Tony invariably wore a dark suit on Sundays and a stiff white collar. He went to church, where he sat in a large pitch pine pew, put in by his great-grand-father at the time of rebuilding the house, furnished with very high crimson hassocks and a fireplace, complete with iron grate and a little poker which his father used to rattle when any point in the sermon attracted his disapproval.
December 29, 2010
The Joys of Reaction
From Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel A Handful of Dust, the story of Tony Last, a mild English aristocrat devoted to keeping up the ancestral manse:
December 28, 2010
Betting
John Tierney crows in the NYT:
Five years ago, Matthew R. Simmons and I bet $5,000. It was a wager about the future of energy supplies — a Malthusian pessimist versus a Cornucopian optimist — and now the day of reckoning is nigh: Jan. 1, 2011.
The bet was occasioned by a cover article in August 2005 in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Breaking Point.” It featured predictions of soaring oil prices from Mr. Simmons, who was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the head of a Houston investment bank specializing in the energy industry, and the author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.”
I called Mr. Simmons to discuss a bet. To his credit — and unlike some other Malthusians — he was eager to back his predictions with cash. He expected the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, to more than triple in the next five years, even after adjusting for inflation. He offered to bet $5,000 that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars.
Crude oil prices are at about $91 today.
I certainly would have bet against Mr. Simmons, as well, but he didn't offer to bet me.
My suspicion at the time was that Simmons was, more or less, writing a $5,000 check postdated January 1, 2011 to buy his book publicity right now on the NYT op-ed page. That might explain why he didn't haggle and try to split the difference with Tierney, such as putting the win-lose line halfway between $65 and $200, the way a real betting man trying to make money would. But a public bet that the price of oil would be, say, $132.50 or higher would have been kind of a boring story. In contrast, a man confident enough to put $5,000 on the round number of $200 is a man who is acting like he might know something, and thus you'd better buy his book to find out what it is.
All that said, I fully expect to see gasoline pump prices of $5 to $10 per gallon. (I'm just not telling you when.)
"True Grit"
From my review in Taki's Magazine:
The new True Grit doesn’t get as many laughs in the theater as the genial 1969 version, which was powered by John Wayne’s happy-to-be-alive status as America’s most famous lung-cancer survivor. Shortly after the Surgeon General’s 1964 Report on Smoking, Wayne, a six-pack-a-day man, had to have his left lung and four ribs cut out. At a time when the word “cancer” was assumed to be a death sentence, to most everyone’s surprise (except his own), Wayne, although diminished, was ready for fun on True Grit.
Jeff Bridges, who received his own de facto Career Achievement Oscar last year for playing a drunken country singer in Crazy Heart, does his usual competent, creative job. Still, The Dude doesn’t quite have The Duke’s screen presence. For a force of nature large enough to fill the legendary boots of that “one-eyed fat man” Rooster Cogburn, the Coens might have turned instead to Bridges’s co-star in The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak himself, John Goodman.
Read the whole thing here.
Denis Dutton, RIP
Denis Dutton, founder of the invaluable Arts & Letters Daily website, has died at age 66 of prostate cancer. He was a professor of philosophy at the U. of Canterbury in New Zealand. When I mentioned to him once where I was from, he pointed out that he'd grown up in the San Fernando Valley, too, and his parents had owned the well-known Dutton's bookstore in North Hollywood.
His recent book is The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. He also wrote insightfully about the always interesting topic of art forgery.
You can't make this stuff up
For years, the Atlantic Monthly would run a back page column, "Word Fugitives," that solicited readers to invent clever terms for common phenomena for which there ought to be a word. And each month, brilliant suggestions would pour in and columnist Barbara Wallraff would then pick one as the best of the best. And then ... nothing would ever happen. As far as I could tell, none of these useful and self-explanatory terms would ever enter common use.
Similarly, in 2003, while reviewing a Matrix sequel, I coined the term frauteur to refer to one of a pair of brothers who make films together, fraternal auteurs such as the Coens, Farrellys, Wachowskis, Wayans, and on and on.
