July 4, 2009

Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire

It's not widely remembered today, but Fred Astaire was a sizable singing star in his day, who introduced such standards as "Night and Day," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Way You Look Tonight," "They Can't Take that Away from Me," "Something's Gotta Give," and even that noir classic "One for My Baby." Although he had a light voice, his perfect timing and professionalism were much appreciated by composers. Today, anthologies of Great American Songs that can't afford the rights to Frank Sinatra's recordings will often choose Astaire's 1952 re-recordings of his work with Oscar Peterson's quintet as the next best thing.

In other words, Astaire's talents were roughly similar to Michael Jackson's: great dancer, pretty good singer.

But, jeez, look at the difference in their careers and lives: Astaire lived to be 88, exemplified the concept of growing old gracefully in how he slowly wound down his show biz career, enjoyed a decorous private life devoted to his family and his grown-man hobbies (horseracing and golf), and left behind an enormous body of creative dance work in his movies. With Astaire, there's no single peak that overwhelms everything else.

Astaire didn't write songs, but Jackson, who couldn't play an instrument, wasn't particularly fertile of melodic invention, either: even "Billie Jean" succeeded because of an enormous amount of production effort -- it was mixed 91 times -- that went into making it sound minimalistically under-produced. Jackson would have benefited from the pre-Dylan assumption that singers didn't have to write their own music.

For Michael as a dancer, what to do we really have? The live "Billie Jean" on the Motown 25th Anniversay show, the "Beat It" video, and a few other peaks, but most everything else is overshadowed in the build-up to or let-down from 1983.

One of Jackson's career problems was that, unlike Astaire, he appeared in only one real feature-length musical movie, The Wiz. Our popular culture had largely lost its ability to make musical movies. In contrast, the lightweight musical comedies of the 1930s provided Astaire with an established genre, routine frameworks within which he could repeatedly exercise his genius without worrying too much about script, acting, the Meaning of It All, etc. The studio system took care of that kind of thing. (Berry Gordy modeled Motown on 1930s Hollywood studios, and had remarkable success that has never been surpassed, but the cult of authenticity makes that impossible to reproduce in pop music today above the teenybopper level.)

Musical comedy movies gave Astaire a reason to get up and put in a hard day's work doing something he knew how to do. He didn't wait around for inspiration to strike him; the inspiration would come during the drudgery. Astaire was by no means psychologically bullet-proof. He was insecure and used his inner nagging voice to push him to constantly revise and improve his dance sequences. But then get up the next day and start on the next one.

The more ambitious genre of musicals that Rodgers and Hammerstein introduced with Oklahoma in 1943 were a great leap forward aesthetically, but perhaps they began to introduce that note of megalomaniacal artistic ambition into American pop music -- notice how, say, Leonard Bernstein was permanently stuck by his inability to top West Side Story -- of which Jackson's later career was a sad exemplar.

Unlike Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson didn't have any kind of framework. Astaire was a craftsman who happened to be a genius. Jackson was a genius for about six months at age 25, and spent the rest of his life having people tell him he was a genius.

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

July 3, 2009

The American Media's Bias toward English-Speaking Foreigners

The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there's a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world's dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians -- Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements.

Thus, the American media was sympathetic toward Mousavi's complaints about vote-counting in Iran because because his supporters were good at communicating them to Americans, while the populist Ahmadinejad draws his support from uncool people who don't speak much English. In contrast, the complaints of Lopez-Obrador, the populist mayor of Mexico City, about vote-counting in Mexico were greeted with yawns in the U.S. press because his supporters are generally not very articulate in English, and his party's ideology is fairly anti-American and anti-globalist.

Being biased toward the better English speakers is not just a custom of convenience for the American media and the American government. There's a moral feeling as well that the better English speakers deserve to win because they are more like us. Of course, this is self-serving: promoting the triumph of English-proficient classes also promotes the global dominance of American media institutions.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. FDR's Administration routinely overestimated Chiang Kai-shek's regime in part because it possessed a facade of charming English-speaking UCLA and Berkeley-educated officials, even though the real decisions were made in very Chinese ways that Washington never understood. Meanwhile, Mao's rebels had few English speakers, so FDR underestimated them.

