September 23, 2009

How is "affordable housing" handed out?

Rich Calder in the New York Post answers a question I've long been asking: How is "affordable housing" (i.e., below market price housing) handed out? Who gets to decide who gets housing subsidized by the neighbors?

Despite a string of scandals that recently led Congress to cut off its federal funding, ACORN still stands to make millions of dollars off its support for Brooklyn’s controversial Atlantic Yards project, The Post has learned.

The left-wing organization -- longtime boosters of the $4.9 billion NBA arena and residential- and office-tower project -- says it expects to be tapped to market and help decide who gets to live in the coveted, but long-delayed, 2,250 affordable-housing units planned for Atlantic Yards.

This, after Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner helped bail ACORN out of financial trouble last September with a $1 million loan and a $500,000 grant, according to memos.

Although contracts are not yet been signed, Ismene Speliotis, executive director of ACORN’s New York chapter, told The Post her organization “expects to play a role in the marketing and lease-up” of the Prospect Heights project’s affordable housing to be underwritten by the city.

The work would include community outreach and screening people to determine qualified applicants, and then scandal-scarred ACORN would be entrusted with overseeing a lottery system to choose who gets the housing. Ratner’s firm is expected to manage the housing.

When asked how much ACORN might make off Atlantic Yards, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development referred questions to Ratner, who said via a spokesman it wasn’t the “appropriate time” to make such “decisions.”

But Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN official-turned-whistleblower, estimates the anticipated deal could bring the group $5 million to $10 million annually over multiple years from the public and private sector based on other housing deals ACORN has nationwide.

Patti Hagan, a Prospects Heights activist and former operative for ACORN’s political arm, the Working Families Party, said she’s learned the hard way that “ACORN is a corrupt organization that had its silence bought by Ratner.”

As Ratner was quietly funneling $1.5 million in grants and loans to ACORN last year, his firm was reeling from the economic downtown and laying staff off and bringing in “value engineers” to shave Atlantic Yards' costs.

Critics and some project supporters began questioning whether Ratner could deliver the affordable housing and jobs he promised. But ACORN -- which was embroiled in an embezzlement scandal and owed millions of dollars in back taxes -- remained silent and accepted Ratner’s gift.


Sounds like nice work if you can get it.

It's a fascinating symbiotic relationship between capitalists and professional anti-capitalists. The capitalists aren't just paying protection money to avoid a few protesters. They are also buying ACORN's reputation as a leftist power-to-the-people street organization to demonstrate to center-left politicians that their giant project is good for the poor.

By the way, Ismene Speliotis? What kind of name is that? I found one politician with that name, and he's from Boston and his first name is Theodore, so I would guess it's Greek.

Have you ever noticed that leftist organizations that claim to represent poor people of color don't always follow strict affirmative action guidelines when it comes to their really good jobs? Like the Hispanic union SEIU, which is headed by Andy Stern. Or, for example, here's a picture of ACORN's founder Wade Rathke, who looks like if he ever went outside in the sun, he might burst into flames.

Or here's John Taylor, head of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (the "nation's social justice trade association"), who looks like a cross between John Connally and Nathan Lane.

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

My Taki's Mag review of The Informant!

In Taki's, I ponder Steven Soderbergh's latest -- The Informant! -- with Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, the division president at Archer Daniels Midland who finked on the Andreas family's price-fixing cartels, along with the economics of anti-trust and the morality of manic-depression.

Read it there and comment upon it below.

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

September 22, 2009

My VDARE.com column on Ethnic Equality: Ethnicity for Everybody or for Nobody

Here's part of my VDARE.com column outlining a potential breakthrough in long-term political strategy:

Although we are constantly instructed in the teeth of all the evidence that race is “just a social construct,” the reality is that “Hispanic” ethnicity is certainly less of a natural inevitability. Instead, it’s just a bureaucratic construct of the Nixon Administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

While the government allows all individuals to self-identify as a member of a wide selection of races (including “Guamanian or Chamorro” on the 2000 Census short form), it only recognizes a single ethnicity: Hispanic. Nobody else is allowed an ethnicity. All others get lumped together as a nullity: merely Non-Hispanics. ...

The Hispanic electoral tidal wave you always hear about actually consists of an artificial agglomeration of people who don’t share the elemental ties of race, looks, national origin, cuisine—or even language ...

What “Hispanics” do share now is legal privilege. By granting Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Paraguayans etc. etc. preferences for being “Hispanic,” Nixon and the federal bureaucracy conjured up a pan-Hispanic political class dedicated to uniting together to defend this special treatment. ...

As long as Hispanic-only ethnicity exists, this Hispanic elite will side overwhelmingly with the party more favorable to affirmative action, the Democrats. Thus, while Republicans typically lose about 2 to 1 among Latino voters, they are outnumbered 12 to 1 among Latino elected officials.

Nevertheless, decisive action can declaw and defund a seemingly powerful lobby. For example, for 30 years “bilingual” educators grew more numerous and better organized off the taxpayers’ money. Essentially no politicians, least of all the hapless California GOP, dared take on this ever-growing lobby. In 1998, though, Ron Unz’s Proposition 227 put the abolition of bilingual education directly to the voters of California. And they agreed with Unz 61-39.

With the bilingual Ed lobby’s myth of inevitable triumph punctured, the Bush Administration’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act—otherwise so softheaded—cut back on bilingualism’s federal mandates. Today, bilingual Ed is far from dead, but Unz’s well-placed blow has left it close to dead in the water politically.

