May 10, 2011

WTF is causing rising disability

David Brooks writes:
As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. 
According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. That costs taxpayers $115 billion a year, or about $1,500 per household. ...

Fortunately, Dave has a long list of suggestions about how to Win The Future:
It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses. 

A reader comments:
Wow, a fifth of men out of the workforce. Dave is waxing speculative about redirecting some huge tranche of resources from the welfare state as a result. What's the one huge factor, which would have a much cheaper solution, that he dare not mention? 

I don't know ... Sunspots? Continental drift? Fluoride? I'm as baffled as Dave. What could be causing all these American guys to develop bad backs who are expected by people like me and Dave who type for a living to compete with illegal immigrants for $9 per hour jobs lifting stuff? Mercury in vaccines? It's a complete mystery. Global warming? Yeah, it's usually global warming.
Really, are establishment Republicans so cowed that touching the Medicare third-rail looks better than coming to Jesus on immigration and the national question?

Well, it looks like a lot of Republican politicians are developing cold feet on privatizing Medicare for under 55s. But, yeah, cowed is the right word.

Meanwhile, President Obama is crowing about the success of his plan to discourage new illegal immigration through high unemployment and how therefore the health of the economy depends upon putting illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship and voting Democratic. Or something like that. Frankly, beginning in 2001, every couple of years (e.g., 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2011) the President announces some gibberish about how it's a national priority to amnesty illegal immigrants, so we can Win The Future.

WTF is the right acronym.

Old Blue Eyes

From FOXNews:
Scientist: All Blue-Eyed People Are Related  
"If you've got blue eyes, shake the hand of the nearest person who shares your azure irises: He or she may be a distant cousin. 
Danish researchers have concluded that all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor, presumably someone who lived 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. 
'Originally, we all had brown eyes,' Professor Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen said in a press release. 'But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes.'"

Me, Peter Brimelow, Norman Podhoretz, Mrs. Paul Krugman, and Jorge Ramos of Univision should schedule a family reunion!

A request

Benjamin Franklin said you get people to like you by asking them to do you a favor. So, here's a request. I'm looking for an autobiographical article written by playwright Tom Stoppard that appeared in the first issue of Tina Brown's now long defunct magazine Talk in September 1999. It began on p. 190. (Did magazines used to have 190 pages? Wow.) It was reprinted in the UK in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine on October 10, 1999, pp 14-21.

I want to write another essay about Stoppard, and this is the key piece of the puzzle.

I don't think it's readily available online.

May 9, 2011

A mother-in-law's opinion of the First Lady

Here's a paragraph from Janny Scott's biography of the President's late mother, A Singular Woman, that seems like a fair depiction of Michelle Obama:
The new girlfriend Obama had brought with him to Hawaii the previous Christmas was different from Ann. ... Her father, Fraser Robinson III, a descendant of slaves, had been employed as a maintenance worker, later a foreman in a city water-filtration plant; her mother, Marian, had stayed at home with Michelle and her brother when they were young. The family was hardworking, churchgoing, and close-knit. As an undergraduate at Princeton and as a law student at Harvard, Michelle Robinson had been active in black student organizations. She moved systematically through life, making sensible, carefully considered decisions, each building to the next. "I would say Michelle is much more like our grandmother, [Obama's half sister] Maya told me. "And I would say that my mother and my grandmother really were also opposites." After the Christmas visit, Ann reported back to Surakusuma. "She is intelligent, very tall (6'1"), not beautiful but quite attractive," Ann wrote of Robinson. "She did her BA at Princeton and her law degree at Harvard, But she has spent most of her life in Chicago." Ann, who prided herself on raising her children to have a global perspective, described Robinson as "a little provincial and not as international as Barry." But Ann liked her. "She is nice, though," she said. If Robinson and Obama were to marry after he graduated from law school, Ann told Suryakusuma, she would not be unhappy.

By potential mother-in-law standards, "not ... unhappy" is pretty high praise.

I want to put a word in here for Michelle Obama.

She got put on an elite track that she wasn't cut out for by 1) affirmative action, 2) her older brother Craig's popularity as a star basketball player and well-liked personality at Princeton, and (I would imagine) 3) recommendation letters from the man she babysat for: Rev. Jesse Jackson. (Her long friendship with Jackson's daughter might help explain why she had a hard time, during the dizzying heights of Obamamania, agreeing with everybody else that her husband was all that: compared to Jesse at his peak of charisma a generation ago, Barack is kind of dull).