Similarly, why did the U.S. side with Maliki's Iranian-aligned Shi-ites in Iraq, when it would have made more strategic sense to side with the anti-Iranian Iraqi nationalist Shi-ites of Muqtada al-Sadr? A big reason is that Maliki's gang, who had spent decades in Iran while their rivals were holed up in the slums of Iraq (such as Sadr City), were more cosmopolitan -- i.e., were better at speaking English.

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

July 2, 2009

Mr. Ritholtz replies: "They are cogent arguments ..."

In a new Comment, Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, replies to a sampling of my articles on how "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:"
I think we are approaching this from two entirely different universes.

I am looking for cause and effect; I want to see data that supports or detracts from the proposition at hand. PROVE TO ME that X caused Y (including actual statistics).

Your proposal of Diversity causing the housing crash reads to me as a soft philosophical argument that is by definition unprovable -- and undisprovable.

At the very least, I see no proof in your writings. They are cogent arguments that leap from A to B to C -- but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data.

In my belief system, I use as few assumptions as possible. I try to avoid things that are unquantifiable. Statistical back testing is just on way to do that.

But even softer analyses such as war-gaming and alternative scenarios have to have some reasonable basis for proceeding. It cant be all assumptions, beliefs guesses and hunches.

This shows heartening progress in just a few days. Before he was exposed to my work, Mr. Ritholtz was denouncing and demonizing anybody who shared my views.

Here's a sample of what he wrote at the beginning of this week:

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisan.

The rhetoric of those pushing nonsense on the public in an attempt to confuse rather than illuminate — the phrase is “agnotology” – only serves to aid the lobbyists working on behalf of the Banks and Investment houses to maintain the status quo. ..

The nonsense rhetoric blogged about has no cost to those pushing these discredited memes ...


Now, having finally read my articles, he admits I offer "cogent arguments." He no longer seems to think he can prove them wrong, so he's insisting that I haven't proved them right.

He today argues, not incorrectly, "but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data."

Of course, that tends to be true of all historical writing. As the venerable historian Jacques Barzun wrote at age 93 in his summa, From Dawn to Decadence, in one of his 12 modest dictums summing up what he's learned during his career as a historian:
The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.

Further, let me point out, that I'm not done yet collecting data. For example, we now know the subprime default rates by race for the state of Massachusetts. We now know, on a national level, the default rates by race for FHA loans in the 1990s. Eventually, somebody will apply the same laborious process to the Big One -- California -- and then we will be a lot farther along.

In summary, as Mr. Ritholtz more or less admits, my arguments, long ignored, distorted, or demonized, deserve a place at the table in any discussion attempting to discern the historical causes of the present unpleasantness.

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

"Who? Whom?" Part 418

As Justice Alito's concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.

Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn't the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it's a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There's a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called "disparate impact" that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

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

Fixing the Supreme Court

That Justice Ginsburg's dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what's wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can't imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg's clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don't care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn't just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I'm still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, "How stupid of me not to have thought of that."

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still ...)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.

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

July 1, 2009

Ricci: When even the NYT Letters-to-the-Editor make sense

Traditionally, the New York Times has the world's worst Letters-to-the-Editor page, filled with credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT's soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn't include some additional argument so dumb that not even the NYT Editorial board would fall for it.

It indicates just how badly the diversitarians got smoked intellectually on Ricci that even the NYT's Letters-to-the-Editor section (The Firefighters' Test: Flawed or Fair?) responding to the paper's editorial denouncing the New Haven test is pretty good.

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

Troy Patterson

I've been giving various Slate writers a hard time lately, so I want to say how much I enjoy the work of Slate's TV critic Troy Patterson.

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

More on Michael Jackson

Over in Taki's Magazine, I write:

The late Michael Jackson was a strange individual, but his various obsessions, such as weight loss, whitening his skin, and expensively designing his children, were hardly unique to him.