It's a genuine phenomenon of some interest that deserves explication: we need a frauteur theory, if you will. The emergence of frauteurs appears to have slowed down a little in recent years, probably because of the decline in the number of pairs of brothers due to the decline in family sizes after the Baby Boom, but 2010 did see the emergence of the Duplass brothers with Cyrus, starring John C. O'Reilly, Jonah Hill, and Maria Tomei. In contrast, I've never heard of a sisterly equivalent or a mixed sex pair of siblings who make movies together as a team, although I may be missing somebody.
With the Coen Brothers in the news for True Grit, I checked Google to see how far my convenient coinage had spread over the last seven years.
As you might guess, it hasn't spread at all. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
In contrast, the wholly non-self-explanatory phrase "jump the shark" shows up on 376,000 webpages. That phrase requires the recounting of an incredibly boring backstory about some television episode, which suggests that the Atlantic got it all backward by looking for clever terms. The stupider and more abstruse the etymology, the more likely chance it has to flourish.
That seems to be true not just with neologisms. Etymology is perhaps the most intellectually frustrating field of study because, as a general rule, all clever theories about the origin of any word are wrong. The real explanation is always something boring and senseless, like "from a West Frisian word for turnip greens."
By the way, that reminds me of a question: how many well-known brother-sister partnerships are there outside of male-female entertainment fields such as singing (Donny & Marie Osmond), dancing (Fred & Adele Astaire), and figure skating (various)?
For example, the Versace designing family has had two flamboyant celebrities, the late Gianni and his sister Donatella, but I'm drawing a blank on other well-known brother-sister partnerships. I'm sure there are other ones, but I just can't think of any more.
By the way, that reminds me of a question: how many well-known brother-sister partnerships are there outside of male-female entertainment fields such as singing (Donny & Marie Osmond), dancing (Fred & Adele Astaire), and figure skating (various)?
For example, the Versace designing family has had two flamboyant celebrities, the late Gianni and his sister Donatella, but I'm drawing a blank on other well-known brother-sister partnerships. I'm sure there are other ones, but I just can't think of any more.
December 24, 2010
Merry Christmas
It's time to shake my tin cup again.
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Or, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Thanks. I appreciate it, profoundly
India, Again
A continuing theme here at iSteve over the years has been the future of India.
As I first noticed back in 1981 when I was at UCLA, there sure are a lot of smart Indians in America. About a decade later, India's economic growth started to come more in line with that observation. By now, it is a cliche of spokesmen for the conventional wisdom, such as Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Thomas Friedman, that India itself is full of superstudents to whom America's lagging masses of youth must somehow try to catch up ... although what objective evidence that does exist suggests that eventuality has not fully gone through the formality of taking place yet. On the other other hand, evidence from places like Trinidad, South Africa, and Fiji suggests that pretty ordinary Indians do pretty well for themselves once they are free of Mother India.
To have a clue about India's future, it helps to know something about India's present and past. But that is inordinately complicated. Moreover, since Indians think about their society's human capital potential in terms of only partial exogenous extended families (i.e., racial groups, dozens and dozens of racial groups), Americans have a hard time grasping what they are talking about. All this Indian talk about race and IQ, well, if Americans didn't know that Indians are diverse and therefore, by definition, can't be racist, well, they just wouldn't know what to think.
A reader who calls himself Andy, writes to clear up matters about the intellectual structure of modern Indian life.
"Most of this information is passed through word of mouth from elders to youngsters and it would be hard to find this kind of detail in books. So enjoy!"
I'll put Andy's description of the different categories of South Asians and their rough IQ levels below the fold:
December 23, 2010
Uniqueness
Jay Matthews delivers breathtaking news in the Washington Post: acceptance rates to get into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, perhaps the hardest public science school in the country (average exiting SAT score of 2220 out of 2400):
Looking at applicants of different ethnicities, the crux of Meikle's question, 184 African Americans applied and four (2.3 percent of those applying) were admitted. With Hispanics, the figures were 225 applied and 13 (5.8 percent) admitted. In the multiracial category, 190 applied and 21 (11 percent) were admitted.
The number of whites (1,277) and Asians (1,243) who applied was close, but their admission rates were not. Of whites, 166 (13 percent) were admitted and 276 Asians (22.2 percent) were admitted.