How should we offer Ethnic Equality?

- Either, everybody should be allowed to choose an ethnicity—Italian, Okinawan, German, Guatemalan, Barbadian, Navajo, or whatever—and all laws and regulations, including the EEOC's Four-Fifths Rule, should apply equally to all ethnicities. (Administratively, data collection would be simple: the Census Bureau currently asks about “ancestry,” which could simply be renamed “ethnicity.”)

- Or, nobody should have a legally recognized ethnicity. Ethnicity would be treated by the government like religion rather than like race. You can win a discrimination lawsuit over disparate treatment due to your religion, but you can’t win one based on disparate impact on your co-religionists -- the government doesn't collect statistics on religion, so statistical impact can't be calculated. Hence, there are no religious quotas.

Note that the public doesn’t have to understand the concept of “disparate impact.” (How many New York Times columnists do you think understand it?) All that voters need is to have an opinion on the unfairness of one ethnicity being more equal than all other ethnicities.

And unfairness is something that people can’t help having feelings about.

Which form of Ethnic Equality should we have: Ethnicity for Everybody or for Nobody?

Well, in the spirit of bipartisanship upon which Barack Obama ran for President, I think we should let him make the choice between Everybody and Nobody.

What could be more just than that? It’s like when you have to divide one desert between two children. The fairest way is to announce that one will cut and the other will pick which piece he wants.

To make the deal even better, I’d go so far as to offer the President a historic compromise: permanent racial preferences for the descendants of American slaves (and for tribally registered American Indians, while we’re at it) in return for Ethnic Equality.

Mr. Obama, you can achieve a historic victory for the black race, you can fulfill the “dreams from your father,” just by choosing either Ethnicity for Everybody or Ethnicity for Nobody.

Take your time, Mr. President. Talk it over with the public! Let’s have a national conversation on ethnic preferences!

After all, as an old discrimination lawyer, that’s your field of professional expertise.

Seriously…taking preferences away from Hispanics in return for preserving them for blacks is the last thing David Axelrod wants Obama to talk about—an “alliance of the diverse” always threatens to dissolve into an oxymoron (which is exactly why making him talk about it should be a GOP priority).


Read the whole thing at VDARE.com and comment about it below

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

September 21, 2009

Why athletes go broke

Sports Illustrated ran a good article last spring on How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke, which an awful lot of them do. There are really two classes of jock bankruptcy -- the stars who made enough millions to live on for a lifetime and went broke spectacularly, and the guys who made only a million or two in a career that ended before they expected. The latter are especially prevalent in the NFL, which chews up players rapidly.

Wonderlic test scores suggest that NFL players average about 5 IQ points higher than their race's average. They tend to be above average in work ethic, too. And they're pretty good at following instructions. Merlin Olsen, the great defensive lineman who later starred on the long-running "Little House on the Prairie" TV show tells the story about his first day on the set. The director is telling him "Just act natural," until finally he explodes and explains that he's a professional football player not a naturally talented actor, but the one thing you can say about professional football players is that they are coachable, so get him a good acting coach who will teach him how to move and how to react on camera.

(By the way, I wonder what percentage of guys with the natural ability to make the big time never do because of lack of intelligence or lack of self-discipline, and thus ends up in jail or at fails to do the rehab to come back from an injury.)

So, that suggests that professional athletes are not all that unrepresentative of the average American's ability to handle a financial windfall, which may explain a lot about where the money went during the Housing Bubble.

The article makes the point about how athletes tend to invest their money into something tangible -- real estate, small businesses, or inventions -- rather than into the more abstract realms of finance.

Traditionally, the one sure-fire business for a congenial retired jock was to own a bar or a restaurant. If you have a lot of famous friends who want to have dinner with you while you schmooze with autograph-seeking patrons, you can make a nice amount of money off the tourist trade (as long as your accountant isn't conspiring with the manager of the restaurant to rip you off) who come to see celebrities in person. Michael Jordan, who does not have a congenial personality, did well off a restaurant in Chicago for awhile -- his solution was to have the backers build him a giant fishbowl-like private dining room in the middle of the restaurant where the masses could watch him dine with his friends without being pestered.

One issue is that big league athletes don't really have an off-season anymore in which they get work experience. Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach spent his off-seasons from 1970-1977 working in the real estate business. He recently netted about $100 million from the sale of The Staubach Company. But nobody works at a future career in the off-season anymore because they all have to workout several hours per day -- the offseason is when you build muscle -- even if you're making the NFL minimum and probably will only play a few years.

A lot of NFL players go broke within a few years of retiring, but one thing to remember is that many of them don't know they've retired yet, and I'm not talking about Brett Farve. For example, I was recently looking at the Wikipedia lists of Jewish athletes, but it turned out to be hard to figure out how many are currently playing in the NFL since most of the ones who have recently played are currently listed as "a free agent," which suggests they hope their careers aren't over yet. Presumably, they spend a lot of time each day staying in shape, and maybe flying around the country to audition for coaches looking to fill a spot on the bench opened by an injury. That can be an expensive lifestyle, especially if you feel it's crucial to your confidence that you roll like an NFL player, not a member of the reserve army of the unemployed.

A problem that most black and many white pro athletes have is that they typically don't have any nuclear family members that they can (reasonably) trust to manage their money for them. In contrast, a high school friend of mine, whose father was a respected lawyer, became a CPA. One of his younger brothers grew up to be a star baseball player who graduated from Stanford and then made about $20 million in salary in the 1990s. With his brother managing his money and his father available for advice on legal matters, the ballplayer did fine. But the number of parasites lurking around jocks is legion.