There's so much good will in modern America toward respectable black people like Michelle and Craig Robinson that it winds up sometimes embarrassing one of them by pushing her forward until she finally crashes and burns upon contact with something objective, publicly confirming her deepest worries about herself. It's not surprising that she vaguely resents the many favors white people have done her. As Ben Franklin pointed out, doing favors for people just makes them resent you. (Have them do you a favor instead.) 

So, after her super-duper Princeton-Harvard education, her law career at a big time firm was a bust: she didn't pass the easy Illinois bar exam on her first opportunity. It became quickly apparent to all concerned that she wasn't going to make partner. Soon, she was working for Valerie Jarrett in Mayor Daley's office doing whatever it is that people in The Machine do. (I never wanted to ask.) After awhile, she got ensconced on the Diversity & Political Connection/Corruption track. 

It's a living.

As a First Lady, she's been fine. Nancy Reagan told people to Just Say No. Laura Bush said to Read Books. Michelle Obama says, Don't Get Fat. These days, that's a pretty good thing for a First Lady to say. And she has to put herself on the line: Laura Bush wasn't going to stop reading books, and if she did, nobody would notice. But if Michelle stops exercising and gets fat, everybody is going to know.


Obama's mom on his choice of racial identity

There had been a lot of subtle evidence available before about Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro's psychological hurt over her son's choice to identify solely as black, but it's historically valuable to have it now all spelled out in Janny Scott's new biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman. Now, we learn (via Jacob Weisberg's review in Slate) what the President's own mother thought about her son's choice of racial self-identification. From Scott's biography:
"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." She felt he was making what Johnston called 'a professional choice' to strongly identify himself as black."

Scott's revelations are not just important for what they say about the President of the United States of America, but, more essentially, for what they say about modern America.

David Axelrod's version of Barack Obama's Narrative as the racial transcender always had one obvious weakness: the politician himself self-identifies as black and only black (as he chose to do on the 2010 Census). When this inconvenient fact has been brought up, it has usually been explained away by noting that white racism wouldn't allow poor Obama to identify as both black and white. The One Drop Rule, you know.

Yet, the existence of part-black celebrities, such as Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter, who take a less dogmatic view of how to self-identify racially, has seldom been mentioned in the press in relation to Obama's choice. Further, Obama's Hawaiian upbringing in the laid-back 1970s, where he was thought of as "just another mixed kid" at his highly mixed prep school, is also ignored.

Another implicit suggestion of the Axelrodian version of The Narrative is that being half-black made the rise of Barack Obama harder. If he were white, presumably, an amazing talent like Obama would have been President at 37 instead of 47.

The subversive counter-narrative is that Obama figured out fairly early on that his path to power would be much easier in modern America if he self-identified only as black. (He made a mid-course correction in  whom to target his Narrative to after his humiliation by Bobby Rush in the 2000 House primary taught him that black voters, who are more savvy about matters of black identity, would not recognize him as "black enough" relative to other black candidates, but that clueless white people would.)

When Obama was elected head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he banged the paternal race gong hard in the ensuing PR, to his mother's bemusement. You can read this important account from Scott's book on Google Books.
"A longer article a week later in The Boston Globe went into greater detail. "What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification what what he calls 'the typical black experience,' paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice," the Globe reported. It described "his unusual path, from childhood in Indonesia, where he grew up, he says, 'as a street kid [with several servants looking after him],' to adolescence in Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents." The article dwelt at some length on the influence of Obama's father, who, it said, was born in Kenya, "studied at Harvard and Oxford [?] and became a senior [?] economist for the Kenyan government." In high school, the article said, Obama began a regular correspondence with his father, "whose heritage was to be a major influence on his life, ideals and priorities." One of Obama's most valued possessions, the article said, was the passbook that his grandfather, a cook for the British before Kenyan independence, was required to carry. "He said that even though his heritage is one-half white, and although has had a mixture of influences in his life, 'my identification with the -- quote -- typical black experience in America was very strong and very natural [?] and wasn't something forced and difficult," the article said. Of Ann, it said little more than "His mother, who is white, is a Kansas-born anthropologist who now works as a developmental consultant in Indonesia." 
In an even longer article in the Los Angeles Times a month later, Ann was described simply as "an American anthropologist" and "a white American from Wichita, Kan." 
The marginal role to which Ann was consigned in those accounts did not go unnoticed. She had raised Obama, with the help of her parents, after his father had left for Harvard when Obama was ten months old. She had been his primary parent for the first ten years of his life. 
She had returned to Hawaii to live with him when he was in middle school. She had moved back to Hawaii from Indonesia for several months during his senior year. Yet in those accounts, Obama had been "a street kid" in Indonesia, then sent back to Hawaii to be "raised by his grandparents." Yang Suwan, Ann's Indonesian anthropologist friend, recalled Ann returning to Jakarta around the time of the Harvard Law Review election. As always, she was extraordinarily proud of her son. But on another level, she seemed crushed. 
"'His mother is an anthropologist,' Ann told Yang, quoting an article she had seen. "I was mentioned in one sentence." ... 
When Ann told Made Suarjana that Obama was graduating from Harvard Law School, he said, "So, he's going to be a billionaire." Ann corrected him: No, she said, he wants to return to Chicago and do pro bono work. Because Suarjana knew that Obama was interested in politics, and because he felt he knew something about American public life, he said, knowingly, "Okay, so he wants to be president." 
To his surprise, Ann began to weep. ... 
"No, not this time," she answered, according to Suarjana. "He's going to be a senator first."
Had they already talked about it, Suarjana wondered later. ... 
"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." Ann felt he was making what Johnston called "a professional choice" to strongly identify himself as black." It would be too strong to say that she felt rejection," he said. But she felt, in that way, "that he was distancing himself from her.""