They are shared by more than few of his legion of female fans. To become a superstar, you have to embody some of the inner fixations of either the male or female publics. And in popular music in recent decades, the biggest names have had largely feminine audiences because male tastes have fragmented into multitudinous narrow genres, such as, say, Melodic Death Metal.

Read the whole thing there and comment on it here.

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

The Mortgage Meltdown and Pearl Harbor

Look, Sailer, why do you keep saying that we should keep in mind that Pearl Harbor got us into World War II? Lots of other countries got into World War II without Pearl Harbor happening to them. And even if Pearl Harbor never happened to us, we probably would have gotten into World War II eventually anyway. Therefore, you should shut up, and nobody should ever mention Pearl Harbor again.

Or:

C'mon, Sailer, why are you so evil as to mention the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when discussing the Great Depression? Lots of other countries were involved in the Great Depression. And even if there hadn't been a Wall Street Crash in 1929, the U.S. probably would have suffered in a Great Depression sooner or later anyway. Thus, logically, anybody who mentions the Wall Street Crash of 1929 should be hounded out of polite society.

Liberals to America: Hey, we were only kidding about "equal protection"

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about "Who? Whom?" Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

Consider this entry, From Washingto to New Haven, the Rules They Are A-Changin', on the Washington Post's XX blog by Nicole Allan, the Slate intern/Yalie who coauthored with Emily Bazelon that long article in Slate entitled The Ladder.

The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”

It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. ...

I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.

As Strobe Talbott wrote in Time in 1982:
Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: "Who—whom?" No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over "them," whoever they were.

The funny thing is how modern American liberals consider their Who? Whom? mindset not cynical, but sacred.

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

Barone on Ricci

Michael Barone has a good column today on Ricci, Firefighter case shows seamy side of racial politics, which is clearly drawn from my stuff. Considering all the mean things I said about him a number of years ago, it's big of him to be a reader.

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

June 30, 2009

Mr. Ritholtz replies

From the comments section of my recent post offering a reading list to bring Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, up to speed on how "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:"
Ritholtz said...

My bad -- I guess I am not clearly defining what I mean by "Data".

Allow me to present an example:

The Federal Reserve Board data shows that:

* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. These firms are not covered by the CRA

* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the CRA.

Sources:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2007/articles/hmda/default.htm

and
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/1999/FIL9920a.html

amongst others

This is what I mean by data, from reputable sources, relating to the actual issue at hand.

My apologies for any prior confusion...

Dear Mr. Ritholtz:

We are discussing whether or not "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown." I realize you wish to confine the debate to the narrowest possible technical question of institutions officially covered by the Community Reinvestment Act. As you will recall, however, my invitation to you to debate me here rejected such a contrived and unenlighteningly narrow limitation of the topic. I wrote on Monday morning:

I would certainly debate him on the topic "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown."

The causes are much bigger than the Community Redevelopment Act. I've always argued that George W. Bush's drive to add 5.5 million minority homeowners, as enunciated at the October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, by abolishing down payment requirements and by allowing "low doc" mortages (a.k.a., liar loans) was more directly responsible. But they are obviously both part of the same overall Diversity mindset.

Moreover, you should realize by now from reading those nine articles (you have read them by this point, haven't you?), you are drawing a legalistic distinction that didn't have a real world difference. Nonbank mortgage lenders not officially covered by the CRA, such as Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide, were told in no uncertain terms by the Clinton Administration that either they could start behaving like they were covered by the CRA or the CRA would be legislatively extended to them.

As Steve Malanga explained in the Spring 2009 City Journal:
"Pressuring nonbank lenders to make more loans to poor minorities didn’t stop … If it didn’t happen, Clinton officials warned, they’d seek to extend [Community Reinvestment Act] regulations to all mortgage makers. … To rebuff the criticism, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) shocked the financial world by signing a 1994 agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), pledging to increase lending to minorities and join in new efforts to rewrite lending standards. The first MBA member to sign up: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage firm that would be at the core of the subprime meltdown."

