What I really want WikiLeaks to leak

The WikiLeaks' State Dept. cables revealed so far have been mildly entertaining. For example, American diplomats reported on President Sarkozy of France (according to the NYT):

But the cables also convey a nuanced assessment of the French leader as a somewhat erratic figure with authoritarian tendencies and a penchant for deciding policy on the fly. ... By January 2010, American diplomats wrote of a high-maintenance ally sometimes too impatient to consult with crucial partners before carrying out initiatives, one who favors summit meetings and direct contacts over traditional diplomacy.

... Mr. Sarkozy was criticized by European diplomats referred to in a cable for an “increasingly erratic” last half of his 2008 European Union presidency.

“Combined, these stories have bolstered the impression that Sarkozy is operating in a zone of monarch-like impunity,” said an Oct. 21, 2009, cable. 

In December 2009, Mr. Rivkin told Mrs. Clinton: “Sarkozy’s own advisers likewise demonstrate little independence and appear to have little effect on curbing the hyperactive president, even when he is at his most mercurial.” He added: “After two years in office, many seasoned key Élysée staff are leaving for prestigious onward assignments as a reward for their hard work, raising questions as to whether new faces will be any more willing to point out when the emperor is less than fully dressed.”

Nothing terribly surprising here, but gossip is fun. I especially look forward to (hopefully) forthcoming cables about Berlusconi.

What I'd really like WikiLeaks to leak, however, is the exact counterpart of this: what French diplomats are telling Sarkozy about Obama. It would probably be a lot more interesting than what the American press has told the American public about Obama.

For example, if Sarkozy tends toward mania, the obvious question is: does Obama tend toward depression? 

Obama's own memoirs suggests that the President suffered through significant depressive episodes in roughly 1981-1983 (a period when his sister asked his mother during a visit, “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here”) and 2000-2001 (of the 18 months following his crushing defeat by Bobby Rush, Obama wrote, "Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality.")

But some Googling on "Obama" and "depressive" brings up mostly an Onion piece and me.

Is Obama entering a third depressive phase?

I don't know, but it would seem both interesting and important. Of course, the American press hardly noticed Obama's references to his first two depressive phases, so we can hardly count on them to be on top of this question. 

On the other hand, I would suspect the energetic Sarkozy has been pestering his diplomats in Washington to keep him apprised of the Most Important Man in the World's mood swings. Maybe some day we'll be able to read what they've found out.

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

Stutterer Awareness?

You're going to be hearing a lot about the Weinsteins' movie The King's Speech between now and the Oscars. It's a sort of fake social concern Oscar film -- Stutterer Awareness! -- that turns out to be charming and entertaining.

And that got me thinking about why stutterers, like King George VI, aren't, actually, an identity politics special interest group. What helps determine who gets to be an identity politics group and who isn't?

Like left-handers, another group that isn't much of a group, stutterers occur fairly randomly across the population. So, the vast majority of their social allegiances are to non-stutterers. And most stutterers have non-stuttering loved ones.

Queen Elizabeth II believes her father's stutter was somehow related to his being forced as a child to switch from left-handedness to right-handedness, although the scientific evidence on this theory remains vague, at best. But that raises the point that Left Handers Liberation -- the big social change in the first half of the 20th Century when parents stopped forcing their lefthanded children to write righthanded (Ronald Reagan was a natural lefthander switched over to righthandedness, while three of the four subsequent Presidents have been public lefthanders) -- is completely off the radar. PBS never runs documentaries celebrating this triumph over bigotry.  

Lefthanders tend to view themselves as slightly better than righthanders (certainly at baseball, perhaps at creativity) who have to put up with a lot of hassles dealing with the physical world. In general, however, society expects lefthanders to pay for their own accommodations. For example, a running joke on The Simpsons is that Ned Flanders owns a shop at the mall that sells expensive scissors and so forth for lefthanders. Left-handed golf clubs are rare, so most left-handers play golf right-handed. Nobody ever gets worked up over this bit of unfairness.

Stutterers don't particularly want "awareness," either. Most stutterers would like to stop being stutterers. They view stuttering as a defect, which lefthanders generally don't view left-handedness.

