Disparate Impact: How it works

How could disparate impact legislation lead to de facto quotas? Let's check out an NYT article on the gigantic gender discrimination lawsuit against Walmart. Note how frequent (and how uncontroversial) are the article's references to Walmart not being quite aggressive enough in imposing quotas on itself to avoid a huge payout:

More than six years before the biggest sex discrimination lawsuit in history was filed against Wal-Mart Stores, the company hired a prominent law firm to examine its vulnerability to just such a suit.

The law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, found widespread gender disparities in pay and promotion at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores and urged the company to take basic steps — like posting every job opening and creating specific goals to promote women and minorities — to avoid liability....

Without significant changes, the lawyers said in their confidential analysis, Wal-Mart “would find it difficult to fashion a persuasive explanation for disproportionate employment patterns.”

In 2001, seven women filed a class-action suit on behalf of all women working at the company. They complained of a general pattern of discrimination in pay and promotions.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has denied any systematic discrimination and asserts that any claims should be tried individually, not as a class action that would sweep in more than a million current and former employees.

Akin Gump estimated that for 1993 alone, Wal-Mart’s potential legal exposure in a class-action sex discrimination suit was $185 million to $740 million. Mr. Seligman said the women suing Wal-Mart were seeking damages for every year since 1997, meaning the company could be on the hook for billions of dollars.

The report examined employment patterns at all Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores. It found that men employed by Wal-Mart as department managers, an hourly position, earned 5.8 percent more than women in those positions in 1993 ($236.80 versus $223.70). Men in salaried jobs earned $644.20 a week compared with $540.50 for women.

Akin Gump also found large disparities in job assignments. Fifty-five percent of women were initially hired as cashiers compared with 12 percent of men. Twenty-nine percent of men were initially hired in receiving jobs like unloading, which generally pay at least 20 percent more than cashier jobs, compared with 7 percent of women.

I'm utterly baffled coming up with any reason other than sheer malignant irrational prejudice why Walmart would hire more men than women to unload trucks. What possible reason could there be? Clearly, Walmart is a totally irrational organization that doesn't know anything about how to, say, unload trucks. No doubt, Walmart will become much more efficient after this lawsuit. Walmart should thank the plaintiff's attorneys for helping them get better at unloading trucks.

The law firm found smaller, but still significant, disparities in the company’s employment of black employees.

The report warned that the overall disparities it found were “statistically significant and sufficient to warrant a finding of discrimination unless the company can demonstrate at trial that the statistical disparities are caused by legitimate, nondiscriminatory factors.”

... Mr. Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, also said that in the last five years, Wal-Mart has told its 50,000 managers to promote more women and minorities, with 15 percent of managers’ bonuses tied to achieving diversity goals. Women now hold 45.8 percent of assistant store manager positions — a pipeline to higher-level jobs — up from 39.7 percent five years ago.

Employment experts say there can be innocent reasons for the types of disparities found by Akin Gump. For example, women might apply disproportionately to be cashiers and men disproportionately to work in receiving. But there could be improper discriminatory reasons for the differences, like managers believing that cashier jobs are for women.

Akin Gump recommended that Wal-Mart document applicants’ job preferences, post notice of all openings and training opportunities, establish promotion goals and timetables for women and minorities, and monitor progress. ...

Company documents and depositions in the lawsuit suggest that Wal-Mart’s initial adoption of the report’s recommendations was fitful and incomplete.

Wal-Mart began posting more, but not all, job openings and adopted numerical goals [in business, the term "goals" is interchangeable with the term "quotas"] for promoting women. But in a February 2000 memorandum to Wal-Mart board members, Coleman H. Peterson, executive vice president for human resources at the time, bemoaned the lack of progress toward diversity goals.

“Female management representation at Wal-Mart super centers, Sam’s and logistics and, therefore, total company are worse than prior year,” he wrote in the memorandum, which was turned over to the plaintiffs.

... Mr. Seligman, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the Akin Gump report, which he has not seen, would seem to confirm that “top managers were fully aware that women were not getting promoted in proper numbers.”

Let's review the number of references in this one article to de facto quotas:

- creating specific goals to promote women and minorities
- 15 percent of managers’ bonuses tied to achieving diversity goals
- establish promotion goals and timetables for women and minorities, and monitor progress
- adopted numerical goals for promoting women.
- proper numbers

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

The American Advantage in Soccer

Soccer is fun to play, but dull to watch on TV. Americans might have the highest ratio of hours spent playing soccer to hours spent watching soccer.

Is that so bad?

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

The Minnesota Challenge

Audacious Epigone has a new ranking of U.S. states, this time of the percentage of young people "fit-to-serve" in the enlisted ranks of the military. It's based on a recent report Ready, Willing, and Unable to Serve: 75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military; Early Education across America is Needed to Ensure National Security by a bunch of retired generals and admirals.

The report lists the percentage of each state's young people are undesirable enlistees because they:
- are high school drop-outs
- have a criminal record
- have a health problem (typically, obesity).