Both in order to maintain the favor of regulators, politicians, Fannie and Freddie, and the media, and because Mozilo appears to have been a true believer in the Diversity dogma and saw himself as sticking it to the old WASP finacial establishment by lending money to "underserved Americans" (as Connie Bruck's recent New Yorker article makes clear), Countrywide made pledges identical in form to the pledges made by CRA-covered institutions, such as Mozilo's $1 trillion (that's trillion with a T) promise on January 14, 2005. (See Countrywide's press release entitled Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillion in Home Loans to Minority and Lower-Income Borrowers.)

Once you've finished reading my nine articles, Mr. Ritholtz, so that you are up to speed enough to carry on a sophisticated discussion of "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown," please come back. I look forward to carrying on a well-informed discussion.

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

The intellectually feeble left wing of the Supreme Cout

Half Sigma offers a lucid review of Justice Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in Ricci:

Instead of rejoicing over the outcome of the Ricci case, the fact that four justices signed on to GInsubrg’s dissenting opinion fills me with both anger at liberals and dread that the liberal viewpoint will eventually triumph over reason and sensibility. Ginsburg writes, “The Court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power.” I translate this as meaning that Obama is going to be president for another seven and a half years, so the liberals are only one heart attack away from reversing Ricci and imposing their will. It’s an unusually unsportsmanlike statement and demonstrates a disrespect for stare decisis that’s unbecoming of a Supreme Court justice. When something like that shows up in a dissent, it indicates that the decision created a great deal of ill will.

As I explained in my previous two posts analyzing the Ricci decision, the statutes passed by Congress are racially neutral and state that it’s unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 42 USC §2000e–2(a)(1). It doesn’t say that it’s only unlawful to discriminate against minority races. The Supreme Court has continuously paid at least lip service to the concept of race neutrality, and theoretically there are only a few limited circumstances in which it’s legal to discriminate against whites in order to favor minority races. One such circumstance is in education where the need for “diversity” is such a compelling interest that it allows colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions See Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

It seems clear to me that Ginsburg doesn’t agree with the idea of race neutrality. She believes that it’s always desirable to discriminate against whites, and presumably Asians as well, in order to benefit blacks and presumably Hispanics. But she dare not say this directly in her opinion, because such a direct statement of what the left really wants is unpopular with the majority of Americans, and it would also make her dissent irrelevant because it would be such an obvious misstatement of the current law, a misstatement of both the text of the statutes and judicial opinions interpreting the statutes. Her actual dissent is a lot more pernicious, because it undermines the holding of the majority by repeating and thus bolstering the standard liberal half-truths and lies.

If you don’t believe my view of Ginsburg’s true motives, then try to imagine how she might have decided this case if the facts were the same except the races were reversed. After the city gave the test, too many blacks did well on the test, and white groups in the city complained that too many blacks were being promoted, and then the city threw out the results under the pretext of disparate impact. Does anyone seriously think that Ginsburg would agree with the city? Hell no! It would be an obvious case of discrimination against blacks!

At the beginning of her dissent, Ginsburg mentions that the city is nearly 60% “African-American” and Hispanic. She thinks this bolsters the view that the fire department needs more black and Hispanic firefighters in command position. This is only because she judges fairness by outcomes. From my perspective, the fact that non-Hispanic whites are a minority in the city of New Haven makes it more likely that the city refused to certify the test results for the worst possible reason; to discriminate against a minority (non-Hispanic whites) in order to benefit the majority.

Read the whole thing.

That brings to mind the intellectual firepower imbalance currently on display in the Supreme Court:

The right wing:

Chief Justice Roberts is 54. He may have epilepsy, though.

Alito is 59.

Scalia is 73.

Thomas is 61.

Kennedy is 72.

Average age is 65.

The left wing:

Breyer is 70.

Ginsburg is 76 and was operated on in February for pancreatic cancer. It's really rather heroic that she (or her clerks) came up with the dissenting opinion at all, and its quality should be mercifully evaluated in light of that.

John Paul Stevens is 89. It's basically a scandal that somebody is on the Supreme Court at age 89. The press didn't complain about it during the Bush years for obvious reasons.

David Souter, the original Stealth Nominee, is only 69, but is apparently so out of it that he's packing it in.