I suspect a hidden resource of some powerhouse college athletic programs is that they tap their rich supporters to offer career paths to valuable kids who might not be pros. For example, one of the hidden strengths of the USC defense is that USC's fourth-string quarterback, the guy who in practice pretends to be the upcoming opponent's quarterback, is a tremendous all-around athlete named Garrett Green. Very few programs have a fourth-string quarterback who can credibly imitate in practice Terrelle Pryor of Ohio State.

Green went to my old high school, Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks, CA, where he averaged 11 yards per pass attempt and 10 yards per carry. I saw him outrun the entire defensive backfield of Compton Dominguez on an 80 yard touchdown keeper in the CIF championship game. Green would be a star anywhere outside of Division I (he was heavily recruited by Harvard) and would probably be a starter for the Vanderbilts and Rices of semi-big time football. But he doesn't quite have the height or arm strength to be a plausible NFL quarterback, so USC has him playing special teams, holding on field goals, filling in at wide receiver and defensive back, but mostly playing opposing quarterback in practice for the first team defense to work out on.

Green already has his USC bachelor's degree and is getting a Master's in real estate development. I wouldn't be surprised if USC boosters who are big time real estate developers made clear to him that he has a definite career path ahead of him in hometown real estate development if he sticks its out with USC as their utility infielder rather than transfer to somewhere where'd be a starter.

It strikes me that one competitive advantage a college football program could develop is to have superrich alumni offer to manage the money of pro athletes who attend their schools. If I was some single mom whose kid was being widely wooed by college coaches because he was a sure bet for the pros, I wouldn't mind if the Oklahoma St. coach, for example, said that T. Boone Pickens has volunteered to have his accountants provide very conservative money management for free until your son is, say, 28. It probably violates all NCAA amateurism rules, but it would seem like a reasonable perk to me.

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

Cuckoos Eggs

According to the rating system of Chessmetrics.com, for a brief period in the early 1970s, Bobby Fischer was the greatest chess player of the last 170 year.

Peter Nicholas in the LA Times has a long article, Chasing the king of chess, documenting his theory that Bobby's true father wasn't German gentile biophysicist Gerhardt Fischer, whom his mother Regina Wender, a Jewish-American, had married in Moscow in 1933. Instead, Nicholas argues that the biological father was Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist. Nicholas has pictures of the two men, Gerhardt Fischer and Paul Semenyi, for you to compare to the chess legend's looks. I guess I'd lean toward his theory, but neither man looks implausible for the role of Fischer's father.

That reminds me of John D. Gartner's theory in In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography that the former President wasn't actually the posthumous son of the bigamous marriage of his mother Virginia (the first of her five marriages) to traveling salesman Bill Blythe (the last of his five marriages). Bill Blythe, a high school dropout, was in the Army in Italy nine months before Bill Clinton was born. In 1993, when the Washington Post revealed that the President had an unknown half-brother in California, Clinton shrugged it off.

Gartner feels that having one charming tramp for a parent, his mother is enough to account for the ex-President's charming trampiness, while having another charming tramp, his putative father, as a parent is genetic overkill and leaves open the question where Clinton got his more serious genes.

Gartner theorizes that a doctor in Hope (where Virginia was a nurse) named George Wright was the real father. Later, Dr. Wright had young Bill Clinton vacation with his family every summer at a lakeside house. Apparently, lots of people in Hope believe Clinton was Dr. Wright's natural son.

Wright was a dirt-poor farmboy who graduated from high school at 16, worked in his brother's cotton-field for four years to save up money for college, graduated in 2.5 years, and then graduated from LSU medical school, where a classmate recalled him as "the poorest person I met im medical school." He was a bright workaholic and a voracious reader of medical literature. Of Wright's three legitimate sons, one is a doctor, another a lawyer, and a third is a car salesman.

It sounds plausible that Clinton is the product of his mother and the bright, hard-working doctor. But, of course, that's not proof. One of the doctor's sons is willing to provide a DNA sample if the ex-President is ever willing.

This reminds me that the bane of the uneasy reign of King Henry VII, the Lancastrian founder of the Tudor dynasty, were the impostors, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be the rightful heirs to the late King Edward IV, whose daughter Elizabeth of York Henry had married to end the War of the Roses after killing her uncle, Richard III at Bosworth Field. The impostors were handsome youths whom Yorkist malcontents seized upon to lead sizable military uprisings. Warbeck, who looked much like the famously handsome King Edward IV, might possibly have been an illegitimate offspring of that lusty monarch.

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

September 20, 2009

Mighty oafs from little acorns grow

From the San Antonio Express-News:
Cisneros advising ACORN in crisis

By Gilbert Garcia - Express-News

Former Mayor Henry Cisneros said Friday he accepted a request to serve on an advisory council for ACORN in order to help the community organizing group recently rocked by allegations of corruption.

Cisneros, who worked closely with ACORN on housing issues during his stint as HUD secretary, said ACORN representatives approached him “about six weeks ago” to help the organization deal with the voter-registration crisis. He added that his advisory role simply took on greater urgency this week with the emergence of the video....

Cisneros said the advisory council consists of “five or six people” and is attempting to recruit a prominent individual who can conduct a thorough review of ACORN.

