Noah Millman on "The Closing of the Conservative Mind"

Noah Millman writes:

... assuming one agrees (as I do) that the American right-wing is, these days, substantially more closed-minded than the American left-wing (as represented not so much by ordinary people as the intellectual, political and media leadership), why should we have come to this pass?

I'm not sure if that is true in the absolute sense, but it is true in the relativistic, opportunity cost sense. Because, for example, 92% of Hispanic elected officials are Democrats, the Democrats can't afford to have an intelligent debate on immigration. They just can't. The Republicans can, but the Republican Establishment (e.g., George Bush, Karl Rove, John McCain) has striven hard for the last decade against all intelligent discussion of immigration.

Noah goes on:

- Blame the money. Is there a major patron of conservative intellectuals who is a patron primarily because he or she wants to generate new ideas, insights, works of the spirit that do not already exist in the world, as opposed to advancing arguments for ideas that are already well-established in defense of interests that are well-entrenched? If there is, please let me know that person’s name. Ron Unz is the only person who comes immediately to mind, and honestly I don’t think he’s quite in the wealth category one would ideally want.

Nobody, of course, is just going to hand out money willy-nilly. But there is an enormous difference between bankrolling a person or organization because you like what they think, and bankrolling a person or organization because you like the way they think. If a multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I believe that vouchers are the answer, so I’m going to give $100,000 per year to a think-tank to produce pro-vouchers research and advocate for vouchers, well, that’s not really intellectual patronage. If, on the other hand, that same multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I am skeptical of the way the system works now, how we train teachers to how our schools are financed, and impressed with some of what’s been achieved following new models. I’m going to find the smartest, most informed, most independent-minded people I can, who are also skeptical of established practice, and give them money to do whatever research they want. If they can impress me with their independence and intelligence, then I want to know what they can learn with a bit of money to work with – and I want other people to know as well. That second millionaire might wind up funding Diane Ravitch – and getting a very different report than he or she expected. And why would that be so bad? If Diane Ravitch has lost faith in a certain kind of school reform, that’s a hugely important fact – her arguments are ones that any advocate of school reform needs to know and grapple with. Even if she doesn’t change her patron’s mind, he or she should be glad to have funded her work.

Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment.

I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind.

But if I’m right, the question that must next be asked is: has this changed? Were things different in 1975, and if so – why? I think it would be highly instructive to see a study done on the sources of funding for conservative organs and see how these sources have changed over time – is the money coming more or less from individuals over time, from more or fewer sources, from the same or different industries, is the age of donors changing, has the place in American life of donors changed over time, etc. I don’t know much of this information is in the public domain, but if it is, it would be interesting to see if anything can be gleaned from this kind of aggregate data. But, you know, I’m an elitist. My own inclination is to think that single individuals who are determined to shape history can make an enormous impact if they have the wherewithal. You don’t need a whole generation of intellectually-minded plutocrats to sponsor a renaissance. If he’s rich enough, and clear-eyed and determined enough, you may only need one.

Noah continues:

- Blame David Frum. Just prior to the Iraq War, David Frum published a now-infamous essay expelling “unpatriotic conservatives” – that is to say, people who vociferously opposed the war – from . . . well, it’s not exactly clear from what, since he had no power to expel anybody from anything – let’s say from “conservative respectability.” And this endeavor on his part was, generally, applauded by the outlets of the organized American right. I don’t know that this was literally unprecedented, but it felt to me at the time – and more so since – like a crucial Rubicon had been crossed.

In previous defenestrations – Eisenhower’s turn against McCarthy, Buckley’s expulsion of the Birchers, the removal of Trent Lott from his leadership position – the organizations or individuals being expelled were extremists of the dominant tendency. If Republicans were generally anti-Communist, McCarthy took this to an unacceptable extreme; if Republicans were generally more friendly to a white Southern perspective on American history, Lott, in his remarks, took this to an unacceptable extreme. Frum was not expelling extremists, however; he was expelling dissenters.

The expulsion of dissenters is not something we generally associate with mainstream political movements; it is most memorable as a tic of the radical left, Stalinists expelling Trotskyites and so forth. Certainly, right-wing groups – anti-tax groups, anti-abortion groups, etc. – have tried to impose orthodoxy before, demanding pledges of allegiance in exchange for electoral support. But this is just interest-group politics; civil-rights groups, unions, and other left-wing organizations do that sort of thing all the time, with more or less effectiveness depending on the political circumstances. Expelling dissenters is something else again, and once the precedent has been set, it is very difficult to see how one may justify not applying it in more and more circumstances.

While I don’t think it’s fair to blame David Frum as an individual for very much (and poetic justice has already been served on him specifically anyhow), I do think it’s important for those who are concerned with the openness or closedness of the conservative mind to grapple with this particular event, and consider whether a formal repudiation might not do rather a bit of good, even at this late date.

A simple model would suggest that conservative intellectual productivity was at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s when neoconservatives were being welcomed to the movement with open arms, but once neoconservatives got the upper hand within the movement, they began purging their rivals, with an unsurprisingly deleterious impact on intellectual life.

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

The Derb's remarks to Penn's Black Law Students' Association

John Derbyshire gave a ten minute presentation to Black Law Students Association at the U. of Pennsylvania on "Should the government play a role in eliminating racial disparities in education and employment?" You can read it here.

My considered judgment is that we will pay the Slavery Tax forever, and that we can, more or less, afford it. What we can't afford is expanding disparate impact and other forms of racial preference to immigrant ethnic groups.

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

Just how senile was Justice Stevens?

Justice John Paul Stevens, who will turn 90 in ten days, finally announced his retirement from the Supreme Court.

How senile was he? Well, here's an excerpt from his 2005 opinion in a case striking down a California policy first instituted in 1979 that new prison inmates have only roommates of the same race for the first 60 days while the system checks on whether they have a history of racist gang violence. The 84-year-old Stevens scoffed at the testimony of a veteran prison official:

"One of these [California] officials, an associate warden, testified as follows:

'[W]ith the Asian population, the control sergeants have to be more careful than they do with Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics because, for example, you cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. You cannot. They will kill each other. They won’t even tell you about it. They will just do it. The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos. You have to be very careful about housing other Asians with other Asians. It’s very culturally heavy.

"Such musings inspire little confidence. Indeed, this comment supports the suspicion that the policy is based on racial stereotypes and outmoded fears about the dangers of racial integration. This Court should give no credence to such cynical, reflexive conclusions about race. ...

[I]ntegrated cells encourage inmates to gain valuable cross-racial experiences…"

Uh ... yeah ...

Obviously, Stevens sounds completely gaga here.

And, yet, he sounds no more senile than practically every other public figure in our society when it comes to writing about race.

Kinda hard to tell, isn't it?

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

Malcolm McLaren, RIP

Malcolm McLaren, the amusing and sticky-fingered (self-)promoter / idea man behind the Sex Pistols, has died at age 64.