So, Asians first, whites second, Hispanics third, blacks fourth. What an astonishing result! Who has ever seen that rank ordering before in any competition involving test scores and grades? It's an anomaly!
Of course, no attempt is made to compare this to the countless similar situations where similar results are seen. We're only supposed to to talk about Thomas Jefferson HS. What is it about TJHS that leads to such remarkable results? We're simply not supposed to notice any similar pattern elsewhere, and thus preserve our intellectual virginity for thinking about the Virginia school. People who have actually learned things from general patterns are considered unwanted gatecrashers.
2010 Census Results
From the Center for Immigration Studies, a first glance at the 2010 Census numbers:
Steven Camarota, (202) 466-8185, sac@cis.org
Immigration Drives Huge Increase; Since 1980, Population Up 82 million, Equal to Calif., Texas & N.Y.
WASHINGTON (December 21, 2010) – Most of the media coverage of the 2010 Census will likely focus on the country's changing racial composition and the redistribution of seats in Congress. But neither of these is the most important finding. Rather, it is the dramatic increase in the size of the U.S. population itself that has profound implications for our nation's quality of life and environment. Most of the increase has been, and will continue to be, a result of one federal policy: immigration. Projections into the future from the Census Bureau show we are on track to add 130 million more people to the U.S. population in the just the next 40 years, primarily due to future immigration.
So much for attempting to hold national carbon emissions stable.
- Immigration accounted for three-quarters of population growth during the decade. Census Bureau data found 13.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived in the last 10 years; there were also about 8.2 million births to immigrant women during the decade.1
- The numerical increase of 27.3 million this decade is exceeded by only two other decades in American history.
- Without a change in immigration policy, the nation is projected to add roughly 30 million new residents each decade for the foreseeable future.
- Assuming the current ratio of population to infrastructure, adding roughly 30 each decade will mean:
- building and paying for 8,000 new schools every 10 years;
- developing land to accommodate 11.5 million new housing units every 10 years;
- constructing enough roads to handle 23.6 million more vehicles every 10 years.
- While our country obviously can 'fit' more people, and technology and planning can help manage the situation, forcing such high population growth through immigration policy has profound implications for the environment, traffic, congestion, sprawl, water quality, and the loss of open spaces.
- ...While immigration is making our population much larger and our country more densely settled, it has only a modest impact on slowing the aging of our society. It must be remembered that native-born Americans, unlike couples in most other developed countries, still have about 2 children on average.2
- Census Bureau data collected earlier this year showed that the 13.1 million immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years, plus all of the children they had once in the country, have reduced the average age in the United States slightly, from 37.4 years to 36.8 years.3
- As the Census Bureau stated in its population projections published in 2000, immigration is a 'highly inefficient' means for addressing the problem of an aging society in the long run. The updated projections done in 2008 show the same thing.4
I'll say.
December 22, 2010
iSteve Christmas Panhandling Drive
It's time to shake my tin cup again.
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.
Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the Paypal "Donate" button on the top of column to the right.
When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen by clicking on the word "Continue" in the lower center/left.
Or, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.
Thanks. I appreciate it, deeply.
More PISA in Perspective
At Super-Economy, Tino takes another crack at PISA scores, putting up graphs that overcome two of the weaknesses I pointed out in my own PISA graph: I could only find scores for America by race for 2009 for reading (and Americans overall did better on reading in 2009 than on science and math), and I used national average scores for other mostly white countries. So, Tino compares the average of reading, math, and science for white Americans to Europeans who are not first or second generation immigrants to come up with a good apples to apples comparison. Finland is still well in the lead (546), but the U.S. comes in seventh (524) out of 27 European-origin countries, well ahead of, for example, the EU-15 average for wealthy Western European countries (506).
That sounds about right. There's a lot of evidence that the U.S. spends a lot on education and get at least something in return. Not great, but not bad either.
Remember, there is, inevitably, a lot of noise in PISA scores, so fine comparisons aren't too reliable.
Remember, there is, inevitably, a lot of noise in PISA scores, so fine comparisons aren't too reliable.
"Out of Africa, with Benefits"
Here's that big new science story I teased a couple of days ago. By Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:
An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.
All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.
An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them. ...Next, the researchers looked for evidence of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa, Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.
“The correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and Bougainville genomes. ...
Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of these ancient genomes.”
If the genomes of New Guineans come almost 5% from non-modern humans, then the obvious next step is to test the genomes of Australian Aborigines, who are last in line in the original Southern, Indian Ocean shoreline route Out of Africa. However, there are a lot of regulatory barriers against testing Aborigines, perhaps out of fear that scientists will find something like this. After all, Aborigines look a little archaic, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if their genes turn out to be a little archaic.
It was lucky that the first findings of non-modern human ancestry involved Europeans, or it would have been hard to get up the political courage to publish this.
So, the Out of Africa model of evolution of the current human race turns out to be mostly, but not wholly, correct. Greg Cochran calls the new model "Out of Africa, with Benefits:" modern humans picked up useful genes from older human types, and not all of those inheritances spread equally to the entire current human race, probably in part because they aren't equally useful in all environments.
Here's an FAQ by John Hawks. And here are comments by Dienekes.
By the way, here's an interesting 2006 article on Nick Patterson, one of the scientists involved. He's had successful three careers, first as British and American government cryptologist, then as a quant for James H. Simons' hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and now as a genome researcher.
Obama sends sharp warning to employers
The NYT runs a long, mildly gloating article over the Washington Post's Kaplan unit being sued by the Obama Administration for disparate impact job discrimination in a precedent-setting case:
Sending a sharp warning to employers nationwide, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation on Tuesday, accusing it of discriminating against black job applicants through the way it uses credit histories in its hiring process.
With the unemployment rate close to 10 percent, is it really a good idea for the Obama Administration to be "sending a sharp warning to employers nationwide?"
The lawsuit, an unusual intervention by the federal government on the issue, comes amid rising concerns that employers are denying jobs to applicants with damaged credit histories, even in cases where creditworthiness does not appear to be directly relevant to the job...
Private and government surveys have suggested that about half of all employers use credit histories in at least some hiring decisions.
Justine Lisser, an E.E.O.C. spokeswoman, said that credit histories were often inaccurate and might not be a good indicator of a person’s qualifications for a particular job. “Credit histories were not compiled to show responsibility,” she said. “They were compiled to show whether or not someone was paying the bills, which is not always the same thing.”
In the E.E.O.C.’s suit, which was filed in federal district court in Cleveland, the agency said that since at least January 2008, Kaplan had rejected job applicants based on their credit history, with a “significant disparate impact” on blacks.
“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity,” the commission said. The agency did not specify what types of jobs were involved.
... The company added that it typically conducted background checks on all prospective employees. “The checks are job-related and a necessity for our organization to ensure that staff handling financial matters, including financial aid, are properly screened,” Kaplan said. Kaplan and other for-profit education companies have come under intense scrutiny from the federal government because of concerns that the industry leaves too many students unable to repay large federally backed education loans, while providing them with little help in finding jobs. The Department of Education has proposed regulations that would cut off federal financing to for-profit education companies whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low repayment rates.
Let me see if I understand this: One part of the Obama Administration says that some of what Kaplan does borders on being a scam (which seems pretty plausible); meanwhile, another part of the Obama Administration demands that Kaplan hire people who on average have worse track records of untrustworthiness.
Sounds like a plan to me!
The bigger issue is not Kaplan, of course, but the Obama Administration choosing to make it riskier to hire Americans (instead of outsourcing or insourcing to illegal aliens less likely to sue). Obviously, taking away a tool that firms find profit-making in hiring just discourages hiring; yet, I don't think that's obvious to many people these days when it comes to race, where we've all been taught to shut our brains off and just point fingers at bad people.
The federal lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Kaplan’s use of credit histories in hiring and other employment decisions. The agency is also seeking lost wages and benefits for people who were not hired because of Kaplan’s use of credit reports to screen applicants, and it wants Kaplan to make employment offers to those individuals.
Michael J. Zimmer, a professor of employment law at Loyola University in Chicago, said that, under federal law, “if an employment practice has a disparate impact on a certain race, you have a case.” He said that the E.E.O.C. would not have brought the case unless it had reviewed statistics about Kaplan’s hiring.
“I think the issue is going to boil down to whether it’s justified as job-related and necessary for business,” he said. “That’s the defense’s standard in a disparate impact case.”