Unfortunately, there's no information available on how much these problems overlap in individuals. Audacious merely subtracts from 100% the sum of the three problems to create his state rankings, which, presumably, overstates the severity of the problem somewhat. But, it's still pretty helpful as a ranking tool. Here are the Top Ten states with the most fit-to-serve youths:

State	Eligible %
1. Vermont	59.8
2. Minnesota	59.2
3. Wisconsin	57.4
4. Iowa	57.1
5. North Dakota	55.4
6. Connecticut	53.0
7. Montana	52.7
8. Utah	52.4
9. New Hampshire	51.9
10. South Dakota	51.5

So, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Law of Proximity to the Canadian Border is verified once again. And here are the Bottom Ten:

42. Alaska	32.2
43. Florida	28.8
44. Alabama	27.9
45. New Mexico	23.1
46. South Carolina	22.4
47. Louisiana	21.2
48. Georgia	19.3
49. Mississippi	17.4
50. Nevada	15.9
51. District of Columbia	15.2

Among the demographically diverse Big Three States of the Future -- California, Texas, and Florida -- California does best at 37.2%, Texas is at 35.5% and Florida at 28.8%. Super fast growing Nevada is next to last at 15.9%, while population-stagnant Vermont is first at 59.8%.

Here's my advice to generals based on the fit-to-serve trends implicit in these state rankings. Don't plan on getting us into any more land wars in Asia.

(Here's the list of per capita enlistment rates in 2003. Montana was first at 67% above the national average, Alaska second, Wyoming third, and Maine fourth. DC and Puerto Rico were last, Utah next (Mormon missionary commitments?), followed by Rhode Island and Massachusetts.)

By the way, Minnesota comes in -- Big surprise! -- #2 on this measure of fit-to-serve at 59.2%.  It seems to me that Minnesota almost always does well on state rankings of just about anything good.

In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis says, "There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones." Sociologically, we see positive correlations between most positive things: income, IQ, trust, cooperation, law-abidingness, kindness, future time orientation, health, beauty, and so forth and so on.

So, here's The Minnesota Challenge: find a state ranking of a broad-based social good where Minnesota's general population falls in the lower half of all states.

It has to be broad-based. It can't be something super-elite, like Nobel Laureates resident per capita or billionaires resident per capita. And it can't be weather-related, like Lack of Frostbite.
 

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

"How a Soccer Star Is Made"

Here's a good article in the NYT Magazine by Bruce Sokolove about an Amsterdam soccer club that makes huge money selecting and training local little boys to be professional soccer players.

Sokolove reflects on not only why America hasn't won the World Cup but why there are no really top tier world class American soccer players:

There are two ways to become a world-class soccer player. One is to spend hours and hours in pickup games — in parks, streets, alleyways — on imperfect surfaces that, if mastered, can give a competitor an advantage when he finally graduates to groomed fields. This is the Brazilian way and also the model in much of the rest of South America, Central America and the soccer hotbeds of Africa. It is like baseball in the Dominican Republic. Children play all the time and on their own. 

It helps to grow up dribbling a soccer ball at all times -- in other words, it helps if you don't really go to school too much.

The other way is the Ajax method. Scientific training. Attention to detail. Time spent touching the ball rather than playing a mindless number of organized games. 

In the Dutch system, you go to school, but definitely not to college. The Europeans think it's unhelpful that American kids with soccer potential spend from age 7 to 17 playing a lot of games instead of learning their trade in practice.

A high school friend of mine whose younger brother went on to win the Cy Young Award said something similar about minor league baseball. He thought his brother's minor league baseball career was pretty useless, with enormous amounts of time spent on buses and playing 100+ games per year and very little time getting coached by anybody who knew anything more than his brother did about pitching, and with little access during the season to competent sports doctors out in the sticks. During one minor league season when he was chronically injured, his manager kept telling him to tough it out and pitch through the pain. Finally, he walked off the team, flew back to LA, had himself operated on by Sandy Koufax's old surgeon, and sat out the rest of the season recuperating.

And they think it's nuts that American 18-22 year olds are sitting in the classrooms on college soccer scholarships when they should be training full time.

The more thoughtful people involved in developing U.S. soccer talent know that we conform to neither model. We are a much larger nation, obviously, than the Netherlands. Our youth sports leagues, for the most part, are community-based and run by volunteers rather than professionals. They have grown organically, sending out tendrils that run deep and are difficult to uproot. Change at the elite levels is more possible than at the stubborn grass roots. 

But, is it all that important that the U.S. compete for the World Cup or nurture a Wayne Rooney? This Dutch system doesn't seem all that much fun for all but the handful of superstars.

The current American system largely reflects the values of white, middle class American parents. It's not designed to win World Cups, it's designed to get their kids some exercise and let them experience some level of success in a game that African-Americans aren't interested in.

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

"Sex and the City"

I haven't quite gotten around to seeing the savagely-reviewed Sex and the City II, but I must mention that I was already engaging in protracted abuse of Sarah Jessica Parker's looks back in 2008, back when most critics were praising the first movie. Since I never got around to posting my full-length review in The American Conservative of the first movie, here it is for completists:

Sex and the City (2008)

On the last day of May, my younger son was flipping through the movie section of the newspaper when he looked up with sad eyes: "All month, we had good movies -- "Iron Man," "Speed Racer," "Prince Caspian," "Indiana Jones" -- but then … this," he intoned, unable to bring himself to utter the words "Sex and the City." "What happened?"

Indeed, across America, countless guys felt that the Manly Month of May, when the biggest explosion-laden blockbusters are unveiled at the multiplex, was being tainted by the long lines of ladies attending the film version of the 1998-2004 HBO sitcom. "Sex and the City" updates us on a coven of four skanky spinsters who, long ago, moved to Manhattan to find "labels and love" (there apparently being no stores or men in Minnesota or wherever).