“We're advising that they find someone who is regarded by the country as beyond reproach, a very high-level person, like a Sen. (George) Mitchell, who did this with baseball, or Warren Christopher, who weighed in after the riots in Los Angeles. Someone whose recommendations would be accepted.”

Hey, I know of a very high-level person who has worked closely with ACORN over the last 17 years: Barack Obama. He'd be perfect!

Cisneros, of course, is a poster child for how much destruction the corporate - community organizing - political connection can do. As Bill Clinton's HUD secretary, he signed the 1994 deal with Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide that Countrywide would behave like it was covered by the Community Reinvestment Act, then later joined Countrywide's board. As perhaps the best known Mexican-American politician, Cisneros provided Countrywide with "regulatory air cover" as it ran amok with ridiculous loans, all in the name of closing the minority homeownership gap.

From Mozilo's January 2005 press release:

"The $1 trillion We House America Challenge, expanded from $600 billion announced in 2003, embodies Countrywide's long-standing commitment to lead the mortgage industry in closing the homeownership gap for minority and lower-income families and communities," said Countrywide Financial Corporation Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Angelo Mozilo. ...

"We have also called upon one of our esteemed directors, the Honorable Henry Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a former mayor of San Antonio. Henry will put to use his long and respected experience as an advocate for affordable housing who understands the benefits to communities of homeownership."

That sure worked out well for all concerned.

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

"President Obama: Please take your Aunt Zeituni off our hands"

From Philip Greenspun's blog:

Barack Obama has taken pains to assure Americans that illegal immigrants won’t be able to buy health insurance on his new exchange. They’ll still get free emergency care but they will be prohibited from paying the world’s highest prices for health care. ...

Meanwhile, we taxpayers in Massachusetts are stuck with the bill for housing Obama’s Aunt Zeituni. The Wikipedia entry on this illegal immigrant has a good explanation of how she has avoided deportation thanks to the U.S. court system taking years to process even the simplest cases, e.g., Should a woman who has already twice been ordered deported, but did not leave, be… deported? ...

Massachusetts taxpayers have been paying for Aunt Zeituni’s housing for six years. Ever since Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the White House, we’ve also been paying for extra police details to deter the curious and the press. ...

What could Barack Obama do to help Massachusetts? He owns a 14-room, 6500 square foot house in Chicago (using fossil fuels to heat 6500 square feet for a family of four in one of the coldest parts of the U.S. is apparently a demonstration of one’s commitment to reversing global warming) that presumably sits vacant nearly all year. The house is guarded 24/7 by Secret Service agents. The street is closed to non-residents. Why can’t Aunt Zeituni live there? ...

If Barack Obama wants to convince Americans that his health care plan won’t burden national taxpayers with the cost of caring for illegal immigrants, wouldn’t it be good for him to relieve the taxpayers of Massachusetts of the cost of caring for his illegal immigrant relative?

Via this posting I hereby offer to pay for Aunt Zeituni’s round-trip transportation to Chicago. I will pick her up in her public housing complex, drop her off at the new Southwest Airlines terminal at Logan Airport, buy her a ticket on Southwest, and arrange for my friend Jen to pick her up at Midway. Jen will drop Aunt Zeituni off at the Secret Service barriers and they can escort her to Obama’s house. We will reverse the process to get her back to Boston for her February 4, 2010 immigration hearing (source).

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

September 18, 2009

If you want to understand ACORN ...

read Tom Wolfe's 1970 classic Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

The big innovation in racial shakedown rackets since then, however, has been getting into the business of being pre-emptively co-opted by corporations.

Say that you are Vice President of Predatory Securitizing at an Orange County lender and you've come up with a great idea: you want to give subprime liar loans with exploding teaser interest rates to illegal immigrants, then bundle them up ("secretizing") and sell these mortgage-backed securities to naive foreigners.

But, you don't want regulators getting sniffy about your new strategy and accusing you of Predatory Lending. So, you find a leftwing community organizing group to conduct pseudo-negotiations with. They start out denouncing you for predatory lending but end up signing a deal with you that says that in the name of fighting the financial industry's despicable and tragic history of racist redlining, you pledge to lend billions to Hispanic undocumented workers. (In return, you cut the lefties in for a little piece of the action, but you don't have to give them much because they have so many competitors -- the National Community Redevelopment Alliance lists 600 member organizations.) Then you wave that agreement in front of the noses of any regulators who start asking questions: "Look, capitalists and leftists have come together to fight racism and nativism! What, are you, some kind of nativist racist?"

My vague impression is that perhaps the most professionally cynical leftist group in this racket is The Greenlining Institute, which repeatedly publicly endorsed the ethics of Roland Arnall's Ameriquest subprime boiler room operation in return for donations. ACORN, in contrast, is more anarchic and unprofessional, as the recent tapes show. But, parts of ACORN has played this game too, as Michelle Malkin points out using the example of the 2005 arrangement between Citigroup and ACORN to give loans to illegal immigrants.

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

Illegal Aliens, Health Care and Amnesty: Medical costs are just a fraction of the issue

This happens every single day right now: an illegal immigrant roofer falls off a roof and is hurt. He doesn't have health insurance. Is he denied health care?

Of course not. America is a civilized country and we won't let suffering people within our borders go untreated. So, an ambulance rushes him to a hospital emergency room and he spends as many nights in the hospital as it takes to treat him. He pays nothing because he has no money. The roofing contractor doesn't pay either (his motto: privatize profits, socialize costs). The illegal alien's cost is simply added to the bills paid by people with insurance.