Average age 77 (rounding down).

Basically, the liberal team on the Supreme Court consists of one very smart guy just entering his 70s and a very motley supporting crew. I wonder why Breyer didn't write the dissenting opinion. Perhaps he just couldn't bring himself to be as obtuse and mendacious as it took to get the job done.

Souter will be replaced by 55-year-old diabetic Sonia Sotomayor, who is hard working and will be a reliable vote for the left, but who isn't likely to be the second coming of William Brennan in terms of persuading the other Justices to move to the left through Machiavellian manipulation. Sotomayor got the nomination because Obama, in effect, drew a Venn Diagram consisting of circles labeled "Hispanic," "female," "not old," "liberal," and "credentialed enough to be plausible," and Sotomayor was the last one standing.

So, you can expect pressure to build on Stevens from the media and the Obama Administration (not that there's much distinction between the two these days) to get the hell out, no later than his 90th birthday next April.

Look for Obama not to draw a Venn diagram next time and waste another pick, but to find somebody who will be highly effective.

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

I think The Who had a song about this

From AOL News:
A Swedish couple's decision to keep their toddler's gender a secret is stirring debate, especially now that the parents are expecting a second child.

"Pop" is 2 ½ years old, but so far only those who change the child's diapers know whether the youngster is a boy or a girl, TheLocal.se, an English-language site for Swedish news, said last week.

Back in March, the parents gave an interview to the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, saying they decided not to reveal their child's sex because they believe gender is a social construction. "We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mold from the outset," said the child’s mother, "Nora." (The paper used fake names for the entire family to protect their privacy.)

"It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead," the mother said.

The parents, both 24 years old, said they never use personal pronouns when referring to the child. They just say "Pop."

The tot wears everything from dresses to pants, and Pop is usually the one who decides what to wear on any given morning. Pop's hairstyle is also changed on a regular basis, so it doesn’t provide any clues.

Swedish gender equality expert Kristina Henkel told The Local that the experiment could make Pop a stronger person, since he or she won’t be subject to gender stereotypes.


By The Who:
I'm A Boy
(Pete Townshend)

One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally Joy
The other was me, and I'm a boy

My name is Bill and I'm a headcase
They practice making up on my face
Yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend ages taking hairpins from my hair

Chorus 1
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am I get it

Put your frock on Jean Marie
Plait your hair Felicity
Paint your nails, little Sally Joy
Put this wig on, little boy

Chorus 1

I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the street
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud

Chorus 2
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm__ a__ boy__

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

June 29, 2009

Why South Africa isn't going to be Zimbabwe South

People always get mad at me whenever I suggest that Zimbabwe might hold some suggestions about South Africa. Yet, it's as if something happened to Canada, you wouldn't be too surprised if it later happened to the U.S.

They tend to sputter when denouncing the very idea that Zimbabwe is just South Africa with a 14 year head start. Everything is so different!

I've finally figured out one relevant difference. The old Rhodesians had to work, hard and competently, for their wealth. They were world class farmers, and then during the embargo of 1965-1980, they built up their own industries.

So, when the new rulers of Zimbabwe started murdering the farmers, stealing their farms, and driving off the other people who knew how to do stuff, it all went to hell.

In contrast, much of South Africa's economy is mineral, which generates huge profits with small skilled workforce; the mines' wealth can paper over much shortfall in other parts of the economy.

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

The left took an intellectual drubbing on Ricci

The ignorance and just plain dumbness of the purveyors of conventional wisdom is one of the most obvious lessons of the Ricci case. They got drubbed in the Supreme Court decision in large part because they don't know anything about topics like testing and couldn't think rationally about it even if they did.

Consider this statement today from the Washington Post-owned Newsweek by Slate's regular Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick:
Once upon a time, civil rights laws had two vehicles—one forbidding "disparate treatment" (overt racial discrimination) and one prohibiting disparate impact (discriminatory effects, regardless of intent). These two vehicles have been chugging along side-by-side for years, ostensibly to the same destination, until today, when they suddenly turned on each other and charged.

Stop for a second and savor just how stupid her assertion is.

