January 5, 2011

"The Rise of the New Global Elites"

Chrystia Freeland writes in the Atlantic:

... But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

... I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.” 
... Wilson’s distinction helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving.

For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others.
 
Unsurprisingly, Russian oligarchs have been among the most fearless in expressing this attitude. A little more than a decade ago, for instance, I spoke to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” 

By the way, just because Khodorkovsky is an SOB doesn't mean that his jailer, Mr. Putin, isn't an SOB-squared.

Though typically more guarded in their choice of words, many American plutocrats suggest, as Khodorkovsky did, that the trials faced by the working and middle classes are generally their own fault. When I asked one of Wall Street’s most successful investment-bank CEOs if he felt guilty for his firm’s role in creating the financial crisis, he told me with evident sincerity that he did not. The real culprit, he explained, was his feckless cousin, who owned three cars and a home he could not afford. One of America’s top hedge-fund managers made a near-identical case to me—though this time the offenders were his in-laws and their subprime mortgage. And a private-equity baron who divides his time between New York and Palm Beach pinned blame for the collapse on a favorite golf caddy in Arizona, who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble.

... The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. 

Not surprisingly, the word "immigration" never comes up in the article. Dissent suppression seems to be working fine.

I've argued for citizenism as an alternative to the reigning ideologies in part because globalism is so endlessly vulnerable to manipulation by clever elites.


Hall of Fame and Steroids and Naked Ballplayers

Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar got voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame today. Nate Silver wonders if too few players are getting in these days, what with there now being 30 teams and larger populations to draw from. In his first year of eligibility, Houston Astros slugger Jeff Bagwell didn't get in. Silver says:
Steroid use — actual or suspected — is another issue. Rafael Palmeiro, whose case was debatable on the statistical merits anyway, and who was actually suspended by Major League Baseball for steroid use, would not have made my ballot. Like Tyler Kepner, however, I cannot understand docking Bagwell for mere suspicion of steroid use when there is no evidence of it. 

I can. For one thing, players have 15 years of eligibility to get voted into the Hall (and if they fail there, can get picked by a Veterans Committee later). But they can't get kicked once they're in. So, what's the rush? Blyleven had to wait 15 years to get voted in. Why not wait awhile to see what shakes out? Let's see what turns up. This would only be a major injustice to Bagwell if he suddenly drops dead before he gets in. And if he suddenly drops dead ...

One advantage that working sportswriters have over statistical analysts like Silver in voting on whether players who hit a lot of homers during the steroid years should be entrusted with permanent Hall of Fame membership is that many of the sportswriters, unlike the stats analysts, saw these players naked in the locker room. For example, when Jeff Bagwell went from a .516 slugging average at age 25 to a .750 slugging average at age 26, how much different did he look with his jersey off? Statistical analysts like Nate don't know. I don't know either. Some of the sportswriters who get to vote for Hall of Famers do know, and have, I would guess, talked to other voting sportswriters about it.

Personally, I don't know, I've never heard any rumors about Bagwell. 

Tyler Kepner in the NYT says he's voting for Bagwell and all the other sluggers who haven't gotten official caught:
Circumstantial evidence can be used against anybody. Mike Piazza might have been the most productive offensive catcher in baseball history. But suspicion of steroid use has dogged him, even though, like Bagwell, there has never been a tangible link.

Did Piazza use steroids? I don’t know. He denied it in 2002 by explaining, “I hit the ball as far in high school as I do now.” [Piazza was drafted in the 62nd round out of high school by the LA Dodgers, and he was the brother of Tommy Lasorda's godson, so he wasn't all that awesome in high school.]

All I know for sure is that Piazza played like a Hall of Famer and should be enshrined for that. The New York Times does not allow its writers to vote for the Hall of Fame, but to me, the playing record is the only fair way to measure those who were never suspended for using steroids. 

The rumor I heard in the 1990s was that sponsors often wanted to feature Piazza shirtless in ads, but his back acne was so bad this made for a major issue. (Acne on the back is one possible symptom of juicing.) I recall finally seeing a commercial of Piazza shirtless, but with so much backlighting he was more or less in silhouette.

To me, the tough question is Barry Bonds, who was a first round Hall of Famer before, evidently, he started juicing in 1999. A lot of these other guys might not have gotten close to the Hall without the juice. Rafael Palmeiro, for example, was traded away by the Cubs because they had Mark Grace to play first base instead of him. Grace is the model of the pretty good player, the slick-fielding firstbaseman who never hit more than 17 homers in 15 seasons in little Wrigley Field, who doesn't belong in the Hall. He got only 4% vote for the Hall in 2009 and was dropped from consideration.

