"Obama Takes Immigration Reform Off Agenda"

From the AP ten minutes ago:

Obama Takes Immigration Reform Off Agenda
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:19 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Immigration reform has become the first of President Barack Obama's major priorities dropped from the agenda of an election-year Congress facing voter disillusionment. Sounding the death knell was Obama himself.

The president noted that lawmakers may lack the ''appetite'' to take on immigration while many of them are up for re-election and while another big legislative issue -- climate change -- is already on their plate.

''I don't want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn't solve the problem,'' Obama told reporters Wednesday night aboard Air Force One.

Immigration reform was an issue Obama promised Latino groups that he would take up in his first year in office. But several hard realities -- a tanked economy, a crowded agenda, election-year politics and lack of political will -- led to so much foot-dragging in Congress that, ultimately, Obama decided to set the issue aside.

With that move, the president calculated that an immigration bill would not prove as costly to his party two years from now, when he seeks re-election, than it would today, even though some immigration reformers warned that a delay could so discourage Democratic-leaning Latino voters that they would stay home from the polls in November.

Some Democrats thought pushing a bill through now might help their party, or at least their own re-election prospects.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose campaign is struggling in heavily Hispanic Nevada, unveiled an outline -- not legislation -- on Thursday for an immigration bill at a packed news conference. Asked when it might advance, he declined to set an ''arbitrary deadline.''

If immigration goes nowhere this year, Democrats can blame Republican resistance, though in reality many Democrats didn't want to deal with an immigration bill this year either.

The Democrats' draft proposal, obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday, called for, among other things, meeting border security benchmarks before anyone in the country illegally can become a legal permanent U.S. resident.

Obama praised the outline and said the next step is ironing out a bill. He said his administration will ''play an active role'' trying to get bipartisan supporters.

Republican Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had been working with Democrats on immigration reform, criticized the proposal as ''nothing more than an attempt to score political points.''

By Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered little hope that the issue was still alive on Capitol Hill.

''If there is going to be any movement in this regard, it will require presidential leadership, as well as an appetite, is that the word? ... as well as a willingness to move forward in the Congress,'' she said.

House Republican leader John Boehner was more blunt. ''There is not a chance that immigration is going to move through the Congress,'' he said Tuesday.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the Democrats' leading advocate for immigration reform, has said he voted for health care reform on the understanding that Obama and congressional Democrats would move a major immigration bill.

Even though he would like to see Latinos turn out to vote for Democrats in 2010, Gutierrez said ''many will probably decide to stay home.'' However, he added, a strict, new immigration law in Arizona may change that dynamic. The law requires law enforcement officers to question anyone they suspect is in the country illegally.

''On one hand you are not going to vote because you don't believe people you voted for are doing a good enough job,'' Gutierrez said. ''Then you say, 'I got to vote, because the enemy is so mean and vindictive, I got to get out there.'''

The Hispanic vote is growing, largely because of Latinos' increasing population. The 9.7 million Latinos who cast ballots in 2008 made up about 7.4 percent of the electorate, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center study.

Anyway, this is about the 27th announcement about amnesty I've posted from the Democrats over the last 18 months. Most of those said, "Amnesty will be Real Soon Now." So, how long will this announcement be operative?

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

Eating your cake and having it, too

From the Washington Post:

In a January poll by the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of white people said Obama is "mixed race" and 24 percent said he is black. In contrast, 55 percent of black people said Obama is black and 34 percent said he is mixed.

When filling in his Census form, President Obama passed up the opportunity to check two boxes, and only checked "Black."

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

A question

A question from a reader:

Q: if you were a Republican running against a conservative or moderate Dem – how much value do you think you’d get running not only against Obama, but Bush?  If the ad argued that the last, say, 4-6 years of BushObama rule has shown almost no differentiation between the high deficit spending, the wars and the bailouts – and you (the candidate) were the one to stand up and stay stop! – do you think that would be effective?  Forget the GOP leadership, and I don’t think we owe W much of anything.  A legit strategy or totally outrageous?  And do you think it would motivate the electorate, by saying – hey DC is broken, both parties offer little change in the status quo and I don’t believe either of what our leaders have offered since 2005?