I always liked best Malcolm's own 1983 minor hit single Buffalo Gals, which pointed out explicitly what I'd been saying since about 1979: rapping sounds an awful lot like that most uncool of all musical forms: square dance calling. McClaren took the 1840s minstrel show song Buffalo Gals, which had evolved into a square dance call, and had some some New York rappers back him up while he rapped it (this was back in the early days before the racial wall hardened, when white people, such as Blondie, Talking Heads, and the Clash, were allowed to rap because rap was just the latest fun fad, not the sacred keystone of African-American culture):

Buffalo Gals go round the outside,
Round the outside, round the outside
And dozey-do your partners

To make sure nobody missed his point, McLaren's Buffalo Gals video features footage of square dancing. (Here's an even better video of a Buffalo Gals square dance on the Lawrence Welk Show.)

I assumed in 1983 that after Malcolm's Buffalo Gals that the world would now get the joke: rap was descended from minstrel shows and the dorkiest of all white forms of music: square dance calling. What more could shame black people, after four years of hip-hop, into going back to something they do very well, singing? Perhaps popular music would finally climb out of the rut of rap, the novelty music gimmick that had refused to die?

I was wrong.

And that was one of Malcolm's better ideas.

Most of his other ideas tended to sound cool in his constant self-promoting interviews, but sputtered out in practice. For example, the whole punk rock ideology Malcolm dreamed up about musical competence meaning nothing was a bad joke. The Sex Pistols were a young but fairly talented band, as their one album, which is full of catchy stuff demonstrated. Then bassist Glen Matlock was thrown out and replaced with Sid Vicious who couldn't play at all. It sort of made sense when you heard Malcolm spin it, but it turned out to be a disaster for all concerned.

Malcolm made an entertaining 1980 movie starring the Sex Pistol's affable guitarist Steve Jones, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, about how the Sex Pistols were just a plot he invented to rip off the record companies for his own bank account. Yet, the concert footage from before their disastrous American tour when they still had Matlock instead of Sid shows they were a very high potential act, that just needed to, you know, practice. Instead, they spent most of the time suing their manager for cheating them.

Malcolm's line of intellectualization about how the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen was built on the Situationist philosophy of French intellectuals from 1968 inspired critic Greil Marcus to write a ridiculously brilliant book about the Situationist roots of why the Sex Pistols hated the Queen. The autobiography of Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, however, debunked all that. Johnny didn't care about Situationism. He hated the British monarchy for the same simple reason his mum and dad did and his grandparents had: Lydon was Irish.

Around 1980, McLaren came up with the good idea of building pop music on top of tribal rhythms from Burundi, first for Adam Ant, and then he took Ant's backing band away, including the prodigious drummer David Barbarossa, to form Bow Wow Wow. There was always speculation that Barbarossa's album tracks had to be multilayered in the studio, but when I saw Bow Wow Wow around 1981, he was moving his hands faster than any drummer I'd seen.

But Malcolm could never have too much controversy, so he hired a 14-year-old girl to be a lead singer and promoted her as a sex kitten. At the show I attended in LA, she blew her voice out painfully on the second song, suggesting to me that 14-year-old girls shouldn't be on rock band world tours.

Anyway, when I was reading McLaren's obituaries yesterday, being reminded of how far he'd gotten in the garment and entertainment industries on sheer chutzpah, I decided to look up more about McLaren because I thought it was striking that he could have the most stereotypically Jewish career imaginable, yet be a Scotsman named Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren. Pointing this out would be good way to shatter stereotypes!

But, then I worried that I ought to check his maternal line and his upbringing before saying this in public. To my surprise (although I shouldn't have been surprised), when I looked up McLaren on Wikipedia yesterday, I found:

McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish^[6] teenaged war deserter, and Emmy (née Isaacs) in the suburbs of post-World War II London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, "To be bad is good... to be good is simply boring".^[7] ... When he was six, McLaren's mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London's rag trade.

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

"Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base"

Here's the #1 most important news story on NYTimes.com tonight:

Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Protests appear to have overthrown the government, calling into question the fate of a U.S. air base that supports the war in Afghanistan.

Whatever will America do without our key base in Kyrzygsrgtz ... ah, to hell with it. If I can't spell, I can't care about it.

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

What does it take to be a genius?

Here's the beginning of my new Taki's Magazine column:

What does it take to be a genius?

Europeans of the Romantic Era tended to ascribe the accomplishments of the great to an inborn spark. In contrast, in this age in which voracious competitiveness must rationalize itself in politically correct terms, American self-help books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, denigrate the importance of talent. They even go to the comic extreme of citing Mozart, who could compose music as fast as he could jot it down, as evidence for the dominance of nurture over nature.

To reach the pinnacles of achievement, to be, out of the 100 billion or so humans who have ever lived, one of the few hundred individuals to be remembered by one name—to be a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Bach—does it help to have innate talent? How about ten thousand hours of practice? An intense work ethic? An obsessive personality? A supportive family? A conducive culture? Role models? Personal connections? Energy? Being in the right place at the right time? Not dying before adulthood? Sheer luck?

Yes.

Few of the all-time greats were fortunate enough to have every single one of these factors in abundance, but they typically had more than a few. Nobody can accomplish all that solely on his own. Conversely, no family, culture, or state can concoct a genius without a unique individual. ...

And, yet, the notion that golden age German-speakers enjoyed some genetic advantages in musical talent is not implausible. Why?

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

Did we get Hammurabi backwards?

Awhile ago, I was waiting at a government office and finally got up to the window at 4:25 pm, which was lucky because the agency's website had said the cutoff time for what I wanted to do was 4:30 pm. But the clerk refused. When I protested, he pointed to a sign on the wall that said the cutoff was 4:00 pm.

I couldn't win that argument. The man had a $5 plastic sign that said the cutoff was 4:00 pm.

So it is written, so it shall be done, as Yul Brynner used to say.

That got me thinking about King Hammurabi of Babylon (ruled 1792 BC to 1750 BC), who has been popular at least since the Code of Hammurabi stele was dug up in 1901 showing that he was one of the earlier kings to have the laws carved on a hunk of rock and set up in a public place.

This is usually praised as a step forward in the struggle against tyranny: Writing laws down mean that even the king is bound by laws, that laws that are spelled out beforehand mean that the king can't rule by whim, that he must spell out laws that seem fair in the abstract.

No doubt there is some truth to that, but I suspect that carving laws into stone made the king more powerful in some ways.

Before written laws, everything was kind of vague. The king would thunder from memory, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and, I would bet, immediately a kibitzer would interject, "I always heard it was 'An eye for two teeth,'" and then some other senile codger would say, "No, it's 'An eyetooth for an ear,'" and so forth and so on.

But once the king had the laws carved in stone, then, just like the bureaucrat with the plastic sign, he had powerful juju on his side. You can't argue with a sign.