Copyright News: Gerry Rafferty, RIP

Scottish pop-rocker of the 1970s (Stuck in the Middle with You and Baker Street with the unforgettable sax solo), Gerry Rafferty, has drunk himself to death at 63.
"In the 2009 interview, Mr. Rafferty called the music industry “something I loathe and detest.” Nevertheless, he earned nearly $125,000 a year in royalties for “Baker Street” alone." 

So,  his daughter or her heirs will collect on Baker Street until 2081.

What were the best movies of 2010?

Put your recommendations in the comments.

Does spending more on education improve test scores?

Conservatives have been saying for a long time that spending more on schools doesn't raise test scores: just look at how much D.C. spends per student or how much the U.S. spends versus Finland.

But Tino at Super-Economy crunches the test scores (PISA internationally and NAEP in the U.S.) after adjusting for demographics, and finds positive correlations between spending and test scores:
However the left in the United States doesn't use this argument, because they are ideologically averse to demographic adjustments having to do with race and ethnicity (most of them consider all statistical generalizations about race and ethnicity somehow offensive, regardless of why you are doing it).

The result of liberals' political correctness is that they are depriving themselves of a very important argument in a very important debate.

True, but there are other adjustments that need to be made, such as for cost-of-living and/or wealth. Compared to Mississippi, New Jersey has expensive public schools, but then it's an expensive place to live full of expensive people. In Tino's comments, I suggest a few methodological wrinkles he should add.

In general, Americans spend a lot of money on schools. The architecture and landscaping of American colleges, for example, is often absurdly lavish. Do expensive buildings raise, say, LSAT scores among individual undergrads, as opposed to attracting better applicants? 

Probably not much. Other reasons are more important, such as social climbing, monument building, regional pride, and so forth. One reason that's often overlooked is that school isn't just preparation for life, it is part of life. For example, Rice has a lavish campus due to the generosity of some rich people and I appreciated my four years admiring the aesthetics that they had arranged for my edification. Similarly, one point of hiring high quality teachers is to have your kids talked to by high quality people.

A reader writes:

Of the 8,320 people who took the GRE between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2008, and indicated that Secondary Education was their chosen field of graduate study, exactly *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test.

Of the 5,901 people who indicated that Elementary Education was their chosen field of study, *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test.

And of the 1,521 people who indicated that Early Childhood Education was their chosen field of study, *zero* scored an 800 on the verbal test. 

If you widen the net to catch those in the 700-790 range, the results aren't much better. I think this supports the conventional wisdom (or is it the conventional unconventional wisdom?) that teaching in the U.S. is low-status and low-pay, so it inevitably attracts the low performers among the college-educated. Improving the quality of our public schools is contingent upon changing the composition of the teaching pool.
I scored an 800 on the GRE verbal section, but I attend, however improbably, a mid-tier education school in a master's program. Most classes are a waste of time, and insulting to my intelligence, to boot. I was dismayed enough last fall to send off a fusillade of applications to law schools and PhD programs in history. I will do a round of student teaching at a Chicago public magnet school, and then probably bolt.  

I think this is a big, unspoken problem: teacher indoctrination in  Ed Schools and in professional development can be painful to self-respecting intelligent, independent minded people. It's hard to get first rate people to be teachers when they have to put up with so much inanity to earn their credentials.
My publishe articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 4, 2011

Intellectual Property Rights

Reading up on how Rep. Howard Berman (D-Disney) works to extend copyrights (while many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, consider copyright laws the work of the devil), I was reminded that I've never been persuaded why I should much care pro or con about the copyright controversy. Every time I try to think it through, it all seems to come out a wash.

For example, Matthew Yglesias today laments all the books and movies from 1954, such as Lord of the Flies, Horton Hears a Who, and On the Waterfront, that would have entered public domain these days if the old 56 year copyright had been maintained.

Today, copyright extends for 70 years after the date of the author's death. This length seems pretty absurd, and it creates a tiny gentry of people who have inherited lucrative copyrights. For example, Hugh Grant's selfish character in About a Boy has never bothered to work because his father composed the 1950s novelty Christmas song Santa's Supersonic Sleigh.

But, I have a hard time seeing how length of copyright does much, pro or con, for the quality of entertainment.