Inside the theatre, the palpable affection toward the characters was reminiscent of a 1980s "Star Trek" movie, whose fans couldn't wait to hear Scotty exclaim one more time, "She cannae take any more!" Granted, the movie version of "Sex and the City" isn't as witty as "Star Trek IV." It's also grindingly long at 148 minutes -- the DVD ought to include a "Couples' Cut" with an hour edited out and a few dozen more jokes tossed in. Still, it's certainly no worse than the "Matrix" sequels and "Star Wars" prequels that males turned out to see by the tens of millions.

The stars aren't getting any younger, so sit in the back row. Hollywood has generations of experience lighting actresses of a certain age, though, and the three supporting women look passable, even Cynthia Nixon (who plays the prickly redheaded Miranda), whom I pointed out to my wife in 1998 was an obvious lesbian. (It took Nixon until 2003 to figure it out for herself.)
 

In contrast, "Sex and the City's" leading lady, purported fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker, who portrays columnist Carrie Bradshaw, looks horrifying, like a bulimic bodybuilder. Evidently fearing matronly upper arms, the 43-year-old with zero percent body fat appears to have spent the last four years bench pressing and not eating, giving her the grotesquely defined arm musculature of Rambo after the Bataan Death March. Her horse chin and witch nose have become even more prominent, making me wonder whether, like Sylvester Stallone, who was recently arrested smuggling Human Growth Hormone into Australia, she's on some muscle-building medicine with head-enlarging side effects.
 

In the climactic scene in which bowlegged Carrie reunites with her true love, the financier Mr. Big (played by an embalmed-looking Chris Noth from Law & Order), Parker's cheesy fur coat and stick insect legs jutting out of her tiny skirt make her resemble a streetwalking crack addict. The sequence is a masterpiece of the memento mori genre, a terrifying depiction of the skull beneath the skin. Unfortunately, it's supposed to be a romantic comedy.
 

As hideous as Parker looks, the "Sex and the City" movie is actually less repugnant than the TV series. Each of the four women is monogamous throughout the year covered in the film. That's typical for rom-com movies these days, which are about living happily ever after. In contrast, the TV show just went on and on for six years, with the bodycounts (and, presumably, STDs) piling up.
 

The 1998 TV series was to Helen Fielding's 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary as Dick Wolf's 1990 TV show Law & Order was to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolf made a fortune by taking Wolfe's sardonic story of New York cops and prosecutors hunting for "the Great White Defendant" and stripping out all the satire. Similarly, the gay male writers behind Sex and the City started with Fielding's spoof of "urban families" of stylish single women who undermine each other's chances of landing a husband by constantly gathering over drinks to nitpick their boyfriends, and turned these mutually-destructive circles into a fantasy about friendship.
 

It was never actually about female solidarity, but about female competition for alpha males like Mr. Big. Nevertheless, women hate to be seen as competitive, so "Sex and the City" displayed the nice side of cliquishness, minus the nasty side: these social X-rays wouldn't be seen dead in the company of 99 percent of their fans.

The trick was to make women viewers feel less awful about the big mistakes they've made in their lives by making their bad decisions feel fashionable. Misery loves company.

Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language.

And here's Manohla Dargis mad about how sexist is the response to SatC II.

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

IQ, ADD, Depression

It's amusing that IQ testing is always being accused of "reification" and general pseudoscienceness when intelligence is one of the least fuzzy, most consistently measurable of all concepts in psychology. Compare IQ to, for example, more popular categories like Attention Deficit Disorder or depression.

ADD (or ADHD -- note the vagueness of terminology) is only now beginning to be measured objectively:

Last fall the National Institutes of Health awarded Dr. Teicher a $1 million grant from the federal stimulus package to delve further into the quest for a definitive test or biomarker for the disorder. He plans to focus his research on three detective strategies: his Quotient system, magnetic resonance imaging to compare blood flows in different brain regions, and the ActiGraph, an activity monitor widely used by medical researchers.

James M. Swanson, a developmental psychologist and attention researcher at the University of California, Irvine, praised Dr. Teicher’s research, echoing his concerns about the need for a more objective test to detect the disorder. But he questioned whether the Quotient system produces more reliable diagnoses than a doctor’s dogged questioning of a child’s parents and teachers, and also whether it is an appropriate way to figure out the right dose of medication.

“It’s essentially a dull, boring task,” he said of the Quotient system, “so do you want to medicate your child to pay attention to dull, boring tasks?”

I bet Elena Kagan always paid attention to her dull, boring tasks.

This is interesting:

The key to his system, he said, is what he suspects will eventually be confirmed as a valid biological marker for A.D.H.D.: an unstable control of head movements and posture, particularly while paying attention to a boring task. 

I wouldn't have guessed that.

In another NYT article, Benedict Carey discusses how the medical profession has tried to stamp out the term "nervous breakdown" in favor of "depression," in part because they can make more money off depression.

Decades ago modern medicine all but stamped out the nervous breakdown, hitting it with a combination of new diagnoses, new psychiatric drugs and a strong dose of professional scorn. The phrase was overused and near meaningless, a self-serving term from an era unwilling to talk about mental distress openly.

But like a stubborn virus, the phrase has mutated.

In recent years, psychiatrists in Europe have been diagnosing what they call “burnout syndrome,” the signs of which include “vital exhaustion.” A paper published last year defined three types: “frenetic,” “underchallenged,” and “worn out” (“exasperated” and “bitter” did not make the cut).

This is the latest umbrella term for the kind of emotional collapses that have plagued humanity for ages, stemming at times from severe mental difficulties and more often from mild ones. There have been plenty of others. In the early decades of the 20th century, many people simply referred to a crackup, including “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 collection of essays describing his own. And before that there was neurasthenia, a widely diagnosed and undefined nerve affliction causing just about any symptom people cared to add.