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

The Census

From my VDARE.com column:

I’m always being asked why I study identity politics issues such as race, ethnicity, sex, and age. The implication is that those aren’t respectable topics for serious thinking.

Yet the Census form that recently arrived in your mailbox shows that the U.S. government is obsessed with those precise questions.

The Constitution defines the decennial Census as an "enumeration"—i.e., a count of everybody. Therefore, the questionnaire is kept relatively short. (The Census Bureau asks more detailed questions on a vast variety of subjects on its monthly American Community Survey sample of 250,000.)

What questions are considered so critical to the government in 2010 that the Census has to ask them of every single resident?

Of the ten questions on the 2010 form, five are concerned with enumeration (for example, asking your name and phone number) and one with whether you own your home (with or without a mortgage). The other four deal with identity:

6. What is Person 1's sex?
7. What is Person 1's age and Date of Birth?
8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin?
9. What is Person 1's race?

In contrast, there are—of course—no questions asked about whether the resident is a citizen or is even in the country legally.

Personally, I believe that paying careful attention to what the state is doing is public-spirited. But it’s more fashionable to be naïve and ignorant about race. For example, liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias recently proclaimed: "My guess is that in the future the vast majority of people descended from immigrants from Asia or Latin America will be seen as white."

Yet, why in the world would they want to be white when they win money and prizes from the government for being legally nonwhite? You get more of what you pay for. And the U.S. pays people to consider themselves non-white. Thus, since the 1960s, all the movement has been away from being seen as white.

Read the whole thing.

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

Armenians

An Armenian-American reader asks for an "all Armenian post." So, let's see what I can come up with:

- The basic cultural flavor of Armenians strikes me as Mediterranean -- thus, this restaurant bloodbath near my house on Saturday immediately reminded me of the restaurant shooting scene in The Godfather. But just as Sicilian gangsterism in New York in the 1950s, while repugnant, didn't ruin New York as a place to live, Armenian gangsterism in SoCal in 2010 seems to mostly consist of Armenians shooting other Armenians.

This Mediterranean flavor seems odd because the Armenian homeland is well to the east in Asia, on the south side of the Caucasus Mountains. The Black Sea, however, gave a huge section of Eurasia relatively easy access to the Mediterranean. In America, though, we don't normally pay much attention to the lands around the Black Sea. We're vaguely aware that Constantinople / Istanbul was long considered to have the world's most strategic location, but we don't really pay much attention to the lands east of Constantinople. Which is a verbose way of saying I don't know much about Armenia. (I know even less about the other Christian Asian nation, Georgia, which shoved its way into the headlines in 2008 when it attacked the Russian Army.)

- A reader writes:

In addition to the critical mass issue, one of the interesting things about Armenian criminality, whether in LA or NY, is that it's skewed overwhelmingly toward people from Soviet Armenia rather than Lebanon or Syria or Turkey or Egypt. And this is despite the fact that the immigrants from the former Soviet Armenia are almost all the first cousins, literally, of the people who came from the non-Soviet middle east, because the people emigrating from Armenia are those (plus their children and grandchildren) who made aliyah, as it were, to Armenia after WWII by the tens of thousands. The ones who stayed in Syria and Iraq etc. and then came to the US are basically successful middle class immigrants but their first and second cousins who lived under communism were basically wrecked, morally, by the experience.

The Soviet empire's cultural legacy seems to be an advanced education for its inmates in Gangsterism 101.

- Armenian-Americans are unusual for a small immigrant group at doing well in both farming (especially orchards around Fresno) and in the kind of businesses at the polar opposite of farming, such as being a Hollywood agent. (In contrast, Jews don't farm, while the Japanese made fine farmers in the West, but didn't get much into Hollywood.) Anyway, it seems kind of an odd combination of skills. Perhaps an explanation is that California farming is more like running a medium-sized business with a hired workforce than is, say, dairy farming in Wisconsin, which is more classic do-it-yourself farming.

- There has long been bad blood in California between Armenians and Mexicans, such as gang fights at Grant H.S. in the San Fernando Valley going back to the 1970s. This is actually pretty funny considering how often you always hear people say that racial conflicts are due to people looking different and having different colored skins, or to having ancient prejudices against each other. But practically nobody in Mexico has ever heard of Armenia and practically nobody in Armenia has ever heard of Mexico. Yet, when the kids of immigrants from Mexico and Armenia show up at Grant H.S., they take one look at each other and decide they don't like what they see.

Which is also ironic, because they really don't look all that different. A few years I was walking around a neighborhood in the central SFV amazed at all the new gigantically expensive security fencing that was going in around each house. Each homeowner seems to be competing with his neighbors to buy the tallest, scariest, and most over-decorated steel fencing. Afterwards, I started wondering: "How can Mexicans afford all those lethal finials and wrought-iron fleur-de-lis?" The next time I was there, I noticed that all the Mexicans in the neighborhood seemed light-skinned and non-mestizo. And then it finally dawned on me that it wasn't a Mexican neighborhood at all, it was an Armenian neighborhood. It was a stupid mistake for me to make, but it does raise questions about all the assurances we hear that racial rivalries are only skin deep.

- Those two very parallel English novelists, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, had famous things to say about Armenians. Waugh admired the urbane competence of the Armenian chauffeurs and hoteliers he met on a trip to Abyssinia and gave one a major role his novel "Black Mischief." Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London: "after meeting him i saw sense in the proverb : Trust a snake before you trust a Jew, Trust a Jew before you trust a Greek, BUT NEVER TRUST AN ARMENIAN."

- So, how smart are Armenians? It's hard to say. They tend to have a wide variety of talents -- e.g., the Mikoyan brothers in the Soviet Union: one was head of MiG fighter jet production and the other was one of Stalin's inner circle of six. Armenians have owned and run major movie studios in Hollywood.

On the other hand, there isn't that much depth in Armenian accomplishments -- they are a small people who see to be pretty good at a lot of different things, which doesn't leave them room to be be really great at too many things. In general, I 'd compare them to Italian-Americans, a group that that lodged itself securely in the middle of the levels of American accomplishment.

Armenians tend to be considered white. For example, when Republican candidate George Deukmejian beat LA Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1982 and 1986 elections for governor of California, he was universally know as the White Guy while Mayor Tom was The Black Guy. On the other hand, I've heard an Armenian young man refer to "whites" as the non-Armenians, so attitudes could be shifting.

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

"Teach For America Chews Up, Spits Out Another Ethnic-Studies Major"

An interesting perspective:

NEW YORK—Teach For America, a national program that recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income rural and urban communities, has devoured another ethnic-studies major, 24-year-old Andy Cuellen reported Tuesday.

"Look, the world is a miserable place," said Cuellen, a Dartmouth graduate who quit the TFA program Monday morning. ... Just one of the 12,000 young people TFA has burned through since 1990, Cuellen was given five weeks of training the summer before he took over a classroom at P.S. 83 in the South Bronx last September.

