In manner, Daniels is not classically presidential. Some say he is short (though others do not regard 5 feet 7 inches as freakishly diminutive). He does not dominate every room he enters. But he is not without political skills, in an offbeat sort of way. If you have some time, Google “Mitch TV” and you can watch a few episodes of the reality show his campaign produced during his gubernatorial races.
February 25, 2011
Mitch Daniels in 2012?
Mitch Daniels, the two-term Republican governor of Indiana is, as far as I can recall, the only potential President I've had dinner with a couple of times. (Note to future opposition researchers: I wasn't me back then, so don't bother.)
Nice guy. Didn't instantly come across as Presidential Timber. David Brooks writes in "Run, Mitch, Run:"
Seemed like a bright corporate executive type, which I guess he was at the time. Andrew Ferguson writes: "He favors pressed sport shirts and sharply creased Dockers, public-golf-course casual," and that seems about how I recall him: like the kind of marketing research executive I used to play golf with. An impressive guy, but it's interesting to hat met somebody before they become a really big deal.
Interesting facts about Mitch Daniels:
- He's had two marriages and one wife. He and his wife, by whom he has four daughters, divorced in 1993 and remarried in 1997. In 1930s, remarriages were the favorite happy endings to screwball comedies, but they usually strike me as evidence of interesting internal passions not wholly consistent with his image of chipper blandness.
- He's Hillbilly/Arab-American. His mother was born Daisy Wilkes, while his paternal grandparents were born in Syria.
- Drugs form a continuing theme in his life. His father was a pharmaceutical salesman, he was arrested at Princeton in 1971 for LSD, and then he was, between government gigs, an Eli Lilly executive. When I mentioned to my wife that he was being mentioned as a Presidential candidate, she recalled how interested he'd been in her tale of one of her relatives' medical problem and how enthusiastically he had recommended a Lilly drug then in trial. (It turned out to be a bust, with some nasty side effects, but she appreciated his concern.)
February 24, 2011
Chris Christie in 2012?
On paper, NJ governor Chris Christie sounds like a pretty good nominee for the Republicans in 2012. The GOP these days is rooted in the South, so a northeasterner gives a good balance.
But, how fat does the guy look? I've never met him and I don't watch much television, but is he just too fat to go up against a half-Luo skinny incumbent President?
Hoist by their own petard in Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to take away the collective bargaining power of the teacher's union follows years of attacks by white liberals on teachers and teachers unions for failing to Close the Gap.
Consider the beginning of the media-celebrated documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman.'" Davis Guggenheim, white liberal dad, winner of an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary, drives past three public schools in Venice every morning to get to a private school in Santa Monica. He muses on the narration that he felt he was “betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.”
Why, then, doesn't he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn't think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He'd never get another Oscar.
So, Guggenheim makes a well-publicized documentary to blame his private decision on what's best for his kids on the horrible, evil teachers unions who prevent America from Closing the Gap. See, if only the teachers unions weren't screwing up black and Hispanic students so bad, Davis Guggenheim and his wife, movie star Elizabeth Shue, would be happy to put their kids in a 95 percent NAM school! But until America decides to Fix the Schools and Close the Gap by firing bad teachers, they'll just have to continue to drive past all those public schools to their private school.
Why, then, doesn't he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn't think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He'd never get another Oscar.
So, Guggenheim makes a well-publicized documentary to blame his private decision on what's best for his kids on the horrible, evil teachers unions who prevent America from Closing the Gap. See, if only the teachers unions weren't screwing up black and Hispanic students so bad, Davis Guggenheim and his wife, movie star Elizabeth Shue, would be happy to put their kids in a 95 percent NAM school! But until America decides to Fix the Schools and Close the Gap by firing bad teachers, they'll just have to continue to drive past all those public schools to their private school.
Can you blame Republican politicians for taking advantage of liberal logic?
February 23, 2011
"Unknown"
From my review in Taki's Magazine of Unknown with Liam Neeson:
Orson Welles once explained that he was, inevitably, what the Comédie-Française classified as a King Actor. “They weren’t necessarily the best actors; they were the actors who played the king.” Welles had to be cast as the highest authority character “or I discombobulate the scenes,” because the audience couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t in charge. Thus, the great man’s last role was as Unicron, the planet-sized chief bad guy in the 1986 cartoon Transformers: The Movie. “You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy,” Welles mused to his biographer shortly before his death.