I went to the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain and was underwhelmed by their vision of a utopia in which Creature from the Black Lagoon enters public domain this year:
Think of the movies from 1954 that would have become available this year. You could have showed clips from them. You could have showed all of them. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. (You could have been a contender!)

Or you could mash up your favorite movies from 1954 and release Creature from the Waterfront. But it all sounds pretty tedious.

It seems to me that a lot of the anti-copyright enthusiasts are stuck in an adolescent fan-boy stage where you just want to remake your favorites and you don't feel worthy of making up your own stuff. 

I'm reminded of this story that Keith Richards likes to tell about how the early Rolling Stones just wanted to perform cover versions of American songs, but manager Andrew Oldham kept telling them about how much money there was in writing original songs. So, he locked Mick and Keith in a kitchen until they'd written a song. After they'd eaten all the food in the kitchen, they decided they might as well try writing a song. So they came up with "As Tears Go By."

Warning: not all of Keith Richards' memories are wholly reliable.

January 3, 2011

Gerrymandering

In VDARE this week, I compare two examples of how the press has treated two Members of the House of Representatives who have been major beneficiaries of racial gerrymandering: the media has portrayed Howard Berman's gerrymandering with appropriate cynicism but Luis Gutierrez is repeatedly profiled with near-complete credulity.

January 2, 2011

Canadian Border Alert

In the NYT, Nicholas Kristof writes:
Professors Wilkinson and Pickett crunch the numbers and show that the same relationship holds true for a range of social problems. Among rich countries, those that are more unequal appear to have more mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, high school dropouts, teenage births, homicides, and so on.

They find the same thing is true among the 50 American states. More unequal states, like Mississippi and Louisiana, do poorly by these social measures. More equal states, like New Hampshire and Minnesota, do far better. 

So, it's not the ice hockey that's behind Moynihan's Law of Proximity to the Canadian Border, it's the inequality.

Now, it could be that the Rich Getting Richer is, overall, a bad thing. I don't know. But, the single most obvious quantitative example runs in the opposite direction.

Here's one historical experiment in the effects of the Rich Getting Richer that ought to be familiar to subscribers to the New York Times: homicides in New York City.

New York City always had a lot of income and wealth inequality, but it really took off with Wall Street's boom that started part way through 1982. The rich in New York City became unbelievably rich in the 1990s and 2000s. And what happened? Homicides in New York City hit 2,245 in 1990, then dropped 79 percent by 2009.
 

December 30, 2010

Is there a Silent but Sensible Majority anymore?

A commenter on the PISA post below writes:
Well, the question I ask myself is what percent of the American population doesn't really deep down believe that HBD is probably a substantial factor in all these sorts of things...

Ten percent? Five percent? One percent? Zero percent?

The floor is open for people's guesses...

Back before I started participating 18 years ago in Internet discussions with anonymous participants, I would have agreed with these low estimates. All these years later, however ... I dunno. Maybe there is a Silent But Sensible Majority out there somewhere. Maybe.

To pick a random example of the quality of contemporary thought, here is an online discussion on Hacker News / Ycombinator about Tino's recent blog post at Super-Economy showing the PISA results when you adjust for demographics. Reading through it, it's hard to take away the impression that there are a lot of people out there who are well informed and hold reasonable views. Instead, you just see a lot of people getting intellectually snarled up in their own underwear. 

My approach has always been based around my sense that I'm not smart enough to juggle in my head complex wrong ideas. I need to find the simplest answers that work (but, as Einstein said, no simpler).

Happy New Year

It's time to shake my tin cup again.

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Study Chinese or Spanish?

Nicholas Kristof opines in the NYT:
... we’re seeing Americans engaged in a headlong and ambitious rush to learn Chinese — or, more precisely, to get their kids to learn Chinese. Everywhere I turn, people are asking me the best way for their children to learn Chinese. 

Partly that’s because Chinese classes have replaced violin classes as the latest in competitive parenting, and partly because my wife and I speak Chinese and I have tortured our three kids by trying to raise them bilingual. Chinese is still far less common in schools or universities than Spanish or French, but it is surging and has the “cool factor” behind it — so public and private schools alike are hastening to add Chinese to the curriculum.

In New York City alone, about 80 schools offer Chinese, with some programs beginning in kindergarten. And let’s be frank: If your child hasn’t started Mandarin classes by third grade, he or she will never amount to anything.

Just kidding. In fact, I think the rush to Chinese is missing something closer to home: the paramount importance for our children of learning Spanish.