No, the big issues about illegal aliens, health care, and amnesty revolve around the indirect effects on the birthrate that nobody is supposed to think about in modern America.

If the roofer eventually goes home to Latin America because there is no construction work anymore in America without fathering any children in the U.S., then the costs he imposes on us are finite. If, however, he fathers a number of anchor babies within the U.S., then the costs become long term and difficult to fully foresee.

Clearly, one reason for Obama's repeated announcements that he's going to push through "comprehensive immigration reform" Real Soon Now is to dissuade unemployed illegal immigrants from going home: Sure, it's cheaper to be unemployed back home in Mexico than in LA, but you'll miss out on the amnesty if you leave now.

Add to that Obama's message to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute on Wednesday that the 12-million (or whatever) illegal aliens he intends to amnesty in 2010 would benefit from his subsidized health insurance, and you have another inducement for them to stay here, or to rush on in, even though there aren't jobs, so they'll be on the amnesty list next year.

A massive question that nobody thinks about other than Democratic political strategists is whether the synergy of Obama health and amnesty plan attracts maternal-minded women from Mexico. Maternal-minded women tend to be more cautious than men about crossing the border illegally and living without health insurance for their children. Plenty of them do sneak in anyway and have babies (according to the Public Policy Institute of California, the 2005 total fertility rate for foreign-born Latinas in California was 3.7 babies per lifetime, versus 1.6 for American-born whites and 1.4 for American-born Asians, and about 2.4 in Mexico itself -- the U.S. is attracting Mexican women who can't afford to have as many children as they want in their own country).

But think about what's coming if we have another amnesty and we have subsidized health insurance.

We know that the 1986 illegal alien amnesty, even without health insurance, brought in a flood of women from south of the border, who then had an extraordinary number of children in California over the next eight or so years. Demographer Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California wrote:

“Between 1987 and 1991, total fertility rates for foreign-born Hispanics [in California] increased from 3.2 to 4.4 [expected babies per woman over her lifetime]. ...

“Why did total fertility rates increase so dramatically for Hispanic immigrants? First, the composition of the Hispanic immigrant population in California changed as a result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. In California alone, 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants applied for amnesty (legal immigrant status) under this act. The vast majority were young men, and many were agricultural workers who settled permanently in the United States. Previous research indicates that many of those granted amnesty were joined later by spouses and relatives in the United States... As a result, many young adult Hispanic women came to California during the late 1980s. We also know that unauthorized immigrants tend to have less education than other immigrants and that they are more likely to come from rural areas. Both characteristics are associated with high levels of fertility. As a result, changes in the composition of the Hispanic immigration population probably increased fertility rates.

This post 1986 amnesty-induced Latino Baby Boom is one of the sizable events in recent American social history and a major contributor to California's current dire financial straits, yet it simply is off the media map as if it never happened. I've been whooping about it for seven years, but I don't recall anybody else ever mentioning it. The national Baby Boom of 1946-1964 is rehashed endlessly, but this more recent and more relevant Baby Boom is utterly unknown.

When it comes to health insurance by itself, I don't have a strong opinion. The current system of employer-provided insurance, which is a byproduct of a loophole in WWII wage controls, is ridiculous. If this was Finland, with negligible immigration and a broadly skilled and healthy population, I'd probably be fine with the government-dominated health insurance system they have there. But, we're not Finland. As Milton Friedman said at the 1999 World Libertarian Conference: "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."

Many have commented on the craziness of trying to hold a debate over health insurance, when there are multiple plans floating around, each 800 pages long. Worse, though, we're not supposed to publicly debate (or even think about) the most important impact of these bills: the long-term impact on the population.

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

Obama takes his talking points from iSteve

From the Washington Times:

President Obama said this week that his health care plan won't cover illegal immigrants, but argued that's all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage.

He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered - a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.

"Even though I do not believe we can extend coverage to those who are here illegally, I also don't simply believe we can simply ignore the fact that our immigration system is broken," Mr. Obama said Wednesday evening in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. "That's why I strongly support making sure folks who are here legally have access to affordable, quality health insurance under this plan, just like everybody else.

Mr. Obama added, "If anything, this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all."

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

Recruiting better politicians

Has either party ever done any serious research into how to recruit better candidates?

For example, has any Republican ever seriously researched the question of what level of salary for officeholders is best for attracting better Republican candidates and officeholders?

Most discussions of pay for politicians in America seem to be moralistic/idealistic rather than pragmatically partisan. I can't recall anybody saying we should pay state assemblymen more/less because that would help my party beat the other party. But, that is an interesting question.

By way of analogy, about a century ago in Britain, the question of whether the government should start paying a salary to Members of Parliament was a major partisan issue. The fledgling Labour Party desperately needed to have the law changed to have salaries paid to MPs because it did not attract many rich supporters who could live off their "private incomes." Eventually, the Labour Party got the law changed and was able to recruit talented candidates to be professional politicians, dooming the Liberal Party. In other words, this is serious stuff.

In the U.S. today, the income gaps between Republicans and Democrats in a particular locale aren't as large as between the the three British parties a century ago.

Still, Republicans, I suspect, would be better off if governments offered either very low or very high pay to entry level offices, such as state legislators. Too often pay gets stuck in-between where it's very attractive to the typical potential Democratic politician (e.g., the chairperson of the Diversity Sensitivity Nook at a community college or the press spokesperson for a Save-the-Sea Otters organization, and would be making five figures) but not attractive to a potential high-quality Republican politician (who would typically be running a successful business unit and making six figures -- or is married to somebody making high six figures and doesn't need the salary).