This may offer clues for some of the missing pieces in the puzzle of Obama's life, such as why he wound up at Occidental College, a fine liberal arts college but not exactly the Ivy League. And he came from an academically ambitious family: his father had gone to Harvard, his mother was working on her Ph.D., his grandmother's sister was a statistics professor at (I believe) the University of North Carolina, and his grandmother's brother was an executive in the U. of Chicago libraries. 

Similarly, Obama seems like a smart guy, but not only didn't his PSAT score at his prep school allow him to make National Merit Semifinalist (a very high bar, one that few recent Presidential candidates would have cleared), but he didn't even make the much lower bar of National Achievement Scholar, the affirmative action version of National Merit Scholar for blacks. 

Then, after two years at Oxy devoted largely, in his own account, to smoking weed and and hanging out with rich Pakistani Marxists, he suddenly transferred to the Ivy League.

What happened? 

Well, one thing we know happened at Oxy was that he changed the first name he went by from Barry to Barack. Perhaps, he also changed his racial identity as well?

Maybe on the PSAT and on his college applications he didn't check the "Black" box? If he didn't, college admissions officers would have looked at an application from some kid named Obama in Honolulu and figured he maybe was another Japanese kid, and they already had lots of applications from affluent East Asians with better grades than this Obama character.

His mother, who had lived with him in the fall of his senior year in high school when he would have been thinking about his college applications, recalled, "That [black] identity, she felt, 'had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.'"

Maybe his idealistic mother suggested it wouldn't be fair for a privileged preppie like him to claim affirmative action benefits? Who knows?

Granted, this would sharply contradict Obama's own race-obsessed version of his teenage years. Accounts by his high school friends vary. Most of his friends remember him as a mellow pothead. His half-Japanese half-black friend Keith Kakugawa (whom Obama fictionalized as the all-black and bitterly anti-white "Ray" in Dreams from My Father) recalls Obama as being far more paranoid about white prejudice than he was. (Another character fictionalized in Dreams also told the LA Times that the anti-white views his character expressed in the book sound more like Obama's literary self-projections). But Kakugawa also said that the main emotional turmoil in Obama's life was caused not by race but by his feelings of abandonment by his parents.

Of course, Kakugawa is an ex-con, so who are you going to believe? The jailbird or the President? The guy who couldn't talk his way out of prison or the guy who talked his way into the White House?

Quite possibly, Obama's own view of his racial identity was subject to the usual teenage emotional flux.


White Flight in Finland

The global press was baffled by the success of an anti-immigration party in last month's Finnish elections. Only dumb people ever worry about immigration, but Finland has the highest test scores in Europe: Does Not Compute!

Why in the world would Finnish voters, which has had the least immigration of any European country that hasn't been Communist, be worried about immigration?

From the Helsinki Sanomat:
Pasi also emphasises the attraction of the neighbouring area, but in addition to the attractive factors there are other features that made the mother from Metsälä refuse to consider a school in Maunula. 
      “Undoubtedly we all want to live in a multicultural and tolerant atmosphere, but the fact is that if there are many children who do not speak Finnish, the teacher’s time is spent on them”, the mother of two says. 
      She does not know any children who have actually attended school in Maunula, but she has “heard stories”.
   