Similarly, in the 2007 blockbuster Transformers, Michael Bay directed his animators to model the good robots’ wise leader Optimus Prime’s body language on today’s most imposing patriarchal presence, Liam Neeson.
But the 6’4” actor’s apotheosis was the surprise 2009 hit Taken, in which Neeson plays an ex-CIA man whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex slavers. Taken wasn’t a great movie, but it made a great trailer built around the Dangerous Dad’s speech to the head pimp promising, “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
Read the whole thing there.
By the way, veteran actor Bruno Ganz has a fun role in Unknown as a retired secret policeman turned private detective. Here's a tribute to Bruno Ganz's YouTube ubiquity that seemed pretty funny at 4 AM when I was writing this review.
And here's a more lowkey video that seemed pretty funny at 5 AM.
Where is Tony Rezko?
With Chicago politics back in the news, I was reminded of one of the weirder political facts of this decade and the last: Tony Rezko, longtime Obama friend and fundraiser, has been held at an undisclosed location while still awaiting sentencing on charges he was convicted of way back in June 2008. A few months ago, I heard a rumor that he was being held at a federal facility in Wisconsin and that he was finally going to be sentenced on January 28, 2011. Then I didn't hear anything more about it because who in the world would be interested in such a mundane topic as the disappearance of the President's real estate adviser?
So I went and looked for news. I found that an NBC Chicago blog reported on January 28, 2011:
So I went and looked for news. I found that an NBC Chicago blog reported on January 28, 2011:
Rezko is serving his time at a county jail in Wisconsin.
So, it's not a federal jail in Wisconsin, it's a county jail in Wisconsin. There are 72 counties in Wisconsin.
His lawyer said today that no matter the outcome of his ongoing efforts to obtain a new trial, Rezko remains prepared to testify against Blagojevich at his own retrial in April.
Judge St. Eve set Rezko’s sentencing for October 21.
So, just in case Rezko's sentencing actually happens eight months from now, he will by then have served 39 months in an undisclosed facility between conviction and sentencing. That seems pretty odd.
Domestication Genes
National Geographic has an article "Taming the Wild" by Evan Ratliff on the now famousunder-the-radar experiment by a renegade Soviet geneticist, who had been previously sent to the Gulag by the Lysenkoists, to breed a domesticated silver fox that would be a amiable as a dog
In fact, says Anna Kukekova, a Cornell researcher who studies the foxes, "they remind me a lot of golden retrievers, who are basically not aware that there are good people, bad people, people that they have met before, and those they haven't." These foxes treat any human as a potential companion, a behavior that is the product of arguably the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted. ...
One number I've never seen in accounts of this experiment is what percentage of these domesticated silver foxes breed true. Do 99% of new kits grow up to act like Labradors or do a sizable percentage have to be shipped off to a fur farm?
Miraculously, Belyaev had compressed thousands of years of domestication into a few years. But he wasn't just looking to prove he could create friendly foxes. He had a hunch that he could use them to unlock domestication's molecular mysteries. Domesticated animals are known to share a common set of characteristics, a fact documented by Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. They tend to be smaller, with floppier ears and curlier tails than their untamed progenitors. Such traits tend to make animals appear appealingly juvenile to humans. Their coats are sometimes spotted—piebald, in scientific terminology—while their wild ancestors' coats are solid. These and other traits, sometimes referred to as the domestication phenotype, exist in varying degrees across a remarkably wide range of species, from dogs, pigs, and cows to some nonmammalians like chickens, and even a few fish.
Belyaev suspected that as the foxes became domesticated, they too might begin to show aspects of a domestication phenotype. He was right again: Selecting which foxes to breed based solely on how well they got along with humans seemed to alter their physical appearance along with their dispositions. After only nine generations, the researchers recorded fox kits born with floppier ears. Piebald patterns appeared on their coats. By this time the foxes were already whining and wagging their tails in response to a human presence, behaviors never seen in wild foxes. ...The Soviet biology establishment of the mid-20th century, led under Joseph Stalin by the infamous agronomist Trofim Lysenko, outlawed research into Mendelian genetics. But Dmitry Belyaev and his older brother Nikolay, both biologists, were intrigued by the possibilities of the science. "It was his brother's influence that caused him to have this special interest in genetics," Trut says of her mentor. "But these were the times when genetics was considered fake science." When the brothers flouted the prohibition and continued to conduct Mendelian-based studies, Belyaev lost his job as director of the Department of Fur Breeding. Nikolay's fate was more tragic: He was exiled to a labor camp, where he eventually died. ...Not all domestication researchers believe that Belyaev's silver foxes will unlock the secrets of domestication. Uppsala University's Leif Andersson, who studies the genetics of farm animals—and who lauds Belyaev and his fellow researchers' contribution to the field—believes that the relationship between tameness and the domestication phenotype may prove to be less direct than the fox study implies. "You select on one trait and you see changes in other traits," Andersson says, but "there has never been proven a causal relationship."