Stutterers aren't, on the whole, all that articulate in speech (although there's a subset of stammering as an affectation: e.g., Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited or William F. Buckley going "B-b-b-b-b-b-but" on Firing Line as Hubert Humphrey steams onward).

It's worth comparing two kinds of deaf people: those who start out deaf and thus learn sign language, and those who gradually go deaf. The first form a small but rather fierce identity politics group, since their primary language is signing. (American signers can converse easily with French signers, but not with English signers, because American Sign Language is an offshoot of French Sign Language.) So, they form an insular cultural/language community. Innovations like cochlear implants threaten to take people out of the community, so leaders of the sign language using community tend to be against them. There is a lot of radical deaf activism at the sign language college, Gallaudet University.

On the other hand, the profoundly deaf aren't at all articulate, neither in speaking (of course), nor particularly in writing -- they have to think in sign language, in pictures of fingers according to Oliver Sacks, then translate into English. So, the media mostly ignore them.

People who gradually go deaf, on the other hand, do not form much of any kind of identity politics group at all. They are very happy to get better hearing aids.

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

One Loyalty

Newsweek has a long profile of Rep. Luis Gutierrez, whom I recently cited as a prime example of how racial gerrymandering creates extremist politicians:

“I have only one loyalty,” he says, “and that’s to the immigrant community."

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

"The King's Speech"

From my review in Taki's Magazine:

In outline, The King’s Speech sounds like a Wayans Brothers spoof (Oscar Movie) of a Weinstein Brothers prestige film: the King of England, a victim of society’s prejudice against stutterers, is empowered by an impudent immigrant therapist to overcome his stiff upper lip just in time to rouse his countrymen to defeat Hitler.

Here, though, practice does make perfect. The King’s Speech is delightful: fast-paced, funny, touching, and extraordinarily well-acted.

Veteran TV-movie screenwriter David Seidler (who finally has written a cinema hit at age 73) is aware that overcoming one’s fear of public speaking isn’t an exceptionally edifying Triumph of the Human Spirit story, but it’s something with which almost everybody can identify. The British Royal Family remains of broad interest because it plays out on a grand stage such human-scale dramas as speech impediments and engagements.

The King’s Speech illustrates G. K. Chesterton’s 1905 insight that hereditary kingship is “in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule.”

Read the whole thing there.

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

The #2 Whitopia is Idaho; The #1 Whitopia is ...

Audacious Epigone has a table derived from the Pew Research Center of net migration trends for white people in the housing bubble years of 2005 to 2007.  

By 2007, Idaho had 4.6 percent more white people than it had in 2005, making it the country's #2 Whitopia for that period. During those years 384,000 residents of America (i.e., not immigrants from foreign countries) moved into Idaho and 307,000 moved out. So, net, Idaho added 77,000 Americans from interstate migration over that period, of whom 53,000 were white.

The term "whitopia" comes from a black author, Rich Benjamin, whose recent book "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America," took him to places like Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which he found to be pretty darn nice. In the course of his research, he took up golf and discovered that he really enjoys it. (The fourth picture down here is of the Coeur d'Alene golf course.)

Interestingly, Hispanics only accounted for 2,000 and Asians 1,000 of the net increase in Idaho. Blacks, however, made up 22,000 of the net increase in Idaho. So, Idaho is also a new Blacktopia. Who knew?

In 2008, McCain carried 65 percent of the white vote in Idaho.

In contrast, the #1 Whitopia for 2005-2007 is a place where Obama carried 86 percent of the white:, of course, Washington D.C. The nation's capital lost from interstate migration (i.e., not from immigration/emigration), net, 37,000 blacks, 5,000 Hispanics, and 2,000 Asians. But it gained 10,000 whites, for a net increase in its white population of 5.1 percent just from 2005 to 2007.

According to the 2008 exit poll, whites accounted for 35% of all votes in D.C., despite a huge black turnout for Obama. African-Americans were down to 56%. This sense within D.C. of the inevitable triumph of white liberal technocrats, leading to a whitopia of good public schools and high property values, was given a rude shock by the technocratic Fenty administration being given the boot in 2010 by black voters.