As I said last month in VDARE, the most obvious area where Obama could use his political capital to boost hiring is by declaring victory in the war on discrimination:
... Obama could announce that his election as President shows that the civil rights war is officially over and it’s time to reap the peace dividend: the federal government can dramatically cut back its persecutions of employers for race-related reasons.
Nothing the President could do with a stroke of his pen would do more to cut unemployment by making it legally safer to hire Americans than Obama announcing that, between now and the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in 2014, he will lay off most of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bureaucrats and other federal racial inquisitors.
And the business climate would be immediately improved by Obama abolishing the EEOC’s innumerate “Four Fifths Rule.”
Sure, if Obama declared victory on civil rights, his base would howl. But, that's pretty much how you accomplish something as President: by stabbing your supporters in the back.
Conversely, could a President Haley Barbour abolish the Four Fifths Rule in 2013? Of course not, he'd have to boost pointless enforcement to show he's on the side of the angels.
But Obama actually has an opportunity here for statesmanship, which he's, so far, failing utterly to seize, and public affairs discourse is so braindead over anything approaching race that nobody even notices his chance.
December 21, 2010
A semi-exception to the Fundamental Constant of Sociology
You always come across smug dismissals of The Bell Curve as being discredited, but you never hear explanations from them of why the U.S. military has put such emphasis on cognitive testing for several generations now. In fact, I once interviewed the retired head pscyhometrician of one of the major branches of the military, who had provided the military's AFQT testing data to Charles Murray. He said Murray and Herrnstein had done a bang up job with it.
In general, the military tries to keep a very low profile about their addiction to IQ-like testing, mostly releasing data to projects like Rand Corporation studies that nobody in the press ever reads, but now the Army has cooperated with The Education Trust, a Nice White Lady organization.
From the Associated Press:
Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the military fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can't answer basic math, science and reading questions.The report by The Education Trust found that 23 percent of recent high school graduates don't get the minimum score needed on the enlistment test to join any branch of the military.
That's 23% of high school graduates who want to join the Army and the Army wants them because they don't have other black marks against them like obesity or a bad criminal record, who can't get in because they score too low. Add in high school dropouts, and, overall, the Army sets the minimum score for the heavily g-loaded AFQT (the very IQ-like test featured in The Bell Curve) for enlistment at the 31st percentile.
The study, released exclusively to The Associated Press on Tuesday, comes on top of Pentagon data that shows 75 percent of those aged 17 to 24 don't qualify for the military because they are physically unfit, have a criminal record or didn't graduate high school.
Perhaps this is right, but I suspect that to get to 75% unfit to serve before cognitive testing, they are simply summing the percent disqualified for each of those reasons and ignoring the overlaps: e.g., kids who are fat, dumb, and crooked get counted three times, not once. Hopefully, I'm right that the Youth of Today aren't quite that bad, but, maybe I'm just a cockeyed optimist ...
"Too many of our high school students are not graduating ready to begin college or a career — and many are not eligible to serve in our armed forces," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the AP. "I am deeply troubled by the national security burden created by America's underperforming education system."
... This is the first time ever that the U.S. Army has released this test data publicly, said Amy Wilkins with The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based children's advocacy group. She said the organization worked with the U.S. Army to get raw data on test takers from the past five years.
... The Education Trust study shows wide disparities in scores among white and minority students. Nearly 40 percent of black students and 30 percent of Hispanics don't pass, compared to 16 percent of whites.
The funny thing is that this particular white-black racial gap isn't quite as large as the normal one standard deviation gap seen in La Griffe du Lion's Fundamental Constant of Sociology. Probably due to self-selection and range restriction, the black-white gap is less than one standard deviation here. But, the authors of the report and the AP don't notice that the Army represents a below-average sized problem because we aren't supposed to know about the Fundamental Constant.
Even those passing muster on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, usually aren't getting scores high enough to snag the best jobs.
The AP article is a little confused about a tricky aspect of the military's admission test. The AFQT is, last I checked, a highly g-loaded four-test subset of the the ten test ASVAB, which includes less g-loaded tests of specific skills, such as vehicle repair. The AFQT is not exactly an IQ test -- it includes questions on trigonometry, for example, which almost nobody learns outside of school. So, yes, if schools did a better job of teaching trig, then more of their graduates would pass the AFQT.
