw out for producing unheard of numbers. Obviously, Stamford needs to spend a fortune on a customized test that will produce less bizarre outcomes.

The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.

The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year.

David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said.

Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said. ...

Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said.

A couple of things to notice: First, the policy change is driven by racial gaps. Tracking makes the racial gaps visible, so it must be done away with.

Second, note that they aren't getting rid of tracking completely, they're just going from three tracks to two tracks. They're going to have an Honors Track for the top 25% of the kids. As you might imagine, the parents of the top 25% in Stamford tend to be high-powered people who work in Manhattan or at hedge funds in Greenwich or at marketing consulting firms in Darien or the like, and they will not put up with having their kids tossed in with underclass kids.

But middle class kids, well, too bad for them. They should have chosen their parents more wisely.

What we see across the country is that tracking constantly reappears in the public schools under various guises, as long as it's not called tracking -- Advanced Placement classes, magnet schools, science academies with schools, and so forth. Eventually, the enemies of tracking, who aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, figure out what's going on and stomp it out, only to have it reappear under a new name.

But it would be a lot more effective if we could track on a less ad hoc, less covert fashion. But we can't do that anymore because of racial gaps, which remain the single most dominant force in determining school policy.

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

The Testing Industry Gold Rush

One of the odder phenomenon is that as political correctness grows, so does that most politically incorrect of businesses, standardized testing. You might think that standardized testing would be a stagnant industry, what with the fact that it would appear to be the classic mature industry -- there haven't been fundamental innovations in testing since the middle of the last century -- and that the results it comes up with are viewed with deep suspicion by the courts and the media.

And yet, it's booming.

For example, when researching the Ricci case, I stumbled upon nine different firms that make up firefighters tests. And they are constantly being paid large amounts of money to make up customized new tests -- reportedly, New Haven paid $100,000 for the test that Frank Ricci took -- even though a national test would work fine.

Similarly, the passage of the Kennedy-Bush No Child Left Behind act led to the development of a huge number of new school achievement tests by each state. It was important to have new tests because the NCLB's mandate that federal aid to states would depend upon annual progress toward making every single student in the state above average by 2014 on the state's test could only be accomplished by massive fraud.

A frequent pattern was for a state to introduce a new test and make it initially extremely hard. When the first years' results were announced, the governor would declare an all-hands-on-deck educational crisis in the state. Then, the state would make the scoring progressively easier over the years, and the politicians would congratulate each other on how much they've improved schooling in just a few years. Unfortunately, on the various national tests such as the NAEP or the Iowa test, nothing much would change.

Now, the Administration of the husband of the test-phobic Michelle Obama is set to pour vast new amounts of taxpayer largess on this little industry to create new national tests to replace the state tests mandated by the NCLB, even though plenty of national tests have long existed. (I took the Iowa Test in California in 1966, for example.)

The AP reports:
U.S. to Spend Up to $350 Million for Uniform Tests in Reading, Math

RALEIGH, N.C., June 14 -- The federal government will spend up to $350 million to help states developing national standards for reading and math, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced Sunday.

In the current patchwork of benchmarks across the nation, students and schools considered failing in one state might get passing grades in another. The Obama administration is urging states to replace their standards for student achievement with a common set.

Every state except Alaska, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas has signed on to the concept, but getting them to adopt whatever emerges as the national benchmark will be politically difficult.

Duncan said the government's spending will go for the development of tests that would assess those new standards.

The money will come from the Education Department's $5 billion fund to reward states that adopt innovations the Obama administration supports. ...

Any tests developed for the new standards would probably replace existing ones.

Asked to explain the money's focus on developing more tests, Duncan said developing the standards themselves would be relatively inexpensive.

Developing assessments, by contrast, is a "very heavy lift financially," he said, expressing concern that the project could stall without federal backing.

"Having real high standards is important, but behind that, I think in this country we have too many bad tests," Duncan said. "If we're going to have world-class international standards, we need to have world-class evaluations behind them."

So, what's the fundamental reason for why the government has been spending so much money on new tests in this decade? Because the politicians don't like the results, especially the continuing existence of racial gaps. They're behaving like a fat man who keeps buying more and more expensive bathroom scales because he doesn't like what the old scale tells him about his weight.

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

My VDARE.com review of Nisbett's "Intelligence" book

Here's an excerpt from my book review:
Intelligence and How to Get It by U. of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett seems to be set in some alternative universe in which James D. Watson’s heresies are the almost-unchallenged orthodoxy, Malcolm Gladwell is a pixel-stained wretch barely scraping by while I’m pulling in the big bucks making speeches to national sales conventions, and poor Nisbett is a dissident bravely speaking truth to power. ...

Nisbett never explains his bizarre rhetorical strategy. But, I suspect that after a few drinks, he might justify it like this: “Well, sure, a bunch of innumerate journalists and excited ideologues like Stephen Jay Gould convinced themselves and a lot of their more naïve readers that all this IQ stuff was hooey, but you know and I know that the kind of thing you write in VDARE.com about IQ is actually the conventional wisdom … among those few who know what they are talking about.”

