November 12, 2010

Prescience

One thing worth noting about Anthony Burgess's 1962 book A Clockwork Orange is how prescient it was about a future England of high crime, home invasions and, especially, about how the Government's response would be technocratic. When New Labour came into office 35 years later, it pursued a largely sci-fi approach to fighting crime, putting up millions of surveillance cameras. If the Ludovico Technique actually worked, I suspect Blair would have used it.

Art talk

Not having much to say,  I realized I might as well post these comments from Ray Sawhill that were buried deep in the comments:
Hey, Steve's comment about Annie Liebovitz -- "Sure, Annie Liebowitz is an airhead, but she's made more people look cool over the last 40 years than anybody else" -- highlights a little hobbyhorse theme of mine, namely that art-talent and IQ have little or nothing to do with each other! Fun.

If anyone's interested and open to the idea ... As someone who's led the arts-and-media life for more than 30 years, I suggest that you'll find it far more useful to think of art-talent as something that resembles athletic talent than it is to think of it as something having anything to do with IQ-style brainpower. The work of art-and-entertainment world people is sometimes worth paying attention to not because these are such smart people who are conferring their brainpower on us but because they're gifted people who've managed to find ways to turn their often bizarre talents into products that the rest of us can enjoy.

Creative artsworld people are often seriously unimpressive intellectually. But they're also often gifted in ways that can make your jaw drop.

And ...
Which to my mind brings up a whole other topic: How much fabulous art is out there that you've never heard of (and never will hear of), because editors, critics and profs are ignorant, or resistant, or copycats? In my experience, ANY time I poked around a little corner of art history on my own (in other words, any time I bore down on a little corner of art history hard enough to get by the usual masterpieces and landmarks and do a little investigating of my own), I found work that I thought was great, in fact often greater than what the profs, critics, historians etc had told me about.

Another question: Let's face it, historians, critics, editors and such -- the people who write and publish the articles and books, and who teach the classes -- are a peculiar bunch. They're a lot more scholarly and intellectual than most people are, for one thing. To what extent has this shared temperament shaped our view of art history? Maybe the version of it they pass along is best understood as "a history of the art that intellectuals approve of"? Should we -- we non-scholar types -- maybe be a little more challenging of (and wary of) their tastes and their lists?

I would add that a lot of the art of the past that gets left out of the standard art history textbooks wasn't obscure outsider art, it's stuff that was a really big deal in its time.  We all like to think that great artists like Van Gogh and Kafka are dropping dead unheeded all the time, only to be discovered much later. But the reality is that most of the artists who get rediscovered were stars in their own day, or would have been if they'd only lived their three score and ten. 

It's kind of depressing to think of all the talent that gets forgotten. For example, compare Borges and Burgess. Today, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is seen as one of the giants of 20th Century literature. Google comes up with 2,340,000 pages for his name. Back in the 1970s, however, Borges was probably no more famous than Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), who is little mentioned today except in conjunction with his novel A Clockwork Orange, which was made into a celebrated movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. ("Anthony Burgess" has only 463,000 pages on Google today). Borges, an ardent Anglophile and admirer of Burgess, wrote that he hoped that he and Burgess were relatives. 

Today, Burgess's reputation is in one of those lulls that follows the death of a writer who lived a long time, wrote a gigantic amount, and whose later novels weren't as strong as his earlier ones. It's like how a lot of basketball fans remember the fortyish Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of 1989 more than the force of nature Kareem of 1972. 

Burgess mostly pursued music composition and teaching as a young man, then started publishing books around age 39 and wouldn't stop, publishing something like 50 books over the rest of his life.

Like Burgess, Borges had a long decline phase (not surprising, because he went blind), but that was masked in the English-speaking world because it took place in a different language. With Borges, you only need to read about his best 100 pages (and there is a pretty clear consensus on his ten or twenty best short stories), so he's easy to get into. Burgess, in contrast, was so prolific, and it's hard to tell what was his best stuff, so he's kind of daunting and easy to ignore.

Was Burgess as good as everybody assumed he was in the 1970s? I don't know. In the mid-1970s I was hugely impressed by his 1974 novel The Napoleon Symphony, a historical novel about Bonaparte structured to follow Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (which had originally been dedicated to Bonaparte until he crowned himself Emperor). But, I was a callow youth, so what do I know? I read quite a few more of his books, but they became progressively less dazzling.

Likewise, was Burgess a good critic? God knows he was a prolific critic. In the 1970s, his reviews were highly prestigious, but by the 1990s, he was increasingly seen as a hack.

Was Burgess a hack who deserves to be forgotten? Perhaps. He certainly liked making money from writing. But, it's also possible that the reputation he enjoyed in the 1970s was reasonable.

Hopefully, some consensus will emerge on what was Burgess's best stuff, and his influence will come into better view.

Anyway, it's more likely that Burgess will be rediscovered by a new generation than that some dead writer who was obscure all his life will be discovered for the first time.


November 11, 2010

Not by me

I'd like to thank everybody who sent me this late-breaking news from the New York Times:

College Admissions in America v. Canada

Here's an article from the Toronto Star that got me wondering about something else:

Long admired for raising academic superstars, parents of Asian background are coming under fire from their own community for pushing their children into university programs for which many have no real interest or talent and often quit in distress.