"I walked into that school actually thinking I could make a difference," said Cuellen, who taught an overflowing class of disadvantaged 8-year-olds. "It was trial by fire. But after five months spent in a stuffy, dark room where the chalkboard fell off the wall every two days, corralling screaming kids into broken desks, I'm burnt to a crisp."

Cuellen said his TFA experience "taught him a lot about hopelessness." ... "And there's not a goddamned thing you or anyone can do about it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Or trying to get you to teach kids math."

According to Dartmouth literature, as a member of the ethnic-studies department, Cuellen learned "to empower students of color to move beyond being objects of study toward being subjects of their own social realities, with voices of their own."

Teach For America executive director Theo Anderson called ethnic-studies departments "a prime source of fodder."

"Oh, I'd say we burn through a hundred or so ethnic-studies majors each year," said Anderson, pointing to a series of charts showing the college-major breakdown of TFA corps members. "They tend to last a little longer than women's studies majors and art-therapy students, but Cuellen got mashed to a pulp pretty quickly. It usually takes ethnic-studies majors another year to realize that they're wasting their precious youth on a Sisyphean endeavor."

Continued Anderson: "Of course, we don't worry about it too much. Every year, there's a fresh crop to throw in the grinder. As we speak, scores of apple-cheeked students are hearing about TFA for the first time."

According to Anderson, a small portion of these students will lose interest after hearing horror stories from program alumni.

"But the majority of them will march on like cattle to the slaughter, thinking that pure determination and hope can change young lives," Anderson said. "I can hear their footsteps now, marching toward our offices like lemmings to a cliff. And believe me, we're ready for 'em."

Although Cuellen quit the program early, his mother said he was with TFA long enough for it "to crack open his bones and suck out the marrow inside."

"Andy is a ghost," Beverly Cuellen said. "Those [TFA] people beat the idealism out of him, then they stomped on him while he lay there gasping for air."

TFA regional coordinator Sandra Richman said it is common to blame the TFA employees for the organization's high plow-through rate.

"Should I have said something to wake those kids up sooner?" Richman said, crushing out her seventh cigarette. "Probably. But listen, no one can tell you that you can't make a difference. It's something you have to figure out for yourself."

From the February 16, 2005 issue of The Onion.

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

To the surprise of nobody

In local police blotter news on Saturday, a man walked into the usually "oddly empty" restaurant in a nice part of the southeast San Fernando Valley and shot six people, four of whom have died so far. I tried to drive by last night and the cops had four square blocks barricaded off.

My dad says he ate there once. He was the only customer in the restaurant the whole time, but employees were coming and going, making deliveries.

To the surprise of nobody, it was announced today that all the dead men's names end in -ian or -yan. From the LA Daily News:

An official with the Los Angeles County Coroner's office said Sarkis Karadjian, 26, of Sherman Oaks, Hayk Yegnanyan, 25, of Glendale, and Harut Baburyan, 28, whose address was unknown all died as a result of injuries sustained after the shooting Saturday at the Hot Spot Cafe on Riverside Drive. Vardan Tofalyan, 31, was later identified by police. Police said at least one gunman shot at the six men inside the Hot Spot Cafe in the 11600 block of Riverside Drive. The cafe bills itself as a Mediterranean restaurant but neighbors described it Saturday after the shooting as often oddly empty. ... The main suspect was described only as a white male, possibly Armenian, around 30 years old.

There's no mention of whether the gunman took the cannoli.

As I wrote a couple of months ago in my study of all 2600+ homicides in LA County since 2007:

Not surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of the population of Los Angeles County is Armenian, but some of them are a bit lively, rather like Sicilians in a Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an Old World code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are often described as vanishing into the night in BMWs or Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of immigrants rather than from the pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants. ...

The density of diversity in L.A. County provides a critical mass that allows the bad apples to find each other. In most of the U.S., for instance, Armenians are well-behaved. In Southern California, however, there are 170,000 Armenians, enough to furnish an Armenian street gang, Armenian Power, as well as transnational mafias with roots in the old Soviet Union.

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

Why no arrests of Banksters yet in 2008 collapse?

A year and a half after the financial crash of 2008, no major Wall Street figures have been arrested (except for loners like Bernie Madoff). There has been much discussion of how to improve financial regulation, but it's clear that A) It's very complicated and B) Clever guys on Wall St. would probably find ways to outsmart not-as-clever civil servants.

So, it's totally impossible to impose some level of deterrence on future Wall Streeters, right? How can the government write rules ahead of time that will prevent firms from engaging in dubious behavior that hasn't been dreamed up yet?

Fortunately, there's another form of deterrence. As Voltaire said after the British navy messed up and lost the island of Minorca to the French: The English like to shoot an admiral now and then to encourage the others. We can encourage future banksters by what we do to the old banksters.

Now, shooting is probably a little much, but why not imprison a few 8-figure per year bank officers? That will put a little fear in future banksters. That will make them cautious about exploiting loopholes they find in regulations.

You may say, but that's the problem, they didn't violate any laws.

And I say, I've watched Law & Order. There are a lot of laws out there. Creative prosecutors can improvise. I've seen the feds put Martha Stewart in prison even a after they found out that she was innocent of what they started investigating her for. And Martha Stewart didn't lose a trillion dollars of the public's money. 

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

Tom Friedman repeats phrase "High I.Q. risk-takers" 8 times

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times:

After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”

 

... In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-I.Q. risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-I.Q. risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. ...

“When you get this happy coincidence of high-I.Q. risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-I.Q. risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. “What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-I.Q. risk-takers and all thrived ...

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-I.Q. risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, “we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-I.Q. risk-takers, said Mundie.

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

Finally, a poll on how clueless everybody is

From the Washington Post:

If he stays past this term, [John Paul] Stevens will remain on course to become the oldest and longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history. Paradoxically, he is also among the court's least-known members; in a poll taken last summer, only 1 percent of Americans could summon his name. 

They should do this more often: instead of just asking people their opinion on stuff as if the average man in the street actually knows what he is talking about, pollsters should ask more questions with objective answers.

Stevens should be better known: the press should have been asking for years why Stevens, who will turn 90 this month, hasn't done the right thing by the country and retired. That's just a ridiculous age for a Supreme Court justice, but it hasn't been an issue because he's a liberal.

As I've been writing since 1993, Supreme Court Justices should get a single 18-year term, so that they would typically serve from roughly age 55 to 73. You win a Presidential election, you get to nominate two Justices to the Supreme Court. That's fair.

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

Cheaper than Mayor Bloomberg's program

There is much discussion these days about expensive programs to ameliorate social problems. One plan that has been overlooked is to bribe fortunetellers.

From the LA Times:

Whether migrants should stay or leave California is a question that reaches even the palm and card reader at the El Indio Amazonico botanical shop on Alvarado Street.

Patrons usually come in with common questions about love or money. But since the economy wobbled, they also come to ask whether their future is elsewhere -- perhaps far from California.