Nisbett’s 2004 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why was an intriguing exploration of how Northeast Asians tend to think in terms of context and harmony while Americans are more object-oriented and innovative. Hence, I had some hopes for his new book as a critique of the views held by the best-informed.

Nisbett concedes vast swathes of normally disputed territory: IQ, according to Nisbett, is real and important; IQ tests measure it accurately; there are sizable racial gaps in IQ; and IQ tests are not culturally biased (which will come as a big surprise to Sonia Sotomayor). On many of the issues I covered in my FAQs on the subjects of IQ and race, we wouldn’t have much to disagree over.

Nisbett, however, tries to draw a line in the sand in two places by:

- Denying absolutely that heredity plays any role in the existing black-white IQ gap
- Asserting vociferously that IQ is highly malleable

... Unfortunately, Nisbett’s handling of the evidence in Intelligence and How to Get It undermines his own reputation. Terms like “cherry-picking,” “scattershot,” and “disingenuous” come to mind. Arthur Jensen and J.P. Rushton have already pointed out many of the ethical shortcuts Nisbett has taken in order to appeal to the Gladwellites, and an upcoming review by a Harvard psychology grad student named James Lee will also be damaging.

Moreover, despite his book’s self-help title, Nisbett hasn’t figured out an actual plan for increasing IQ among one’s own children, much less among the masses of black and Hispanic poor.

Depressingly, out of the countless educational experiments tried over the last five decades, he mostly trots out the same old handful of legendary preschool intervention studies whose claims of success have been debated back and forth for much of my lifetime: the Perry Preschool Program of the mid-1960s, the Milwaukee Project of the late 1960s, and the Abcedarian Project of the late 1970s. Even Nisbett laments, “a huge amount of research needs to be done to establish whether something like the Perry or Milwaukee or Abecedarian program would be effective and feasible if scaled up to national proportions.”

... Nisbett’s recounting of the lore of preschool IQ Improvement projects brings to mind a concern that nagged at Herodotus, the Father of History, back in the 5th Century B.C.: the older the tale he retold, the more miraculous the events it recounted. Rather than rehash the controversies over whether or not these storied endeavors actually worked in the distant past, the more relevant question in 2009 would seem to be: Why haven't their successes been replicated in the last 30 years?

It never quite dawns on Nisbett that educational projects aren’t exactly like chemistry experiments, which should be perfectly reproducible. Unusually successful schooling experiments are more like hit movies, which notoriously depend upon the temporary and highly unstable commingling of charismatic individuals. ...

Consider merely all the movies about dedicated teachers who overcome societal prejudices to make a difference in the lives of their students. (IMDB lists 31.) A few of them triumphed (for example, Maggie Smith’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), while others fizzled (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Dangerous Minds). You might think that Hollywood would have a formula by now for reliably churning this genre of films out, but each new one remains a gamble.

Something vaguely similar is true with schooling.


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

June 14, 2009

"Il Divo"

Here's my full review from The American Conservative of the recent Italian film, which I'm posting to provide some perspective on my subsequent post, "The Deep State:"
Most movie critics are more concerned with film than with life, but my goal has been to help make movies, those pungent yet unreliable distillations of life, more compelling for the reader who is more interested in the world than in the cinema.

Consider “Il Divo,” a baroquely stylized biopic about Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy in the 1972-1992 era, and then a perpetual defendant in murder and Mafia trials in 1993-2003. Paolo Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” is clearly a film of aesthetic ambitions (the owlish politician inhabits a De Chirico Italy of sinisterly empty arcaded streets) and some historical significance.

Still, the labyrinthine “Il Divo” would be impenetrable to any American who hasn’t read up on Italy’s lurid recent past, in which Andreotti’s rival, ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, various Vatican-connected bankers died in fashions that would have amused the Borgias, a Masonic lodge served as a seeming government-in-waiting for a post-coup Italy, and brave magistrates investigating the Mafia blew up.

Italian politics, with its constantly collapsing governments, strikes Americans as a joke. Yet, the fundamental questions of Italy’s Cold War years were deadly serious: Would the unruly joys of Italian daily life succumb to the grayness of a Communist state, the Cuban tragedy writ large? Yet, just how many Machiavellian machinations in the name of saving Italy from the Reds could be borne?

We often heard in 2002 that the U.S. did such a wonderful job reforming Germany and Japan after WWII that we were bound to accomplish the same in Iraq. Unmentioned went the 1943 American invasion of western Sicily. Needing to keep civil order without tying up troops, we turned control over to local anti-Fascist men of respect: i.e., Mafiosi who had been lying low during Mussolini's crackdown. It worked, but the blowback lasted 50 years. After the war, to keep Italy’s huge Communist Party out of power, the U.S. subsidized the Christian Democrats, who relied on Mafia get-out-the-vote capabilities in the South.

In the Anglo-American world, to label anything a “conspiracy theory” is to dismiss it out of hand. In Italy, in contrast, conspiracy theories are the default explanation for how the world works, because conspiracies are the main mechanism by which politicians get done what little they do. In Italy, the political is personal. To understand historical events, you need to tease out the occluded connections among the players.