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

Immigrants and Exurbs

Ever since African-American voters in Washington D.C. kicked out school reformer Michelle Rhee, lowering property values in gentrifying sections of D.C., blogger and D.C. condo-owner Matthew Yglesias has been on the warpath to admit 165,000,000 immigrants to the U.S.. You might think that the subsequent increase in global carbon emissions alone would make that an expensive way to drive African Americans out of D.C. in order to improve the public schools and raise Yglesias's property value, but, you see, Yglesias has a triple bankshot plan to remake America into his beloved native Manhattan. He thinks 165 million immigrants couldn't help but come in handy in the Manhattanization of America so that everybody will take the subway to work.

But, has Yglesias ever asked immigrants where they want to live? Much of the evidence suggests: in the exurbs, in big houses, with big air conditioners, driving big SUVs. For example, here's a 2009 article by Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing entitled Immigrants and the Suburban Influx. It describes exurban Gwinnett County, about 30 miles outside of Atlanta. Famous as a white flight region just a couple of decades ago, Gwinnett is now majority minority, with lots of prosperous Indians and Koreans. Maybe in a generation or two, affluent Indians and Koreans will want to lead the downtown hipster life, but right now they want the traditional American Dream of a home with a yard and a big car (i.e., they want to emit a lot of carbon.)

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

"There will always be a reasonably passionate opposition"

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense. ...

Is there anything good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an individual level, no. It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells of human sympathy. Honor belongs to the people who resist partisanship’s pull, instead of rowing with it.

But for the country as a whole, partisanship does have one modest virtue. It guarantees that even when there’s an elite consensus behind whatever the ruling party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or passing Obamacare), there will always be a reasonably passionate opposition as well. Given how much authority is concentrated in Washington, especially in the executive branch, even a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is better than no opposition at all.

At the very least, the power of partisanship means that there will always be someone around, when Americans are standing spread-eagled and exposed in the glare of Rapiscan, to speak up and say “enough!”

Okay, but what happens when elites of both parties are in favor of a bad idea? To return to air security, President Bush campaigned in 2000 against ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims by airport security and Al Gore immediately said "Me, too!" Bush's Transportation Department had been running a big program in 2001 to crack down on profiling of passengers who look like Arab terrorists at the time that 19 Arab terrorists got on their flights on 9/11. (See my 9/11/2001 article for UPI, "Bush had called for laxer airport security.") Did the Democrats rush to denounce Bush for making it easier for Mohammed Atta to board? Did Republicans turn on Bush?

No, what happens is largely that the issue disappears down the old memory hole.

Similarly, how about Bush's push for more zero down payment mortgages in the name of fighting racist redlining?

I've largely devoted my career to raising unwelcome questions about bipartisan elite consensuses. It's not a wise career choice.

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

The Set-Aside Boondoggle

Heather Mac Donald explains in NRO in The Set-Aside Boondoggle another detriment on the economy. 

Allow me to reiterate that the one comparative political advantage that Obama personally would possess in improving the economy is his ability as a black President to set in motion -- so should he choose -- the reform of the huge number of distortions in economic life due to the Civil Rights Era of the last half century.

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

"Why isn't Mexico rich?"

Asks Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics blog, citing a paper by an American economist about how the Mexican government has done much of what American economists have advised them to do, with only fair to middling results.

The comments are relatively interesting. I would add that it's worth looking at areas in the U.S. with a traditionally Hispanic dominant population, such as parts of the upper and lower Rio Grande Valley as a test of the institutionalist explanations. They tend to be much richer than Mexico, but much poorer than the rest of the U.S., thus showing the institutionalist theory's glass is part full and part empty.

I would also add that a lot of Mexico isn't terribly poor anymore. Overall, the current life expectancy in Mexico is 97.5% of the life expectancy in the U.S.

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

Well-Staffed

You can't complain that high tuition private colleges aren't well-staffed these days. From an article in the Washington Post about problems college freshmen have with their parents when they go home on vacation for the first time:

A growing number of colleges are helping freshmen and their families navigate the fine art of learning to live together once again. Last week, George Washington University hosted a seminar for about 40 students on "Going Home: It will be different."