Yet medical historians say that, for versatility and descriptive power, it may be hard to improve upon the “nervous breakdown.” Coined around 1900, the phrase peaked in usage during the middle of the 20th century and echoes still....
Never a proper psychiatric diagnosis, the phrase always struck most doctors as inexact, pseudoscientific and often misleading. But those were precisely the qualities that gave it such a lasting place in the popular culture, some scholars say. “It had just enough medical sanction to be useful, but did not depend on medical sanction to be used,” said Peter N. Stearns, a historian at George Mason University near Washington, D.C. ...

The vagueness of the phrase made it impossible to survey the prevalence of any specific mental problem: It could mean anything from depression to mania or drunkenness; it might be the cause of a bitter divorce or the result of a split. And glossing over those details left people who suffered from what are now well-known afflictions, like postpartum depression, entirely in the dark, wondering if they were alone in their misery.

But that same imprecision allowed the speaker, not medical professionals, to control its meaning. People might be on the verge of, or close to, a nervous breakdown; and it was common enough to have had “something like” a nervous breakdown, or a mild one. The phrase allowed a person to disclose as much, or as little, detail about a “crackup” as he or she saw fit. Vagueness preserves privacy....

“People accepted the notion of nervous breakdown often because it was construed as a category that could handled without professional help,” concluded a 2000 analysis by Dr. Stearns, Megan Barke and Rebecca Fribush. The popularity of the phrase, they wrote, revealed “a longstanding need to keep some distance from purely professional diagnoses and treatments.”

Many did just that, and returned to work and family. Others did not. They needed a more specific diagnosis, and targeted treatment. By the 1970s, more psychiatric drugs were available, and doctors directly attacked the idea that people could effectively manage breakdowns on their own.

Psychiatrists proceeded to slice problems like depression and anxiety into dozens of categories, and public perceptions shifted, too.

But that doesn't mean that the term "depression" is all that much more scientific. The basic term fails, for example, to distinguish between two important types of depression: the kind with obvious causes and the terrible kind without. 

For example, I've been depressed several times in my life, but it was always for really obvious reasons: I had cancer and might die, the company I was working for was obviously going to go under and I would lose my job, and so forth. Those things were depressing, but there wasn't a whole lot the field of psychiatry could do about it. Solve the underlying problems and the depression would go away. 

In contrast, other people have been hit by depression out of the blue with no obvious cause, and that is a highly appropriate field for mental health.

Compared to ADD/ADHD and nervous breakdown / depression, IQ testing is like dropping a heavy ball and a light ball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and seeing which hits the ground first.

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

Two Hobbits: Which one is the Kiwi?

Sad news: with MGM unable to come up with reliable enough financing to start production, Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) has dropped out of directing Tolkien's Hobbit under Peter Jackson's (Lord of the Rings) production. I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that both del Toro and Jackson are quite Hobbitty-looking themselves.

Here's a picture of the pair in happier times. Which one is the Kiwi and which one the Mexican?

 

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

The Great Mexican-American Hope

Here's an NYT article about movie director Chris Weitz that vaguely refers to one of the oddities of the modern movie industry: although Los Angeles is about half-Hispanic, and although Latinos are the most loyal fans of Hollywood blockbusters, Mexican-Americans are extraordinarily under-represented in Hollywood. They are so missing in action in the modern film business that this article plays up the authentic Mexican-American roots of the Trinity College of Cambridge University-educated son of John Weitz: 

Another Los Angeles in ‘Gardener’
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Quiet on the set was no small order last week, as Chris Weitz, probably best known as the director of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” worked a grittier side of the street on this city’s largely Hispanic East Side.

So it goes with “The Gardener,” a small film that has the tall, very dark-eyed Mr. Weitz — who talked of leaving the movie business after an unhappy experience with New Line Cinema’s high-budget flop “The Golden Compass” — looking downright chipper these days. ...

More remarkably, Mr. Weitz has turned his tiny movie, about a gardener and his son on a hunt for their stolen truck, into an exploration of Los Angeles places, both cultural and geographic, that have largely been ignored, even when production was at full throttle here. ...

Mr. Weitz went so far as to adjust the language in the script — the story was written by Roger L. Simon, with revisions by Eric Eason — to match the slang of not just the city, but of individual streets.

“The Gardener” is being made for a bit less than the cost of “American Pie.” In 1998 Mr. Weitz and his brother, Paul, shot that film — a teen comedy that went on to make $102 million at the domestic box office for Universal Pictures — on a budget reported to be about $11 million.

But “The Gardener” carries more risk in that its cast is virtually all Hispanic, with Demián Bichir, who played Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” in the starring role. ...

Asked why he had chosen to make “The Gardener” at a time when the success of “New Moon” gave him choices, Mr. Weitz said it “was a chance to reconnect” with some family heritage. His grandmother, Lupita Tovar, from Oaxaca, Mexico, was a star who sometimes made films shot simultaneously in English and Spanish. She married Mr. Weitz’s grandfather, the agent Paul Kohner.

“This was a chance to get in touch with the language,” said Mr. Weitz, who figured that 30 percent of the dialogue in “The Gardener” would need English subtitles.

He added, “I’m one of the few people in my family who doesn’t speak Spanish.”

The joke that's not mentioned in the article is the Weitz Brothers' famous father, John Weitz. He was a Nabokovian Continental exile -- fashion designer, race car driver, spy, yachtsman, novelist, and historian -- who made Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote seem like that bandito who don't need no steeenking badges in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. 

