April 23, 2010

Twins

Identical and fraternal twins are particularly interesting for questions of nature and nurture. And, yet, one problem with writing about twins is that there really aren't that many famous identical twins to use as examples.

I'm particularly interested in famous individuals who have an identical twin who isn't famous. For example, movie star Jon Heder has an identical twin, Dan Heder, who isn't as famous, but I'm not exactly sure why Jon Heder is famous in the first place. (And I'm not sure he is either.) But that situation is relatively uncommon. Either both identical twins are famous or neither one is. And the percentage of famous people who are identical twins appears to be lower than the percentage of identical twins in the population.

Wikipedia offers a list of "Famous people with a twin," but most of the twins appear to be either fraternal and/or died young. For example, Elvis Presley had a twin brother, but he died at birth. (That's not uncommon on this list -- carrying and delivering twins is tough.)

I suspect that to get famous in a lot of fields, such as acting (here's Wikipedia's list of twin actors -- most of the names either aren't too famous or are fraternal twins) you have to elbow your way past a lot of people to grab the spotlight as you are growing up. 

For example, a lot of well-known actresses were the stars of their high school musicals. That's a common rite of passage if you want to be a movie star someday. Say you and your identical twin sister want the role of Maria in your high school production of "Sound of Music." One of you would get Maria and the other would  get stuck being the Head Nun. So, maybe you talk it over with your twin and decide neither will try out for it because it would be too painful for the loser. Or maybe the director feels uncomfortable choosing between you, so he gives the role to somebody else who isn't a twin.

I suspect that considerations such as this tend to discourage identical twins from pursuing a lot of careers with steep pyramids of fame.

April 22, 2010

Stereotypes about Redheads

I've seen a lot of assertions about how red-haired people tend to differ from other white folks of similar backgrounds (e.g., redhead Irishmen versus brunette Irishmen) over the years:

- Redheads are more fiery-tempered
- Redheads are quirkier, more unpredictable
- Redheads are more muscular (from Covert Bailey, PBS fitness guru)
- Redheads smell better (That's from Tracy Ullman's best character, aged Hollywood make-up artist Ruby Romaine)

I don't see a lot of common ground, so I'm skeptical, but I'm open to suggestions.

In general, there seems to have been more interest in redheads in American popular culture in the middle of the 20th Century.

The Cult of the Blonde really got going in the 1960s, when Sweden was at its peak of fashionability in America, and tanning became trendy. The Southern California outdoor/beach/surfer/bikini lifestyle of the 1960s and 1970s was unfeasible for redheads (sun blocks weren't as effective then), while it made people with light brown hair turn blond in the sun -- i.e., their skin got darker and their hair fairer at the same time, which was a fashionable look for awhile, e.g., Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models like Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley. Natural redheads got left at home, literally, by the beach lifestyle trend of the era.

After awhile, it became apparent that tanning causes wrinkles, so tanning went out of fashion (although that hard-earned knowledge seems to have been lost on the new Jersey Shore generation), but redheaded women didn't make a particular comeback into trendiness as in the mid-century.

One theory I have is that in the middle of the 20th Century, the existing hair dyes worked better for brunette-to-redhead transformations than for brunette-to-blonde. (Platinum blonde bombshell Jean Harlow's dyeing regimen in the 1930s eventually destroyed her hair and she had to wear a wig.) So, perhaps attention-seeking brunette women in the mid-20th Century were more likely to wind up redheads than blondes, which in turn generated a lot of buzz about what that special something was that redheads had that made them so fascinating. When, in truth, what it really was was that they wanted to be fascinating, so they became redhead as a way to distinguish themselves from the brunette masses.

Since then, it's become chemically easier for ambitious women to go blonde, so they do.

April 21, 2010

The Neanderthal in You

The idea has been kicking around for a number of years that modern humans may have picked up some valuable genes by mating with Neanderthals (kind of like Clan of the Cave Bear, that really odd series of romance novels set in caveman days that were huge bestsellers a generation ago).

A new study supports that theory. John Hawks has the background.

The idea is that if Neanderthals were off evolving by themselves in the frigid North for a few hundred thousand years, they likely would have developed some well-honed genes for dealing with the difficulties of life outside the tropics. The fastest way for modern humans migrating out of the tropics to acquire traits optimized for surviving winters, or whatever, would have been to interbreed with Neanderthals.

April 20, 2010

Clone of Contention

Should Bryan Caplan clone himself?

Julian Simon acolyte Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason U., wonders whether to include this paragraph in his upcoming book:
I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally.  Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet.  Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son.  Seriously.  I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share.  I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me.  I'm not pushing others to clone themselves.  I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream.  I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone.  Is that too much to ask? 