The stories are spread as mothers meet for coffee during the day, but few bother to examine whether or not there is any truth to these mental images that people have. The result is mass flight. 
      Pasi also has an impression of the Maunula school. “Normal education does not work there. There are many children who should not be in first grade at school. When your own child is at stake, you have to be careful.” 
      The large number of immigrant children is a concern for him. “It’s damn hard to teach if the group doesn’t speak any language. They just yell in their cultural agony.”

May 8, 2011

Team Obama's Odd Ineptness

The Administration of George W. Bush made us used to a federal government that messed up frequently in the real world, but showed impressive marketing skills and message discipline in the world of spin. This past week has shown us, strangely, an Obama Administration succeeding very nicely in the real world, but then delivering a long series of disabling shots to its own collective foot.

While the military execution was pretty damn good -- kill bin Laden, spare most of the women and all of the children, grab records, evade the Pakistani Air Force -- it's pretty clear that the politicians didn't think through what their responsibilities would be afterwards.

At least the politicians didn't impose a bunch of regulations on the SEALs -- say, first ask bin Laden to surrender in Arabic, Pashto, English, and International Sign Language -- that might have endangered the mission. But they didn't seem to ask themselves what kind of questions they were inevitably going to get asked afterwards, so they ended up improvising contradictorily with lots of now obviously risible inventions. 

A reader writes:
McCain painted Obama as a celebrity, happy to hear applause. He did little in his first 2 years to change that opinion. 
Ideally, Obama would have said little about bin Laden, leaving us with the impression he gives orders like this all day long. That would make him look really powerful. That would earn back a lot of the voters he had in 2008, but lost in the interim. 
Instead his aides said too much about the raid, much of which they are revising. He's waffling on providing a picture of a dead Osama, leading some 9/11 families to demand a photo. In contrast to the strong confident president we saw Sunday night, we are learning he kept his generals waiting. 
The contrast between Obama, and the victorious Seal Team is striking. We know a lot about what Obama did, but we may never learn about the Seal Team members until too it's late. 
The American people gave him a great chance to reinvent himself, and what did he do? He reinstalled the fake greek columns.

The strong, silent approach would have been the best choice:

Osama bin Laden, the man behind 9/11, is dead. Last night, American forces raided his compound deep inside Pakistan and killed him. Vengeance is ours. Good night and God bless America.

But, Team Obama couldn't resist chatting up a storm.

Getting facts wrong is unavoidable. I, for example, accepted the Google Maps identification of the wrong compound in Abbottabad. (Sorry, Mr. Anonymous Rich Pakistani!) But, by now, I think we can start to figure out the non-random reasons behind all the changes in story.

The White House politicians never seemed to think through the contrast between what they were doing -- sending men to, more or less, execute a mass murderer -- and their desire to make this the grand kickoff of Campaign 2012 by making it seem like Obama was totally involved minute by minute. 

Notice the contradiction? The idea of the President watching the daring raid on bin Laden from the Situation Room sounds cool . And the idea of the President cold-bloodedly ordering the execution of the man that ordered the murder of 3,000 Americans also sounds cool. 

What doesn't sound cool, however, is the idea of the President watching his lethal order being carried out on live video feed. That's kind of creepy.

That may explain why we were suddenly told that, in the grand tradition of Rosemary Woods, the President somehow didn't see the key 20 to 25 minutes of video feed when bin Laden was killed.

If so, the real mistake was in not thinking things through during the months that evidence was accumulating that they had found bin Laden.

There were also all the usual Obama constituencies of NPR subscribers and Euroweenies who give Obama Nobel Prizes (he still hasn't won the Nobel for Literature). Thus, this story on Death Penalty News:
The death of bin Laden was not an "execution" and does not call into question Europe's opposition to the death penalty, the European Commission said today. 
In the wake of a statement from Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso welcoming his death as a "major achievement" which ensured his crimes did not go unpunished, a spokeswoman insisted the EU's underlying values of justice were not called into question. ... "This in no way questions the basic principles and values we have always supported ... this was not the execution of a death sentence, it was something completely different. We continue to be against the death penalty."

My guess would be that the White House gave the SEALs trigger-pullers lawyerly instructions that technically gave Obama an out from having precisely ordered OBL's death -- e.g., if bin Laden surrenders in a particularly cowardly method that his entire life, which you've got to admit does show courage, makes unlikely, well, then you don't have to shoot him. (Or, maybe they really didn't expect the SEALs to shoot him.)

The first sign that the White House hadn't thought things through was the quick announcement that they had dumped the body in the ocean. When I first heard that I couldn't believe they would botch the aftermath so badly, so I blogged that they should bury OBL on completely secure Diego Garcia.