 Thoughts?

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

The Conventional Wisdom

 Dan Froomkin writes:

Former President Bill Clinton enthusiastically weighed into the blistering national debate on immigration today with a resounding assertion that America needs more immigrants -- not fewer -- to ensure its long-term fiscal future. ...

And looking at the overall budget numbers, comparing money in to money out, "I don't think there's any alternative for us but increasing immigration," he said. "I just don't see any palatable way out of this unless that's part of the strategy."

Which is why California, the state with the highest proportion of immigrants and children of immigrants, is in such great fiscal shape compared to, say, North Dakota.

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

The love life of Hugo Chavez

Back in 2000, I wrote in VDARE.com:

After almost twenty generations of intermarriage between whites and Indians, Mexico has ended up with an almost wholly white elite, a vast mixed race (mestizo) working class, and at least 10 million extremely impoverished pure Indians who have never assimilated into Hispanic culture. And the ruling class is becoming ever whiter. How did this happen? 

Since then, I've gotten dozens of emails from Mexicans thanking me for helping them finally understand the basic mechanism of their social order:

... Now, in Mexico every century or so, there is a massive upheaval like the Revolution of 1910. The white monopoly is fractured. Up through the cracks come the most talented mestizos and Indians. They start dynasties that persist to this day … but their grandsons and great-grandsons are notably whiter than they were, since the men of the family have been exploiting their social ascendancy to marry white women. (Of course, many rich Mexican men father second families with their lower-ranking mistresses. But these kids seldom get the breaks in life that the legitimate children do.)

I was thinking tonight that it would be fun to test whether this works for Latin America's most famous nonwhite politician, Hugo Chavez, fire-breathing President of Venezuela, who portrays himself as the leader of the dusky masses against the white elite. Chavez is a "pardo" of mixed black, Amerindian, and European ancestry. He claims his family used to be big landowners, but had their estate confiscated in a 1920s political struggle. His parents were fairly poor schoolteachers in an obscure town.

Wikipedia says:

Chávez has been married twice. He first wedded Nancy Colmenares, a woman from a poor family originating in Chávez's own hometown of Sabaneta. Chávez and Colmenares remained married for eighteen years, during which time they had three children: Rosa Virginia, María Gabriela, and Hugo Rafael. They separated soon after Chávez's 1992 coup attempt. 

I can't find a picture that specifically says its his first wife, but I'm guessing this is an old picture of Hugo with his first wife and two daughters by her. If that's his first wife, she she was perhaps a little fairer than him, but not too different.

During his first marriage, Chávez also had an affair with historian Herma Marksman; their relationship lasted nine years.^[9][10] 

Wikipedia describes Prof. Marksman:

Herma Marksman is a Venezuelan historian. Marksman was born of a peasant woman and a German immigrant who worked as an ironworker union organizer. When she was in her 30s she met the future Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who was then married and in his twenties. She became his mistress. They both were students of socialism and idealistic and she helped him in his academic studies. After the failed 1992 coup attempt Chavez left both his first wife and mistress.^[1] Marksman now repudiates him, and describes his government as imposing a "fascist dictatorship."

She's a rather sour looking older woman, half German, but, presumably, he was attracted to her because she could teach him about the big picture topics that he'd need to discuss if he were to make a plausible Presidente. 

But, when he became a celebrity with his failed, but rather popular 1992 coup attempt, Chavez dumped his peasant first wife and his smart but dowdy mistress and married a media personality:

Chávez is divorced from his second wife, journalist Marisabel Rodríguez de Chávez.^[11] Through that marriage, Chávez had another daughter, Rosinés.

No surprise here about his second wife's looks. Judging from video footage of her, I'd guess she's part Eastern European. Hugo's ex-wife became a leader of the opposition in the 2008 election.