As “Il Divo” demonstrates, Italy apparently needed to be led during those difficult decades by the least operatic politician imaginable, and can only now afford to revert to more stereotypically Italian showboats such as current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Like a more cultivated, less bumptious version of the Daleys who have ruled Chicago for 41 of the last 54 years, Il Divo is not a diva. Andreotti doesn’t bluster from balconies, nor even bother to cut a stylish figure. He listens carefully, forgets nothing, and confines his own utterances to mordant witticisms. As portrayed by Toni Servillo of the recent Neapolitan mob movie “Gomorrah,” Andreotti is a thin, stoop-shouldered man who never talks with his hands. Telegraphing his introversion, he keeps his chin tucked to his sternum, his elbows tight to his ribs, and makes only the most primly clerical symmetrical gestures. Servillo’s characterization is reminiscent of Austin Powers’s nemesis, if only Dr. Evil were underplayed by Jack Benny.

Margaret Thatcher reminisced about Andreotti, “He seemed to have a positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun.” “Il Divo’s” nightmarish depiction of Italian politics raises an unsettling point. In Andreotti’s defense, he at least was born into his system, while America is now led by a man who, with every opportunity in the world beckoning, carefully chose to make his career in our closest equivalent: Chicago politics.

Having been acquitted on a second appeal in the shooting of a journalist investigating Moro’s death, and saved by the statute of limitations from conviction for his 1970s alliance with the Sicilian Mafia, Andreotti is still influential as a Life Senator at 90. The unflappable maestro commented on “Il Divo,” "I don't agree with Sorrentino's portrayal of me, but I understand he had to make certain dramatic choices to make it interesting; my real life is actually quite boring." Unfortunately, an American would have to be as well-informed as Andreotti to make sense of “Il Divo.”

Unrated, but would be PG-13.

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

The Deep State

An intriguing concept almost unknown in America but common in political discourse in Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Turkey is the putative existence of a "deep state" whose members ultimately pull (or could pull) the strings. In Italian history, for example, its manifestations might include Mafia connections with politicians, the P2 Masonic lodge in Rome that was discovered in 1980, and NATO's Operation Gladio "leave behind" commando units that were intended to wage guerrilla war after a Communist takeover but may have been turned to less noble ends in the meantime.

Currently in Turkey, the ruling Islamic party is putting on trial many of its Kemalist and other enemies on charges of being part of a shadowy organization supposedly known as Ergenekon. Wikipedia says:
The Deep state (Turkish: derin devlet) is said to be a group of influential anti-democratic coalitions within the Turkish political system, composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services (domestic and foreign), Turkish military, security, judiciary, and mafia.[1][2] The notion of deep state is similar to that of a "state within the state". For those who believe in its existence, the political agenda of the deep state involves an allegiance to nationalism, corporatism, and state interests. Violence and other means of pressure have historically been employed in a largely covert manner to manipulate political and economic elites and ensure specific interests are met within the seemingly democratic framework of the political landscape.[3][4] Former president Süleyman Demirel says that the outlook and behavior of the (predominantly military) elites who constitute the deep state, and work to uphold national interests, are shaped by an entrenched belief, dating to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, that the country is always "on the brink".[5]

The ideology of the deep state is seen by leftists as being anti-worker or ultra-nationalist; by Islamists as being anti-Islamic and secularist; and by ethnic Kurds as being anti-Kurdish.[6] As pointed out by former prime minister Bülent Ecevit, the diversity of opinion reflects a disagreement over what constitutes the deep state.[7] One explanation is that the "deep state" is not an alliance, but the sum of several groups that antagonistically work behind the scenes, each in pursuit of its own agenda.[8][9][10] Rumours of the deep state have been widespread in Turkey since Ecevit's term as prime minister in the 1970s, after his revelation of the existence of a Turkish branch of Operation Gladio, the "Counter-Guerrilla".[11][12]

To the foreign observer, the Turkish belief in the deep state is an interesting social phenomenon, seemingly based on a confluence of fact and conspiracy theories.[2] Many Turks, including elected politicians, have stated their belief that the "deep state" exists.[13][14]

To the American mind, this way of thinking sounds terribly Byzantine, a part of a culture where the smartest guy in the room isn't the one who comes up with the simplest explanation but the one who comes up with the most complicated conspiracy theory.

And it also seems simplistic from an American/globalist perspective. Where would, say, Goldman Sachs fit into the Turkish model of a Deep State? Isn't the whole concept of a "state" rather obsolete-sounding in the age of Davos Man, more appropriate for old-fashioned patriotic Turks than for postmodern Westerners?

And, in the Turkish (much less American) context, does it even really exist? Is it excessive to give a portentous-sounding name to something that sounds like big shots scratching each others' backs?

Nonetheless, the notion of a deep state, although perhaps better conceptualized less as a top-down conspiracy than as an emergent phenomenon among insiders with overlapping interests, might prove useful to Americans in overcoming our native bias toward boyish naivete about the ways of the world.

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