Presumably, in all the years Obama had been publicly advocating this type of raid (and give him credit for doing that), neither he nor his brain trust had thought much about what to do with bin Laden's body.

There were a couple of obvious interacting issues: after years of the world being told by American and Pakistani government officials that bin Laden was holed up, perhaps in a cave, in remote Waziristan, he turned out to be living in a three story house near the Pakistan Military Academy. Clearly, somebody official hasn't been truthful. The very location of the raid, Abbottabad, meant that there would be lots of questions from disillusioned people. This meant that OBL's body would be important as evidence that they really got him.

The instructions to the SEALs, you'll notice, were therefore sensible in this situation: take bin Laden's body and leave the other bodies. So, they thought it through that far.

But, it appears they hadn't thought much about what state OBL's corpse would be in, either from illness or bullets, facts that pictures or an autopsy would reveal. So, the initial stories out of the White House made it sound like OBL had gone down like Tony Montana in Scarface, guns blazing. Those then had to be walked back.

A commenter calling himself "Incompetence in Chief" (I think he or she chooses a catchy new name each time, a practice which I would recommend to other commenters rather than generic "Anonymous") writes:
People claimed that Bush and his people were dumb as dirt, but the Obama team's main job was handing the messaging of this raid. This WH has more serially inept than anything I can recall for any POTUS.

Here's the famous picture released by the White House:

Now look at it again. 

What a terrible picture. The President looks insignificant, hunched-over, not in control, like the least important person in the photo. The military man is sitting in what should be the President's chair: the big one with the high back. Which chair would President Reagan have sat in?

And that's the one photo the White House picked out of however many the White House's full time professional photographer took.

Obama's body language looks pretty depressed. The word "power" repeatedly comes up in Dreams from My Father, but Obama's experience of exercising power has been mostly at the cancelling-somebody's-grant level. This is what real President-level power looks like: killing people. And the Obama in this picture looks like he's just realizing what that means. (When it was over, he made his usual speech about how "I" did this and "I" ordered that.)

The commenter continues:
Now I'm trying to decide how much each of the following factors explain Obama's team total incompetence: 
1) They are inherently dumb as dirt (relative for such a high profile operation) and promoted way beyond their abilities 
2) They have the clever sillies - basically intelligent but made stupid by anti-reality PC dogma and their lack of natural curiosity to explore obvious inconsistence of PC 
3) They've grown incredibly lazy and arrogant knowing the Pravda MSM will parrot their obvious lies and errors without question or comment, enough to brainwash 51% of the electorate. 
4) They have little to no experience dealing with the real - have never had to make an arguement, sell an idea or meet minimum standards of logic/facts outside the echo chamber of likeminded ideologues.  
5) They are rank amatuers in all this business. One sign of their novice ignorance - they are sending out many conflicting and illogical stories trying to be all things to all people never thinking that this would cause a problem.

Good questions.

I would lean toward #3. How many tough questions has Obama been asked over the years? His campaign staff didn't even ask him any tough questions about Rev. Wright. Through sheer luck (I presume), Rev. Wright happened to be out of the country on a cruise when this long-looming scandal finally surfaced, so the Rev. wasn't around to respond to Obama's gassy Philadelphia race speech.

What Obama didn't realize was just how interesting Navy SEALs shooting bin Laden would be, and how, therefore, the press, for once, wouldn't be able to stop itself asking questions. Americans have been well trained over the decades to not be interested in Rev. Wright-type stuff, to accept whatever explanation Obama stayed up all night to dream up. But we can't help being really, really interested in this kind of action movie stuff.

So, Obama's instinct was that this event would be like most of the others in his life: he and his people would get to talk all they want, but nobody else would ask any tough questions about everything they said.

Still, the most obvious comparison is to Bush, who was completely clueless, apparently, that OBL was living in Greater Islamabad from 2003 onward. By that standard Obama looks awfully good.

May 7, 2011

Happy 300th!

It's the 300th birthday of David Hume. 

I don't actually have much to say about the Scottish philosopher other than that I always assumed that Hume's line about how you can't really tell the rock falls because you dropped it is more or less a joke that a bunch of German philosophers took too Teutonically. Personally, I like the philosophy of Hume's Scottish contemporary Thomas Reid a little more, but Hume was certainly a great man.

IQ: Intelligence and/or motivation?