And here's Chavez's daughter by his second wife.

Who has replaced the second Mrs. Chavez appears to be obscure. Google Translate comes up with this version of a Spanish-language article in Petroleum World: "After his second divorce, amatory life of Hugo Chávez has shielded beneath the mysterious mantle of power." (He's probably trying to get in touch with Amanda Seyfreid.)

So, Chavez Release 1.0 has three legitimate children who are just a little fairer than him, while Chavez Release 2.0 has, no surprise, one child who is blonde. 

By the way, Venezuelan politics are awesome. For example, one of Chavez's main political opponents is Leopoldo Lopez, mayor of Chacao, who recently ran ahead of Hugo in a poll for the 2012 election (assuming Hugo allows such a thing). He has the handsome but clueless good looks of a 1970s sit-com star, such as John Ritter. But who cares about what he looks like because here's a picture of his wife, the potential First Lady of Venezuela, a famous kite-surfer named Lilian Tintori.

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

The Middle East Debate in a Nutshell

I'm reading Sam Lipsyte's new comic novel, The Ask, which is like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if Hunter S. Thompson were on the wagon and had a really emasculating job working in the "development" office of a mediocre New York university asking rich people for money for even more grandiose facilities for the privileged but talentless students of the Fine Arts department:

I crawled to the computer and hoisted myself into the chair. It was time to catch up  on the state of the world. I'd start with the Middle East. I found the report of a recent debate between two professors at the Ivy League college uptown. One of the experts said the Palestinians were irrational and needed a real leader, like maybe a smart Jewish guy. The other professor said that the central paradox to all of this was that Jews both were Nazis and didn't really exist. But how could they be both? He was still working on it.

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

War! What Is It Good For?

One of the common assumptions behind praise of America's rapidly growing population, as in Joel Kotkin's America's Next 100 Million, is that it's a good thing because it will make America stronger foreign policy-wise. But nobody goes on to explain the precise mechanism by which the population increasing by 42% from 2010 to 2050 will benefit current Americans and their posterity.

Fortunately, I've finally figured it out: more cannon fodder! See, all we have to do is to use our 42% bigger population to invade, conquer, and depopulate other countries equal to 42% of the land that we have now (a mere 1.6 million additional square miles), and then we'll have just as much land per person in 2050 as in 2010!

The logic is foolproof.

Oh, and make sure the conquests are between 25 and 50 degrees in latitude. No Nunavuts or Guatemalas, please. We could start with Tuscany -- that's a nice place. Who wouldn't want to own Tuscany? Although I see now that Tuscany is only 1/200th of the amount of land needed to keep up with population growth in the U.S. over the next 40 years. Hmmhmmh ...

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

Harvard Law student crimethinks

A woman who is a third year Harvard Law School student and in line for federal clerkships, is in trouble for sending out the following email (From "Harvard Law School 3L's Racist Email Goes National" on Above the Law:

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

Of course, the Black Law Students Associations are attempting to pull a Larry Summers on her and deny her a clerkship.

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

Genetic Relativism

Carl Zimmer writes in the NYT in "The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places:"

Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumors by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working. Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.  

I pointed out that in terms of genetic similarity, humanity and yeast weren't really all that different in a National Review article in 1999, "Chimps and Chumps," one of the earlier expressions of my constant theme of "genetic relativism:"

Ms. [Natalie] Angier hopes future studies prove we are more closely related to bonobos than to common chimps. Even Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, the dour authors of "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence" ask, "Those loving bonobos -- did we pick the wrong primate to evolve from?" Dr. De Waal asserts that the news about the bonobo lifestyle "commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile … making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago." ...