To understand how Andersson's view differs from that of the researchers in Novosibirsk, it's helpful to try and imagine how the two theories might have played out historically. Both would agree that the animals most likely to be domesticated were those predisposed to human contact. Some mutation, or collection of mutations, in their DNA caused them to be less afraid of humans, and thus willing to live closer to them. Perhaps they fed off human refuse or benefited from inadvertent shelter from predators. At some point humans saw some benefit in return from these animal neighbors and began helping that process along, actively selecting for the most amenable ones and breeding them. "At the beginning of the domestication process, only natural selection was at work," as Trut puts it. "Down the road, this natural selection was replaced with artificial selection."
Where Andersson differs is in what happened next. If Belyaev and Trut are correct, the self-selection and then human selection of less fearful animals carried with it other components of the domestication phenotype, such as curly tails and smaller bodies. In Andersson's view, that theory understates the role humans played in selecting those other traits. Sure, curiosity and lack of fear may have started the process, but once animals were under human control, they were also protected from wild predators. Random mutations for physical traits that might quickly have been weeded out in the wild, like white spots on a dark coat, were allowed to persist. Then they flourished, in part because, well, people liked them. "It wasn't that the animals behaved differently," as Andersson says, "it's just that they were cute." ...
These perspectives might also apply to the evolution of phenotypical racial differences. Some differences in looks might have just been unselected for side effects of traits that were selected for by the environment. Or, as Darwin suggested, sexual selection or, among children, what Judith Rich Harris calls selection for cuteness might have played major roles.
But delving into the DNA of our closest companions can deliver some tantalizing insights. In 2009 UCLA biologist Robert Wayne led a study comparing the wolf and dog genomes. The finding that made headlines was that dogs originated from gray wolves not in East Asia, as other researchers had argued, but in the Middle East. Less noticed by the press was a brief aside in which Wayne and his colleagues identified a particular short DNA sequence, located near a gene called WBSCR17, that was very different in the two species. That region of the genome, they suggested, could be a potential target for "genes that are important in the early domestication of dogs." In humans, the researchers went on to note, WBSCR17 is at least partly responsible for a rare genetic disorder called Williams-Beuren syndrome. Williams-Beuren is characterized by elfin features, a shortened nose bridge, and "exceptional gregariousness"—its sufferers are often overly friendly and trusting of strangers. ....
"They didn't select for a smarter fox but for a nice fox," says Hare. "But they ended up getting a smart fox." This research also has implications for the origins of human social behavior. "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another. There had to be a change in our social system."
I'm not sure that the friendliest dogs are the smartest dogs. If Golden Retrievers don't distinguish between humans in terms of their intentions, which keeps them from biting your kid's friends but also makes them lousy guard dogs, that doesn't seem too smart.
There is also much else in the article, such as on nature-nurture adoption experiments with silver foxes. The keepers have also been breeding an Evil Twin breed of extremely nasty foxes. What happens when Nasty Fox is raised by a Nice Fox and vice-versa?
Because that's where the money isn't
The centerpiece story on NYTimes.com is:
Bank Closings Tilt Toward Poor Areas
By Nelson D. SchwarzGovernment data shows that as banks shut branches in poorer areas last year, like an Ohio Savings Bank in Cleveland, they expanded in richer neighborhoods.
Perhaps Willie Sutton could have explained this strange phenomenon.
Reading this article reminds me that there is a sizable infrastructure of academics, activists, corporate staffers, and government officials whose jobs revolve around checking up on mortgage lending to make sure enough money is going to the right sort of people. We have a sizable apparatus of people employed to nudge mortgages in only one direction.
In contrast, far fewer people get a paycheck for complaining that, say, Apple Stores aren't opened in Compton. For example, the three Apple Stores on the Apple website listed as being in Los Angeles are at The Grove, the Beverly Center, and Century City, which aren't exactly fully representative of Los Angeles. At minimum, Apple, which has a colossal amount of cash on its balance sheet, should be required to run free buses from the corner of Florence and Normandie to the nearest Apple Store.