Unfortunately, Professor Caplan doesn't inform us what his wife thinks about his desire to create a child untainted by her genes. Does Professor Caplan intend to have Mrs. Caplan bear his clone for him? Does Professor Caplan intend to have Mrs. Caplan pick up after his clone for 21 years? Will Mrs. Caplan appreciate it when she and her husband's immature clone get into an argument and Professor Caplan sides with his clone against his wife? Will she be concerned that he might favor his clone in his will over their mutual children?

Of course, that's assuming that Bryan's assumption that he and his clone would be Best Friends Forever is correct. More likely, the opposite would be true.

Generally speaking, people who would like to clone themselves tend to be arrogant and lacking in common sense. Their children will tend to also be arrogant and lacking in common sense. The interpersonal dynamics between cloner and clonee would likely be disastrous.
Are families in which the sons are exactly like the fathers happier? I don't see a lot of evidence for that. In fact, I see a lot of evidence from memoirs and fiction that strong-willed fathers tend to have strong-willed sons, and the two clash relentlessly over who will be dominant. Too much similarity does not always make for happiness within a family.

Of course, this whole cloning thing might be useful if a husband was trying to pawn some illegitimate kid he had with a stripper off on his wife to raise: "Hey, honey, sorry that I forgot to mention it, but I had myself cloned! Be a doll and clean up after little Me Jr. for the next 21 years." This might work on an exceptionally clueless wife.

That reminds me. Back in the 1990s, I pitched a screenplay to that old HBO comedy show about a sports agent, Arliss, in which one of Arliss's clients, a narcissistic gay Olympics superstar modeled on sprinter Carl Lewis, wants Arliss to arrange for his cloning:
Arliss is setting up a grudge match race between a Carl Lewis-style track superstar and his arch-rival, an extremely juiced-up looking Ben Johnson-type. Client Carl shows up, accompanied by his best friend / sister Carol. Carl says he isn't interested in reproducing the old-fashioned way, and asks Arliss to help him clone himself. Carol will carry the clone/fetus and raise the baby. Carol takes Arliss's secretary Rita aside to suggest that they try to get the cloning over and done with real fast. She breaks down and says it's a ruse she's putting over on Carl because she's pregnant -- with Ben Johnson's baby. Arliss asks Carl that in return for making the arrangement at a pet cloning clinic to get the clone signed up for a lifetime deal. But, Arliss is heartbroken when Rita breaks the truth to him.

In general, I have fewer problems with cloning in the abstract than I have deep doubts about the specific type of person (e.g., Bryan) who would want to get himself cloned.

The Americanization of Britain

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
American culture has become so globally dominant that even the lamest U.S. customs, such as our soporific presidential debates, infect countries blessed with superior traditions. For example, as part of the run-up to the May 6th General Election, the Brits are holding their first ever prime ministerial debates, although their party leaders come up through the gauntlet of Parliament’s vastly more substantive and scintillating daily Question Time.

That the prime minister has been evolving into the president junior is a recurrent theme of Robert Harris’ 2007 novel The Ghost, which Roman Polanski has made into The Ghost Writer. This competent political thriller for grown-ups, one of the better movies of 2010, has been playing in limited release in the U.S. and opened over the weekend in Britain.

The PM’s job was long more human-scale job than the president’s, less insulated from normal life by security and by deference (which in Britain was paid instead to the Queen as head of state). For example, when I attended a conference with ex-PM Margaret Thatcher in 1999, she showed up accompanied only by a secretary and a bodyguard, wearing an old dress that had been mended with needle and thread. Tony Blair and his money-hungry wife Cheri were the first to indulge fully in American superstaritis.

Read the rest here and comment upon it below.

NFL Draft: Toby Gerhart update

Since we've been following Stanford's running back Toby Gerhart here since early October 2009 through his just missing out on the Heisman Trophy, it's time to check in on his prospects in this week's NFL draft
 
Judging by his various combine statistics, he looks like a legitimate NFL prospect, although not an overwhelming one: Among college running backs measured, he was tied for third in bench press repetitions, fifth in vertical leap, sixth in shuttle, seventh in cones. His time in the 40 yard dash of 4.50 seconds was quite good for a 231 pound back, but there were about 10 guys faster. The fastest in the CBS Sports database was C.J. Spiller of Clemson at 4.27 and second were Ben Tate of Auburn and Jahvid Best of Cal at 4.34.
 
Gerhart's Wonderlic score of 30 (about a 118 IQ) was the best of the running backs. He was valedictorian of a working class / exurban high school, so he's a solid all-arounder.
 