"A lot of people ask, 'Should I go back to my country, to Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador,'" said Juliana Contreras, 45. "People ask, 'Should I go or should I leave?' I usually tell them if it's bad here, it's worse in their countries."

Still, the streets teem less than before. Is that because fewer people are going out and spending money, or because immigrants have left?

It seems to me that slipping palm-readers a few twenties to tell unemployed illegal immigrants on the verge of leaving the country that, yes, they should go home, their moms miss them, would return more bang for the buck than any other social program imaginable.

Really, when out-of-work illegal immigrants are already asking "Should I go or should I leave?" how hard would it be to persuade them to go and/or leave?

The Obama Administration has been desperate to get unemployed illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. through Census Day, April 1st to pump up the quotas by making them fear they'll miss the Coming Amnesty if they bail out now. But, come April 2nd, can we finally let the poor bastards go home?

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

When fiction turns to fact

The LA Times has an article by Alana Semuels entitled:

From bucolic bliss to 'gated ghetto'
Hemet's Willowalk tract was family-friendly. Then the recession hit.

This news story about the Inland Empire exurb of Hemet is pretty much identical to the short story, Unreal Estate, I published in the November 17, 2008 issue of The American Conservative (see posting below for the best version). From the LA Times:

Reporting from Hemet - The gated community in Hemet doesn't seem like the best place for Eddie and Maria Lopez to raise their family anymore.

Vandals knocked out the streetlight in front of the Lopezes' five-bedroom home and then took advantage of the darkness to try to steal a van. Cars are parked four deep in the driveway next door, where a handful of men rent rooms. And up and down their block of handsome single-family homes are padlocked doors, orange "no trespassing signs" and broken front windows.

It wasn't what the Lopezes pictured when they agreed to pay $440,000 for their 5,000-square-foot house in 2006.

The 427-home Willowalk tract, built by developer D.R. Horton, featured eight distinct "villages" within its block walls. Along with spacious homes, Willowalk boasted four lakes, a community pool and clubhouse. Fanciful street names such as Pink Savory Way and Bee Balm Road added to the bucolic image.

Young families seemed to occupy every house, throwing block parties and holiday get-togethers, and distributing a newsletter about the neighborhood, Eddie Lopez recalled.

"We loved how everything was family-oriented -- all our kids would run around together," said Lopez, a 41-year-old construction supervisor and father of seven. "Now everybody's gone."

Home foreclosures have devastated neighborhoods throughout the country, but the transformation from suburban paradise to blighted community has been especially stark in places like Willowalk -- isolated developments on the far fringes of metropolitan areas that found ready buyers when home prices were soaring but then saw an exodus as values crashed.

Vacant homes are sprinkled throughout Willowalk, betrayed by foot-high grass. Others are rented, including some to families that use government Section 8 vouchers to live in homes with granite countertops and vaulted ceilings.

When the development opened in 2006, buyers were drawn to the area by advertising describing it as a "gated lakeshore community." Now, many in Hemet call Willowalk the "gated ghetto," said John Occhi, a local real estate agent. ...

In Hemet, city officials have simply boarded up homes in some troubled neighborhoods. Plywood covers the windows of dozens of apartments on Valley View Drive; resident David Hall says it keeps prostitutes and drug dealers out.

Willowalk presents a different challenge. The development promised a Tiffany neighborhood for what was then something closer to a Target price.

"Leave the world behind as you unwind by our picturesque lakes," cooed one advertisement, which touted "intimate botanical gardens and walking trails, tranquil lakes" and other attractions.

At first, the reality matched the come-ons.

Maria Lopez, a stay-at-home mother, recalls gazing at the mountains in the distance as her children played with groups of neighbors their own age. The community pool was just a few blocks away, and she says she used to let her older children, ages 13 and 14, go there by themselves. ...

Now she accompanies her children to the pool -- though it has been closed of late -- because the people who now hang out there "have no class," she said, and she sits out front with her children if they play in the yard.

"My next-door neighbors -- there are so many people living there, I don't know who they are," she said.

Walking through the development, there is not much evidence of the well-kept yards and friendly families Maria Lopez fondly recalls.

Many of the people answering a knock say they are renters, and won't open their doors more than a crack to see who is on their doorstep. Red-and-white "for sale" signs dot the neighborhood, clashing with the golds and browns of the homes. The contrast between occupied and empty houses is evident on one block, where high grass in weedy clumps gives way to a neatly mowed lawn with handwritten signs pleading "Please do not let your dog poop on our yard."

Homeowner Norma Hernandez, one of the few people outside on a recent sunny afternoon, can point out which families are permanent on her block.

"Rented, owned, rented, rented, rented," she said, gesturing at the gargantuan houses across the street, one after another. "It's bad," she said, shaking her head.

Nacho Gomez is paid by absentee owners to look after their rental properties. Currently, he's taking care of 17.

Doing a check of the homes on a recent Thursday, he left his van's engine running as he inspected a shattered window in one property.

"A lot of them can't pay the rent, and they leave the house a mess," Gomez said, referring to tenants.

He has had to fix holes punched in walls and replace refrigerators, dishwashers and other appliances -- even ovens -- stolen by renters on their way out.

Those tenants appear to be the exception, and the renters provide at least one benefit: Without them, there would be even more vacant homes. Even so, their presence has fundamentally changed the character of what was once sold as an exclusive community.

The Willowalk Homeowners Assn. is trying to recapture some of the community's lost spirit. In recent months, it launched a trash committee -- members pick up rubbish in the park -- and started a neighborhood watch group to keep an eye on residents' homes.

But it wasn't enough for Angelica Stewart and her family, who are leaving the $318,000 home they bought in 2006. To Stewart, living in a gated community is absurd when drug busts are a regular occurrence.

"It's not worth it for us to live in this neighborhood," she said.

The Lopez family plans to stick it out, knowing they can't sell their house for anywhere near the $440,000 they paid for it. Based on comparable prices in the neighborhood, the place is probably worth about $170,000 now, and maybe less. They're petitioning their bank for a loan modification.

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

"Unreal Estate"

Here's my Autumn 2008 short story about the Housing Bubble. I finally figured out a way to set up the punchline, and now it's slightly improved over the original version.

Unreal Estate

Memorial Day Weekend, 2005

“So, this guy joins a monastery where he’s not allowed to talk.” Travis, your brother-in-law, is telling a joke. He’s told it to you before. “After five years, the head monk tells him he can say two words. ‘Tiny room,’ the guy answers.”

"That reminds me,” Travis continues, “You kids have been engaged, like, what? Two years now? That’s great. No rush to get married, not with the market the way it is in West LA. Who can afford to marry and settle down in LA? I couldn’t. Georgie Cooney can’t afford to get married in LA.”

While you’re trying to figure out whether Travis means actor George Clooney or boxer Gerry Cooney, he’s already onto his favorite topic, “Still, isn’t it time to buy a place of your own? I mean, West LA’s a great place to meet somebody, but, c’mon, are you going to entrust your kids -- and I know how much my wife’s little sister wants some (you know how women are, they can’t keep a secret) -- to the Los Angeles United School District?”