Reading this article reminds me that there is a sizable infrastructure of academics, activists, corporate staffers, and government officials whose jobs revolve around checking up on mortgage lending to make sure enough money is going to the right sort of people. We have a sizable apparatus of people employed to nudge mortgages in only one direction.
In contrast, far fewer people get a paycheck for complaining that, say, Apple Stores aren't opened in Compton. For example, the three Apple Stores on the Apple website listed as being in Los Angeles are at The Grove, the Beverly Center, and Century City, which aren't exactly fully representative of Los Angeles. At minimum, Apple, which has a colossal amount of cash on its balance sheet, should be required to run free buses from the corner of Florence and Normandie to the nearest Apple Store.
February 22, 2011
More on Japan
A reader writes:
I'm spending about 50% of my time in Japan these days. I've been traveling there for years both for personal and business reasons.
In the mid-90's, I started noting the dissonance between the reality of Japan and the portrayal in the press. By my observation, Japan is one of the most advanced societies in the world - longest life expectancy, universal literacy, unbelievably safe streets, and so forth. Great place to live, which is why they have to be such hawks on immigration enforcement.
But to read the WSJ, the country is a basket case and due to this propaganda, most Americans tend to think the same - it is incredible the kinds of comments and questions I get from Americans along the lines of how rotten things are in Japan.
Ultimately, the reason that Japan gets such bad press here is that the Japanese don't do any of the Chicago School/Washington Consensus stuff - they are still essentially mercantilist, strictly limit immigration, are paternalistically concerned about equitable distributions of wealth, and are not about to let their country to become a turnip squeezed for blood by Wall Street. And despite rejecting the whole package, they have some of the best outcomes in the world in terms, again, of life expectancy, economy/wealth, education, crime, and so forth.
Basically, they are such an embarrassingly successful refutation of the whole neo-liberal package that the establishment press has to either ignore or deprecate them.
It surprised me that I don't hear more along this vein. And, again, as for Japan not being good for foreign financiers, well, Japan still remains very Confucian, very little there happens by accident, certainly not something this large.
As a final thought, since Japan opened up in the mid-1800's, other than a brief time in the 1980's, it has always been underestimated by foreigners. Things may seem a little quiescent there now, but the next big leap forward (and that is how Japan typically progresses, incidentally) is going to be this robotics stuff.
Well, robots have been the Next Big Thing for a long time. But, who knows?
One thing to keep in mind is that Japan's overall productivity isn't that good because while they are extremely efficient at making, say, Lexuses, they also keep a lot of Japanese people employed in very low productivity jobs like elevator operator and door-to-door mop salesman. It's sort of like a welfare system for border collies.
The Japanese have a whole lot of ways readily at hand to make their economy more efficient as the population shrinks.
Japan
For 20 years, you've always heard about how horrible Japan's economy is. In 2008 you heard over and over about how the worst thing that could happen to America is a Japanese-style Lost Decade. It always sounds like Godzilla, or maybe the B-29s, have come back.
And yet, Japan doesn't actually seem to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A friend of mine who has lived in Japan since about 1980 said a couple of years ago that although he's always reading in the English-language press about how badly off Japan is, it doesn't see so bad when he steps outside. When he first arrived in Japan, the country was full of badly-dressed people and ugly buildings. Now it's full of well-dressed people and attractive buildings.
I guess I'm just obtuse. It finally dawned on me that the reason you hear about how horrible Japan is all the time is that it has been horrible for financiers since 1990. The Nikkei index is now only one-third what it was in 1990 at the end of a ridiculous real estate bubble in which the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were theoretically worth more than all the real estate in California.
The New York Times runs a contrarian article about how you can make a lot of money investing in Japan because all investors hate Japan:
Japan’s government finances are on the verge of collapse, and its economy has floundered for two decades. ...“Japan is by far one of the cheapest markets in the world,“ said Charles de Vaulx of International Value Advisers, a New York-based investment firm. “It’s so universally hated, yet it might be one of the world’s best-performing markets over the next five years.”
Or, then, again, it might not. But the point is that all investors hate Japan.
“So many Japanese companies are well managed from an industrial standpoint,“ he said.
Yeah, but who cares about that?
... An attraction for the bulls is the fire-sale prices. Although the benchmark Nikkei recently hit a nearly 10-month high, it is still more than two-thirds off its peak before Japan’s real estate and stock market bubble burst in 1990.