He's being talked up as a second round or third round pick, with lots of NFL executives saying that they'd play him as the featured back rather than as the fullback (blocker, where white runners are usually stockpiled).
If I were him, I'd still be tempted by baseball. The Dodgers have a 230 pound centerfielder in Matt Kemp, and Gerhart is about as big and fast. As a hitter and fielder, Kemp was a Project for a long time, but now he's dating Rhianna because he's 230 pounds and fast enough to play centerfield. Gerhart hasn't shown in college baseball that he could hit major league pitching, but if he ever got the hang of it, it's a sweet life compared to getting mauled by NFL defenses.

April 19, 2010

Can a fat guy be Presidential timber?

Back in the good old days of Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft, fatness was seen as reassuring evidence in a leader of success, maturity, calmness, and a high blood sugar level. But in recent generations, Presidents have tended to be lean and hungry types, with the exception of Bill Clinton, who ran from 214 to 236 on a 6'2.5" frame, but that didn't count because he's a Democrat.

I bring this up because close watchers of politics (i.e., not me, but people who know what they are talking about) are starting to speak with surprised admiration of the recently elected Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, the dark horse local who upset that Goldman Sachs honcho last fall.

It's not like the GOP has so many outstanding leaders that it couldn't use any fresh blood. But, the New Jersey governor is a dead ringer for Paul Blart, Mall Cop, just without the cool Segway to ride around on. So, can a fat guy be considered Presidential timber?

Obama and the CIA

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems to me that Barack Obama had a little bit of help along the way from the CIA. Yet, the more I think about it, the less important that seems.
If you conceive of the CIA not as an omnipotent puppet-master, but as a player in an international version of the municipal Favor Bank familiar from The Wire and The Bonfire of the Vanities in which various players scratch each others' backs, then the idea that Obama might have had a little help along the way (e.g., perhaps a recommendation that helped him transfer from Occidental to Columbia's International Relations program despite spending most of his time at Oxy getting high), the more likely and less significant it seems. 

The CIA chiefly recruited two kinds of people. First, the good blood, good bone, old-line WASP Skull and Bones types on the grounds that they were less likely to betray America because they pretty much owned it. For example, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence that George H.W. Bush, who, when he was appointed CIA Director in the mid-1970s was described as being an "outsider," had previously helped the CIA with the Bay of Pigs and other anti-Castro operations in the 1960s, using his offshore oil drilling rigs in Mexican waters not terribly far from Cuba. There's nothing too shocking about this idea. In fact, GHW Bush may even have sacrificed a good deal of wealth to stay in an offshore business helpful to the CIA. He split with his partners, who kept the domestic onshore oil business, which they turned into the huge firm Pennzoil.

The other type of people the CIA liked to do favors for were cosmopolitan leftists, such as Obama's parents. 

Obama is not a particularly cosmopolitan person, at least not compared to his parents. But the three foreign countries where he has had the strongest ties -- Indonesia, Kenya, and Pakistan -- were particularly of interest to the CIA.

Barack Obama Sr. was a protege of Tom Mboya, the Kenyan Luo politician who was famously Washington's man in a three way struggle for power within Kenya between the pro-Soviet Luo Oginga Odinga and the pro-British Kikuyu Jomo Kenyatta. Obama Sr. claimed to have been the chief witness to the 1969 assassination of Mboya, a landmark event in Kenyan history equivalent to the JFK assassination in the U.S. Obama Jr. left this out of his autobiography, but that Obama Sr. claimed this are now well-documented.

Obama's mother worked in the late 1960s at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, which was Ground Zero for the CIA after the 1965 Communist putsch and subsequent military massacre of leftists. Indeed, Dreams from My Father refers to her conversations on the job with CIA men. David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, explains that his mother went on to a career in microlending social reform in Indonesia and Pakistan funded by the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and a Saudi bank. 

At Occidental, Obama's best friends were rich Pakistanis leftists. In 1981, he visited Pakistan and stayed at a friend's estate, whose politician father became the caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan in 2008. Pakistan in 1981, of course, was crucial to the CIA's attempts to rally an armed resistance to the Soviets over the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. These are the kind of social connections that would be of interest to the CIA.

After he got out of Columbia, Obama got a job at an international business newsletter firm, Business International, where, he says, he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines." That reflects his leftist ideology, but I suspect he's amusing himself as well by referring to the fact that Business International had served to provide cover to at least four CIA agents over the years.

How did Obama wind up working at a CIA front? Coincidence? Perhaps, but maybe he had some advice. Maybe somebody made a phone call for him.

None of this is to say that Obama was a CIA agent. He seems more like the kind of promising young leftist American Third Worlder whom an old friend of his mother's or father's in American intelligence might have pulled a string or two to help out over the years.

As I've said, the more I've thought about it, the less fundamentally important it seems. But it sure is interesting.

Who knows what?