The university's Office of Parent Services also sent a letter to parents explaining that their kids won't be the same people this semester - and probably will sleep a lot.

Tips included: "Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress." The letter ends with a couple of phone numbers to the school's Office of Parent Services that parents can call "if things get rough."

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

Would a Sarrazin-like megaseller even find a publisher in New York?

The publishing sensation of 2010 is Thilo Sarrazin's million selling work of statistical analysis, Germany Abolishes Itself. You might think that the New York publishing industry would be abuzz over rumors of plans for how to put out a similar product to obtain megasales. But all I hear is crickets chirping. 

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

An English review of Sarrazin

Via Arnold Kling, David Goodhart, editor of the U.K. Prospect, reviews Thilo Sarrazin's book Germany Abolishes Itself in his magazine, which may have been the best intellectual journal in the English language over the last decade:

Thilo Sarrazin, a minor German politician on the technocratic wing of the country’s Social Democratic party, has just written what is probably the bestselling political book in postwar Europe (1m copies in hardback and counting). Everyone in Germany knows at least a simplified version of what Germany Abolishes Itself says, and the reaction to the book is helping to drive government policy on minority integration.

The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that educated Germans are having fewer children and the fastest growing part of the population are poorly-integrated Muslim immigrants). That “stupider” is, of course, contested and has led to accusations of a flirtation with eugenics—of which more later.

But Sarrazin is no right-wing populist in the image of Jörg Haider, the late Austrian politician, or even Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamic leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Much of the book is a dry compendium of economic and social data. Indeed, I suspect his book is the political equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—much purchased but little read. Although controversy has swirled around his comments on group intelligence and the failure of German immigration policy, there is little in German public policy that he does not also take his axe to: welfare policy, education and training policy (apparently Britain now has a much higher proportion of students studying maths, science and technology than Germany), the poverty lobby and more. In fact, it is a meticulously prepared trashing of the liberal pieties of the 1968 generation.

The political and media class’s initial instinct was to denounce the book, and Sarrazin was forced out of his job at the Bundesbank. But as sales started to take off and as the new social media—the bloggers and emailers—lined up overwhelmingly behind Sarrazin, the reaction of political Germany shifted, albeit grudgingly. Chancellor Angela Merkel opportunistically declared the happy-clappy multikulti of the German left to have “failed utterly.” There was even a respectful and self-critical essay in Der Spiegel magazine by a leading liberal, Peter Schneider.

This shift is rather remarkable and it may help to prevent the rise of a serious right-wing force equivalent to France’s National Front. As the book complains, German public debate has, for obvious historical reasons, been more constrained by various kinds of taboos about national culture than any other big European country. As recently as 2000 a leading Christian Democrat politician, Friedrich Merz, had his political career damaged by merely asking that minorities show respect for the law and institutions of the dominant culture (Leitkultur). In the ensuing row the then-president of Germany, Johannes Rau, declared that he was not proud to be German.

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.

Another difference that struck me was the invisibility of the Turks and the other big minorities living in Germany, compared with the relative visibility of Britain’s minorities. I later worked out why this was. There was what Peter Schneider calls an “unholy alliance” between left and right to pretend that Germany did not have an integration issue—especially amongst its Turkish, middle eastern and north African minorities. By 1990, there were more than 2m Turks living in Germany, many of them second and third generation. Yet the Christian Democratic right still refused to accept that some of the “guest workers” who had arrived in the 1950s and 1960s had come to stay—and rejected the idea that Germany was an “immigration country.” This meant that they put no effort or money into turning Turks into Germans. As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent. So the mainly Muslim minorities were left alone in their parallel worlds.

I would add my impression after a couple of weeks in Turkey attending Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society conference in Bodrum, which is kind of like the Santa Barbara of Turkey, is that Turks don't particularly want to make spectacles of themselves either. In some ways, Turks and Germans seem pretty similar in personality, although Turks don't drink much, so they are less likely to loosen up after a few beers the way introverted Germans sometimes do.