But, results on the AFQT correlate closely with leading IQ tests, so it's close enough for government work. You must score at the 31st percentile or above on the AFQT (roughly a 92 IQ) to be allowed to join the Army. Once you clear that hurdle, they look at your ASVAB scores, which includes tests of things like auto repair, for help in determining vocational specialties. If you are already a first rate shade tree auto mechanic, then you might be able to skip truck repair school.
"A lot of times, schools have failed to step up and challenge these young people, thinking it didn't really matter — they'll straighten up when they get into the military," said Kati Haycock, president of the Washington-based Education Trust. "The military doesn't think that way."
If there are 310 million people in the country, then about 100 million aren't smart enough to enlist in the Army. Over 140 million aren't smart enough to enlist in the Coast Guard.
Those are gigantic numbers that simply don't register on the pundit class. And when they are reminded of them, of course, the only thing they can say is "fix the schools."
But, tautologically, 30% of youth are going to be in the bottom 30% of youth.
I knew a kid who was totally focused on enlisting in the Army. The recruiter thought he was great, but then he flunked the AFQT. So, the Army paid to send him to an AFQT boot camp for about six weeks, where the kids live in barracks and where uniforms while they bone up on the AFQT. He loved it. The sergeants picked him as Best Recruit in the program. Then he took the AFQT again. And still failed.
He was a good kid but he just wasn't smart enough to enlist in the Army. In the conventional wisdom, Americans like him don't exist.
In the real world, they do.
The average enlistee in the U.S. military is above the national average in intelligence.
Christina Theokas, the author of the study, said the test was updated in 2004 to reflect the current needs of the Army, and the Army didn't want to release data from before the realignment.
Recruits must score at least in the 31st percentile on the first stage of the three-hour test to get into the Army or the Marines. Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard recruits must have higher scores.
From the Education Trust's report, Shut Out of the Military:
Table 1: Enlistment Eligibility 2010
The minimum AFQT score required to qualify for entry into the
military varies by branch.
Service Branch Minimum Required AFQT Score
Army 31 [i.e., 31st percentile]
Navy 35
Marines 32
Air Force 40
Coast Guard 45
... For the Army, those who score at the AFQT level of 31 and higher—Category IIIB and above—qualify for enlistment. Those scoring at 50 and higher on the AFQT [i.e. 100 IQ], falling into Categories IIIA and above, are eligible for Army
incentive programs including enlistment bonuses, college repayment programs, and the Army College Fund (a monetary incentive that increases the value of G.I. Bill benefits). ...
Recruits that rank at the highest AFQT levels are eligible for special opportunities. While most military jobs are tied to the kind of composite scores described above, certain elite categories are available only to those who also possess an especially high AFQT. For instance, jobs in technical fields require significantly higher AFQT scores than the minimum score needed for regular enlistment. These high level jobs, because they come with education, training, and skills development, open doors to high-level career paths, provide better active-duty experience and pay, and set up enlisted personnel for greater success following life in the service.
You can see the source at Military.com here. The Education Trust report continues:
Our sample consists of the nearly 350,000 high school graduates aged 17-20 who applied for entry into the Army between 2004 and 2009 and took the ASVAB at a Military Entrance Processing Station. These young people are among the 25 percent of young Americans who do not have problems preventing them from applying for enlistment in the military. Approximately 50 percent of these applicants, a total of 172,776, joined the Army. The group is not representative of individuals across or within states and the nation, but is a self-selected sample of individuals aged 17-20, with a high school diploma,
and an interest in joining the Army. We chose only to examine the results of recent high school graduates to have a sample of individuals who had experienced similar high school requirements and standards. ... In the sample, 58 percent of the test-takers were white, 19 percent African-American, 12 percent Hispanic, 8 percent unknown, 1 percent each of Asian, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander, while 76 percent were male and 24 percent female.
About 23 percent of the test-takers in our sample failed to achieve a 31 —the qualifying score—on the AFQT. Among white test-takers, 16 percent scored below the minimum score required by the Army. For Hispanic candidates, the rate of ineligibility was 29 percent. And for African-American youth, it was 39 percent.