Inductivist highlights a Pew survey of how much people know about political news. Pew asked 1000 adults a dozen current affairs questions, and then published the demographic breakdowns. (You can take the online test here. The foreign debt questions turns out to have two more or less right answers.) The demographics aren't too surprising: Republicans average 5.9 right answers out of 12 versus 4.9 for Democrats. (Independents, however, do better than is typical on these surveys: 5.6.) People under 30 only got 3.8 right on average. Men defeated women 6.0 to 4.6. Whites did much better than blacks. Affluent people know a lot more than poor people. The well-educated are smarter.
They didn't ask if you played golf, but previous evidence suggests that the more somebody fits the stereotype of a boring middle aged Republican white male golfer, the more likely they are to know what the hell they are talking about.

Fundraising

April 17, 2010

How many serious white girlfriends has Obama had?

As you'll recall, one of the most stylized, fable-like sections of the President's Dreams from My Father is the when Obama describes to his half sister Auma the serious girlfriend he had in New York (where he lived from 1981-1985), whom he dumped because she was white, and not only white but old money WASP. As several commenters have noted, the whole episode sounds like it was lifted from a white ethnic writer like Mario Puzo or Philip Roth.
David Remnick's bestseller The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama doesn't mention the white New York girlfriend -- that's too interesting for Remnick to pursue. Remnick's audience is primarily white women who have a bit of a thing for the President, so a discussion of Obama's disquiet about interracial relationships would be a downer for Remnick's readers.

But Remnick does say about his first Chicago stay (1985-1988):
"Toward the end of his time as an organizer, Obama had a steady girlfriend, a white University of Chicago student who was studying anthropology."

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, she sounds much like his mom, who got accepted by the U. of Chicago at age 15 back when they took younger students (but she didn't go) and got a Ph.D. in anthropology.

Second, according to his book, he had previously realized in New York that it wouldn't work with a white girl, so why another white girlfriend? (This is assuming that they aren't the same person, whom Obama has melded together for whatever reason). One might think that a 656 page biography might ask those kind of questions, but it doesn't.

Why Michelle isn't amazed by Barack

Reading David Remnick's biography of Barack Obama, The Bridge, I was struck by the contrast between the hosannas offered up by whites after meeting Obama and the more balanced evaluations of blacks who knew him better. Most notably, the President's own wife Michelle has repeatedly tried to explain to worshipful journalists that he's not all that.

On second thought, Michelle's opinion may not be quite fair to Barack since she may have exceptionally high standards in just how charismatic a Presidential candidate is supposed to be. After all, as teen, she worked as a babysitter for a neighborhood man who was much more handsome than Barack, much more eloquent, a much snazzier dresser, and who ran for President twice as much: Jesse Jackson. (The Rev.'s daughter Santita Jackson became Michelle's friend and godmother of one of their children.)

Michelle's personal ties to the Jackson dynasty may have helped her in her educational, legal, and political career, and probably didn't exactly work against her in attracting the interest of a hugely ambitious young politician named Barack Obama.

April 16, 2010

The Iceland Volcano

The ash-cloud from the volcano in Iceland that is shutting down air-travel in parts of Europe reminds me that Ben Franklin may have been the first to theorize that a 1783 Icelandic eruption caused the cool weather and poor harvest in England that year. (Much like the 1991 Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines made the summer of 1992 in Chicago the coolest I experienced, with a notable dust haze in the sky all year). Franklin was in his late 70s at the time. 

As I've mentioned before, Franklin's life story is the most comically upbeat that I am familiar with. He just goes from one triumph to another well into old age. He negotiates the favorable Treaty of Paris settling the Revolutionary War, and then, en passant back to America, discovers the link between volcanoes and climate, maps the Gulf Stream, and invents bifocals.

Capitalist Fronts

What's the story behind SEIU union boss and media darling Andy Stern, the most frequent visitor to the Obama White House, being forced out by his own union? It's remarkable that they let the bad feelings slip out. You would think that all parties concerned would phrase it as, "Now that ObamaCare has passed, Andy Stern has decided that he would like to spend more time with his family."
Stern has long followed a quantity over quality strategy of signing up as dues-paying members huge numbers of poorly paid Hispanics. About once a decade, he wins for them a janitors' strike in one city (LA in the 1990s, Houston in the 2000s), but mostly they seem to do more for Stern's reputation than Stern does for Alberto and Blanca. Stern is committed to continued political promotion of illegal immigration, which just stabs his existing members in the backs.