The most obvious personality differences are in neuroticism and conscientiousness. Germans tend to be energetic worrywarts, while Turks are more sedate and easygoing. This makes driving in Turkey less alarming than I had expected. Even though winding country roads in Turkey feature vehicles of wildly different maximum velocities, from S-Class Mercedes to the common sight of a farmer driving a tractor pulling an open wagon holding a dozen middle aged ladies in head scarves, Turks in slower vehicles are pretty good about pulling over to let faster cars go by. It's a polite culture.

On the other hand, there are lots of stray dogs around because they aren't really into worrying and organizing about things like that.

If I were a Turk I'd be proud of being a Turk and would have no problem coming up with reasons why I shouldn't conform to the neurotic culture of the Germans. Who cares about stray dogs?

Add in Islam ...

... The fact that Muslim migrants perform poorly in the context of German society does not, however, support the outlandish claim that they are inherently stupider than Germans or other minorities. Sarrazin does not quite say this but he does assert that their poor performance is dragging down the country’s average ability level—something that could probably be said of most of Europe’s immigrant groups from poor countries, at least for a generation or two.

Turks in Germany are well into a third generation. How's that working out?

Much of the issue is upon whom should the burden of proof be placed. Germany is currently 45 years into a massive social experiment. So far, the vast majority of the evidence is on the side of Sarrazin. Social scientists Detlef Rost and Heiner Rindermann conclude: "As far as the psychological aspects of his book are concerned, they are largely compatible with the state of knowledge in modern psychological research."

Not surprisingly, the political class in Germany thinks, however, that it's all much too soon to tell. Germany should merely wait another 45 years, by which time everybody responsible for the current situation will be beyond blaming. What could be fairer?

Goodhart goes on to repeat the standard embarrassing sophistries about intelligence, which is depressing in reminding us that a good guy like Goodheart is reduced to this in today's anti-intelligence intellectual world. But, he concludes:

Ultimately, Sarrazin’s hard-headedness is a welcome counterpoint to the wishful thinking of the 1968 generation. The former finance minister of Berlin, who looks like a soldier in the Kaiser’s army, is a member of the awkward squad. You can imagine him causing minor riots at liberal Berlin dinner parties. Most of his argument is clear-eyed and well-informed, but he could not resist the provocations both on intelligence and on the nature of the underclass, which he never bothers to define. Yet the fact that his book has been so influential, despite the provocations, marks an important step forward for Germany—not only in facing up to the failures of its past immigration policies, but also in bridging the wide gap between popular opinion and the political class and thus preventing a German Haider.

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

Link Fixed: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1"

Read my review in Taki's Magazine:

Kids these days have short attention spans.

Or so I’ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of “synaptic pharmacology,” recently warned the House of Lords that social-networking websites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity.”

Yet having recently plunked my 20th-century mind down amid an otherwise superbly attentive young audience cheering on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the seventh and penultimate film in the witches and warlocks series, I suspect the opposite is truer. When sufficiently interested, the new generation can display attention spans that boggle the old. 

Read the whole thing there.

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

More unsolicited advice for President Obama

In VDARE this week, I offer the President another policy suggestion that he won't hear from anybody else that would be politically feasible and good for himself, good for the Democrats, and good for the country.

You're welcome, Mr. President.

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

"Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction"

The NYT has a long article on the younger generation's shrinking attention spans.

By MATT RICHTEL

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.

It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it. ...

“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. ...

Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly’s new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.

“Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the program used by the best music studios in the world,” he says.

In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had secured iPads to help teach the language.)

I was going to read the whole thing, but I got distracted. 

Anyway, one thing I did notice before I zoned out, however, is that Woodside H.S. is one of the Five Bad Schools featured in the much-lauded documentary Waiting for "Superman". In this article, though, it sounds groovy.

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

Rindermann's "Smart Fraction" paper

I should have gotten around to posting on this before, but here, via Steve Hsu, is the 2009 paper The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competences of peoples on social development by Heiner Rindermann, Michael Sailer (no know relation), and James Thompson.

To test La Griffe du Lion's "smart fraction" theory, they first synthesize a large number of results from international school achievement tests (PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS), then convert them to an IQ-like scale where Britain has a mean of 100 and the standard deviation is 15. (They don't use Lynn and Vanhanen's database of IQ tests, but Rindermann previously showed strong correlations between L & V's numbers and performance on international school achievement tests. Just looking through this data from international school achievement tests, it's remarkable how few surprises there are if you are familiar with Lynn and Vanhanen's data from IQ tests.