Look, I’m a fervent believer in more American kids learning Chinese. But the language that will be essential for Americans and has far more day-to-day applications is Spanish. Every child in the United States should learn Spanish, beginning in elementary school; Chinese makes a terrific addition to Spanish, but not a substitute. 

No, unless you have Chinese relatives, or are based in China for your job, or your child is a prodigy at learning languages, having your kid study Chinese will almost surely turn out to be a waste of time. Chinese is hard. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any adult in America who learned Chinese just by going to school in America.

Check out the Chinese Language and Culture Advanced Placement test results. In 2010, 3,426 Asian students scored 5s out of the 4,294 Asians who took the test, for an average score of 4.70. In other words, the AP Chinese test was taken mostly Chinese kids who already spoke Chinese. In contrast, only 229 white kids took the Chinese test, and only 26 in the whole country got a 5. (No Mexican-Americans got a 5, but 4 blacks did.)
Spanish may not be as prestigious as Mandarin, but it’s an everyday presence in the United States — and will become even more so. Hispanics made up 16 percent of America’s population in 2009, but that is forecast to surge to 29 percent by 2050, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center.

As the United States increasingly integrates economically with Latin America, Spanish will become more crucial in our lives.

No, it won't become crucial. 

You can tell by looking at parents' fads in Los Angeles, which is a generation or more ahead of the rest of the country in terms of immigration. I've lived on-and-off in Los Angeles since the 1950s. My parents engaged in the same kind of discussion as this in 1972 when my mom wanted me to take French in high school and my father wanted me to take Spanish, which he argued, like Kristoff in 2010, was more practical.

I suspect the debate was basically about where my parents would like to go on vacations. My mom liked Europe because it was classy, while my father liked Latin America because it was cheap. My dad won, so I took two years of high school Spanish, and he and I took some fun trips to Mexico and South America while my mom stayed home. 

Did this dispute between my parents have major consequences for my life? Not that I notice. Over the last twelve months, the language I've most often wished I'd studied has been German, but that may be a passing phase, and I wouldn't have learned it even if I had studied it, anyway.

I would endorse Spanish as the most reasonable choice for fulfilling a mandatory foreign language requirement, but I think English is becoming so globally dominant that we should probably reconsider whether we should have mandatory foreign language requirements at all. (If we should, then we ought to start them in elementary school, not after puberty when the language learning capability starts to shut down.) 

The point is that I don't know many people in LA today who say, "Wow, I'm so glad my parents made me study Spanish in high school, and it's crucial to my children's future that they learn Spanish." Maybe if you are a politician, a slumlord, or a fast food franchisee. Where I live in LA, Russian and other Slavic languages are heard more and more on the street. (Hey, who won the Cold War anyway?

If any language is trendy with LA parents, it's Chinese. For example, one of the public elementary schools that Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for "Superman," drove his kid past in Venice to get to their private school has switched to Mandarin immersion and has recruited a much more fashionable set of children. I can't recall knowing any any white liberal parents in LA looking for a Spanish immersion school.

In LA, which is one of the largest Spanish-speaking cities in the world, Spanish has been out of fashion for years. 

Even Latino kids agree. As I've pointed out before, it might be easier in LA to see a movie in Persian than in Spanish. I go to the Plant 16 movie theatre in Van Nuys a lot, where about 80% of the patrons are Hispanic youths, and they almost never have movies in Spanish, whether dubbed or foreign, and maybe have one out of 16 screens showing an American movie in English with Spanish subtitles. Granted, Van Nuys is, by Latino LA standards, pretty wealthy but still ...

Ron Unz's Prop 227 largely banned bilingual education in 1998, and that rare act of Anglophone assertiveness pushed on an open door. To a typical Mexican-American teen, English is a lot cooler than Spanish.

Similarly, educated liberal white people in LA pay almost zero attention to what is going on in the Spanish-language media in LA. The LA Times and local NPR and PBS stations make minimal effort to stay informed about what Spanish monoglots are talking about. For example, the huge turnouts of illegal aliens at Mayday marches in 2006 was a complete mystery to the LAT/NPR/PBS. Who told all these people to march? It took weeks for the Anglo press in LA to find out that it was funny morning disk jockeys on Spanish-language radio stations. 

Is there any intellectual life in America that's carried out in Spanish? A decade ago, I was fascinated by a series of articles called "Los Amigos de Bush: The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush’s Latino advisors" by Julie Reynolds in a smart bilingual Mexican-American magazine called El Andar, but nobody else was.