Bryan Caplan writes:
Years ago, I told Tyler Cowen, "It's surprising that IQ tests predict life outcomes so well, because there's usually no financial incentive to get a high score."  He replied, "People try out of pride - an under-rated motive."  So when Tyler blogged Duckworth et al, "Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing" I naturally took notice.  Key claims: 
1. Material incentives boost IQ scores: ... "The authors reasonably infer that IQ is more of a composite intelligence/motivation measure than usually believed - especially by inter-disciplinary researchers." 
As far as I can tell, the authors do nothing to show that their results make IQ is less predictive.  They don't even show that IQ is more mutable than earlier studies find; boosting incentives boosts scores while the incentives remain in place, but there's no reason to think the boost lasts after the test-takers receive their pay.  All the researchers require us to reconsider is the reason why IQ is so predictive and hard to durably improve.  

I made Duckworth's point in my 2007 FAQ on IQ:
Q. So, you're saying that IQ testing can tell us more about group differences than about individual differences? 
A. If the sample sizes are big enough and all else is equal, a higher IQ group will virtually always outperform a lower IQ group on any behavioral metric.... 
Of course, everything else is seldom equal. A more conscientious group may well outperform a higher IQ group. On the other hand, conscientiousness, like many virtues, is positively correlated with IQ, so IQ tests work surprisingly well. 
Q. Wait a minute, does that mean that maybe some of the predictive power of IQ comes not from intelligence itself, but from virtues associated with it like conscientiousness? 
A. Most likely. But perhaps smarter people are more conscientious because they are more likely to foresee the bad consequences of slacking off. It's an interesting philosophical question, but, in a practical sense, so what? We have a test that can predict behavior. That's useful.

Keep in mind that the notorious average group gaps in cognitive test scores show up not only on low stakes tests, but on high-stakes tests where the testees are highly motivated: the SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, GRE, the military's AFQT enlistment test, NYC firefighting hiring tests, New Haven fire department promotion tests, Chicago cop tests, the NFL's Wonderlic IQ test, insurance agent licensing tests, and so forth and so on ad infinitum.

I can think of only one example where different levels of group motivation had a sizable effect: the military's AFQT enlistment test was renormed in 1980 on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth sample of about 12,000 young people, most of whom weren't trying to enlist. The test was 105 pages long. It was found years later that the anomalously large white-black gap on this renorming (18.6 IQ points rather than the usual 15 or 16) was caused by blacks being more likely to give up from discouragement part way through this long and hard test and leave the latter questions unanswered or just "bubbled in." (Keep in mind that this was a low stakes test for the participants, who were just taking part in a social science project, not trying to enlist).

In 1997, the AFQT was renormed using a computer adaptive testing where wrong answers lead to easier questions and thus less discouragement. The white-black gap was only 14.7 points.

This finding is worth keeping in mind for evaluating school performance test scores, which are usually low stakes tests for the students. 

Some of the difference in performance among schools on achievement tests therefore depends upon how well the principal and teachers manage to motivate students to keep working until the end of the test.

So, a lot of reports of miracle schools that seem to fizzle out after awhile have to do with higher scores ginned up by getting students just to not bubble in.

On the other hand, I'd rather send my kid to a school where the management has enough on the ball to figure out how to look better and is persuasive enough to motivate students to work for an extra 20 minutes than a school where management isn't. And a school that manages to motivate students on their state tests is likely to attract the children of more motivated and smarter parents in the future. 

So, once again, the question of intelligence v. motivation turns out to be more philosophical than predictive.

One thing to keep in mind is that in experimental situations involving low stakes tests, if the experimenters _want_ one group of testtakers to be unmotivated, it's easy to demotivate them to work less hard on the test. The test administrator can convey that a lackadaisical attitude is okay just through word choice, tone of voice, body language, and so forth.

I suspect this is a major feature of the popular stereotype threat experiments where low stakes tests are given to blacks. In the test group, blacks are told that they are expected to score low on the following test and in the control group, they aren't. Not surprisingly, on these tests that are meaningless to the testtakers, the first group is more likely to pick up the experimenters' hopes that they will work less hard and they do work less hard.

I've never seen stereotype threat confirmed experimentally on high stakes tests. I can't see how such an experiment would pass an ethical review board.

You'll note that stereotype threat experiments aren't about getting blacks to perform better on tests but about getting them to perform worse. Big difference.