I don't really understand SEIU's strategy. I sometimes wonder if the are not "capitalist fronts," the opposite of the old "communist fronts." Businesses want more cheap immigrant labor so Andy signs up all the warm bodies and tells them to vote for more cheap labor. 
Makes sense for Andy but I don't understand what's in it for all his Hispanic workers.
There are organizations on the left that are pretty much full time capitalist fronts. If you are a banker, and if ACORN is hassling you about not giving the boss of their local office a job at the bank, and thus marches and screams against you as racist imperiling your purchase of another bank under the Community Reinvestment Act, well, the Greenlining Institute specializes in giving you "regulatory air cover" by saying that, yes, you are fully committed to diversity, according to us, the famous social justice outfit, Greenlining. And then, maybe, you fund some Greenlining activities.

Is SEIU like that? 

Carlos Slim getting his money's worth out of NYT

The New York Times has commissioned a study on immigration, so all you morons out there can stop believing your lying eyes. And don't even think about using advanced concepts like distinguishing between illegal and legal immigrants -- "distinguishing" is the same thing as "discriminating," you racist. Why use your head at all when you can just act smugly dumb about illegal immigration, like the NYT?

The shamelessness of the stupidity of most conventional wisdom about immigration is striking. This NYT article comically illustrates just how obtuse the elite theories are. This article completely writes itself into a corner, but the editors didn't notice that the details are all backward from the lead.
Immigrants in Work Force: Study Belies Image
By JULIA PRESTON

ST. LOUIS — After a career as a corporate executive with her name in brass on the office door, Amparo Kollman-Moore, an immigrant from Colombia, likes to drive a Jaguar and shop at Saks. “It was a good life,” she said, “a really good ride.”

As a member of this city’s economic elite, Ms. Kollman-Moore is not unusual among immigrants who live in St. Louis. According to a new analysis of census data, more than half of the working immigrants in this metropolitan area hold higher-paying white-collar jobs — as professionals, technicians or administrators — rather than lower-paying blue-collar and service jobs.

Because when you think about immigration in 21st Century America, you think St. Louis! Why pay any attention to, say, Southern California, with its 17 million residents, when we can focus on St. Louis instead?

I've been following the NAEP federal test scores for years, and the state of Missouri almost always has the highest Hispanic scores in the country. (For example, here are the 2009 8th grade math scores for Hispanics. Missouri's Hispanics outscore the Hispanics in any other state in the country by six points, far ahead of the field.

How come? Mostly because there are very few Hispanics in Missouri. They aren't representative. And being unrepresentative is why the NYT wants to use St. Louis to represent its story about immigration rather than Southern California, just as that's why their token Latino immigrant in this story is surnamed, of all things, "Kollman-Moore."

A quick search find that Ms. Ampy Kollman-Moore went to work in 1973 for pharmaceutical manufacturing firm Mallinckrodt Inc., which is headquartered in St. Louis. In 1998, she was appointed President for Latin American Operations. She's an example of the small, mostly random flow of elite immigrants who find their way to St. Louis from the upper classes of Latin America to take corporate or professional jobs, just as elite Danes or elite Egyptians or whatever wind up in America. Ms. Kollman-Moore is, clearly, not an example of mass immigration, much less of mass illegal immigration.
Among American cities, St. Louis is not an exception, the data show. In 14 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York and San Francisco, more immigrants are employed in white-collar occupations than in lower-wage work like construction, manufacturing or cleaning.
The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration — articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers.

Over all, the analysis showed, the 25 million immigrants who live in the country’s largest metropolitan areas (about two-thirds of all immigrants in the country) are nearly evenly distributed across the job and income spectrum.

“The United States is getting a more varied and economically important flow of immigrants than the public seems to realize,” said David Dyssegaard Kallick, director for immigration research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group in New York that conducted the data analysis for The New York Times.

Sure, if you lump illegal and legal immigrants together. But why take any unskilled legal immigrants?
The findings are significant because Americans’ views of immigration are based largely on the work immigrants do, new research shows.

“Americans, whether they are rich or poor, are much more in favor of high-skilled immigrants,” said Jens Hainmueller, a political scientist at M.I.T. and co-author of a survey of attitudes toward immigration with Michael J. Hiscox, professor of government at Harvard. The survey of 1,600 adults, which examined the reasons for anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, was published in February in American Political Science Review, a peer-reviewed journal.

Americans are inclined to welcome upper-tier immigrants — like Ms. Kollman-Moore — believing they contribute to economic growth without burdening public services, the study found. More than 60 percent of Americans are opposed to allowing more low-skilled foreign laborers, regarding them as more likely to be a drag on the economy.

Those kinds of views, in turn, have informed recent efforts by Congress to remake the immigration system. A measure unveiled last month by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, aims to reshape the legal system to give priority to high-skilled, high-earning immigrants, offering narrower channels for low-wage workers. (A bill in 2007 by the Bush administration tilted even more sharply toward upper-tier immigrants; it failed in Congress.)