At a recent conference hosted by and for the [Greater Toronto Area’s] Asian community, Chinese-Canadian educators and professionals warned some 300 parents in Mandarin, Cantonese and English to stop giving their children no other choice than professional courses such as engineering, medicine, accounting or pharmacy — programs for which some are so ill-equipped and uninterested they drop out, fail, get suspended for cheating or suffer depression and acute anxiety.

This is the kind of article that you'd read in Los Angeles back in the 1970s: "Mellow Out, Chinese Dudes." 

Since then, however, American parents in LA have largely decided that 1400 years of Chinese test prep (the first Chinese civil service exams were held in 605 A.D.) can't be wrong, and have since switched their tunes to the Chinese one: getting into a fancy college is the most important thing ever.

But that Canadians are just now finally getting around to this raises a different question, one about differences between America and Canada. Granted, I don't know very much about Canada. Most of the time I've spent in Canada was in Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas, but I can say that Canada looked a lot like America (or at least its Crowne Plazas did). The main difference I noticed on business trips in the 1990s was that everybody drove around during the day with their headlights on, like they were on their way to some national funeral. "Did Wayne Gretzky die?" I asked, but it just turned out to be a safety regulation. 

Anyway, my point is that because America and Canada are so similar, it's interesting when they differ, especially when they differ in something that we Americans assume is just an inevitability of 21st Century life, like College Admissions Mania. In 2010, Chinese immigrants in LA and Toronto apparently feel the same way about getting into college, but Americans and Canadians evidently don't.

I just realized that I have no idea if Canadians get all worked up over getting into college the way Americans do.

If Canadians do, you sure don't hear about it much. Off the top of my head, I can name all of four colleges in Canada (Simon Fraser, McGill, U. of Toronto, and U. of Western Ontario). I guess that Canadian colleges must not employ the vast number of publicists and promoters that American colleges do. For example, to pick small liberal arts college at random, Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA has an Admissions Staff of 13, while Grinnell College in Iowa (1600 students) has an Admissions staff of 19. They spend the first few months of the year reading applications, but most of the rest of the year promoting their respective colleges. 

To an American by now, that just seems like the natural order of things. How can you have a modern civilization of Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas and automobile safety regulators without having a vast pyramid of increasingly exclusive colleges all expensively elbowing each other for the spotlight?

But, does it seem inevitable to a Canadian? The only thing I've ever read about college admissions in Canada was a Malcolm Gladwell article about his own extremely low-key experience getting into college, which made Canada in the 1980s sound like America in a Heinlein novel in the 1950s: You know, when it's Labor Day Weekend and the 18-year-old hero of the book still hasn't decided where he's going to go to college: "I don't know, I guess I'll take the bus down to State U. on Tuesday and register for some classes."

So, if you know anything about college admissions in Canada, please let me know.

November 10, 2010

White Flight from MySpace to Facebook

Here's a scholarly article by danah boyd (e.e. cumming-like lack of capitalization intentional) called White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook. It's based on a lot of interviews with teens. For example, one white boy pointed out that MySpace's tools for customization to bling up their sites drove off more cultured teens:
"These tools gave MySpacers the freedom to annoy as much as they pleased. Facebook was nice because it stymied such annoyance, by limiting individuality. ... The MySpace crowd felt caged and held back because they weren't able to make their page unique."

Unfortunately, it's one of those academic articles which could be about 50% shorter if danah didn't have to constantly puff up the possibility that the universally perceived differences on average between the races might just be one giant mass delusion. We're not talking about reality, you see, just perceptions of reality and perceptions of perceptions of reality.

Like the lack of bling on Facebook, that kind of Occam's Butterknife talk is a marker of respectable academic discourse about race: No, we don't find race interesting, we find our perceptions of other people's perceptions about race interesting. We try to make our interest in it as uninteresting as possible by padding our writing out with endless meta-ness. (We wouldn't want any MySpacers reading our articles, now would we?)

How Obama could improve the economy

How could Obama boost U.S. productivity during this economic downturn? Well, the President could announce that so long as he's President, he's suspending all federal disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. If the country is non-discriminatory enough to elect him President, it's probably non-discriminatory enough to go about the rest of its business without the heavy hand of the EEOC and Justice Departments looking for statistical evidence of discrimination under the Four-Fifths Rule.

Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making

Having spent an inordinate amount of time earlier this year figuring out an optimal family cell phone plan, it strikes me that an awful lot of American corporate activity these days consists of figuring out ways to nickel and dime people over complex monthly charges. It's like a never-ending low intensity war between MBAs with computers versus customers, half of whom will be below average in intelligence, energy, or experience. 

The MBA holy grail now is to figure out a way to get people to agree to pay an extra $9.99 per month for something they won't use -- especially, if the original process of coming up with their bill of $173.41 per month was so arduous that they won't bother to go through all the work it would take to have it reduced to $163.42.