Shares in Tokyo are also about 20 percent off their levels before the financial crisis hit in 2008 — one of the few major markets that have yet to rebound. ...
Certainly Japan can still give investors reasons for doubt — like the long-term effects of the government’s high debt and aging population. There is also the paltry profitability of companies like Sony, which has averaged a 3 percent return on equity over the last five years while its Korean rival, Samsung Electronics, has surpassed 13 percent by the same measure....
More Japanese companies have also tried to counter investors’ longstanding complaints that companies here hoard too much cash, instead of investing it or returning it to shareholders.
...Some activist investors, meanwhile, are trying to coax Japanese companies into creating more value for shareholders, rekindling an issue that ignited contentious battles between foreign investors and Japanese management in the mid-2000s.
February 21, 2011
It does pay to go to a more exclusive college, after all
One of the better known social science studies of recent years is the 2002 study by Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger finding that it doesn't matter what college you attend in terms of how much money you'll make after you adjust for SAT scores and high school GPA.
Actually, as Half Sigma likes to point out, that isn't what Dale and Krueger found in their study of 1976 students, that's only true when they adjusted for SAT scores and GPA and what I would call ambitiousness (by taking into account colleges applied to).
Now Dale and Krueger are back, looking at the 2007 incomes of people who applied to a couple of dozen selective colleges in 1989:
Specifically, for the 1976 and 1989 cohorts, attending a college with a 100-point higher SAT score [on a 400 to 1600 scale] lead [sic] to students receive about 6 percent higher earnings (in 1995 and 2007 respectively) according to results from the basic model ...
On the other hand:
Indeed, the finding that the average SAT score of the highest ranked school that rejected a student is a much stronger predictor of that student’s subsequent earnings than the average SAT score of the school the student actually attended should give pause to those who interpret conventional regression-based estimates of the effect of college characteristics as causal effects of the colleges themselves. ...
So, applying to Harvard is a better predictor of future income, all else being equal, than attending Harvard. I suspect that how much money somebody makes correlates to a surprising extent with how much money they expect to make and/or think they deserve to make, which, in turn, does correlate with applying to Harvard.
About 35 percent of the students in each cohort in our sample did not attend the most selective school to which they were admitted.
Government electing a new people in Bahrain
From my new VDARE.com column:
The unprovoked killing by government forces of five Shi’ite protestors in the Persian Gulf statelet of Bahrain, headquarters for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, turns out upon examination to be deeply intertwined with Bahrain’s troubles with diversity and immigration. ...
The Shi’ites argue that the minority Sunni rulers of Bahrain have been trying, in effect, to elect a new people by importing Sunni mercenaries from poorer countries and putting them on the path to citizenship. ...
Back on June 22, 2009, Yaroslav Trofimov noted in the Wall Street Journal in U.S. Navy Fleet’s Mideast Home Is Facing Rise in Sectarian Tension:" 'There seems to be a clear political strategy to alter the country's demographic balance in order to counter the Shiite voting power,' says Toby C. Jones, professor of Middle East studies at Rutgers University and a former Bahrain-based analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. 'This naturalization stuff is a time bomb.'"
No kidding.
It’s funny how much more readily the American MainStream Media grasps how unfair it is for the government to elect a new people in Bahrain—while they cheer it on in the U.S.
Read the whole thing there.
February 19, 2011
Fraud or Stupidity: Pick One
A reader writes with some experience in SoCal financial circles writes:
-- Essentially, Michael Milken felt a certain level of guilt and agreed to go to jail. That sense of guilt seems lacking with the current crew.-- I have been informed that the reason Countrywide would not be the ideal firm to get a judgment against is for at least two reasons:
1) As you mentioned, he seems to have believed he was doing his patriotic duty to the multicultural cult by issuing mortgages to minorities. [Here's Mozilo's pledge of January 14, 2005 "to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and lower-income borrowers and communities through 2010."]
2) Mozilo/Countrywide made it policy to keep only FICO scores on borrowers (i.e., it was policy; whether or not they paid attention to them seems to be another matter). In short, and unlike almost any finance firm I have heard of, Countrywide made plausible deniability the counrnerstone of its recordkeeping process and procedures. This might imply that he really didn't believe that they were going to be paid back, but smoking gun type proof would be tough to come by ....
-- Still, it is hard to believe that fraud is so difficult to prove in at least some cases during the bubble period.