Yet while visa bottlenecks persist for high-skilled immigrants, on the whole, the census data show, the current system has brought a range of foreign workers across skill and income levels. The analysis suggests, moreover, that the immigrants played a central role in the cycle of the economic growth of cities over the last two decades.

Yes, but not at all in the way the NYT thinks ...
Cities with thriving immigrant populations — with high-earning and lower-wage workers — tended to be those that prospered the most.

Let's reorder that sentence to make it fit cause and effect better: "Cities that were most prosperous attracted the most immigrants."
“Economic growth in urban areas has been clearly connected with an increase in immigrants’ share of the local labor force,” Mr. Kallick said. 
Surprisingly, the analysis showed, the growing cities were not the ones, like St. Louis, that drew primarily high-earning foreigners. In fact, the St. Louis area had one of the slowest growing economies.

Duh.

That's only "surprising" if you have cause and effect as backwards as the NYT does. On the whole, immigrants didn't make, say, Phoenix thrive, they were attracted to Phoenix because it was thriving. (Funny, though, Phoenix isn't thriving anymore, despite having all those immigrants hanging around the Home Depot.) In contrast, not many immigrants were attracted to St. Louis because it's a city that has been in relative decline since, roughly, the 1904 World's Fair, when it was the 4th largest city in America. St. Louis is located at the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which was a great asset in an economy centered around paddlewheel steamboats.
Rather, the fastest economic growth between 1990 and 2008 was in cities like Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix that received large influxes of immigrants with a mix of occupations — including many in lower-paid service and blue-collar jobs.

What is the mortgage default rate in those metropolitan areas? It's above average in Atlanta and Denver and through the roof in Phoenix.
In metropolitan Denver, where the economy doubled between 1990 and 2008, 63 percent of immigrants worked in jobs on the lower end of the pay scale.

Denver “did a great job of attracting people from other places in the world,” said Rich Jones, director of policy and research at the Bell Policy Center, a nonpartisan group in that city that focuses on the impact of economic and fiscal policies in Colorado. 

As for attracting blue-collar Americans from declining Rust Belt cities who would want jobs in construction on Denver's exurbs if they paid well enough to make it worth their while to move, well, Denver didn't do such a hot job. But who cares about their fellow Americans?
“They are coming with a variety of skills,” Mr. Jones said. “They created demand for goods, services and housing that began a dynamic.”

And where does the "dynamic" end? In multiethnic white flight, exurban over-expansion, foreclosures, and the Great Recession.
The figures on jobs and earnings of immigrants in American cities are based on an analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute of census data for the 25 largest metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008. The data from 2008 are the most current in-depth census statistics on immigrants’ places of residence and earnings; they also include the first year of the severe recession. The analysis includes legal and illegal immigrants and naturalized citizens.

But let's not publish anything in the NYT distinguishing between illegal and legal immigrants, shall we? All this distinguishing is in such bad taste.
St. Louis is a good vantage point to observe the census analysis play out on the ground — both in the past and, possibly, the future.

Here, a pattern of stalled growth and low immigration prevailed for decades. But more recently a new pattern is emerging: even in the recession, some corners of the metropolitan area are sputtering to life, and new immigrants with a mix of skills are playing a conspicuous part.

“If you look at what feeds the core of many American cities, it’s the arrival of the immigrant groups,” said Anna Crosslin, president of the International Institute of St. Louis, a refugee resettlement and immigrant aid agency here. “Then one generation moves out, and they’re replaced by another generation. We didn’t have that here in St. Louis.”

In other words, St. Louis got stuck with lots of African-Americans, while richer cities like New York were pawning black Americans off on lower rent cities like St. Louis using Section 8 housing vouchers. That's a big part underlying reason for elite immigration enthusiasm -- a hope that immigrants will show up and make American blacks go away. In New York, it's been working. The number of American-born blacks in NYC has been falling since 1979.
In its heyday as a commerce hub in the 1950s, St. Louis was one of the nation’s premier cities. Since then, business has stagnated, the population of the city proper declined by more than half, and immigration to the area has been slow. Today, in the St. Louis metropolitan area, only 111,000 residents are foreign-born, out of 2.3 million total, according to the census data.

Less than 5 percent. Great example you chose here to demonstrate the impact of immigration.
Many immigrants who were drawn here were doctors, researchers and business executives, attracted by the city’s corporate headquarters, universities and medical centers.

Yup.
Ms. Kollman-Moore, 60, came to St. Louis in the 1970s and rose through the ranks at Mallinckrodt, a medical supply company, to become president of the Latin American division, a $100 million business. She retired when the company was sold in 2000 and is now a consultant and business school professor. She planted a grove of tropical shade trees in the center of the living room in her home on a posh suburban cul-de-sac, a literal reminder of her roots.