You have this conversation, if you could call it a conversation, each time you visit your brother-in-law’s house. Travis lives out in the Santa Clarita Valley, an hour or two north of West Los Angeles. You get on the 405 at Pico, head over Sepulveda Pass, down through the Valley, onto the 5 and up through Newhall Pass into LA County’s northern exurbs.

You’re sitting on the edge of the Travis’s deck, overlooking a canyon lined with oaks and sycamores. It’s hotter out here than back in West LA, where your $1900 per month one bedroom apartment doesn’t have air conditioning because it seldom gets over 82. It’s hot out here, but it’s not bad. There’s a breeze blowing with a hint of the far-off ocean.

Travis says, “I’d be all for you staying in LA if you were an entertainment lawyer or something where you need to be working with the stars. But you manage a drug store and Emma’s a nurse. People buy drugs and get sick everywhere.

“I bought this place in 2000 for $255,000,” Travis says, repeating a number you know by heart now. “Here we are, five years later, and the Schmidts next door just sold their’s for $810,000. So I’m up, what, six, seven hundred thousand? The home equity loans have paid for some nice vacations, I’ll tell you. My house is my ATM.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Travis, who generally does know what you are thinking. “You’re wondering why I’m the lucky bastard who turned 32 in 2000 and decided it was the right time in my life to get out of an apartment in LA and buy a house back when houses in California were cheap. Meanwhile, you’re 32 in 2005, when they’re expensive. Well, they seemed expensive then, too. But I took the plunge anyway.

“I also know you’re thinking you don’t have $810,000. Who does? That’s what they got mortgages for. And you’re good with numbers so you’ve already figured out what a 20 percent down payment on $810,000 is. It’s, like … a lot.

“Okay, coupla things you need to bear in mind.

“First, Emma’s told me about how your dad always talks about the years saving up for the 20 percent down payment he made when he got that 30 year fixed rate mortgage on his little place in Sherman Oaks. "That’s ancient history. Dude, nobody puts down 20 percent down anymore, no matter how iffy they seem.”

Travis’s voice has gone up a third of an octave. When he’s talking about the Lakers or whatever, he’s laidback. But when he gets going on real estate, which is more and more often over the last couple of years, he lets his inner Dennis Hopper out.

“These days, somebody arrives in California from Gautelombia and wants to buy a house, do you think they make him document his credit history? It’s in Spanish, and who knows how many million pesetas were worth a dollar in 1985, and besides, the courthouse in El Carrumbo collapsed in an earthquake anyway, so he doesn’t have a paper trail. Documents? He’s undocumented. He don’t need no steenking documents! He just pays some extra points on his rate, but that’s all on the backend. Everybody’s happy.

“Don’t you watch the news? The President says down payments are un-American because they keep minorities from buying houses. But you don’t have to be diverse to get a zero down loan. IndyMan is happy to hand them out to everybody.

“Second thing, Santa Clarita seemed like a long way out when I moved from Venice in 2000. So, maybe you got to move a little farther, like out to Palmdale, Lancaster. Antelope Valley’s the new Santa Clarita!”

You’re not quite sure how it happens, but ten minutes later, you’re standing on his driveway admiring the rims on Travis’s Lexus SUV, which are bigger than the tires on your Corolla. Soon, you’re rolling northeast on the 14, past the slanting Vasquez Rocks where, according to Travis, lots of Westerns were filmed, but you only remember them from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. The highway turns north away from the mountains through the high desert. A sign says you are heading toward "Edwards AFB."

“Edwards Air Force Base!” exclaims Travis. “The Right Stuff, man! That’s where Chuck Taylor broke the speed barrier in 1957. This is All-American country out here,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the brownish-gray sagebrush. “Granted, it’s a haul from the jobs in LA, but with Iraq calming down now that they captured Saddam Insane, soon they’ll be pumping like crazy from those Iraqi oilwells and the price of gas will be back down to a $1.00 per gallon.”

You pass another sign. This one reads, “San Andreas Fault.” Travis doesn’t seem to notice.

Once off the highway, you see at least one person standing at every intersection twirling or jiggling a giant arrow pointing to an open house. “Human Signs,” nods Travis. “Like back in the Depression when guys would walk around wearing sandwich boards reading ‘Eat at Joe’s.’ But this is the opposite of a depression. Real estate commissions are six percent, so, on a $400k house, that’s $20k, which pays for a lot of twirling.”

Stretching off to the horizon are half-built houses and recently finished ones. Eventually, you follow one particularly active arrow to the Cypress Creek Estates. “Yeah, I know,” says Travis, “The nearest creek is 20 miles south and the nearest cypress tree is 100 miles west in Santa Barbara. But that’s not the point, the point is that everybody in Guatelombia grew up watching Baywatch and has wanted to move to California ever since. Do you know how many people there are in the world? Well, I don’t either, but, trust me, it’s a big number. There’s an endless supply of people who want to live in California. And their brothers, too! Do you think Bush is going to shut the borders? The President says, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Loco.’”

Travis’s voice gets intense. “They’re coming, man, and nothing can stop them. It’s the American Dream!”

“Same with the money,” he continues, in a more relaxed tone. “When the Chinese get a check from Wal-Mart for a billion bucks for their latest boatload of plastic crud, they ask the smartest guy in Peking where to invest it. He calls up the smartest lad in London, who tells him, "Lend it to people buying California real estate. It’ll be safe as houses.” Nobody cares where they lend in California, just so long as it’s in California. You should see the prices they’re getting this year for dumps in Hawaiian Gardens, Bakersfield, Pacoima, Compton. Compton.

“See, in Abu Dubai, nobody knows nothing about Hawaiian Gardens, other than it’s in California. Over in Arabia, Sheik Rattleandroll thinks, ‘It’s like “Hawaii” and it’s full of “Gardens,” so how bad could it be?’

“Although, you’d figure," muses Travis, shaking his head, “That by now, even an Arab would’ve heard of Compton.”

“There’s no stopping them. And the same with normal American people moving to the exurbs. Every year, kids get out of college and move from Mom and Dad’s house in the boring ‘burbs to an apartment in the sexy city. They love hanging out in Hollywood. But after ten years or so, they’ve found somebody. The one. They start looking at the price on those cute little cottages around the corner from their favorite restaurant on San Vicente. The price has seven digits. And it doesn’t start with a “one.” They wonder, “How does anybody buy in the city?” They finally realize: people do it family style. If they’re American and they buy on the Westside, then you know that Mom and Dad gave them a half mil, at least. If they’re Armenian, they have mom and dad move in with them, along with cousin Aram and his uncle-in-law. But Americans can’t live with their relatives. We go nuts. So, it’s out to the exurban frontier for us. It’s a perpetual motion machine.”