Fifth, the oft-cited 98% figure for shared DNA is less impressive than it looks. Most DNA is unused, so natural selection never changes it. Another big chunk of your personal DNA controls the basics of earthly carbon-based life, and is extremely common across multitudinous organisms. Thus, one study found we share 70% of our DNA with yeast! Perhaps if you don't have a great ape around, you can scrape by letting a packet of Fleischmann's Quick-Rise pinch-hit as your role model. De Waal's statement that a chimp is as genetically similar to a human as a fox is to a dog may be true, but it should remind us of the striking number of gene-driven differences seen merely among dog breeds. A collie is identical to a pit bull in all but a tiny fraction of its genes, yet the two breeds differ radically in size, shape, behavior, mentality, and personality. Small genetic differences can have big consequences.

On the other hand, a collie and a pit bull are more similar to each other than they are to, say, an octopus. And a collie and an octopus would be more genetically similar to each other than to, say, copper-based lifeforms on Epsilon Eridani IV.

The question: "Is X similar to or different from Y?" is extremely relativistic.

And that's true for races, siblings, even identical twins, who might differ in, say, a half-dozen genes due to copying errors, along with other types of non-genetic differences. 

When you study examples of twins, you notice that there are often consistent differences between them. For example, a glance at the basketball statistics of the 1970s All-Stars Dick and Tom Van Arsdale shows that Dick was consistently a little bit better than Tom over their 12 year NBA careers. For example, to take the most context-independent statistic, Dick made .790 of his freethrows, while Tom made .762. Dick shot .464 on two pointers, while Tom shot .433. Dick averaged 34.5 minutes per game over his career while Tom averaged 30.9 minutes. (In their high school class, Dick was the valedictorian, while Tom had the third highest GPA.)

The differences between Dick and Tom were relevant to NBA general managers. For instance, Dick was drafted 10th in the 1965 NBA draft, while Tom was drafted 11th, which, looking back on their long careers, was the correct order.

On the other hand, in a lot of ways, Dick and Tom Van Arsdale were awfully similar.

I apply the same relativistic framework for thinking about more contentious issues, such as race. My basic approach is to make sure I'm right by pointing out the tautological nature of all questions about similarities and differences: "It depends upon what you want to know." When you keep that in mind at all times, it's not terribly hard to think accurately and insightfully. If you can figure out what the right question is, it's much easier to get the right answer.

Indeed, that's why I'm right about racial questions so much more frequently than other pundits. It's easy to figure things out if you have an intellectually sophisticated basis for your thinking. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is based on an embarrassingly crude mindset.

 

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

Twins in movies and reality

From my new Taki's Magazine column:

Due to Polish president Lech Kaczyński’s death in the tragic April 10 plane crash, his identical twin brother Jarosław, Poland’s brooding former prime minister, announced on April 26 that he is running to replace his more affable twin.

This kind of heartwarming/unsettling vibe is common with stories about twins. In a civilization that celebrates individualism, identical twins have played a slightly subversive role ever since Castor and Pollux.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spotlight first shone on the Kaczyński twins when they starred in a 1962 hit kids’ movie. Being an identical twin provides an easy entry into acting in front of the camera. Both child labor laws limiting the number of hours allowed on the set and the tantrum-proneness of small children encourage producers to hire spares.

And young audiences, quite reasonably, are fascinated by identical twins. (The real question is why adults aren’t.) Identical twins make up no more than 1/250th of the population. (In contrast, due to late marriages and fertility treatments, fraternal twins are up to around 1/33rd.) Yet, many grown-ups can remember vividly a pair with whom they attended school.

Despite their advantage at getting a foot in the film industry door, identical twin child actors, such as the Kaczyńskis, seldom stay stars as adults.

One reason is that real-life twins almost never get to play twins in movies. In plays and movies, twins often bear a heavy load of symbolism and plot mechanics.

Read the rest there and comment upon it below.

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

Twin study of teaching quality

In reviewing Diane Ravitch's book a few weeks ago, I pointed out that it took decades for baseball statistics to mature, and that statistics measuring teaching effectiveness would likely take awhile, too. Here's the abstract of a clever study from Science:

Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading
J. Taylor,1,* A. D. Roehrig,2 B. Soden Hensler,1 C. M. Connor,1,3 C. Schatschneider1,3

Children’s reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement. Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins’ oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential.