For example, a quality GOP candidate might be, say, a CPA who has built a decent-sized accounting business and now employs other CPAs to crunch the numbers for him while he largely functions as a rainmaker through his multitudinous business and charitable contacts in the community -- somebody good with both numbers and people. (Maybe that's not a good candidate -- that's what research is supposed to figure out).

For the Diversity Sensitivity Nookmeister and other potential Democratic candidates, a state assemblyperson's salary might be a major step up in life, while for the successful Republican CPA, it would require a crushing sacrifice of his family's well-being to take the pay cut.

So, the GOP, being the business party, ends up with a lot of candidates who weren't very successful in business, and probably won't be very successful in running for office or in office either.

Perhaps instead of moderate pay for both lower and upper house members in the state legislature, the GOP would thrive best with low pay for assemblymen and high pay for state senators.

I don't know. I'm just speculating. But that's what research should find out.

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

September 17, 2009

The Half-Full glass

Scandinavians have been keeping careful records on themselves for many generations, which has been a boon to social scientists. Here's a new paper on IQ and Family Background that uses IQ data from the IQ test given to Swedish conscripts. Sample sizes are ample (over 20,000 father-son pairs, and hundreds of thousands of brother pairs):
We use a large representative sample of Swedish men to examine both intergenerational [father-son] and sibling [brother] correlations in IQ. Since siblings share both parental factors and neighbourhood influences, the sibling correlation is a broader measure of the importance of family background than the intergenerational correlation. We use IQ data from the Swedish military enlistment tests. The correlation in IQ between fathers (born 1951-1956) and sons (born 1966-1980) is estimated to 0.347. The corresponding estimate for brothers (born 1951-1968) is 0.473, suggesting that family background explains approximately 50% of a person’s IQ. Estimating sibling correlations in IQ we thus find that family background has a substantially larger impact on IQ than has been indicated by previous studies examining only intergenerational correlations in IQ. ...

What is it then that brothers share and is important for their IQ but is uncorrelated with their father’s IQ? An obvious candidate is the mother’s IQ.

Although spouses’ IQ are most likely positively correlated and thus partly capture the same background factors, the combination of father’s and mother’s IQ is likely to raise the explanatory power in an intergenerational equation. Indeed, in a summary of previous estimates based on small and non-representative samples, Bowles & Gintis (2002) report the highest correlation from a study that applies the average of the two parents’ IQ. We doubt though that simply adding mother’s IQ would bring the explanatory power close to what the sibling similarity suggests. For example, attempts to account for the sibling similarity in long-run earnings by means of the education of both parents do not appear to capture much of the sibling similarity (Björklund et al. 2008). We hypothesize that very detailed information about parental aspirations, attitudes and parenting practices is needed to account for the large gap between what sibling studies and intergenerational studies suggest about the role of family background factors.

Of course, peer groups are also likely to play an environmental role as well as parents. Brothers are part of the peer group because they tend to interact a lot with each other, especially if they are close in age. Brothers born within 5 years of each other have IQs that correlate at about the 0.50 level, versus about 0.44 for brothers born more than five years apart. The researchers call that difference "marginal," and assert "permanent family and community characteristics are more likely determinants," but they seem pretty interesting to me since they are one factor we can tell (lacking maternal IQ scores) that isn't genetic.

Keep in mind that the higher correlation among brothers closer in age is not just measuring the influence of brothers on each other but of broader environments. Two brothers who are only two years apart are more likely to have, say, both been taken care of by the same grandmother, played with the same cousin, gone to the same school, watched the same TV shows, were supported by similar levels of parental income, and so forth than two brothers who are eight years apart.

Brothers born on the same day (i.e., twins) correlate at 0.65, with that made up of a mixture of identical and fraternal twins.

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

College rankings

The neoliberal Washington Monthly magazine has gotten into the business of ranking colleges, but they do it based on their assessment of each university's "contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country)."

Interestingly, in their 2009 rankings of 258 national universities, the top three contributors to the public good are all prevented by law from practicing affirmative action: UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and UCLA. (Of course, the UC administrations break the law, but Prop. 209 does keep them from doing it as flagrantly as they would wish.)

As a UCLA grad (MBA, 1982), I guess this should make my heart go pitter-patter with alma maternal pride, but, I dunno, I'm not sure I'm persuaded. Now, some of the high rankings of the UC universities stem from the Research measures being partly biased in favor of sheer size of school. For example, Berkeley, a huge place, is lauded for being first in the country in number of science and engineering Ph.D.'s awarded annually, while, say, Cal Tech is downgraded for being only 38th in this absolute measure.

But, what interests me is the credit the magazine gives for having a high graduation rate relative to average SAT scores and percent of students getting Pell Grants for being low income. For example, UCLA ranks 7th "best" in the country at graduation rates because a simple multiple regression model of its SAT/Pell percentages predicts that only 76% would graduate but 90% actually do.

I gather the idea is that UCLA is to be commended for inspiring its students with a love of learning or something, but, certainly, one simple way to boost your graduation rate is to make graduating easier. Consider a counter-example Cal Tech: A few years ago, I was walking across the Cal Tech campus and I stopped to listen to a speech given by a sophomore coed to a group of high school students and their parents considering Cal Tech. The young lady who had been chosen by Cal Tech to talk to potential students started talking about how big an adjustment freshmen year is, and how hard it is, and all the all-nighters you have to pull, and how brusque the professors are, and how emotionally wrenching it all is ... and then she broke into tears over her memories.