John Weitz's father won the Iron Cross as an officer in the Third Prussian Guards during the Great War. John grew up in Berlin, St. Moritz, Lake Como, and the Riviera before his parents finally realized the Nazis had it in even for ultra-assimilated Teutonic Jews like themselves, and went into New York exile in the late 1930s. 

From John Weitz's 2002 obituary in The Independent by Adrian Dannatt:

John Weitz was extremely good on socks. He designed some of the best men's socks in 20th-century America, he knew exactly which socks could be worn when and where, he understood the social and economic history of the sock, he himself wore extremely beautiful socks with total panache.

For those interested in style Weitz was an exemplar of modern dandysim, a scandalously well-dressed man who had an innate sense for the slightest detail of grooming, a rightful regular on every "Best Dressed" list. For those of us for whom Robert de Montesquiou or "Beau" Brummel are figures of respect that would be more than sufficient, but for the more solemn world at large Weitz was also a vastly successful businessman, a champion car racer and best-selling writer, a household name.

I wore a lot of his socks. I also read the the biography he wrote in the 1990s, Joachim Von Ribbentrop: Hitler's Diplomat. The best story about the champagne salesman turned Nazi Foreign Minister is summarized by Wikipedia:

Hitler dismissed Göring's concerns by saying "But after all, [Von Ribbentrop] knows quite a lot of important people in England," leading Göring to reply "Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him."

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

Lakers v. Celtics

From my new column at Taki's Magazine:

Starting Thursday, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers meet for the twelfth time in the National Basketball Association finals. The Lakers have traditionally showcased superstars, from George Mikan, the NBA’s first big man in the 1940s, through Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal, to Kobe Bryant today. In contrast, the Celtics, at their best, have exemplified team play.

Before 1968-1969, for example, the Lakers augmented their Hall of Fame duo of Elgin Baylor and Jerry West with 7’1” Wilt Chamberlain, the greatest offensive player of the era. In the 1969 finals, they encountered a dilapidated final rendition of the Celtics dynasty led by 6’9” center Bill Russell, the greatest defensive player. The Celtics eked out a 108-106 seventh game victory for their eleventh title in Russell’s thirteen seasons.

That gave Russell a career record of 6-1 versus Chamberlain in playoff series. Thus, Russell was almost universally acknowledged then to be the better player. The changing celebrity of Chamberlain and Russell since then illustrates some of the workings of fame.

Today, Chamberlain’s gaudy individual statistics grasp the sport’s fan imagination, while Russell’s accomplishments as the finest team player ever are increasingly forgotten, although he’s still alive at 76. The Basketball Reference website, for instance, will sell you an ad on Russell’s page for half the going rate for Wilt’s page.

Chamberlain, who has been dead since 1999, has become part of American folklore. Wilt’s first name alone is enough to call to mind the statistics of which he boasted: the 100 points he scored in one game, the 50 points per game he scored for an entire season, and the 20,000 women he claimed to have scored with.

The ESPN columnist Bill Simmons, a Celtics partisan, repeatedly insinuates in his entertaining and often impressive Book of Basketball that Chamberlain’s most notorious statistic was an elaborate ruse to cover up that he was gay. How often was Wilt actually seen with a woman, he asks?

Read the rest there and comment upon it here.

By the way, the Boston-bred Simmons doesn’t mention it (his Beantown bias might be blinding him), but there's an obvious analogy between the relative fame today of Chamberlain v. Russell and of the Boston Red Sox's great slugger, Ted Williams, who never won a World Series, v. his contemporary Stan Musial. That Williams' obsession with excellence in hitting sometimes got in the way of winning baseball games seems less important to us today than it did to his contemporaries.

The Splendid Splinter's incredible hitting statistics, such as being the last .400 hitter, continue to fascinate baseball fans, while Williams' contemporary, Stan Musial, who was a better team player and better than Williams at everything except hitting, is largely forgotten. Musial earned more MVP votes than Williams (granted, he lost fewer seasons to military service), yet, few can now remember if Musial is still alive (he’s 89), but everybody knows that after Williams's death in 2002, his head was cryonically frozen in liquid nitrogen in case future medical advances can bring him back to life.

 

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

Why were these consequences unexpected?

 From the New York Times:

Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains

By MICHAEL POWEL

MEMPHIS — ... Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

The Economic Policy Institute’s forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. 

So, at the height of the Housing Bubble, during George W. Bush's campaign to add 5.5 million minority homeowners, median white wealth was $143k while median black wealth was 9k. Now, that median number is high relevant because the black homeownership rate had started out the last decade a little under 50% and the goal of the Clinton and Bush administrations had been to push it to well over 50%. But black households right at the 50th percentile -- the people whom both administrations had wanted to get mortgages -- had less than $10,000 in net worth (during the Bubble). In other words, these marginal homeowners had a negligible cushion to ride out a downturn in home prices.

The net worth figures for Hispanic are similar. Not surprisingly, the San Francisco Fed study of hundreds of thousands of mortgages handed out in California during the Bush years shows a foreclosure rate 3.3 times higher for blacks and 2.5 times higher for Latinos.

Now, the higher foreclosure rates for blacks probably weren't that economically disastrous, since they tend to live in low home price neighborhoods in low price cities, such as Memphis and Detroit. But Hispanics averaged bigger new mortgages than whites on average during some of the boom years since they tend to be concentrated in high-priced California and its spillover states.

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans. 