For my money I would go after any and all Wall Street firms. Fraud and failing in their fiduciary duties seems like relatively easy cases to me. It's not the packaging of securities I would focus on; rather, I would push fraud and related issues. Essentially, I would make the case boil down to fraud or stupidity. For example, if presented with the choice between admitting fraud or admitting stupidity, would the head of Goldman Sachs choose stupidity over fraud? I'd bet fraud; whereas, Mozilo would be the one that gets him home without an ankle bracelet (i.e., stupidity with probably a large measure of gross incompetence).
I like the idea of trying them for fraud, while leaving stupidity as a defense. It would certainly be educational to the public. I wouldn't mind seeing the witness list that a hotshot defense lawyer like Mark Geragos would come up with to prove that everybody was this stupid: Henry Cisneros, George W. Bush, Barney Frank ...
Ron Unz on the Evolution of Amy Chua
Over at physicist Steve Hsu's site Information Processing blog, Ron Unz digs up a three decade old term paper he wrote as a Harvard freshman when he persuaded Edward O. Wilson to give him an independent study course on sociobiology. (By the way, Harvard is always criticized as an undergraduate experience for having a glittering faculty who turn out to have no time for lowly juniors and seniors. If you are Ron, though, you just show up as a freshman and talk the world's most prominent biologist into giving you personal service.)
Ron sums up his thesis in 2011 as:
... (B) The idea is a very simple one, and I'd actually gotten it a couple of years earlier when I was taking a seminar on the rural Chinese political economy back at UCLA. Chinese society had several fairly unique characteristics which together probably caused the evolution of high Chinese intelligence.
(1) For many centuries and to some extent for a couple of millenia, Chinese peasants lived close to their Malthusian limits. The orderly, stable, and advanced nature of Chinese society meant that food supply and poverty were usually the limiting factor on population, rather than wars, general violence, or plagues.
I think this makes some sense. A high disease burden caused by, say, malaria-bearing mosquitoes as in tropical Africa before recent times probably isn't good for selecting for foresight because behavior doesn't have much impact on who lives or dies because who gets bit is pretty random. Instead, selection would be focused on developing defenses against diseases.
On the other hand, Ancient Egypt would seem like a similarly "orderly, stable, and advanced" peasant society, but the outcomes don't seem very similar.
(2) Chinese rural life was remarkably sophisticated in its financial and business arrangements, vastly more complex and legalistic than anything you would find among European peasants let alone those in Africa or elsewhere. Hence there was obviously huge selective pressure for those able to prosper under a system of such (relative) financial complexity.
Perhaps, but the the English Common Law, which governed property in England was not easy to understand. It's kind of a medieval programming language for writing contracts full of If-Then-Else statements.
(3) Virtually all Chinese were on an equal legal footing, with none of the feudal or caste legal districtions you would find in Europe or India. Successful poor peasants who acquired wealth became the complete social equals of rich peasants or landlords. Rich peasants or landlords who lost their wealth became no different from all other poor peasants.
(4) In each generation only the relatively affluent could afford to marry, e.g. have parents wealthy enough to afford to buy them wives. The poor couldn't obtain wives for their children, hence didn't have grandchildren.
My impression is that this was true in China from the male perspective. From the female perspective, the great majority of women married, and married young. In contrast, English women who were poor for their class tended to marry late and have fewer children. I don't really know what the implications of this would be.
(5) The unique Chinese custom of "fenjia" meant that land, i.e. wealth, was equally divided among all sons. Since the wealthy tended to have several surviving children, those children automatically started life much poorer than their parents, and needed to reacquire wealth through their own ability. Because of this system, rural Chinese society exhibited an absolutely massive and continual degree of downward social mobility, perhaps unprecedented in human history. Each generation, a good fraction of the poor disappeared from the gene-pool, while the wealthy generally became poor. The richest slice of the population could afford multiple wives and numerous children, but due to fenjia this just tended to impoverish their families to a compensating extent.
I think the idea here is that if you have Five Chinese Brothers, they each inherit 1/5th of the land of their father, and then each must hustle like crazy to make a living. Maybe Number Four Son turns out to be the most fit and has the most descendants. In contrast, under English primogeniture, the eldest son gets the land, so he can probably afford to marry even if he's no great shakes because he's not competing at farming with his younger brothers. The younger sons go into other fields and have to hustle to marry. So, there's more immediate selection on farming talent in China than in England, where the eldest son gets something of a free ride for a generation. But maybe the English system selects for more eccentricity or whatever by forcing younger sons to try to make their way in the world in some other fashion than being a landowning farmer.