According to the Washington Monthly's (presumably linear) model, 104% of Cal Tech students should graduate, but only 89% do, so Cal Tech ranks 248th out of 258 in contributing to the public good by graduating people from college.

If I had a kid who could get into Cal Tech, I'd probably want him to go to Harvey Mudd instead. But, is Cal Tech detracting from the common good by being hard? Beats me.

By the way, Cal Tech is the only university out of the bottom 20 in graduation rates to be private. Colleges largely funded by dads writing checks tend to be more accommodating than at least some colleges funded largely by the taxpayers. The elite model these days is to have very high admissions standards and pretty low graduation standards. Is that better for the country? I don't know, and I doubt if the Washington Monthly knows either.

So, why are the graduation rates at the University of California schools so high? UCLA didn't use to be easy -- six of my high school friends went off to UCLA, rushed the same fraternity, drank a lot of beer, and flunked out together by the end of their freshmen year. Has it gotten easier? I don't know.

The affirmative action ban probably helps.

One obvious reason is that their student bodies are so heavily Asian, whose parents push them hard to graduate.

I'm also wondering whether the UC schools are jiggering the statistics without the Washington Monthly folks catching on. The UC schools have a little-publicized backdoor in that they accept a huge number of transfer students (UCLA takes in about 3,500 per year), typically from California's junior colleges. Are they counting transfer students who only spend half their college career on the UC campus?

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

Barney Frank's New Bill to Expand the Community Reinvestment Act

Nothing succeeds like failure.

Here's a press release from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition:
Expansion of Community Reinvestment Act Would Promote Economic Security and Financial Inclusion for

For ... whom? Can't you guys at least finish your titles? I'm imagine in your "Who? Whom?" equation, I'll end up a Whom, but I don't think the end of your sentence was going to be "for Steve Sailer's Family."

So, what's in Barney's Bill, H.R. 1479, the "Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009"?

- Extension of the CRA from mortgages to small business loans.
- Inclusion of credit unions (my vague impression is that credit unions screwed up less than most financial institutions, so Barney has to rectify that!)
- Switch from unofficial to official inclusion of independent mortgage firms (e.g., Countrywide).

Will we ever learn? How can we learn if we aren't allowed to talk about What Just Happened to the economy?

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

CRA: Does anybody really want to know?

26 months into the mortgage meltdown, we still lack basic data about the borrowers who failed to pay back their loans. Thanks to the efforts of Gale Cincotta, we have a huge amount of data in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database on the ethnicity of who gets mortgages, but no system for tracking who pays them back.

From the testimony of Edward Pinto, chief credit officer of Fannie Mae 1987-89, to the House Financial Services Committee on September 16, 2009:
While at Fannie, I had the pleasure to work extensively with the late Gale Cincotta. Some of you may be aware that Ms. Cincotta was the founder and head of National People’s Action (NPA) and is known as the “Mother of the Community Reinvestment Act”. Ms. Cincotta had experienced first hand the lending debacles created by the misguided efforts of Washington bureaucrats. ...

Cincotta was Alinskyite activist in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (the one that my wife's family was driven out of in 1970 by FHA lending). Cincotta's tragic tale was featured in Alyssa Katz's book Our Lot, which I reviewed for VDARE.com recently.

Cincotta found over the course of her long career in leftwing activism that it was a lot easier to pressure lenders to lend more than it was to get them to lend more responsibly. There is simply no conceptual vocabulary in contemporary America to discuss the idea that NAMs should be lent less money. As Wallace Shawn liked to say in The Princess Bride, "It's inconceivable." Moreover, nobody can get their cut out of a loan that isn't made.
I also need to tell you that I have spent the last 14 months searching for the facts on what caused the real estate bubble and subsequent mortgage and financial meltdown. I have reviewed over 40,000 pages of documents. The process relative to estimating CRA lending volumes and loan performance was particularly difficult and opaque.

I give you this background because if Gale were here today, she would tell you that the federal bureaucrats have done it again, but this time on a much more massive scale. Because of CRA and Fannie and Freddie’s (the GSEs”) affordable housing goals, “American Nightmare of Foreclosure” has spread to virtually every congressional district of these United States.

Here are the facts that I believe Gale would want me to report to you:

• Understanding CRA lending performance is of vital importance because it is now clear that CRA-related single family mortgages totaled trillions of dollars over the period of 1993-2007;
• Over time CRA origination volume became a growing and ultimately significant portion of conventional conforming origination volume, growing from an estimated 7% of originations in 1993 to 19% in 2007;
• As H.R. 1479 points out, announced CRA commitment volume totaled over $6 trillion since CRA’s inception in 1977. Starting in 1992, volume exploded. Over the 17 year period 1992-2008, there were a total of $6 trillion in announced CRA commitments. This is an astounding 680 times the cumulative volume of $9 billion for such commitments over the entire first 15 years of CRA’s existence;
• Ninety-four percent of this $6 trillion in commitments were made by banks and thrifts that were or ended up being owned by just four banks: Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America;

Of course, analogous commitments were made by non-bank mortgage companies (such as Countrywide's $1 trillion pledge in January 2005) that had had been told by the Clinton Administration that if it didn't behave like it was under the CRA, it would be put under the CRA.
The questions you should be asking are:

Why don’t bankers know and disclose how their different products are performing?