Yeah, that was what the Clinton and Bush administrations encouraged them to do. It's called community reinvestment, diversity, and a lot of other socially acceptable names.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure....

“The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. 

Yes, but more lending to minorities, which is what the government, the media, and all right-thinking people were demanding, equals worse lending. It's called diminishing marginal returns. The way you got to do more lending was to lend to more marginal characters, which is what both political parties were insisting upon.

Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.

Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

Glad to see the Obama Administration is taking such a sophisticated view.

... For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

There's a huge history of racial discrimination in housing, much of it outside the South, that has been largely forgotten. For example, it was common in LA in the postwar era for sales contracts to have clauses saying the buyer couldn't resell to blacks. From the standpoint of economic theory, this was an interesting phenomenon. The restriction in the contract wasn't in the self-interest of the sellers, who, after all, were moving out. All else being equal, the restriction on the right to resell their new property to the highest bidder hurt the buyers on an individual basis, but, evidently, was in their collective self interest.

Similarly, all else being equal, from a theory point of view, unrestricted neighborhoods should have had the highest appreciation since the sellers could sell to the highest bidders. But, all else wasn't equal and the opposite happened: restricted neighborhoods appreciated faster, on average, than unrestricted neighborhoods.

Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide — although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

In summary, after decades of complaining that minorities were being discriminated against by not getting enough mortgage money, public discourse has been so lobotomized that the discrimination framework remains the only acceptable way of thinking about the mortgage meltdown, even when it's clear that a part of the problem was that minorities got too much mortgage money.

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

Poverty

The big problem with being poor in 21st Century America is not that you can't afford to buy enough stuff, it's that you can't afford to move away from other poor people.

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

Calling Sam Lipsyte

From the NYT Magazine:

The Integrationist

By RUSSELL SHORTO

Can Job Cohen, a Jew who reaches out to Muslims, be the next Dutch prime minister — and a model for Europe?

While slouching against a wall in a former cigarette factory in the industrial outskirts of The Hague one day last month, I was visited with the sudden realization that over the formative centuries of European history the two words that most succinctly signaled “other,” “foreign” or “enemy” were these: “Jew” and “Turk.” Crudely unpacking them, “Turk” meant Muslim, Arab, infidel, the threat from without; a Jew was the enemy within, someone who, even if born and raised in your hometown, was part of another political as well as religious entity; the Jews of a city were referred to not as a community but as “the Jewish nation.” “Jew” and “Turk” were in fact constructs Europeans used to help define their own identity: that which we are not.

What brought this to mind was the scene in front of me. The Labor Party in the Netherlands — which several weeks ago emerged from the endless gray muddle of the country’s multiparty system to take the lead in polls as the nation approaches an election on June 9 — was unveiling its candidates. On a makeshift stage, before banners bearing the party’s logo of a fist inside a rose, stood two people. At the top of the list of candidates — the man responsible for the recent shake-up of Dutch politics, who is making some people in Europe begin to wonder whether he represents a way for mainstream parties on the Continent to successfully combat the swelling tide of populist, anti-immigrant voices — was Job Cohen, who until March was the mayor of Amsterdam. Cohen was raised in a secular Jewish household in the hamlet of Heemstede, not far from Amsterdam; his parents spent World War II in hiding from the Nazis; his paternal grandparents died at Bergen-Belsen. At Cohen’s side, No. 2 on the candidate list, was Nebahat Albayrak, who was born in the central Anatolian region of Turkey and moved as a child to Rotterdam, where her father worked as a scaffold builder.

There is certainly some truth to the conventional wisdom about the immigration debate: that Europe lags far behind the United States in its ability to craft a truly multiethnic society, to turn newcomers into citizens. European countries, by this reckoning, are prisoners of their old racial or nationalistic identities. And the Netherlands has of late been a particular example of this; its right-wing, anti-immigrant standard-bearer, the golden-maned Geert Wilders, has steadily gained support since he formed his Freedom Party for the 2006 parliamentary elections. Earlier this year, Wilders’s party was leading in the polls. In municipal elections in early March, his party, riding on his virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric, won the city of Almere and came in second in The Hague itself — the seat of the Dutch government and home of the International Criminal Court. On a protest-filled visit to London afterward, Wilders — who is facing trial in a Dutch court for inciting hatred — boasted of becoming the next prime minister.

But shortly afterward, the political landscape was transformed by the surprise entry of Cohen into the race to lead the country. In an electorate split up across a dozen or so parties, the Labor Party doubled overnight, from 11 percent in the polls to 22 percent, while Wilders’s numbers have dropped in several straight polls. Some see in Cohen’s rise the possibility of a new Dutch society, and with it perhaps a hint of how new national identities could form in Europe. In what would be confirmation of the worst fears of a Wilders, the new identity prototype has an inclusiveness that inverts the centuries-old formula. As the Jew and the Turk stood side by side with their fellow candidates — which included a good mix of other ethnicities as well as native Dutch — Cohen proclaimed, “This is the Netherlands!”

From Sam Lipsyte's comic novel The Ask summarizing a debate on the Middle East:

"One of the experts said the Palestinians were irrational and needed a real leader, like maybe a smart Jewish guy." 

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

What should Obama do about the oil spill?

Personally, I think he should put on fins, a diving mask, and a snorkel and swim out and see if he can fix it.

I mean, that sounds about as likely to work as anything else Obama is qualified to do. It's not just that he doesn't know anything about the subject, but he doesn't know anybody who knows anything either. Who's he going to call up whom he knows is likely to give him good advice on deep sea oil drilling? Martha Minow? Elena Kagan? Jeremiah Wright? Laurence Tribe? Bill Ayers? Cass Sunstein? David Axelrod? Emil Jones?