(6) The smartest children of the wealthy often received specialized education in hopes they might pass imperial exams and thereby join the "gentry," which might greatly increase the future economic prospects for themselves and their close relatives. So there was indeed some "pull at the top" but I think the genetic impact was pretty small compared to the "push from the bottom."
Right, the number who strongly benefited in terms of offspring from the imperial examination system were a tiny fraction.
(7) Overall, the model is pretty similar I think to what that [Gregory] Clark fellow wrote about England. However, I think the degree of genetic pressure in each generation was enormously greater, fenjia caused automatic downward mobility each generation, and I think the system remained in place for several times longer than the few centuries Clark claims for England. So you'd expect the results to be much greater.
(8) One very important difference with the Cochran-Harpending model for the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe is that the selective pressure was multifaceted. Ashk Jews merely needed to be smart and make money in order to become selectively advantaged. However, the selective pressure on Chinese peasants pushed in lots of different directions simultaneously. Peasants needed to be smart and have good business-sense, but they were also being selected on the basis of physical endurance, robustness, diligence, discipline, energy-consumption, and lots of other things. So selection for intelligence couldn't come too much at the expense of other vital traits, hence took place much more slowly.
Another question would be how significant was the impact of urban life on the Chinese. Marco Polo marveled at the size of Chinese cities compared to European cities.
Finally, my vague impression is that the Malthusian hammer tend to come down on the Chinese more intermittently. Because the full baby-making capacity of females was utilized, Chinese population would grow faster during good times than English population. But when good government broke down and troubles hit, there would be huge die-offs (as recently as the Great Leap Forward). Unfortunately, I don't have a picture in my head for understanding the implications of selection by famine as opposed to selection by constant hunger.
Angelo Mozilo walks
In the LA Times, E. Scott Reckard, who did a fine job covering the SoCal mortgage wheeler dealers, reports:
Federal prosecutors have shelved a criminal investigation of Angelo R. Mozilo after determining that his actions in the mortgage meltdown — which led to $67.5-million settlement against him — did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.
As the former chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., Mozilo helped fuel the boom in risky subprime loans that led to the crippling of the banking industry and the near-collapse of the financial system.
... But the criminal investigation has wound down without indictments of Mozilo or others at his Calabasas company, according to people familiar with both the prosecution and the defense teams, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
As I wrote in VDARE a couple of years ago, the government's leaked case against Mozilo largely consisted of emails recording "Mozilo’s intermittent spasms of skepticism." It seemed kind of bizarre to try to convict him based on the handful of times when he'd wake up and ask, "Why are we doing this?"
Most of the time, however, Mozilo seemed to be a true believer in the post-1992 conventional wisdom that the mortgage industry had left huge sums on the table by not lending more aggressively to Hispanics and blacks.
Reckard goes on:
"Sometimes the public thinks all you have to do is to indict someone and that's it," one of the federal sources said. "But you have to be able to prove your case, and it can be worse losing a case than not bringing one at all."
The 72-year-old Mozilo hung up the phone when contacted for comment at his home in the Lake Sherwood golf community of Ventura County.
So, Mozilo has to pay a $22 million fine for a civil case settled earlier, but gets to keep the rest of the $387 millionhe took home as compensation during the previous decade.
It looks like not one single corporate officer is going to do even a perp walk over subprime, much less hard time. It seems more and more amazing that only a couple of decades ago, Michael Milken did a few years.
I'm having a hard time seeing what else will serve as a deterrent. If you do the arithmetic based on Mozilo's outcome , why wouldn't it make financial sense to try to shoot the moon like he did? $387,000,000 minus $22,000,000 is $365,000,000. Without the risk of jail time, why wouldn't a greedy guy take those odds?
Will Dodd-Frank regulate moon-shooters out of existence? Maybe, but that's asking a lot of civil servants.
February 18, 2011
Beyonce's Sammy Sosafication
Why I believe Beyonce is betraying all black and Asian women
By Yasmin Alibhai-brown
Betrayal: Beyonce's change of skin tone appears to deny her heritage and send out a bad message to the youngsters who see the images
Not so long ago, I sat in a nursery class in Wandsworth, South London, where a teacher was conducting a test to discover how the children felt about their race.
She asked each youngster to hug the doll in the classroom that looked most like them.