My impression is that American business has gotten more chisely over the years, probably because it's now so easy for MBAs to model complicated variations of payment plans on spreadsheets and then have them coded into the software used by the $10/hour people at the customer service phone bank. In the old days, it was too complicated for a business to concoct and (especially) administer a whole bunch of different payment options, so corporations offered the equivalent of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry, and didn't change them too often. Hence, customers had a fighting chance to figure them out.

Nowadays, though, every MBA can whip up on his PC a million different options. That sounds good for consumers, right?

In theory, it's also gotten easier for customers to whip up a spreadsheet of their own to figure out their optimal choice. Yet, what percentage of the public is proficient with Excel? Ten percent, maybe? 

When I was a young MBA in 1984, the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was the first piece of software I used on my $9,000 IBM PC-XT (10 meg hard disk). It was awesome. I figured at the time that half the public would be spreadsheet mavens within a decade.

I was wrong. Although spreadsheets were the glamor software in the mid-1980s, they rather quickly hit a ceiling in popularity and were supplanted by words and pictures software.

This trend toward complexity led us to disaster in the mortgage meltdown as the complexity of the new products covered up their implausibility. As products became more complicated, customers and investors became more dependents upon professional experts, whether mortgage brokers, appraisers, ratings firms, or investment bankers. Simultaneously, however, the various players figured out how to corrupt the people who were supposed to be the independent, neutral professional advisers. For example, mortgage brokers were offered payments to put their clients into higher interest products.

As daily business becomes more complicated, the intelligent and energetic, the ones who can figure out how to cut their bill to $163.42, benefit at the expense of the tired and dumb who can't. 
Here's a new paper by two Chicago Fed researchers who looked up the military's Armed Forces Qualifying Test entrance exam scores for people who had a chance to make two common mistakes with their finances.

We analyze the impact of cognitive skills on two specific examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined: first, the use of a credit card for a transaction after making a balance transfer on the account, and second, cases where individuals are penalized for inaccurate estimation of the value of one’s home on home equity loan or line of credit application. We match individuals from the US military for whom we have detailed test scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test (ASVAB), to administrative datasets of retail credit from a large financial institution. Our results show that consumers with higher overall composite test scores, and specifically those with higher math scores, are substantially less likely to make a financial mistake. Importantly no such effects are found for verbal or for most other component scores.

Here's their description of the first of two potential mistakes they can track versus AFQT scores that consumers often make:
Credit card holders frequently receive offers to transfer account balances on their current cards to a new card. Borrowers pay substantially lower APRs on the balances transferred to the new card for a sixto-nine-month period (a “teaser” rate). However, new purchases on the new card have high APRs. The catch is that payments on the new card first pay down the (low interest) transferred balances, and only subsequently pay down the (high interest) debt accumulated from new purchases.

The optimal strategy during the teaser-rate period, is for the borrower to only make new purchases on the old credit card and to make all payments to the old card. To be clear, this implies that the borrower should make no new purchases with the new card to which balances have been transferred (unless she has already repaid her transferred balances on that card). Some borrowers will identify this optimal strategy immediately and will not make any new purchases using the new card. Some borrowers may not initially identify the optimal strategy, but will discover it after one or more pay cycles as they observe their (surprisingly) high interest charges. Those borrowers will make purchases for one or more months, then have what we refer to as a “eureka” moment, after which they will implement the optimal strategy. Some borrowers will never identify the optimal strategy.

Got that?

This is the kind of puzzle I would have been fascinated by in 1984. I would have fired up Lotus 1-2-3 and worked it out. Today, though, it just makes my brain feel tired merely to start reading the above description. I just immediately get the impression "Somebody with a fresher MBA than mine has put a huge amount of energy into trying to confuse me into paying more," and I want to go lie down.

Conversely, in 1984, would I have fired up my PC to figure a way to chisel our customers out of an extra $9.99 per month? Well, in 1984 my customer was P&G, my employer's biggest client, and we were all terrified of offending them in any way, so I wouldn't have done it. But, if my customers were just a bunch of nobody consumers, well, yeah, I probably would have done it and then justified it to myself with some libertarian spiel. But now, I'm old, tired, not as smart, and not as persuaded by libertarian theories of ethics. Anyway, the difference in 1984 was that the natural response to getting a PC was: "What problems can I solve with this?" By 2010, most of the obvious problems solvable with a PC and a spreadsheet have been solved already, so more energy is devoted to creating new problems.

Not surprisingly, it's easier to chisel people with two digit IQs than people with three digit IQs:
We find that among those with AFQT scores above 70 [i.e., the 70th percentile], everybody ultimately identifies the optimal strategy. In contrast, among those with an AFQT score below 50 [50th percentile, i.e., two-digit IQs], the majority will not identify the optimal strategy. ...

Interestingly, verbal intelligence doesn't help much:
In columns (5) through (8) we use the four component scores (arithmetic reasoning, math knowledge, paragraph comprehension and word knowledge) that are used to calculate the AFQT score. In all four specifications the two math scores are both highly significant suggesting that quantitative skills are critical for avoiding suboptimal behavior. In contrast, we estimate that the effects of the two verbal test scores are a fairly precisely estimated 0. For example, the largest point estimate for a verbal score suggests that a one standard deviation increase in word knowledge would only increase the incidence of “eureka” moments by a little more than a tenth of a percentage point.