The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.

There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)

Since these tests report performance at the 5th and 95th percentiles, we can see not only the means but also the performance at the top and bottom by countries. Here, for example, is the last page of their results, Singapore to Yugoslavia/Serbia.

Singapore, a high-income high-cost, well-administered city-state, has the highest school achievement test scores in the world at their 95th percentile. It would be interesting to compare a metropolitan area, such as Silicon Valley, to Singapore. Judging by National Merit Scholar awards, the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile.

They write:

The highest values for the smart fractions are found in East Asia (1. Singapore IQ 127, 2. South Korea IQ 125, 3. Japan IQ 124, 5. Taiwan IQ 123, 9. Hong Kong IQ 122). A similar result was found in psychometric (average) intelligence or in student assessment studies (see Rindermann, 2007a). Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. Better are the traditional Commonwealth countries (5. New Zealand IQ 123, 7. Australia IQ 122 and 8. United Kingdom with IQ 122). They are followed by Western and Eastern European and North American countries, by South European countries, Arab or Muslim and Latin American countries and finally by sub-Saharan countries.

Most of the Gulf Arab countries do awful, but United Arab Emirates does quite well (mean 92).

The countries with the lowest results [at the 95th percentile] are 84. Botswana (IQ 96), 85. Saudi-Arabia (IQ 95), 86. Morocco (IQ 95), 87. Kyrgyzstan (IQ 94), 88. Belize (IQ 90), 89. Ghana (IQ 89) and 90. Yemen (IQ 84). Presumably many not participating countries would have lower values.

Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan (6., IQ 122) and the comparatively low for Israel (31., IQ 118, mean 93).

You mean, we were lied to by the movie Borat?

For Kazakhstan we have only results from TIMSS 2007 (4th grade); Mullis et al. (2008, p. 34) describe sample anomalies, a correction would be necessary. Israel has participated in several studies, compared to older studies and [for?] Jews in the Western World the results are deteriorating (e.g. Lynn & Longley, 2006). Most probably multiple reasons are responsible and not only the 20% fraction of Arabs (a thorough analysis would be necessary).

Israel's score at the 95th percentile is ahead of Norway's, so it's not that bad, but Long Island would probably do better. Israel is a country where Zionist intellectuals designed a populist, non-intellectual culture, so smart kids don't get as much cultural backing in Israel as in other parts of the Jewish diaspora.

There are also characteristic differences between mean, upper and lower levels. For instance between Canada and USA there is no difference in the upper level (IQ 120 and 120), but in the lower level (IQ 80 and 75). The past history of slavery and a different immigration policy (or different success of migration policies and geographical distance to societies with lower mean abilities) may be reflected into this difference. A similar pattern could be found for Finland and Germany: The difference in the upper level is only 1.20 IQ-points (IQ 121 and 120), but at the lower level 9.60 IQ-points (IQ 85 and 76). Most likely different immigration histories are reflected here, furthermore differences in educational policy (age of tracking, in Germany between age 10 and 12, in Finland at age 16). Early tracking increases ability variance.

I presume Thilo Sarrazin was thinking about results like this? It would be fun to see Jurgen Habermas respond to Rindermann.

Using regression analysis (as predictors mean and lower level) the largest residual (standing for difference between upper level and the rest) is found in South Africa (with its heterogeneous population of European, Asian and African descent), inverted the largest residual (standing for difference between lower level and the rest) is found in Belgium (probably a result of immigration and educational policy).

A few other notes: Armenia has a low bottom but a decent high end, close to Norway and Belgium. Armenia scores better than Georgia. Oddly, Azerbaijan beats Armenia at the bottom but has a very poor top.

Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).

Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).

China and India aren't on the list.

Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.

South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).

They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.

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

"American Narcissus: The Vanity of Barack Obama"

Jonathan V.  Last had a good article a few weeks ago in The Weekly Standard demonstrating the size of the President's ego.