If we are going to expect Presidents to know things, or at least know people who know things, we should probably worry about that before the election.

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

87 Years Ago

Here's a picture my dad gave me today. It shows him in 1923 with a muskellunge he caught in the short channel between Lake Michigan and Portage Lake in Onekema, MI: a young Nick Adams. (Ernest Hemingway and my father were born in Oak Park, IL about 18 years apart. Like many Oak Park families before air conditioning, in their times the Hemingways and Sailers spent much of the summer in Michigan; the prevailing wind blows across the lake from Illinois to Michigan, being cooled as it goes, so the west coast of Michigan used to be a major summer resort for Chicagoans.)

A muskellunge is the largest fish of the pike family. Wikipedia informs us: 

The name comes from the Ojibwa word maashkinoozhe, meaning "ugly pike."

Update: two readers suggest, from the coloration, that it's a Northern pike.

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

Long spans

After my father got an x-ray in early 2010, it struck me as interesting that his father had been present at the creation in 1895 of the x-ray machine, 115 years before. My teenage grandfather worked as a delivery boy for a lens company in Germany in the 1890s, and one of his customers was the physicist Roentgen, who won the very first physics Nobel Prize in 1901 for his great invention, which used glass plates my grandfather had lugged in. (If the x-ray machine were a movie in 2010, there'd be a ten minute long Credits reel with my grandfather's name in the 8th minute as Delivery Person.)

Not surprisingly, my grandfather later became an x-ray machine salesman, introducing the device to hospitals in China and South America on long, profitable trips in the 1920s. He developed an long-lasting ulcer on the back of his hand from all the hours he held it in x-ray machines with the power blasting during his demonstrations for doctors. Surprisingly, he lived in fine health until 1965.

I thought of that when reading this week that in the Vulcan Society fireman's disparate impact case, to crack down on the bad boys who gave 343 lives on 9/11, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis has appointed as "special master" of the Fire Department of New York the former NYC district attorney Robert Morgenthau. (The very old first DA during early years of Law & Order was modeled on Morgenthau.) 

Morgenthau is 90.

Morgenthau's father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., became FDR's Secretary of the Treasury in 1934, a mere 74 years ago. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

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

Art Linkletter, RIP

Genial television host Art Linkletter has died at 97. 

I was on the "Kids Say the Darndest Things" segment of his House Party talk show, where he interviewed four grade school children, back around 1969 or 1970 when I was ten or eleven. 

I contrived some lines that got pretty big laughs from the studio audience, but, truthfully, I was a little too old, knowing, and show-offy. For example, before our appearance, the lady producer asked the kids to say what they thought were the definitions of various words, but I knew what all the words meant, except "boudoir."

I suspect the little me was fairly insufferable. It's a testimony to Mr. Linkletter's famous amiability that he didn't throttle me on nationally syndicated television.

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

Interracial Marriage: 2008 stats

Here's a rather incoherent article from the AP on new interracial marriage statistics from the Census Bureau. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau hasn't released the numbers yet, as far as I can tell, so we're stuck with the sneak preview they gave the AP.

Two caveats: first, you need to keep in mind the stock v. flow issue of marriages v. weddings. The Census Bureau typically counts marriages (i.e., two people who are legally married to each other) but not weddings (two people getting legally married to each other). The reality that this article is groping toward is that while the stock of interracial marriages as a percent of all marriages continues to rise as the older married couples, from eras when interracial marriage was very rare, die off, but the percent of new interracial weddings as a percent of all new weddings does not seem to be increasing as fast as before.

Second, in my long experience with Census studies of interracial marriage, going back to my 1997 "Is Love Colorblind?" article in National Review, only data from the decennial enumerations (years ending in a 0) were of sufficient sample size to accurately capture trends in interracial marriage rates. The Census Bureau has been working to improve the sample sizes in their interim studies, but who knows whether this one is good enough?

Interracial marriage still rising, but not as fast

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON – Melting pot or racial divide? The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.

The latest trend belies notions of the U.S. as a post-racial, assimilated society. Demographers cite a steady flow of recent immigration that has given Hispanics and Asians more ethnically similar partners to choose from while creating some social distance from whites due to cultural and language differences.

I wrote a VDARE.com column about exactly this happening in California in 2000: "Continued Immigration Retards Growth of Interracial Marriage." It's logically obvious that as minorities become majorities, they have fewer daily interactions with whites and thus are less likely to fall in love with them and marry them.

White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.

"Racial boundaries are not going to disappear anytime soon," said Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology and public policy at Cornell University. He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.

"With a white backlash toward immigrant groups, some immigrants are more likely to turn inward to each other for support," Lichter said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ...

Broken down by race, about 40 percent of U.S.-born Asians now marry whites — a figure unchanged since 1980.

Unfortunately, this doesn't break out the important gender gap in white-Asian marriages. In 1990, 72% of white-Asian marriages involved a white man and Asian woman, while in 2000, 75% involved a white man and an Asian woman.

Their likelihood of marrying foreign-born Asians, meanwhile, multiplied 3 times for men and 5 times for women, to roughly 20 percent.

One of the things that is going on is that the "Asian" population is becoming less East Asian and more South Asian, where the gender gap is very different. Also, South Asians are more into arranged marriages with somebody from the Old Country than are East Asians.