By the way, this should provide a cautionary note for using the ten-word vocabulary test score in the General Social Survey (GSS) as an automatic proxy for IQ. It's often a decent proxy, no doubt, but there are certain situations in which it's not.

November 9, 2010

The evolution of extraversion

Anthropologist Peter Frost blogs:
This has long been the case with simple ‘horticultural’ societies in the tropical zone. The women feed themselves and their children with minimal male assistance because they can grow food year-round. And this food production is not appropriated by a State or a land-owning class.

Such societies remain simple in large part because intense sexual competition keeps them from evolving into more complex entities. The surplus males stir up endless conflict, if only because their sole access to women is through warfare, i.e., rape and abduction. There can never be pacification and, therefore, the formation of larger, more advanced societies.

A high incidence of polygyny favors men with a different toolkit of physical and mental traits. Some personality traits, for instance, will be more advantageous than others. Such is the finding of a series of studies from rural Senegal, where 48% of men over 40 are polygynous.

Alvergne et al. (2009, 2010a, 2010b) found no correlation among Senegalese men between mating success and most personality traits, i.e., neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness. One trait, however, showed a strong correlation. This was extraversion, defined as “pro-social behavior which reflects sociability, assertiveness, activity, dominance and positive emotions.” Men with above-medium extraversion were 40% more likely to have more than one wife than those with below-medium extraversion, after controlling for age. Furthermore, this personality trait correlated with higher testosterone levels. Such a linkage suggests that extraversion is part of the male toolkit for mating success in a high-polygyny environment.

Perhaps this goes along with the notion of a mid-latitude Jealousy Belt (Sicily, Lebanon, Afghanistan, etc.), where life is full of interest because men tend to be extraverted and on the prowl but women remain major investments.

Creative Women

David Brooks explains that America will do swell economically in the 21st Century:
The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power. ... In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation.

Okay, but, that raises the paradox that in 2010 the American state that is the biggest drag on the economy at present, California, is also the one blessed with two vast creative hubs, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, both of which are doing reasonably well right now. (Here's Apple's balance sheet, which is a lot better looking than mine.)

Yet, California, as a whole, isn't doing well.

A population cannot live by creativity alone.

Yet, what really struck  me about Brooks' column was this section:
Howard Gardner of Harvard once put together a composite picture of the extraordinarily creative person: She comes from a little place somewhat removed from the center of power and influence. As an adolescent, she feels herself outgrowing her own small circle. She moves to a metropolis and finds a group of people who share her passions and interests. She gets involved with a team to create something amazing.

Then, at some point, she finds her own problem, which is related to and yet different from the problems that concern others in her group. She breaks off and struggles and finally emerges with some new thing. She brings it back to her circle. It is tested, refined and improved.

Is this self-parody or self-abasement? My impression is that Brooks tends to get the joke, and that he does this kind of thing on purpose to ingratiate himself with the huge audience of Gladwellians who don't get the joke. As an officially designated "conservative," it's particularly necessary for Brooks to periodically humiliate himself like this to assuage suspicions that he might get the joke. Perhaps I'm wrong, though.

Obviously, the first thing anybody would notice when drawing up a composite picture of the "extraordinarily creative person" is that she isn't a she. 

I mean, isn't that a theme in The Social Network: 21st Century Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly dominated by guys? By the way, the creators of The Social Network are named David and Aaron, so Hollywood isn't that different from Silicon Valley.

Further, my vague impression of extremely creative women is that they are less likely than extremely creative men to come from somewhere "removed from the center of power and influence." I don't have a good database of creative women right at hand, but let's take as examples the two women who have been nominated for a Best Director Oscar over the last decade (out of 50 nominees): Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow. The former is the daughter of the man who made The Godfather and the latter used to be married to the man who made Terminator and Titanic. That's about as close as you can get to the center of power and influence in the filmmaking.

My general impression is that women who have made a big splash in a creative (artistic or scientific) field are more likely, on average, to have had strong support from loved ones than their male peers enjoyed. For example, the two most famous female painters of the 18th Century, Angelica Kauffman (left) and Louise Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun (above) were daughters of professional painters, married into artistic families, and were both adorable-looking. The first major female painter, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) was the daughter of a follower of Caravaggio, although she was of more Rubenseque proportions than her Rococco heiresses.

I went to look up some of my favorite female creative artists of the late 20th Century to see if this trend continues. Choreographer Twyla Tharp -- here's a minute of Baryshnikov in her witty 1975 ballet, Push Comes to Shove, about how much fun it is to be a heterosexual male ballet god -- turns out to have been born on a farm in Indiana. Her parents then moved to the San  Bernardino area and bought a drive-in movie theatre. So, that's one strike against my theory.