For example, he highlights this quote from a 2008 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” 

If true, Obama should have hired better speechwriters, policy directors, and political directors ASAP.

Two points:

Does Obama have a sense of humor about his egomania? For example, 

Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” 

Now, that's not a bad ad-lib. I'm sometimes surprised by Obama's wit because Dreams from My Father is so self-serious. Still, I'm left wondering about whether Obama makes many second order jokes about his ego? (I don't watch TV news so I can't say.) Or does he take himself that seriously? You can't expect a President to be humble, but you can hope he'll be self-aware about his ego. Some of Obama's more egregious lines in Last's compendium could be taken as Obama mocking his own ego, but I haven't noticed that he does that. But I could be wrong.

The second point is that Obama's Smartest-Guy-in-the-Room syndrome is directly related to his being constantly seen by his admirers (including his Admirer-in-Chief, the President) as the Living Refutation of The Bell Curve. It's not a coincidence that just about the only exercise in national journalism Obama indulged in during the 1990s was to deliver on NPR in 1994 a commentary on The Bell Curve. 

Much of David Remnick's hagiography The Bridge, for instance, consists of smart Jewish people raving about how smart Obama is. He was the one they'd been waiting for to hold up as an example of a smart black guy, which, in turn, in the "He who says A must say B, C, and D" reasoning that dominates American intellectual life today, could be read to also imply the really important lesson of all this: that Jews aren't naturally smarter on average (so put away those pitchforks). 

I know this web of subliminal logic seems ridiculous when exposed to the light of day, but that's how a lot of important people feel.

The problem with all this investment in Obama's smartness as more than just a personal characteristic is that for any of minions to say to him, "No, Mr. President, you don't understand" or "Let me try to explain that more simply" is not just a personal and political insult, but is also a racial insult.

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

Love

Back in 2007, freshman UCLA basketball center Kevin Love -- whose father Stan played for awhile in the NBA and whose uncle Mike (and Kevin's more distant relatives, the Wilsons) were in the Beach Boys -- dominated the first four rounds of the NCAA tournament, only to look slow and short (he's 6-7.75 barefoot) and white against Memphis St.'s NBA-level athletes in the semifinals. 

My idea at the time was that rather than head immediately to the NBA, Kevin Love should announce he was going to stay all four years at UCLA. That would make him very popular in SoCal (which should pay off in the long run), attract numerous one-and-done superstar recruits to UCLA, and probably lead to one or two national titles. (The downside is that the NBA pays by check and college basketball chews up your knees -- e.g., Patrick Ewing's 4 years at Georgetown were more awesome defensively than his career with the Knicks.)

Love, however, thought he knew better than I did about just how good he was, so he went to the NBA.

It turns out: he was right. This year, at age 22, when he'd be a senior at UCLA under the Sailer Plan, Love is making like the second coming of Moses Malone, leading the NBA in rebounding following last week's game in which he became the first man since Moses in 1982 to have 30 points and 30 rebounds in one game. 

Last year, I though the same thing about running back Toby Gerhart of Stanford: he should announce he was passing up the NFL to try to lead Stanford to the national title in football, which would make him very popular in Silicon Valley, which can't be a terribly bad thing. But he went to the NFL, where he's gotten a couple of dozen carries as a backup for Adrian Peterson's in Minnesota, averaging 3.6 yards per carry, which is okay, but isn't exactly leading fans to demand Peterson be benched.

The funny thing is that Stanford just might have won the national title this year if Gerhart had returned for his last year of eligibility. This year, Stanford is 9-1 and #6 in the BCS rankings, with a terrific quarterback in Andrew Luck and an amazing story in Owen Marecic, who is starting at both fullback and middle linebacker. I remember when Tommy Nobis and Leroy Keyes started on both offense and defense in college in the mid-1960s, but not many since then. Marecic has scored four touchdowns rushing and one on an interception return (scoring on offense and defense on consecutive plays from scrimmage against Notre Dame.) 

Stanford's only loss was to #1 ranked Oregon, a game in which Stanford took a 21-3 lead. But, they didn't grind out the clock because they they failed to get the ball enough to Gerhart.

So, I've only been proven wrong in one of my two suggestions, at least so far.

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