Among U.S.-born Hispanics, marriages with whites increased modestly from roughly 30 percent to 38 percent over the past three decades. But when it came to marriages with foreign-born Hispanics, the share doubled — to 12.5 percent for men, and 17.1 percent for women.

In Southern California, I just do not see 38% of the couples walking down the street together where at least one person is Latino and the other person is white. I'd say it's more like 10%. Maybe it's different in Texas. Maybe interethnic marriage is most common among very white Hispanics, possibly ones who are only 1/2 or 1/4 Hispanic by ancestry, so these couples are not very visible by looks.

Although the Census allows people to identify themselves as being of multiple races, it does not allow them to identify as both Hispanic and non-Hispanic, so people of mixed ethnicities tend to show up in Census stats as solely Hispanic.

Or maybe white-Hispanic marriages are hugely common in working class exurbs in California where I don't hang out much. I don't know. But I don't see white-Latino couples much at, say, the movies in Van Nuys.

In contrast, blacks are now three times as likely to marry whites than in 1980. About 14.4 percent of black men and 6.5 percent of black women are currently in such mixed marriages, due to higher educational attainment, a more racially integrated military and a rising black middle class that provides more interaction with other races.

That would suggest the gender gap in black-white marriages has fallen to 2.21 times as many black men married to white women as white men married to black women, from 2.54X in 1990 and 2.65X in 2000. But, we'll have to see what the sample size is. The decennial enumerations have been far more trustworthy than interim estimates based on a small samples.

... By some estimates, two-thirds of those who checked the single box of "black" on the census form are actually mixed, including President Barack Obama, who identified himself as black in the 2010 census even though his mother was white. 

Census figures also show:

_Hawaii had the highest share of mixed marriages, about 32 percent.

Funny how Mr. Check Only Black Obama was born and raised in Hawaii, which has always been like this.

It was followed by Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Nevada, which ranged from 15 percent to 19 percent. 

You'll note that California, the state with the highest percentage of immigrants and with what had been the second most (to Hawaii) liberal attitudes among whites on interracial marriage, doesn't make the top 5.

The bottom five states were Pennsylvania, Maine, Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia, each ranging from 3 percent to 4 percent.

_Mississippi had the fastest growth in mixed marriages from 2000-08, a sign of closer ties between blacks and whites, though it still ranked second to last in overall share of mixed marriages. 

_Mixed marriages jumped from 2.25 million to 3.7 million, or 65 percent, from 1990-2000, as such unions became more broadly accepted in Southern states.

_Among U.S.-born whites, about 0.3 percent married blacks in 1980; that figure rose to about 1 percent in 2008. About 0.3 percent of whites married Asians in 1980 and about 1 percent in 2008. About 2 percent of whites married Hispanics in 1980, rising to about 3.6 percent in 2008.

The figures come from previous censuses as well as the 2008 American Community Survey, which surveys 3 million households. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race.

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

Updated: Birth Order

Birth order theories (e.g., first-borns tend to be more risk-averse) have been around for a long time without making all that much progress. The data is very complicated and how exactly do you specify what you are looking for?

Well, here's an NYT article on a small study that is well-defined enough that they might have actually found something:

In the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review, Frank J. Sulloway and Richard L. Zweigenhaft went digging for evidence of siblings behaving differently in the vast database of baseball statistics. Given how younger siblings have been shown to take more risks than their older counterparts — perhaps originally to fight for food, now for parental attention — Drs. Sulloway and Zweigenhaft examined whether the phenomenon might persist to the point that baseball-playing brothers would try to steal bases at significantly different rates.

In fact they did: For more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s long recorded history, including Joe and Dom DiMaggio and Cal and Billy Ripken, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother....

UPDATED: A reader tries to reproduce this just for brothers where both were batters (i.e., no pitchers) and finds younger brothers more likely to steal in only 56% of the pairs. 

“We tend not to exhibit birth-order differences all the time in adulthood — we employ them in situations with siblings, because that’s where the behavior comes from,” Dr. Sulloway said. “But we found that here, and that’s significant.” ...

In other words, Sulloway is making a fairly limited claim for the effects of birth order -- birth order has more effect within the family than in the outer world. The oldest son is much more likely to become CEO than the youngest son of the family firm, but not all that much more likely to become CEO of a publicly traded company.

And there remains the plausible issue of whether younger brothers learned baseball strategy more fully simply by watching their older brothers growing up, which Dr. Zweigenhaft, a professor of psychology at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., said could very well be a contributing factor.  

Another explanation about why this study's finding might be restricted to baseball might be that when brothers play on the same team growing up, the older brother will usually be stronger (because he's more mature), and thus be put lower in the batting order in a slugger's RBI slot. In contrast, the younger brother will bat higher in the order where players are more expected to steal.

For example, say you are lucky enough as a high school baseball coach to have two future major leaguers on your team, a pair of brothers two years apart, Al and Ben. Both are much more coordinated at putting the bat on the ball than all your other players. Where do you put them in the batting lineup? When the older one Al was a 150-pound sophomore, you had him batting third or fourth (clean-up) to maximize the number of runs he could drive in because even though he was still thin, he was so much better at hitting the ball than anybody else. But when Al's a 180 pound senior and and his younger 150-pound brother Ben is a sophomore, you still have Al in the RBI slot, but you put Ben in the leadoff slot so he can get on base and steal.

So, by virtue of being older, Al is never given training as a leadoff batter, but Ben, by virtue of being stuck on Al's team, is trained to get on base and steal so his big brother Al can drive him in.

Here's my 1996 book review from National Review of Sulloway's book Born to Rebel.

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