And here's the AP article: 

Study: Better teachers help children read faster

By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP
Associated Press Writer

SEATTLE (AP) -- Genetics play the biggest role in determining how fast a child learns to read, but a good teacher can make a measurable difference as well, according to a study released Thursday.

Florida State University used twins assigned to different classrooms to develop the conclusions.

Researchers studied more than 550 first- and second-grade classrooms with at least one identical twin and more than 1,000 classes with at least one fraternal twin.

Among the identical twins, 42 pairs out of 280 pairs showed significant differences in reading improvement during the year studied, said lead researcher Jeanette Taylor, an associate professor of psychology at Florida State.

In each case, the teachers also had significantly different quality scores. Twins with similarly good teachers got similar scores.

"If you have identical twins, they should do very similarly in school," Taylor said.

Teachers whose students showed the greatest average one-year improvement in the number of words they could read out loud in one minute were considered the best teachers for the purpose of the study. ...

The study shows teacher quality is one reason for the differences between the achievements of twins, but it cannot explain the whole difference, Taylor said. Since these pairs were all in two different classrooms, other possible factors include how well behaved classmates are.

The researchers believe their results showed the best teachers made the biggest difference in learning achievement. Genetic differences between students seemed to disappear in classrooms taught by less effective teachers, because children don't reach their potential, the researchers found. ...

"Good classrooms are all alike; they maximize kids' potential. Poor classrooms are not only poor in one way; they are poor in multiple ways," Shanahan said.

  

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

Joel Kotkin's "The Next Hundred Million"

Here's the beginning of my new 1800 word book review in The American Conservative:

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050
Joel Kotkin, Penguin Press,320 pages 

News From the Future
By Steve Sailer

JOEL KOTKIN’S new book on population growth in America, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, is that rare work of futurism whose title downplays the changes in store for us. The current Census Bureau projection is not that the U.S. will grow by merely 100 million residents from 2010 to 2050, but by 129 million, from 310 million today to 439 million in 40 years.

Although he’s reluctant to be precise about what’s looming, Kotkin, a veteran commentator on social geography and a fellow at Chapman University in Orange County, assures us that the population bubble is, on the whole, very good news. “[B]ecause of America’s unique demographic trajectory among advanced countries, it should emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history,” he writes. “No other advanced, populous country will enjoy such ethnic diversity.”

Perhaps. Yet the U.S. already was the most successful nation in human history. In 1969, for example, a mere 203 million Americans, even without the enjoyments of much diversity, got the human race to the moon. Presumably, the 439 million highly diverse residents of the U.S. in 2050 will have reached, at minimum, Alpha Centauri.

But I’m finding it hard to share Kotkin’s enthusiasm for what he calls America’s “vibrant demography” because I’m tapping this book review out at the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Van Nuys, California. My son is waiting in a 500-foot-long line to get to the first window so he can wait to get to another window, which will probably shut down for the evening before he finishes. California’s government is broke, so the DMV is closed several Fridays per month and is ostentatiously understaffed the rest of the time. 

Van Nuys is in the center of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, where I grew up and where Kotkin has lived for decades. Long ago, the Valley was celebrated for making the California dream affordable to the average American, but we’ve since been test-driving America’s future. When watching all the vibrant demography at the Van Nuys DMV waiting to take their driving tests, the next 40 years appear less edifying than they do in Kotkin’s prose....

Although Kotkin is enthusiastic about the quantity of these upcoming residents, he’s reticent about their average quality.

Read the rest in the magazine, on paper or here.

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

"The Pinch"

From a review in the UK Guardian by Richard Reeves (the British one, not the American one) of the Tory MP David Willetts' new book The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - And Why They Should Give it Back.