LA isn't Canada or Belgium, where two equally sophisticated cultures compete for cultural dominance. It's definitely not Miami, where Spanish-speaking sophisticates probably have the upper hand. 

LA is just the future.

December 29, 2010

PISA Forever

The New York Times sends a reporter to Shanghai to discover what the secret is of Shanghai schools that makes their 15-year-old students do so well on the PISA tests:

... The five-story school building, which houses Grades eight and nine in a central district of Shanghai, is rather nondescript. Students wear rumpled school uniforms, classrooms are crowded and lunch is bused in every afternoon. But the school, which operates from 8:20 a.m. to 4 p.m. on most days, is considered one of the city’s best middle schools.

Oh ... so, that's the secret! Rumpled school uniforms. Or maybe busing in lunch every afternoon. Or could it be the nondescript school buildings? Well, it's got to be something.

Seriously, the article does point out that Shanghai students tend to behave in a more disciplined manner in the classroom than American students, which can't hurt.

The big, unmentioned story in American education is how institutional (i.e., outside-the-classroom) support for teachers in maintaining discipline in the classrooms has been undermined over the decades by disparate impact worries. The Obama Administration, for example, has only increased the persecution of schools that try to maintain order. From the New York Times earlier this year:
School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge
... poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior. On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.

Any time a student is sent out of the classroom to maintain order -- whether to the dean's office, to after school detention, to home for a suspension, or out the door on an expulsion -- can be counted and thus used as evidence in a disparate impact discrimination lawsuit against a deep-pocketed school district. Lawsuit settlements typically require that voluminous statistics then be maintained and published on disciplinary actions by race in order to facilitate future disparate impact lawsuits. For example, Los Angeles public schools publish online their expulsion and suspension data by race for each of the last five years. (Here's the disciplinary data by race for Chatsworth H.S. in the far northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.)

In contrast, what the teacher does in the classroom to maintain order can't be counted.

Thus, the enormous emphasis in the conventional wisdom today on how we must use value-added statistics to identify good teachers and fire bad teachers: because disparate impact lawsuits undermine institutional support for discipline, we're down to needing to find teachers who can maintain order in their classrooms through sheer force of personality.

For example, Teach for America's model for who will make a good teacher is A) got into an exclusive college (i.e., smart), B) got good grades there (i.e., hard-working), and C) has a demonstrated track record of leadership accomplishment (i.e., charismatic alpha personality).

That's swell, but smart, hard-working people with commanding personalities, such as Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Bill Belichik, Warren Buffett, Margaret Thatcher, and the like sometimes have better things to do than be schoolteachers. We need to be thinking instead about how our institutions can provide teachers who are not paragons with the support they need to do their jobs.

For example, it would be nice to be able to hire a person who both  A) cares deeply about making The Great Gatsby come alive for today's youth and B) lives to put young punks in their places. Sometimes, you can find a person who is outstanding at both. Most of the time, however, it's easier to hire two people, one to teach English and the other to be Assistant Dean of Discipline and Offensive Line Coach, and then have them specialize in what they do best. But, that puts school districts in jeopardy of violating disparate impact norms. Hence, the current emphasis on finding Superman teachers and firing the non-Supermen.

In contrast, Pat Buchanan's new column takes a more realistic approach to what the PISA scores tell us:
Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising. [PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know, December 19, 2010]

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese.

White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests. 

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points. 

America's public schools, then, are not abject failures. 

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America's schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America. 

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

"The Town" viewed from "The City"

My man in Istanbul writes about Ben Affleck's Boston Irish bankrobber flick:
I watched "The Town." I liked it.

A deep, self-destructive voice in me said I wanted to be there, in Boston. I probably wouldn't amount to much of anything, not even something like those characters, but heck, who gives a ****. I like the Irish. Maybe they're... Turks of the North, I don't know.

So they're "dysfunctional," eh? Good, I like dysfunctional. I grew up in it, it's my home.

The melancholy, the absence of a ridiculous perkiness and an annoying smirk on the face, the quiet fortitude of stoicism... all of them are good.

**** optimism.

"Life is innocent and just" said Nietzsche -- to invert the ridiculous, phony pessimism of Liberalism which can't get over thinking that "life is unfair" and that the bloody Gov'ment should do something about it... as if It ever could.

Pain is an extreme form of sensitivity. And Fear -- the anticipation of Pain -- is Nature's way of whispering in your ear "Look out, buddy; I'm here. I'm not to be disrespected. Ever."

Merry Christmas!

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:
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 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.