May 6, 2011

Son of Aladdin

The news that lots of teenagers don't know who Osama bin Laden was reminds me of a story a high school teacher emailed me in 2008:
Student Named Yesenia: "Teacher! Teacher! I have a question." 
Teacher: "Yes, what is it?" 
Yesenia: "Who is Son of Aladdin? Why are they always looking for him in a cave?" 
Teacher: "Huh?" 
Yesenia: "What's so bad about Son of Aladdin? Why are they trying to catch him?" 
Teacher: "Oh, you mean … Osama bin Laden?" 
Yesenia: "Yeah, Son of Aladdin." 
Teacher: "He's a terrorist." 
Yesenia: "Oh." 
Teacher [trying to make this into a Teachable Moment]: "But don't confuse Osama with Obama." 
Yesenia: "Who's that?" 
Teacher: "Barack Obama. He's running for President. The African-American candidate." 
Yesenia: 
Teacher: "You know, the black guy?" 
Yesenia [Eyes widening]: "He's black?" 
Teacher: "Yes." 
Yesenia: "And he's running for President?" 
Teacher: "Yes." 
Yesenia: [With wide-eyed alarm]: "That's bad."

"Disgusting, racially-tinged, Muslim-baiting, xenophobic hate-mongering"

Asked about what else he was doing while on the East Coast, [Indiana governor Mitch Daniels] said he was going to Washington to accept an award from the Arab American Institute. “I happen to be one,” he said—an Arab American, that is. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Syria. Somehow I hadn’t registered that aspect of Daniels’s background before. I guess it makes Daniels even less likely to traffic in the kind of disgusting, racially-tinged, Muslim-baiting, xenophobic hate-mongering that some of his “brethren” (and sistren) have flirted with. ~Hendrik Hertzberg

The funny thing is that neither Hendrik Hertzberg nor all the editors and copy editors and fact checkers at The New Yorker noticed that Hertzberg's frothing-at-the-mouth rage about "hate-mongering" is funny.

May 5, 2011

Speculation

From Slate:
Their Fates Were SEALed 
Forget the U.S. version of the Bin Laden raid. Any adult male found in the compound was a dead man.
By William Saletan

You can also look at it the other way around: the SEALs did a fine job of not hurting any of the large number of children in the compound and not hurting any neighbors, and killed only one woman and shot another one in the leg or foot. Meanwhile, all adult men in bin Laden's compound were, by the fact of their presence in bin Laden's compound, assumed to be sworn enemies of the United States and therefore terminated with extreme prejudice. Compare it to the NATO aerial attack on Tripoli the night before that managed to kill a couple of Col. Cathaphee's small grandchildren without getting the target.

The latest news from Obama Administration sources (from the Washington Post):
U.S. officials provided new details on bin Laden’s final moments, saying the al-Qaeda leader was first spotted by U.S. forces in the doorway of his room on the compound’s third floor. Bin Laden then turned and retreated into the room before being shot twice — in the head and in the chest.
“He was retreating,” a move that was regarded as resistance, a U.S. official briefed on the operation said. “You don’t know why he’s retreating, what he’s doing when he goes back in there. Is he getting a weapon? Does he have a [suicide] vest?” 

It sounds like they shot him in the back. In the Wild West, that was supposedly considered unsporting. I recall asking my cousin around 1966 about the plot of some cowboy show episode (Gunsmoke? The Rifle Man?) that turned on whether or not a reward would be paid for a desperado wanted dead or alive who, it turns out, was shot in the back. Saloon sentiment in the show was against paying. (As a rather pragmatic and bloodthirsty seven-year-old, shooting bad guys in the back sounded fine to me.) I don't know what feelings are like in the Wild East.

This could explain dumping bin Laden's body into the sea.

The Assassination Corollary to Peak State Theory

If, in my Peak State theory, the chief puppetmaster in a Deep State is more likely to be the public top guy (or, in case of term limits, the obvious de facto top guy, like Putin in Russia) than anybody else, how can we account for assassinations? For example, Pakistani president General Zia-al-Haq's airplane fell out of the sky in 1988 in a highly suspicious manner.

Well, assassinations of the top guy show that it is important enough to be the top guy that other guys will risk their lives to kill the top guy.

Peak State as Occam's Razor

My concept of the Peak State is the Occam's Razor version of the concept of the Deep State.

The Mediterranean term "Deep State" refers to shadowy string pullers within a ruling establishment. The Peak State theory suggests that the man most likely to be pulling more of the strings than anybody else is the official top guy.

For example, in 1983 Ferndinand Marcos's exiled rival Benigno Aquino announced he was returning to the Philippines to challenge Marcos for the Presidency. He was gunned down on the airport tarmac. That led to a lot of complicated theorizing about which rogue elements and shadowy forces gave the orders, since it obviously couldn't have been Marcos, because that was too obvious. He was the obvious suspect, so he obviously wouldn't have done it.