Willetts might have done better to take as his main theme the links between family, education and social mobility, since on these issues he is on firmer ground. In fact, his title could just as easily have been The Big Grab: How the Rich Are Using Money and Marriage to Buy the Future for Their Kids. His ­opening ­chapter is a tour de force, a brief, brilliant history of England's social architecture. He shows that far from being a modern invention, the nuclear family is a long-standing feature of Anglophone societies. (We are, he says, "the first nuclear power".) The idea that we used to live in big, warm, noisy My Big Fat Greek Wedding-type families is a myth. "Think of England as being like this for at least 750 years," he writes. "We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. We go out to work for a wage."

That quote is worth remembering.

The English have a private, market-based idea of property, in contrast to the familial property forms of our continental neighbours. Over a 44-year period in Leighton Buzzard, more than 900 houses changed hands. Two-thirds were sold to someone outside the family, rather than being passed down. The years in question? 1464 to 1508.

 By contrast, the large familial networks of continental Europe act as the institutional anchor for property ownership and transmission, as well as for the formation of businesses and the provision of welfare. Willetts speculates that the property-managing function of French families may explain why romantic love there is more often associated with extramarital relationships. The orientation towards family-owned firms in Germany helps to explain the strength of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized, locally rooted layers of corporations.

Willetts does not at any point fall victim to the awful if-only-we-were-more-like-the-continentals lament. He does not want to alter our social DNA. But our particular social economy has two important consequences. First, the smallness of our families puts a greater emphasis on non-familial civic institutions. Small families need civil society more. This is why medieval guilds, trade unions and churches have played such an important role in our history.

Second, the welfare role of government is greater in a society marked by a highly privatised notion of property and small families. Breadwinning men are less likely to have family resources to fall back on, so need out-of-work benefits. This system worked reasonably well until the rise in divorce rates in 1970s and 1980s. Then, millions of women, many with dependent children, suddenly became reliant on the state. As Willetts puts it: "A welfare system that was ­originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men." And everybody – but ­especially women – ends up poorer. This is why Willetts, certainly no reactionary, is so pro-marriage.

I would add that this "cultural DNA" -- nuclear families, home ownership, and supra-family employers -- makes Anglo-American societies particularly vulnerable to mass immigration.

Strong parental relationships also influence children's well-being, which in turn affects the chances of upward social mobility, another of Willetts's preoccupations. Drawing on the very latest and best research, Willetts shows how the middle classes are tightening their grip on the opportunities available for the next generation. The professions are all but sealed off from the poor: "The competition for jobs is like English tennis, a competitive game but largely one the middle classes play against each other."

In general, this is a remarkably non-political book; David Cameron is mentioned just once. But ­Willetts does argue strongly for a vouchers scheme in ­education, weighted in favour of the poor, in order to break the middle-class stranglehold on the state education ­system. And the explanation for the flat-lining of social mobility brings Willetts back to social structures and, in particular, the trade-off between gender equality and class equality. The principal beneficiaries of the expansion of higher education have been the daughters of the middle class. Six per cent of girls born into low-income families in both 1958 and 1970 went to university; for girls born into richer households, the rate rose from 21 per cent to 36 per cent.

"Educational upgrading" – the increase in the numbers of young ­people getting qualifications – accounts for 40 per cent of the fall in mobility for women between 1958 and 1970. This is, as Willetts says, a shocking statistic. The expansion of higher education, far from improving social mobility, has actually made it worse.

Women graduates marry male graduates and this trend towards "assortative mating" has increased in recent years, which means that on a household level, inequality is bound to rise. The narrowing of the gender gap seems to have widened the class gap. As Willetts puts it: "Feminism has trumped egalitarianism." And not just for one generation, either: just 5% of degree-­educated mothers split up from their partner before their child's third birthday, compared with 42% of mums with no qualifications.

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

The War over History

Here are excerpts from my new VDARE.com column. It's a long one.

The Texas Board of Education has voted to include in the state’s history textbooks facts more favorable to conservatives. Needless to say, this has provoked condemnations from the national Main Stream Media. That’s because any challenge to the Left’s post-1960s dominion over the past is going to arouse real passion.