You pull up in front of an attractive Mediterranean-style model house. Two stories, 3,150 square feet, the sheet says. It seems enormous -- both compared to your apartment and to its lot, with its miniature front yard consisting of a tiny sapling and a tinier sodded lawn. It’s hotter than in Santa Clarita, so the walk from the Lexus to the front door through the grit-laden wind has you sweating. “It’s breezy out here, but that’s good, it lowers the wind-chime factor,” observes Travis.

Then you’re hit by the blast of air conditioning, and you’re standing in the Great Room, with a 20’ ceiling. “Sure, it seems kind of big, but that’s the crucial element,” explains Travis. “What are they asking, $450k? That’s not a cost to you, that’s an investment, like joining a country club. The sticker price keeps out the riff-raff. You don’t want every peon in Guatelombia who grew up dreaming about Baywatch moving in next door to you, do you?

“What you want is like … well, look at Valencia High School near my house. It’s diverse. It’s … What does the LA Times call the neighborhood when there’s a gang shooting in South Central? … It’s vibrant. But Valencia High School is not too vibrant, if you know what I mean. Valencia’s like mostly white, some Asian, the black kids’ parents are all celebrities. The son of what’s his name, Wesley Snipe Dogg, rushed for 2,500 yards last year. The Latino kids are all from solid home-owning families, no accents, everybody’s dad is a contractor or something. You can’t afford to buy in my neighborhood if you aren’t in a cash business.”

One stair creaks loudly as you ascend to the lavish master bedroom suite on the second floor. “The construction’s just settling in,” assures Travis. “This house is only, it says here, nine months old. The owner is flipping it. Probably moving to a 4000 square foot house with the $50k he’s going to make and do it again. With a no down payment mortgage and a low teaser rate for the first two years (which you deduct on your 1040, by the way), that’s about a … a million percent return on investment. Can you get that kind of interest on your CDs?”

“In fact, I think I’m going to pick up one of these babies, too, and sell it in six months. We’ll be neighbors! Sort of. The mortgage company get a little snottier about down payments and interest rates when you tell them it’s an investment, so I’ll just check the “owner occupied” box. The broker doesn’t care. He gets his commission, then Countrywise bundles it up with a thousand other mortgages and sells it to Lemon Brothers. The Wall Street rocket scientists call this "secretization" because nobody can figure out what anything’s worth. It’s a secret.

“Lemon sells shares in the package all around the world. The Sultan of Brunhilde ends up owning a tenth of your mortgage. Do you think the Sultan’s going to drive around Antelope Valley knocking on doors to see if you’re really living there?”

“Maybe you’d like to come in with me on it, buy yourself a one-eighth share?”

Thanksgiving, 2005

The sky over the Antelope Valley is blue, your Marathon Sod minilawn is green, the temperature is 68, and your bride and her sister are cooking the turkey in your new granite counter-topped kitchen. Travis and you are standing in your driveway in Cypress Creek Estates, admiring the house you two own next door. Travis is explaining, “So, after ten years, the head monk, the abbatoir, tells the new guy he can say two more words. And the guy replies, ‘Roommate snores.’” By the way, this couple from Hermosa Beach counteroffered me $477k on our little investment. I told them I’d think about it. Nice people, they’d make good neighbors for you. But, I don’t think I’m going to sell it yet. I’m going to wait for an even $500k. There’ll be no problem getting that next spring. Yeah, it’s a nice neighborhood. Quiet."

That it is. You don’t have all that many neighbors because about a third of the homes on the street appear to be unoccupied, owned by speculators waiting to flip them. And the people who do live on your street tend to start their commute to LA before dawn and get back after dark. It’s quiet, except on Sunday, when a stream of looky-loos pour through for the open houses.

Voice Mail, April 2006

"Hey, it’s Travis. Look, my accountant was crunching the numbers, and he says I’ve got a slight cash flow problem, what with me paying for 7/8ths of an empty house and the market not quite hitting our target price yet. So, he says that we should rent it out for awhile, just until we sell it. The thing is, what with everybody out there buying with no money down, there aren’t that many people left in the rental market. Most of the local jobs are in construction, building houses. (Well, construction and being a Human Sign.) Now, my accountant keeps the books for this contractor, who tells him he’s got some construction workers from this village down south who need a place to live. Real quiet hardworking types. You hablo un poco Espanol, right? If you need to talk to them, talk to their leader, Juan. He speaks Spanish. The rest of them only speak Mixed-Up. It’s an Indian lingo. But you won’t need to talk to them. They’re very quiet.”

July 2006

It’s Sunday afternoon. Travis peers down as you pry a flattened disk of lead out of the miniature crater in your driveway. “Well, they are real quiet, hardworking types from Monday through Friday,” he says. “You’ve gotta admit that. I guess they just want to relax on Saturday, have a little fiesta, drink some cerveza, shoot their pistolas in the air. It’s their culture. What are you, prejudiced?”

You look at Travis.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go talk to Juan.”

He comes back 20 minutes later. “Juan is gone, man. That’s what they kept telling me: ‘Juan is gone.’ One of the fellows had his stomach bandaged up. He just got back from the emergency room. I couldn’t quite follow what they were saying, but I think Juan had a bottle of tequila on Saturday night and stabbed this dude. Nothing serious. Just a friendly little argument. C’mon, they aren’t gangbangers, they’re working men … Okay, well, then Juan headed for the Border like OJ in his white Bronco. Juan is gone, and with the rent money they all owed us, too. Oh, man…”

Voice Mail, September 2006

"Hey, it’s Travis. I got good news. We’re not going to mess around anymore trying to extract our rent from some mob of illegals. No way, Jose. Instead, we’re going to get paid by check on the first of each month straight from the U.S. Treasury! The Department of Housing and Urban Development. Section 8 rent vouchers. They’re tearing down a housing project in the, uh, LA - Long Beach area, in, uh, Compton, I guess, to be precise, and they’ve got this highly respectable elderly grandmother who needs a place to stay with her family. Really cute grandkids. A few daughters, too. She wants a safe place with good schools to raise them. Actually, she’s not all that elderly. The HUD man said she’s 39. A church lady, you know, pillar of the community, big hat, all that. You’ll like your new neighbors.”

Voice Mail, December 2006

“It’s Travis. Okay, okay, I’ll admit that I hadn’t really thought through the part about the daughters having boyfriends, or grandma having boyfriends either, for that matter. But I think this whole Bloods v. Crips thing is being blown way out of proportion. It’s just graffiti. And lots of kids wear red these days. It’s a very In color. And these days all the young people make those goofy signs with their hands. For that matter, how can anybody know for sure that the Chevy that cruises by every night is full of MS-13 gangbangers planning a drive-by on the Bloods next door as payback for the race riots at the County Jail in Castaic? Are you sure you read the tattoos on their necks right? It’s nighttime, how can you be certain that their neck tattoos say ‘MS-13.’ Maybe they just have, like, ‘Mom’ tattooed on their necks. Did you think about that?”