How about portrait photographer Annie Liebowitz? (Here's a sneering British article about how she's broke because she won't play along with galleries and museums in artificially restricting the supply of her pictures. But, so what? If you had the chance to pick the photographer who would take the picture by which you would -- or wouldn't -- be remembered, who wouldn't make Liebowitz your number one draft choice?) She turns out to be a military brat, the daughter of an Air Force Lt. Colonel. As with Tharp, that's an above average background, but it's not like being Sofia Coppola.

So, my impression went 0-2 with my more recent examples. Perhaps it's becoming less true.

November 8, 2010

"Four Lions"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies of the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups. ...

Directed by Chris Morris, who is apparently legendary in Britain for his TV satires (I confess to never having heard of him before), Four Lions is a British buddy comedy about five Muslim yobbos in Sheffield peer-pressuring each other into staging a terrorist attack on “unbelieving Kafir slags.” (The quintet is culled to the titular four when one, carrying explosives made from hydrogen peroxide purchased at the corner shop, trips over a sheep. CNN subsequently headlines: “ASIAN MAN’S HEAD FALLS OUT OF TREE.”)

Read the whole thing there.

The movie reminds me of when Greg Cochran would tell me, "Terrorists are idiots. Now, if I were a terrorist --" and I would exclaim, "No, don't tell me! I don't want to know. Don't even say it out loud! Echelon could be listening in."

Obama's view of Asians

With the President visiting his old home, Indonesia, it's worth noting that one of the funnier themes in Dreams from My Father (granted, I'm using "funny" pretty relativistically here) is how little attention Obama pays to Asians in his book's black-white conceptual framework, despite having lived amidst many Asians in Hawaii, Indonesia, Hawaii, Occidental and Columbia. If they're Muslim Asians, like his friends in college, he's for them, but otherwise, he barely notices them. In Dreams, Obama's attitude toward people who aren't black or white is much like the Rev. Lovejoy's attitude on The Simpsons towards people who aren't Christian or Jewish:
Rev. Lovejoy: No, Homer, God didn't burn your house down, but he was working in the hearts of your friends, be they [points to Ned Flanders] Christian, [points to Krusty the Klown] Jew, or [glances at Apu with lack of interest] ... miscellaneous.

Apu: Hindu. There are seven hundred million of us.

Rev. Lovejoy: Aww, that's super. 

In Dreams, Obama's feelings toward non-Muslim Asians are like those of a New York Yankees-obsessed Boston Red Sox fan regarding the Milwaukee Brewers: "Which league are they in these days?"

Group Selection, Again

The "Level of Selection" debate in evolutionary theory has been going on for decades, with the advocates of lower levels (e.g., the Selfish Gene) usually drubbing, through better math, the advocates of significant amounts of selection at the group level. 

Personally, I've always found the arguments for group selection plausible (although that probably just shows how bad at math I am). Think of two tribes in prehistoric northern Europe squaring off militarily along the river that divides their traditional territories. They each covet the others' lands, but both groups have been afraid to attempt a river crossing under archery fire. One tribe is mostly lactose tolerant, the other tribe is mostly not. The leaders of the lactose tolerant tribe decide to send their cavalry, without their grain wagons, on a multiday sweep up the river in an attempt to turn the enemies' flank. They can drink mare's milk on their expedition. The lactose intolerant tribe's cavalry attempts to follow them, but gets slowed down by their food wagons. The milk-drinking cavalry outdistances the non-milk drinking cavalry to the point where they can get a full day free to cross the river.

In the next generation, the women of the lactose intolerant former tribe have many children who are lactose tolerant. The men don't have many children at all.

Now, that seems to me like group selection with a bang. Membership in the group -- outflankers or outflankees -- determines much about the fate of your genes in future generations.

But, it's often been explained to me that that's not real group selection, which can't happen because cheaters would undermine the evolution of altruism. 

Okay, but, I've  long had the hunch that this debate isn't framed as productively as it could be.

In recent years, Edward O. Wilson, the ant expert and author of Sociobiology, has taken up the the cudgels for the concept of group selection, which has widely been seen as evidence of imminent senility. A commenter, however, offers an interesting perspective.
Many here have missed the terms of this controversy. EO Wilson & co's change of mind was forced by 1999 work by James Hunt who studied multiple origins of sociality in a wasp phylogeny in which all the species had about the same “kin selection potential” and found that sociality evolved when there were strong “ecological” incentives (Hunt JH 1999. Trait mapping and salience in the evolution of eusocial vespid wasps. Evolution 53: 225-237). But since ~2005 Wilson, Hoelldobler, etc, have hijacked the controversy.

People have indeed started realizing that crucial for the existence/persistence –and thus for the evolution– of animal societies is not (or not so much) “kin selection” but rather the very rewarding ecological niches out there in which biomachines that adopt group-approaches to foraging and interference competition are much more effective trophically than are biomachines which adopt “solitary-consumer/fighter/reproducer” strategies.

This means that the evolutionary success of the genetic programs encoding such group behaviors is fully subordinate to the existence of such ecological opportunities!
In other words: people have begun realizing that, e.g., “altruism” is also a winning ecological strategy, rather than just an example of the promotion, or not, of altruism genes and the rejection (or invasion) of cheater genes.