Who could make a career reporting on legal controversies and simply not get until 6/29/2009 that there is a fundamental contradiction in both theory and practice between abolishing disparate impact discrimination and abolishing disparate treatment discrimination?

Clearly, the Slate team largely thinks about civil rights not in terms of equal protection of the laws, but in terms of "Who? Whom?"

Still, doesn't that get boring after awhile?

Ricci and Unions

Something worth thinking about is the valuable role the firefighter's union in New Haven played in keeping the politicians from getting their hands all over the fire department. It was the union that had negotiated the compromise by which 60% of the weight would be given to a written test (i.e., objective and blind-graded), while the city got only 40% of the weight given to a subjective oral test, where minorities made up almost 2/3rds of the judges.

In general, in cities that have tipped toward minority political dominance, where conmen like Rev. Kimber are trying to get their hands on control of the jobs, unions sometimes provide a bulwark against race discrimination.

This provides a new/old perspective on the much-denounced subject of teachers' unions. It's widely believed that if only we got rid of teachers unions, then we'd have superstar teachers in every inner city classroom. Yet, history suggests that we might wind up with worse teachers because rising politicians would try to fire the old white teachers and give their jobs to co-ethnics.

That's exactly what happened in the late 1960s in the black Ocean Hill neighborhood in New York City, when the NY school board temporarily decentralized. Black politicians immediately fired huge numbers of white teachers (mostly Jewish) and hired blacks. Albert Shanker, the union boss of the United Federation of Teachers, went on the warpath. A huge brouhaha ensued and Shanker eventually mostly won and got the white teachers re-installed. In "Sleeper" (1973), Woody Allen is told by the people of the future that his age had been obliterated when "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."

That teachers unions and their seniority rules keep white teachers in jobs in minority-run cities is one of those phenomenon that nobody talks about but is staring you right in the face.

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

UPDATED: Mr. Ritholtz has a question

In this afternoon's comments on my morning post offering to debate him on whether or not "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown," investment adviser, blogger (The Big Picture), and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy Barry Ritholtz asks:
Ritholtz said...

How about some evidence, hard data, facts?

Or are you more comfortable with nudges, hunches and squishy junk.

Show me some hard evidence!

Mr. Ritholtz apparently hasn't been paying attention here, but I also fear I've overloaded my regular readers so much on the topic of diversity and mortgages over the last couple of years that many would rather hear that I'm about to start a new 9-part series on track & field statistics (my all-time least popular obsession) than hear the same old same old about diversity and the mortgage meltdown.

So, I'll just link to a few highlights in chronological order. The data piles up as we get closer to the present, but it's helpful to understand how my thinking evolved from the point when I had no idea what I was talking about regarding mortgages.

Let's begin with my first blog post on the subject on August 12, 2007, a couple of weeks into the subprime collapse, where you can see my hesitancy to get involved in a topic where I didn't know anything, but I did remember a few things that almost everybody else seemed to have forgotten:
A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon we're talking about real money
I'm sure the private financial markets were quite capable of blowing up a big bubble by themselves in the eternal see-saw struggle between greed and fear, but this political pressure for lending to minorities with doubtful credit must have exacerbated the problem. About half of all mortgages for blacks and Hispanics are subprime, versus about one-sixth for whites.

A reader has sent me some links to articles from 5 to 9 years ago to show me I'm not hallucinating about what I remember. The first are from early in this decade about Fannie Mae's big plans for boosting mortgages for minorities. Now, I don't pretend to understand what Fannie Mae is (but does anybody?). It's some kind of quasi-governmental publicly-traded for-profit thinga-ma-bob, but Fannie Mae's past pronouncements do make interesting reading at present.

Straightforward tax-and-spend programs were out of favor in the 1990s, but lean-on-lenders for the benefit of your political constituents is always in season...

Next, there's my June 22, 2008 Taki's Magazine article, The Diversity Recession, where I finally began to pull my thoughts together into a semblance of a thesis about just how manifold was the involvement of diversity on the mortgage meltdown:

The Diversity Recession

Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities.