May 2007

“So, after fifteen years, the abbadabbadoo tells the new monk he can say two more words, and—Whoa!” Travis flinches when the 120-pound Presa Canario lunges at him. The steel chain securing the dog to the front of the house across the street from your house snaps taut and its massive jaws come up short. “Man,” says Travis, shaken, “That’s one of those dogs that the Aryan Nation breeds to guard meth labs, isn’t it? What’s in that house? A meth lab? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“Look at this neighborhood,” he says, his dismissive gesture taking in the empty malt liquor bottles on the curb, the wheelless car jacked up on a brown front lawn, and the knots of sullen youths playing hip-hop and reggaeton on boomboxes. “All these speculators buy houses, hit a little bump in the road, need some cash, then start renting them out to lowlifes to get by until they can cash in. Property values drop like a rock. It would be no problem if just one investor did that, but when all these speculator jerks do it, the whole ‘hood is hosed.

“Oh, yeah, I came by to mention that in June the mortgage rates reset after two years. Bush put this new guy in at the Fed, Ben Barnacle, and he’s raised interest rates. So that will push up your share of the payment.”

Voice Mail, June 2007

“It’s Travis. Sorry to hear about you having to sell both your cars to make that new monthly nut. Taking the bus to work in that heat, man, that’s rough.

“But, that’s all history. I’ve got great news! I sold the house next door. To the Section 8 grandma. Who else would buy it? I only got what we paid for it, but I figure that was the smart play. She didn’t think she could qualify for the mortgage, but I told her to put down as her household income all the money made by all the people who have ever stayed there. What, is Washington Mutant going to be so racist as to question that a woman like her could have an income of $160,000?

“Don’t thank me for getting you out of that monthly payment. It’s the least I could do for you, bro.”

Phone call, October 2008

You pick up the ringing phone.

“It’s me, Travis. Long time no hear! Hey, I’m sorry about houses in your zip code being down 55 percent versus last year. Bummer.

“Anyway, I’ve been listening to Senator Omama’s speeches about how he is going to invest hundreds of billions to make America energy independent in ten years. So, I wanted to let you in on the next big thing. Alternative energy! When the Democrats get in come November, alternative energy will be bigger than houses. I’ve got great investments lined up with some start-ups in this emerging growth sector. Like biodiesel trolleys. Al Gore is this close to making a big investment. I just need a little help making the minimum required investment. They don’t need chump change. This is just for the big money boys. So, are you in or are you out?

You say nothing.

“Are you going to quit on me? Remember, quitters never prosper.”

You say: “I quit.”

Travis says: “Well, it’s about time. You’ve done nothing but bitch and moan since I met you.”

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

Carrots without sticks

From the New York Times, an article on an experimental program in NYC that had been very popular among economists: using carrots (but no sticks) to get the poor to behave better.

City to End Program Giving Cash to the Poor

An unusual and much-heralded program that gave poor families cash to encourage good behavior and self-sufficiency has so far had only modest effects on their lives and economic situation, according to an analysis the Bloomberg administration released on Tuesday.

The three-year-old pilot project, the first of its kind in the country, gave parents payments for things like going to the dentist ($100) or holding down a full-time job ($150 per month). Children were rewarded for attending school regularly ($25 to $50 per month) or passing a high school Regents exam ($600).

When the mayor announced the program, he said it would begin with private money and, if it worked, could be transformed into an ambitious permanent government program.

But city officials said Tuesday that there were no specific plans at this time to go forward with a publicly financed version of the program. In an announcement at BronxWorks, a nonprofit social services agency, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pointed to a few examples of success: High school students who met basic proficiency standards before high school tended to increase their attendance, receive more class credits and perform better on standardized tests; more families went to the dentist for regular checkups.

But the elementary and middle school students who participated made no educational or attendance gains. Neither did high school students who performed below basic proficiency standards before high school. ...

The program was certainly expensive: Mr. Bloomberg and Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, traveled to Mexico to learn more about Oportunidades, the welfare program there on which the New York City effort was based.

About $40 million in private donations, including from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation, was collected to finance the effort, called Opportunity NYC Family Rewards. Two years into the program, more than $14 million had been paid out to 2,400 families. An additional $10.2 million is for operating costs, and $9.6 million for research and evaluation.

So, poor people got $14 million and middle-class administrators and researchers got $19.8 million? And what happened to the other $6.2 million in donations?

While most behavioral changes were not large, the cash provided to the families had a short-term effect: Those who participated earned, on average, more than $6,000 a year in the first two years. Largely as a result, those participating families were 16 percent less likely to live in poverty.

The families used the money to pay for basic living expenses, school supplies, electronic equipment and going to the movies, among other things.

More than 80 percent of the families were led by a single parent, 43 percent had three or more children and just over half of the parents held jobs. All lived in low-income areas in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan....

Ms. Gibbs said many families had been perplexed by the guidelines that were laid out for them. Cash payments were eventually eliminated for actions like getting a library card and follow-up visits with a doctor.

“Too many things, too many details, more to manage in the lives of burdened, busy households,” Ms. Gibbs said, standing next to the mayor on Tuesday. “Big lesson for the future? Got to make it a lot more simple.”

A good lesson to learn.

The city has been somewhat sensitive about the results of the program. Ms. Gibbs and other city officials cautioned that the report released on Tuesday reflected only initial results, and said that they were in line with other early results from similar conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America.

A program in Mexico that bribes peasant moms to not pull their kids out school and put them to work after 4th grade in the fields but instead keep them in school through 8th grade so they can learn enough math to be carpenters would appear to be less vulnerable to diminishing marginal returns. In contrast, a program in America where a goal is, say, to keep kids from dropping out after 10th grade and have them learn enough math in 11th and 12th grade to get a fancy Regents' diploma would have a big diminishing marginal returns challenge.

On international tests of schoolchildren, Mexican-Americans average quite a bit higher scores than Mexicans, which suggests that Mexico has a long way to go to improve education. By the way, Mexico has a single national schoolteachers' union that is so powerful that teachers' jobs in government schools are becoming hereditary. Mexico has been like the old Soviet joke about how they pretend to teach us and we pretend to study.

But the whole concept of diminishing marginal returns appears to be off limits for thinking about education.

“There have never been these overnight, miraculous turnarounds,” Ms. Gibbs said. “These are programs that are working on deeply entrenched, long-term behaviors.”

One Brooklyn family who participated in the program said they collected more than $7,610 in two years. Janice Dudley and her 16-year-old daughter, Qua-neshia Darden, of East New York, said they received rewards for school attendance, good test scores and receiving regular medical checkups.

How much would it cost to bribe new mothers not to name their daughters "Qua-neshia?" Whatever it costs, it would probably be worth it. What employer could read the name "Qua-neshia" on a resume without betting that if he hires her, she'll sue for racial discrimination the first time she doesn't get the promotion she wants?

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