The social-ant colony, e.g., is an ecological machine that out-competes at the foraging- and interference-competition level most other organisms in almost any terrestrial ecological setting, i.e., a social-ant colony in the field cannot be reduced natural-historically and evolutionary-historically to just an example of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy immune to “selfishness” mutations that may undermine the genetic encoding of its sociality.

Wilson indeed has always made a big deal of the fact that ant species monopolize nearly 70% of the insect biomass on earth, but he did not realize the implications of this until the wasp guy rubbed it in to him and his coterie while they were still happily repeating the empty syllogisms of kin-selection numerologists [who meanwhile have even almost managed to deny Darwin (sic!) the credit for explaining the existence of sterile ants, etc., when he mentioned in the Origin of Species that an individual's sacrifice can benefit the reproduction of relatives, i.e., kin selection].

This 70% means that evolution by “natural selection of individuals” delivers niche-occupancy strategies that suffice to claim only ~30 of the trophic energy monopolized by the insect Bauplan (assuming termites and other social insects are insignificant biomass-wise).

The situation among many mammals is the same. Wild-dog packs and hyenas, e.g., beat the hell out of tigers and lions, and biomass wise they dominate.

It is time for gratuitous faux-aprioristic arguments to be confronted with ultimate natural-historical facts. And it is also time that the applied-math peddlers posturing as evolutionary biologists learn that “natural selection” is not the same as “evolution by natural selection”, that differential fitness is always caused by differential ecological performance (and never by “genes”), and that evolution by natural selection is just something that “may” happen when there is differential ecological performance at some level of biological organization, which however does not “prove” that ecological performance is caused by molecular interactions of genes (or of proteins; genes may suffice but are not necessary for differential performance, but additive genetic variation in performance suffices for evolution driven by differential ecological performance).

In other words, Sober’s 1984 [1984 sic!] book “The Nature of Selection” should be required reading for every evolutionary biologist. Sober showed first that the “kin selection” oxymoron is a muddled verbal construct to refer to that special case of group-level differential ecological performance in which “selected” groups happen to also be kin groups (most of the time but not always... see mutualism, e.g.).

Manny Pacquiao answers my question

I was wondering why the exit poll showed 79 percent of Asians voting for Harry Reid in Nevada. Boxer Manny Pacquiao has an answer, according to Ben Maller:
Manny Pacquiao didn’t make his boxing trainer, Freddie Roach, too happy last week when he announced he’d be leaving after a workout Friday to board a flight to Las Vegas. Pacquiao, a congressman in the Philippines, had some important political work to tend to: campaigning for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “[Reid] was behind 4% in the polls before I got out there ... There’s a lot of Filipinos in Las Vegas.” Population figures show an estimated 30,000 Filipinos in Las Vegas, with perhaps triple that in all of Nevada. Reid defeated Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle by 40,000 votes ...

November 7, 2010

Cuckoo's Egg

I hadn't realized before that Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), the leading French painter of the Romantic Era, was perhaps the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, the most glamorous name in the history of diplomacy. Wikipedia says:
There is reason to believe that his father, Charles-François Delacroix, was infertile at the time of Eugène's conception and that his real father was Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character.[5] Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and king Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand's grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons.

Are there other likely examples of one famous person being the secret child of another?

November 6, 2010

An Uncle Tim


Perhaps the best-written response to Tuesday's election -- frank, clear, logical, and pithy -- is by professional anti-racist Tim Wise.

First, though, who is Tim? TimWise.org says:
Tim Wise is among the most respected anti-racist writers & educators in the U.S., having spoken in 48 states and on over 400 college campuses. He has trained teachers as well as corporate, government, media and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling institutional racism, and has served as an consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State. Wise has contributed essays to fifteen books, and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows worldwide to discuss race and racism.

His Wikipedia page says he's now up to 600 college campuses. He has an appearance scheduled at the University of the South in Tennessee next Tuesday and at Cal State LA on Wednesday. (That's not a particularly easy trip. The man works hard to make a living.) I was under the impression that he had a gig at Georgia Tech as well, but that now seems to be off his schedule. 

Now, you might think that this kind of career would be reserved for blacks, but that just shows how you aren't aware of White Privilege. Tim is a white man of Scottish and Jewish heritage.

Of all the Uncle Tims, he's the Uncle Timmiest.

It's important to understand that Tim is neither controversial nor a controversialist. The colleges that pay him his lecture fee view him as a public-spirited citizen, no more controversial than was, say, a doctor in the 1920s who traveled the country lecturing on the dangers of venereal disease. Tim is not "controversial" -- a term that has shifted in the 40 or so years I've been reading newspapers from one of praise (often, back then, with Ron Burgundyish hubba-hubba connotations: "Masters & Johnson Reveal their Controversial Report on the Female Orgasm!") to one of sniffy warning. Today, Charles Murray is "controversial." Tim Wise is, oh, "outspoken."

And Tim is not a controversialist. He is no more expected to engage in debate with those he denounces than that VD doctor was expected to debate the spirochaetes he warned against.

Keep in mind, that Tim is not a major newsmaker in American public life. The last time he was cited in the New York Times, for example, appears to have been 2006 and before that in 1992. Is that because he's kind of a junior varsity player or because what he has to say is not terribly controversial?