Naomi, a black girl, at once grabbed a blonde, blue-eyed doll and wouldn’t let go. Tears rolled down her face when it was gently taken from her.
... Of course, black and [South] Asian parents work hard to give their children a positive self-image and confidence in their appearance, despite the cultural forces stacked against them.
But when black celebrities appear to deny their heritage by trying to make themselves look white, I despair for the youngsters who see those images.
One black friend of mine, who has a 13-year-old daughter, was incandescent this week when she saw the picture of U.S. singer Beyonce at a pre-Grammy awards party.
Her complexion and limbs were translucently pallid, her locks long, straight and blonde.
Now, racial mixing since the days of slavery means ‘black’ Americans come in a whole range of skin hues, but in recent years Beyonce’s tone seems miraculously to be changing from dusky to peachy.
In my VDARE article last year about retired baseball slugger Sammy Sosa's adventures with skin-lightening, I made a political suggestion so weird that I'm going to toss it out there again:
However, when seen from a global perspective, this assumption that the Republican Party is doomed because immigrants view it as The White Party in an increasingly nonwhite America seems … parochial.
The real question in American politics might turn out to be: Can the Democrats of the Post-Obama Era thrive as The Black Party in an increasingly non-black America?
Of course, that real question won’t be asked much as long as the government continues to offer immigrants and their descendants money and prizes for identifying as non-white.
February 17, 2011
UnSim City
From a long LA Times article celebrating the 83-year-old head of the Los Angeles ACLU, Ramona Ripston, who is retiring after 40 years on the job of imposing her prejudices on LA:
Once upon a time, Ripston was a frustrated New York housewife with do-good instincts. In California, she transformed herself into a formidable force as head of one of the ACLU's largest and, some would say, most liberal affiliates. She stood up to angry San Fernando Valley parents opposed to school integration ...
So much seemed possible when she came to California 39 years ago: She was excited about enrolling her children in its top-rated public schools and living in a state where citizens have the power of the initiative. But school quality has declined. And the ballot initiative has been used to reverse victories --against the death penalty, for school busing, affirmative action and gay marriage -- that she fought so hard to win.
The ACLU imposed court-ordered busing from South Central to San Fernando Valley schools from about 1978-1981, a key blow from which public schools in the SFV never quite recovered. The smart money from then on went to exurbs outside of the LAUSD, such as Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Santa Clarita, Orange County and to the San Gabriel Valley, a similar suburb, but one divided up into many small municipalities.
Too bad Sim City wasn't around to consume Ms. Ripston's prodigious energies and teach her a little bit about cause and effect.
"Moral Combat"
From The American Prospect:
Why do liberals play computer games like conservatives?By Monica Potts
I eventually got the hang of The Sims, the best-selling computer game in history, and my Sim self became productive and happy. She always reached the top of her career, her children always did well in school, and she always had enough money for a comfortable simulated life. Another pattern emerged as well, one that I feel powerless to stop: My Sims are conservative. I'm in complete control of them, but for some reason their lives aren't anything like the life I consider ideal in the real world. I'm a feminist graduate of an all-women's college who has vowed to never change my name or end my career to raise children full time--though I would never undervalue the work that many women do in their home. By contrast, my Sims rarely remain single long into adulthood. My wives always take their husbands' last names. They don't just have children; they bear lots of them. And they leave their careers to take on the lion's share of care-giving duties.
... It's always difficult for liberals to figure out how much they should enjoy pop culture that contradicts their values. ... Video games are just the newest medium through which our social mores are expressed, and questioning whether they do so accurately and responsibly is a natural corollary to their ascendancy.
I blame some of my right-of-center leanings on the structures of the games themselves. Having children has the added bonus of extending game time in The Sims, because I get to continue to play the same family as the generations roll by.
Unlike in the real world, where people get to trade in their children and grandchildren.
Should clones' vital organs be harvested to cure cancer?
From my review in Taki's Magazine:
Although the movie industry is always accused of philistinism, filmmakers are often suckers for prestige novels. Richard Grenier, Commentary’s renegade movie reviewer in the 1980s, pointed out a common type of bad classy movie: the credulous adaptation that inadvertently exposes a polished prose stylist’s underlying silliness. Projecting an author’s vision onto a 30-foot-high screen can expose his lack of realism. The most amusing recent example is Never Let Me Go, the dead-serious adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed 2005 novel. (It’s now out on DVD in the US and in theaters in the UK.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)