That's the IQ ineligibility rate among non-obese, non-crooked, high school graduates who want to join the Army.
The AP story goes on:
The average score for blacks [in this self-selected sample of high school graduates wanting to join the Army] is 38[th percentile] and for Hispanics is 44, compared to whites' average score of 55. The scores reflect the similar racial gaps on other standardized exams.
Actually, these are pretty narrow for racial gaps. All the other filters reduce the variation. Moreover, there's now a multi-generation tradition of lower middle class blacks enlisting in the Army (as opposed to the other branches).
The Education Trust report goes on to complain that:
To qualify for specific occupational specialties, recruits must earn certain scores in nine different Army aptitude areas. For example, to qualify for any of the Special Forces positions, a recruit must earn a score of 110 on the General Technical composite score, which is a weighted average of Arithmetic and Verbal Expression. Approximately 66 percent of applicants did not meet this minimum score. However, nearly 86 percent of African-American applicants and 79 percent of Hispanic potential recruits did not meet the minimum for these specialties, as compared to 60 percent of white potential recruits.
But, once again, these are narrower racial gaps than are found in the overall population.
The Associated Press article suffers from one obvious mistake:
The study also found disparities across states, with Wyoming having the lowest passage rate, at 13 percent, and Hawaii having the highest, at 38.3 percent.
No, this sentence is a typo in the AP news story that gets the meaning 180 degrees wrong. Figure 2 in the Education Trust report is entitled "AFQT Ineligibility Rates by State." The worst failure rate is in Hawaii (followed by MS, DC, LA, SC, NM) and the least bad failure rate is in Wyoming (followed by IN, ID, NE, NH, MN).
More interesting numbers from the report's state tables:
Among white youths with high school diplomas applying to join the Army, the lowest failure rates were in Indiana (10.1%), Alaska, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Among whites, the highest failure rate was, by far, in Maryland (27%). Next was DC, then Kentucky. The high failure rates for whites in liberal MD/DC is probably due to the military being seen by MD/DC as a good place to dump the dud in the family.
Best performances by blacks were in Oregon, Arizona, Alaska, (all small sample sizes), Indiana and New York. Worst performances by blacks were in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin.
Best performances by Hispanics were in small sample size states like Montana, Alaska and Indiana. Worst performances by Hispanics were in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Texas's Hispanics did slightly better than California's.
"Casino Jack"
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison for, as far as I can tell, running a little more amok than is considered seemly among Washington insiders.
As Abramoff brushes his teeth in the opening scene, he pumps himself up for a long day of throwing his weight around with his own personal 1980s action-movie catchphrase: “I am Jack Abramoff and, oh yeah, I work out every day.” When Abramoff escorts his Indian-chief clients, one in an eagle-feather headdress, into the Oval Office, George W. Bush greets him with, “Hey, Buff Guy, what are you benching?”
Granted, a timelier movie could have been made about, say, Tony Rezko, the current president’s old friend and fundraiser, who is still being held in an undisclosed location awaiting sentencing. A half-decade ago, the press thoroughly covered Abramoff’s career of fleecing crooked Indian tribes to fund a sniper school for West Bank settlers. In contrast, the Chicago Democratic operative’s similarly wacky life (as the business brains behind the Nation of Islam, Rezko managed the Black Muslims’ most famous convert, Muhammad Ali) remains almost unknown due to the media’s aversion to mentioning anything interesting about Barack Obama’s background.
Read the whole thing there.
Big science news coming
I don't know what it is, but I've been alerted that there should be science news soon of a caliber comparable to the recent human-neanderthal inter-mating story.
The Secret of Jack Abramoff
Yet, exposure of the megalomaniacal Abramoff has more highlighted the idiosyncrasy and general craziness of Abramoff's personality. I think I've finally figured out the secret of Jack Abramoff's outsized persona, something that the movie hints at repeatedly but nobody else in the punditry seems to have picked up on.
One clue: How did George W. Bush greet Abramoff?
PISA school test scores by ethnicity
My big graph showing how the four main American races would do compared to 64 other countries in this year's PISA reading test scores is up at VDARE.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)