And that raises a key question about his recent essay, An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum. Something this lucid seem hardly like an idiosyncratic effusion. Instead, it's the product of a clear worldview. I don't think most of Tim's political allies have thought this through as fully as he has, but I think the emotions and basic logic are, indeed, widespread. We've heard endlessly about Republican anger and hatred, but Freud's concept of "projection" remains a highly useful one to keep in mind when reading the newspaper. 

Tim writes:
For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.

And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, ...

Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this . . .

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Not much more now.

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Tick.

Tock. ...
Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.

It is coming, and soon.

This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math.

Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.

The kind of math that proves how your kind—mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like—are dying. ...


And in the pantheon of American history, old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving. ...

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta. ...


We just have to be patient.

And wait for your hearts to stop beating.

And stop they will.

And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told.

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

So know this.

If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember . . .

Payback, thy name is . . .

Temporary.

It's important to note that Tim isn't calling here for, say, mass murder, just as when Khrushchev said "We'll bury you," he didn't mean "Under rubble and fallout," but more like, "We'll dance at your funeral."

But, the emotions are clear. And they're common.

November 4, 2010

My Election Overview

From my new column in VDARE:
Let’s recap what happened:

Governors: As of my writing this, some 36 hours after all the polls had closed, Republicans had won 23 gubernatorial races, Democrats nine, independents one, and four were still up in the air.

State legislatures: Numbers are hazy at present, but Republicans supposedly took 500 legislative seats from Democrats. That will be important in the upcoming redistricting based on 2010 Census numbers, and in furnishing bench strength for future races.

Senators: Republicans won 23, Democrats 12, with Alaska still not called.

House: Republicans have won 239 races, Democrats 186, with ten yet to be decided.

"House Democrats lost more than half of the land mass they once held."
 
In other words, the historic Republican House advances of 2010 occurred largely in the less densely populated parts of the country. This was as predicted by my theory of Affordable Family Formation. Back in the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that the less crowded the country, the lower the land prices and the higher the wages. That means that more people can afford, and at younger ages, to get married and have children. The 21st Century partisan corollary to Franklin’s insight: "The party of family values" thrives most where and when family formation is most affordable. The political implication: urbanizing more and more of the country through mass immigration is bad for Republicans. But Republican politicians have been remarkably slow to grasp that concept.

It’s important to remember: this fairly strong Republican performance in the 2010 mid-term elections wasn’t supposed to be demographically possible anymore. After 2008, the whole country was supposed to have become like California—where, indeed, Republicans were mostly thrashed on Tuesday. (One commenter has suggested Republicans could now label Democrats "the Party of California.")

The question was repeatedly asked after 2008: How could the GOP ever win again when the population becomes less white each year?

Well, the answer is obvious, but only semi-mentionable in polite society: the GOP needs to do two things—get white people to turn out; and get them to vote Republican. This is the “Sailer Strategy”.

That’s how Republicans have long won in the South, where the white share of the population is already lower than California. (Outside of Florida, GOP candidates won all but a handful of Southern Congressional districts that weren’t specifically gerrymandered to be majority minority.)

You’d prefer not to live in a country where whites vote like a minority bloc? Me too! But maybe we should have thought about that before putting whites on the long path to minority status through mass immigration.

In the GOP’s 2002 and 2004 victories, whites turned out in large numbers and voted Republican by sizable margins—basically as a patriotic response to 9/11 and the subsequent Bush wars.

With the war going sour in 2006, however, the Republicans failed to hold their share of whites: Republican House candidates only won the white vote 51-47 and thus lost the House.

In 2008, McCain beat Obama by a mediocre 55-43 among whites. That’s not awful, but McCain also didn’t inspire whites to turn out to vote in large numbers, while Obama excited minorities and the callow. (In 2008, 11 percent of voters said it was their first time ever in a polling booth, compared to only three percent in 2010.)

As David Paul Kuhn, author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Party, pointed out in RealClearPolitics, the MainStream Media rewrote the history of 2008 in line with their worship of Obama. The forgotten truth: after picking Saran Palin as his veep, McCain led Obama in the Gallup Poll for the nine days preceding the epochal bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. on September 15, 2008, after which Obama regained the lead. But the Crash of 2008 didn’t so much convert whites into Obama voters as depress them.

In 2010, in contrast, GOP House candidates crushed Democratic House candidates 60-37 among white voters. And minorities had a hard time getting interested in a non-Presidential contest lacking in personalities and Will.I.Am videos.

The GOP picked up 91 percent of its votes among whites—in contrast to the Democrats’ 65 percent.

The two biggest governor’s races—California and Texas—illustrate how it works. In California, Hispanics and blacks together accounted for 31 percent of the voters—compared to 30 percent in Texas. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown won Latinos 64-30. Democrat Bill White carried them 61-38 in Texas.

(Interesting side note: as Hispanics become more dominant in California’s Democratic Party, blacks have been trending slightly more Republican. Among blacks, Meg Whitman lost only 77-21, while Rick Perry lost 88-11. As I’ve argued, immigration will cause problems for the Democrats too)

Adding blacks and Hispanics together, Rick Perry did slightly worse with the Non-Asian Minority vote in Texas, losing it 73-26, than Meg Whitman did in California, where she lost 68-27.