More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness.

The chickens have finally come home to roost...


In VDARE.com on September 28, 2008, I explained how one central element in the housing bubble, President Bush's message to federal regulators to loosen up on zero down mortgages and liar loans in the name of increasing minority homeownership by 5.5 million households at his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Minority Homeownership, was tied to the Karl Rove's grand strategy of wooing Hispanic voters to the GOP:
... some of the conservative talking heads tended to put forward naïve, self-serving, or unpersuasive versions of this theory—such as that the banking crash wasn't the fault of greed in the financial industry, it was the result of the Democrats in Congress passing the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act in 1977.

The reality is that blame is very widely shared: among Democrats and Republicans, businesspeople and politicians, Congress and the Executive Branch, borrowers and lenders, and whites, blacks and Hispanics.

There's one man, however, who has so far escaped any blame. Few have realized something that turns out to have been staring us in the face all along: that the mortgage mess was, in sizable measure, an outgrowth of the primary political goal of the Bush Administration.

That man's name is Karl Rove.

And the primary political goal of President George W. Bush's political strategist: to bring Hispanics into the Republican Party.

As you'll recall, Rove's best-known tactic to appeal to Latino voters was repeatedly pushing "comprehensive immigration reform" (i.e., an amnesty for illegal immigrants).Rove, though, had other arrows in his quiver. One was a plan to turn Hispanics into Republicans by providing them with loose credit so they could become homeowners...

Then, "Tino" introduced me to the key source for numbers, the Federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database. The federal government carefully tracks how much minorities are getting in mortgage dollars (but not, of course, whether they are paying them back). I blogged on October 10, 2008:
Tino has added up all the subprime mortgage dollars for the entire disastrous 2004-2007 period. Among borrowers whose ethnicity is unambiguous, he comes up with $900 billion subprime dollars going to non-Hispanic whites, $887 billion to minorities. So, that's 50% of subprime dollars during the worst years of the Bubble went to minorities.

Someday, we'll get a count of defaulted dollars by race.

On January 21, 2009, I posted a graph I had made up from data of a Boston Fed study of every subprime default in Massachusetts showing that Non-Asian Minority subprime default rates average about twice the white rate over the years.

So, in Massachusetts, the Non-Asian Minority foreclosure rate on subprime mortgages was about twice the white rate. That didn't change too much over the years, but the proportion of mortgages that were subprime and the proportion of mortgage dollars going to minorities changed radically in the Bush years, contributing sizably to the disastrous mortgage meltdown that began in 2007 and triggered the more general crash of 2008.

If that two to one minority to white foreclosure ratio seen in Massachusetts holds true nationally, where minorities took out half the subprime dollars, then minorities would account for two-thirds of all defaulted subprime dollars.

However, Asians probably have a lower default rate. On the other hand, they largely stayed away from subprime mortgages, so it's not a big issue. So, it's likely that minorities accounted for at least 60% of the subprime dollars defaulted.

In VDARE.com on February 1, 2009, I finally got around to focusing on the Community Reinvestment Act, using Washington Mutual, which had pledged $375 billion in CRA lending as a case study of how the CRA subtly changed the culture of the lending business.

Two weeks later, I graphed data from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition showing over $4 trillion in CRA pledges by covered institions between 1996 and 2005, with $1.6 trillion pledged in 2004 alone.

On May 17, 2009 in VDARE.com, I focused on HMDA data on lending in California, where a great majority of defaulted dollars are found. I found that according to federal data, minorities got 77% of subprime dollars loaned out for home purchases in California in 2006, the worst year for subsequent defaults. Within California's 20 biggest metropolitan areas, there was a 0.89 correlation between minority share of subprime dollars in 2006 and default rates in Q1-2009.

And in VDARE.com on June 22, 2009, I profiled the largest lender not officially covered by the CRA -- Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide. And showed that Countrywide had been told by the Clinton Administration that they would be brought under the CRA if they didn't act like they were under the CRA. But, Mozilo quickly became a true believer, which accounts for Countrywide's $1 trillion dollar CRA-style pledge in early 2005.

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