“I made a wonderful career out of understanding the cultures of Latin America and the culture of the United States and how to do business in both,” said Ms. Kollman-Moore, a naturalized American.

During the 1990s, a wider variety of foreigners began to settle in the metropolitan area. Bosnians fleeing the Balkan wars have now made this city their largest community in the United States. Sukrija Dzidzovic, 52, publisher of the Bosnian weekly newspaper SabaH, moved the paper here from New York in 2006 to be closer to the core of his readers.

Bosnians run the gamut, from truckers and bakery workers to lawyers and engineers. Many Bosnians hit the ground running here because they came from Europe with savings they had stashed away, Mr. Dzidzovic said. 

I don't even want to think about where the money the Bosnians had stashed away came from.
At one time, Bosnians opened so many businesses on blighted streets that hostile rumors spread that they were receiving secret subsidies from the federal government.

The NYT wouldn't be so crass as to mention which race of people on the "blighted streets" of St. Louis were spreading hostile rumors about Bosnians. Must be all those white racists who live in inner city St. Louis!
Now, appreciative city officials make a point of attending Bosnian celebrations, Mr. Dzidzovic said.

Immigrants from China have also prospered here as entrepreneurs, creating jobs for other immigrants. 

Creating jobs for Americans, especially St. Louis's African-Americans, not so much. 
Sandy Tsai, 59, said she and her husband chose St. Louis to start a business because they noticed it was in the middle of the country. Now their company, Baily, makes egg rolls, noodles and fortune cookies in three local factories that distribute to thousands of Chinese restaurants nationwide. Ms. Tsai said her employees ranged from egg-roll makers earning $8 an hour to laboratory researchers with advanced degrees in food science.

“It’s a good group, a good combination,” Ms. Tsai said. But despite the long hard times in St. Louis, low-wage workers have not always been easy to find, she said, and her business expansion was slowed because of it.

Damn, "low-wage workers have not always been easy to find." What an insoluble problem that poor employer has. There aren't enough Americans in St. Louis who will work for her for $16,000 per year. It's unthinkable that she might -- God forbid! -- trying paying Americans $17,000 per year. So, the government must help her out by letting in more poor foreigners.
Now, those workers have started to arrive in larger numbers. Raúl Rico, 31, said he came here 14 years ago from the Mexican state of Querétaro, the first in his family to settle in St. Louis. Today, between parents, siblings, cousins and their offspring, his local clan numbers 56.

Hip-hip-hooray!

April 15, 2010

Constance Holden, RIP

Constance Holden, 68, veteran writer for Science, America's top scientific journal, was riding her bicycle to the office on Monday, when she was killed by a big National Guard truck setting up to block off a street for the motorcade of dignitaries to Obama's stray nukes summit.

Constance was a consistent voice against the Williams Syndrome-like conventional wisdom on human nature. For example, her July 30, 2004 Science article in time for the Athens Olympics, Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners, is the best summary of the science of why men of West African descent dominate sprinting and East Africans standout in distance running.

At the blog of VDARE.com, Kevin Lamb has more on on how she spoke out for IQ realism over the decades.

Stevens' heresy

Ann Coulter's new column points out something that has been lost in all the tributes by the media to the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. A long time ago, in the government contracting quota case Fullilove, he noted that quotas are essentially reparations, and asked why then are we giving reparations to voluntary immigrants from south of the border?
But on many other issues, such as race discrimination, Stevens swung so far to the left that his earlier opinions would be unrecognizable as having been written by the same man.

In 1978, Stevens was not only in the majority in University of California Regents v. Bakke, but he wrote the opinion holding that the school's race-based admissions program violated Title VII and ordering the university to admit Bakke.

In another case of government race-based classifications, Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), Stevens ridiculed the idea of race-based "remedies" being applied to every ethnic group under the sun.

Adopting Justice William Rehnquist's view that the specific history of blacks in America makes their claims unique, Stevens wrote: "Quite obviously, the history of discrimination against black citizens in America cannot justify a grant of privileges to Eskimos or Indians." (Remember when you could use terms like "Eskimo" and "Indian" without being accused of a hate crime?)

Unlike blacks, who were "dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Stevens said "the 'Spanish-speaking' subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived."

Now fast-forward to 2003, when the court considered the race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan. The school automatically awarded 20 points -- one-fifth of the total points needed for admission -– to every minority, including not only blacks, but also Hispanics, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.

This time, affirmative action for Aleuts was just peachy with Stevens, who came up with a ludicrous procedural objection to the lawsuit, basically concluding that no one ever has standing to sue for race discrimination in college admissions. I guess he figured it was time somebody did something about the University of Michigan's long, shameful history of discriminating against Aleuts.