OK, I know it’s not clear how many students actually read their history textbooks. But the Texans are showing more enterprise than is common among conservatives. These have fecklessly permitted their ideological enemies to define what gets called history.

Theoretically, history is about learning how the world works so you don't repeat old mistakes. What most people want to know, however, is: Who does society laud? Who is respectable and who is not? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? ...

Why have the Sixties People proven so enduring in molding young people’s minds? My theory: The Sixties mindset—aggrieved, resentful, and unrealistic—is perfectly attuned to appeal permanently to the worst instincts of adolescents.

And yet, young people do have a finer side—their hunger for heroes—that history books once tried to fulfill rather than exploit. For example, I was galvanized in 1975 when I read Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s tribute in his Oxford History of the American People to Orville and Wilbur Wright:

"Few things in our history are more admirable than the skill, the pluck, the quiet self-confidence, the alertness to reject fixed ideas and to work out new ones, and the absence of pose and publicity, with which these Wright brothers made the dream of ages—man’s conquest of the air—come true."

But the Wright brothers aren’t the kind of heroes we like anymore. In our Age of Oprah, rather than Heroes of Accomplishment, we are addicted to Heroes of Suffering. ...

This Heroes of Suffering fetish is exacerbated in modern history textbooks by the “diversity” imperative.

Take, for example, one US history textbook widely used in high school Advanced Placement courses and in college courses: Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic (McGraw-Hill, Fourth Edition). ... 

The need to include a huge amount of material celebrating each politically organized diversity group has bloated the textbook to 1277 oversized pages. It costs $108.78 on Amazon, and weighs in at a vertebrae-compressing 5.4 pounds. ...

Celebrating diversity just takes a lot of space, so there isn’t room in all 1277 pages to mention…the Wright brothers. ... 

This kind of feminized, multiculturalized social history is boring to young people—especially to boys.

... Of course, leaving out so many annoying white male Heroes of Accomplishment from the textbook doesn’t mean that the historians have managed to dig up comparable diverse Heroes of Accomplishment.

Instead, the space mostly gets filled with Heroes of Suffering.

And who made them suffer?

You get one guess.

At one point, I went looking in this textbook’s index for the Civil War hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, colonel of the XXth Maine Volunteers. By repelling repeated assaults on the crucial Little Round Top hill on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Chamberlain may have saved the Union. (He’s played by Jeff Daniels in Ron Maxwell’s movies Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.)

I suspect teenage boys might find him, you know, interesting. Maybe?

Well, needless to say, "Chamberlain, Joshua" isn’t in the Nation of Nations’ index. When looking for him, I did find, however:

Chanax, Juan, 1096—1098, 1103, 1124, 1125

Who, exactly, is Chanax and why does he appear on six pages when Chamberlain can’t be squeezed in anywhere?

It turns out Chanax is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who works in a supermarket in Houston. This hero’s accomplishment is that he brought in 1,000 other illegal aliens from his home village.

The thinking, apparently: featuring an illegal alien so disproportionately will boost the self-esteem of the illegal alien students reading the book—which will then raise their test scores!

But how many are going to read all the way to p. 1096? And how many won’t find it patronizing and depressing that the biggest hero these industrious historians could dig up for their edification and emulation was Chanax?

But the truth is that the Left pays no real attention to illegal immigrants.  Their value is primarily in their colossal numbers—e.g., the 1000 neighbors recruited by Chanax—making them the notional Reserve Army of the Left, justifying whatever changes in America life more elite members of the Left want.

Want a sinecure as a diversity consultant for a textbook company? Nominate yourself as the ethnic representative of Juan Chanax and friends.

They won’t notice.

Maybe you just don’t much like American history: all those Wrights and Chamberlains accomplishing great things get on your nerves. Then rewrite it, in the name of Juan Chanax and company!

It’s not like Juan and his pals down at the supermarket are paying close attention or have a strong, informed opinion on what should go into American history textbooks. You can get away with anything by claiming to be on their side, the side of goodness and the future—the winning side.

 Read the whole thing here.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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