Why is it that the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the OTS and other regulators appear to have no idea how CRA loans are actually performing over the last few years? Data from ten years ago cannot be the basis for making decisions on multi-trillion dollar programs.

Why is it that Comptroller Dugan just three weeks ago delivered remarks at the Interagency Community Affairs Conference where he asserted that CRA is not toxic lending, yet he failed to cite any broad-based quantitative evidence?

Why is it after requiring banks to demonstrate that they make extensive use of “innovative and/or flexible lending practices” in order to receive a rating of outstanding, not one regulator had the common sense to track the performance of these admittedly innovative and flexible loans?

Platitudes are not sufficient. I have presented a prima facia case that CRA is toxic lending which leads to unsustainable loans which leads to an unacceptable level of foreclosures.

Gale Cincotta’s views on FHA 11 years ago are now equally applicable to CRA and AH lending:

“We have been fighting abuse, fraud, and neglect of the FHA program that has destroyed too many neighborhoods and too many families' dreams of homeownership for more than 25 years.”

Section D of H.R. 1479 calls upon the Federal Reserve to create a loan performance database.

I respectively submit that before you take any action on H.R. 1479, you demand that the appropriate regulators request detailed CRA performance data from Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These six institutions should be able to provide performance information for an estimated 70% or more of outstanding CRA loans.

These programs have subprimed America.

The pain and hardship they have spawned is immeasurable. What is measurable is exactly how the trillions of dollars in past CRA and AH loans are performing.

Once you have that information, it is imperative that you learn from it so that you may implement Gale Cincotta’s vision whereby participants in the mortgage lending system have skin in the game. It was this lack of adequate equity and capital by borrowers, lenders, and investors that has put our entire economy at risk.

Only then will America get the sustainable affordable housing programs she deserves.

No, not that! Not what we deserve ... Please, give us something much better than we deserve.

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

September 16, 2009

"Who? Whom?" v. "Whose side are you on?"

Ziel at Your Lying Eyes:
Now Jimmy Carter is joining the "Joe Wilson's Outburst Was About Race" chorus. While using the "race card" to stifle criticism of the president is a concern, perhaps there's a silver lining? Perhaps there is a growing realization that, when it comes to pretty much everything, it's all about race?

Obama himself is all about race - he's nothing without his race - he'd be just another boring guy of above-average intelligence whom no one's ever heard of. Crime is all about race. Education is all about race. Government spending and taxation are all about race. The securitized-mortgage calamity was all about race. Income inequality is all about race. Is health care all about race? It's largely an issue of who pays for it vs. who benefits from it, and so like all such conundrums it too boils down to race. ... And, obviously, there's immigration.

Non-Asian minorities have lower average achievement levels economically (lower median income), in education (test scores, graduation rates). They have higher rates of street crime, of poor health effects (obesity, hypertension) and illegitimacy. These differences are statistically significant and, more important, noticeable to pretty much everyone on each side, particularly to people like Obama who are much higher achievers than average. The question is how do you respond to these differences - resentfully or practically? Immigration greatly exacerbates these divides because it results in very large increases in the numbers of one underachieving group (Mexican-Americans). And when it comes to contentious issues like universal health care, it's a problem that places like Canada - or Vermont - don't have to wrestle with. So, yes, Joe Wilson's outburst ultimately finds its genesis in race - but so does pretty much every other controversy that pops up in this racially divided nation.

Obviously, race -- a question of who is related to whom -- is hardly the only way that humans divide themselves, but it's among the most pervasively salient to politics, especially as the racial balance in the electorate becomes less one-sided.

Therefore, we'd be better off with a political culture that openly asks "Whose side are you on?" versus the alternatives -- the Chicago style of "Who sent you?" and the current dominant culture of covert "Who? Whom?" quasi-thinking.

For example, Sen. Barack Obama spent most of 2007 running for President, but he found time out from campaigning to donate $26,270 to Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s church. Yet, none of the hundreds of journalists assigned to Sen. Obama ever seemed to find time to ask him "Whose side are you on?"

P.S. We keep hearing about all the "crazies" coming out of the woodwork of the Republican Party, yet the President of the United States gave $53,770 to Rev. Wright's church after he'd been elected to U.S. Senate.

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

A question

I have a question. If Obama promises both:

A) to block illegal aliens from benefiting from his 2009 health plan, and

B) to legalize illegal aliens in his 2010 immigration plan that he announced last month in Mexico ...

Then who, exactly, is being disingenuous?

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

My Taki column on country music

My Wednesday column on Taki's Magazine is up. It's a reflection on the permanent features of country music that you notice from an HBD-aware perspective:

Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new.

A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking about when it comes to music is a certain knack for seeing the forest through the trees.

From that 30,000-foot perspective, the answer to what’s new in country turned out to be (as with most genres of popular music in the last couple of decades): not much.

Indeed, what seems odd for an old fogey like me is how much a country radio station these days sounds like a mainstream FM rock station in the 1970s. ...

When we lived in Chicago, my wife used to take guitar classes from the alternative country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who would fulminate amusingly to his students at the Old Town School of Folk Music about the indignities he’d had to put up with as a songwriter in Nashville. As Fulks phrased it in a song about Nashville with a title that’s NSFW:

Hey, this ain’t country-western!
It’s just soft-rock feminist crap!

Read it at Taki's and comment about it below.

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