That's quite a change from the Justice Stevens of Fullilove, who compared government affirmative action programs to Nazi policies, saying if the government "is to make a serious effort to define racial classes by criteria that can be administered objectively, it must study precedents such as the First Regulation to the Reich's Citizenship Law of Nov. 14, 1935," translated in Volume 4 of "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression."

Whatever you think of Stevens' newfound admiration for government racial preferences, it's preposterous to say, as Stevens did, "I really don't think I've changed all that much." 
Here's more from Stevens' 1980 dissent in Fullilove, when he was 60:
Even if we assume that each of the six racial subclasses has suffered its own special injury at some time in our history, [p538] surely it does not necessarily follow that each of those subclasses suffered harm of identical magnitude. Although "the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Bakke, supra, at 387 (opinion of MARSHALL, J.), the "Spanish-speaking" subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived. There is no reason to assume, and nothing in the legislative history suggests, much less demonstrates, that each of the subclasses is equally entitled to reparations from the United States Government. [n8]
 
At best, the statutory preference is a somewhat perverse form of reparation for the members of the injured classes. For those who are the most disadvantaged within each class are the least likely to receive any benefit from the special privilege even though they are the persons most likely still to be suffering the consequences of the past wrong. [n9] A random [p539] distribution to a favored few is a poor form of compensation for an injury shared by many.

My principal objection to the reparation justification for this legislation, however, cuts more deeply than my concern about its inequitable character. We can never either erase or ignore the history that MR. JUSTICE MARSHAL has recounted. But if that history can justify such a random distribution of benefits on racial lines as that embodied in this statutory scheme, it will serve not merely as a basis for remedial legislation, but rather as a permanent source of justification for grants of special privileges. For if there is no duty to attempt either to measure the recovery by the wrong or to distribute that recovery within the injured class in an evenhanded way, our history will adequately support a legislative preference for almost any ethnic, religious, or racial group with the political strength to negotiate "a piece of the action" for its members.

Although I do not dispute the validity of the assumption that each of the subclasses identified in the Act has suffered a severe wrong at some time in the past, I cannot accept this slapdash statute as a legitimate method of providing classwide relief.

Perhaps some Senator could ask Obama's upcoming nominee what he thinks of the sainted Stevens Fullilove opinion? And, then, when they demur to agree, ask why brand new immigrants should legally benefit from preferences from the moment they arrive, even if they arrived illegally?

And, then, ask was it just to the rest of Americans for immigrants from India to have been reclassified from white to Oriental in 1982 in response to lobbying by immigrant Indian businessmen for special breaks on government contracting.

That would be fun.

April 14, 2010

Professional Wrestling Demographics

Some commenters were struck by the fact that fans of professional wrestling (at least, the ones who admit it on a survey) voted heavily Democratic. I recall that Pat Buchanan's Reform Party campaign in 2000 spent some money on campaign spots on professional wrestling broadcasts, but didn't get much from them.

That reminded me that I've never posted an article I wrote about professional wrestling in 2001, at the apogee of its popularity: I took my sons to a sold out Staples Center in LA with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the front row to bless The Rock / Duane Johnson's launch into a movie career.
Then a bunch of setbacks came along to slow it down (the World Wildlife Fund's lawsuit that made it change its acronym from WWF to WWE, the distraction of Vince McMahon's ill-fated XFL professional football league, the rise of UFC, the defection of The Rock to the movies, and general ennui).
It's old, old stuff, but I'll put it up anyway:

LOS ANGELES, Calif. Aug. 10, 2001 (UPI) -- Los Angeles is a city so divided by complex ethnic suspicions that in June white Republicans allied with black Democrats to prevent the election of a Mexican-American mayor. Yet, this week sixteen thousand Southern Californians of all races and languages gathered peacefully in a multicultural celebration of an institution that finally unites rather than divides this most diverse of American cities: namely, the World Wrestling Federation's "Smackdown!"

The Smackdown! audience in the gleaming Staples Center offered almost a scale model of LA's ethnic composition: about half Hispanic, but with large numbers of whites, blacks, and Southeast Asians. The only groups not well represented were other Asians and Jews.

LA's most celebrated philosopher, Rodney King, once asked, "Why can't we all just get along?" At Smackdown!, everybody got along famously (except the wrestlers). The WWF fans were far better behaved than, say, the notoriously drunken and hostile mob at the 1999 Ryder Cup golf tournament at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass.

After the headlining match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kurt Angle had ended in chaos, I became frustrated with how slowly we were all filing out up the stairs. "Hey, can we get a move on up there?" I shouted. Only then did I notice that we were moving haltingly because the people in line ahead of me were politely waiting for a man with a crippled leg to haul himself along with his arms.