Why, then, did Perry cruise to a 55-42 victory in Texas, while Whitman failed 41-54 in California?

Answer: because Perry won the Texas white vote 69-28. In contrast, Whitman only edged out Brown 50-46 among California whites.

Moral: If a Republican candidate can’t win a majority of whites, he or she can’t win the election.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.
 

November 3, 2010

Quantitative Easing II

The Fed wants to concoct some more money: "Quantitative Easing II."

I don't get it. To avoid a recession, the Fed dreamed up more money followed the bursting of the subprime bubble in the summer of 2007. The biggest effect of printing more money was, apparently, to drive up the price of gasoline to almost $5 per gallon in June 2008. (I recall with a shudder putting $87 worth of gas into my minivan -- very stressful). In turn, high gas prices just killed home prices in long-commute exurbs, like Palmdale / Lancaster and the Inland Empire of California. It permanently changed the psychology of homebuyers, which had been, well, sure, gas costs $3 per gallon now, but it might well go back to $1.10 per gallon like it was a few years ago. In 2008, the psychology changed to: Uh, oh, $10 per gallon is going to happen one of these days, so I'd better not get stuck way out in the exurbs.

(By the way, I have a suspicion that the Peking Olympics had something to do with the spike in oil prices. Remember how diesel got much more expensive than gasoline? Were the Chinese stockpiling diesel for some reason? Anyway, it's odd that trying to find an explanation for this bit of traumatic recent history has largely been forgotten.)

And that collapse of exurban home prices is what set in motion the collapse of Fannie/Freddie and Lehman in September 2008.

So, how is Quantitative Easing II going to make people want to buy all the foreclosed homes in the exurbs? I mean, I could see how high gas prices could do inner suburbs some good by making them more desirable than exurbs, but I can't see how printing money solves the main housing problem: the exurbs. Maybe printing more money won't inflate oil prices this time, but it sure seemed to last time.

"The political economy of the subprime mortgage credit expansion"

Here's a 2010 article by economists Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi on how Congresscritters voted in 2002-2007 on Housing Bubble-related bills:
The global financial crisis has its origins in the failings of the US housing market – and, some believe, those of the US government. ... Indeed, government intervention is often well intentioned and justified by economic theory. But once governments are involved in the financial sector, the incentives for individuals to try to manipulate government policy and politicians’ votes can be irresistible. The results can be disastrous. ...

The expansion of subprime lending coincided with key US government policies, often with cross-party backing, that reduced regulation of subprime lenders and increased mortgage support for low-income households.

Among the most prominent was the affordable housing mandate imposed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The mandate required that mortgage providers and guarantors Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae purchase a larger fraction of mortgages that serve low- and moderate-income borrowers....

Beginning in 2002, mortgage industry campaign contributions increasingly targeted US representatives from districts with a large fraction of subprime borrowers. To measure constituent interest we use zip code level data on consumer credit. Combining this with electoral data, we then compare this with campaign contributions, lobbying expenditure, and eventually congressional voting data.

During the expansion years, we find that both mortgage industry campaign contributions and the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district increasingly predicted congressional voting behaviour on housing-related legislation. In 1997 and 1998, the fraction of subprime borrowers in a representative’s district significantly predicts the representative’s votes on only 30% of roll calls. By 2003 the fraction increases to 70%.

As the solid line in Figure 2 shows, beginning with the 107th Congress in 2002, there is a sharp relative increase in mortgage campaign contributions to high subprime share districts, while there is no such pattern for non-mortgage contributions. Our results suggest that a one standard deviation increase in the subprime share as of 1998 – before the expansion – leads to a relative increase in the growth rate of mortgage industry campaign contributions of 81%.

Taken together, our results suggest that constituent interests, measured with the fraction of subprime borrowers in a given Congressional district before the subprime mortgage expansion, and special interests, measured with campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, both helped to shape government policies that encouraged the rapid growth of subprime mortgage credit.

In the final section of the study, we examine voting and co-sponsorship patterns on six bills for which competing interests are well defined, these are:
  • The American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, which aimed to increase homeownership among low-income communities by providing downpayment and closing cost assistance;
  • the Ney-Kanjorski Responsible Lending Act of 2005, which would have preempted state regulations on predatory lending;
  • the Prohibit Predatory Lending Act of 2005, which would have placed more stringent controls on subprime lenders;
  • the Mortgage Reform and Predatory Lending Act of 2007, which was a revised version of the Prohibit Predatory Lending Act that eventually passed the House (but failed in the Senate);
  • and the Federal Housing Finance Reform Acts of 2005 and 2007, which sought to tighten regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
...  Focusing on the trade-off between ideology and economic incentives, we find that conservative politicians are less responsive to both constituent and special interests. This suggests that politicians, through ideology, might be able to commit against intervention even during severe crises.

This suggests that, say, Senator Rand Paul will be less likely to go along to get along on the next trillion dollar scam.