Nah, it was Marcos.

Similarly, when an enemy of Vladimir Putin died in London a few years ago from polonium poisoning, there was much creativity expended on who dunnit, since, clearly, Putin, the man with more means and motive to do it than anybody else, wouldn't do something so obvious as murder an enemy in an extremely conspicuous manner because that would make him look guilty.

Well, maybe. I dunno.

Or when Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007 to challenge General Pervez Musharaff's grip on the Presidency and wound up very dead, the U.S. blamed Al-Qaeda.

Maybe.

But now we know that the boss of Al-Qaeda was living near the Pakistan Military Academy. That raises questions. 

The simplest answer to those questions seems like: Osama bin Laden was alive in Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto was dead in Pakistan because that's the way Pakistan President Pervez Musharaff wanted it. 

Now, Peak State may well be too logical and tidy an explanation for a place like Pakistan. But, maybe not.  

The Iraq WMD Non-Hoax

One of the more remarkable (but little remarked) non-events of the last decade was that when no Weapons of Mass Destruction turned up in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, nobody planted any. 

I can imagine a lot of possible reasons. First, Cheney really believed they'd be there, and Bush figured that if a smart guy like Cheney believed it, then they would be there. So, they didn't have a Plan B.

Second, that Bush and Cheney had a certain code of honor: spin, embroider, and cover-up, sure, but don't plant evidence like a dirty cop.

Third, that organizing a hoax would be hard and risky.

Fourth, that U.S. soldiers have too strong a sense of honor to go along with a massive hoax.

Peak State

My insta-reaction to bin Laden being found not on Pakistan's lawless frontier but next to the Pakistan Military Academy -- We've been scammed for years by the Pakistan deep state! -- is gaining in respectability.

So much so that Speaker of the House John Boehner has had to put out the word that loyal Invade-the-Worldists shouldn't be discouraged by mere embarrassment. Under the title, "Republicans Are Useless," Your Lying Eyes cites an AP story:
The Obama administration was investigating whether Pakistan knew Osama bin Laden was hiding deep inside the country as House Speaker John Boehner and top lawmakers insisted the U.S. maintain close ties with the sometimes reluctant ally in the war on terror. The killing of Osama bin Laden at a compound just miles from Islamabad prompted furious questions about whether Pakistan was complicit in protecting the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks...Amid the harsh criticism of Pakistan, Boehner and others said this was not the time to back away from Pakistan. "I think we need more engagement, not less," he said. "Al-Qaida and other extremist groups have made Pakistan a target. ... Having a robust partnership with Pakistan is critical to breaking the back of al-Qaida and the rest of them."

How true!

Except that Pakistan hosted the founder of al-Qaida.

And that raises difficult questions of what we mean by "Pakistan."

Outside of the GOP brain trust, the discussion has moved on to whether "rogue elements" in, say, Pakistan's intelligence service sheltered bin Laden.

All this raises the philosophical question of what is meant by "the government of Pakistan." Earlier, I had asserted the metaphysical point that, from the point of view of the United States of America, the strategic question is which side are they on in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and that, therefore, whomever implements a decision on bin Laden is, for our purposes, the effective government of Pakistan. 

But, there might not be a need for that kind of subtlety of argument, because there's an alternative to the "rogue elements" theory:

Or did this conspiracy go all the way to the top?

The concept of a "deep state," a permanent government of shadowy behind-the-scenes manipulators, is closely associated with Cold War Italy. 

But there's an irony here. The man most often accused of heading Italy's deep state was Giulio Andreotti, who was prime minister of Italy for a total of over seven years from 1972 to 1992. (Here's my review of the 2009 Italian movie about Andreotti, Il Divo, which, I must say, strikes me as once of my best movie reviews.)

Andreotti is the anti-Berlusconi, a man with negligible need for fame and acclaim. If he took on Italy's prime ministership three times, it wasn't out of ego, but because he could get more things done that he wanted to do in the top job than as a grey eminence.

In other words: less deep state than peak state.

Similarly, having lived in Chicago for 18 years, it was obvious to all that there is a Deep City.

Perhaps there were some rogue elements in the machine who were embarrassing, say, their less ridiculous colleagues by embezzling quarters from tollbooths.

But, for 42 of the last 56 years in Chicago, there was no mystery about who was, overall, in charge of the Deep City: Mayor Daley. The young Barack Obama craved the Mayor's job because it represented true power. Rahm Emmanuel didn't quit his post as the President's chief-of-staff to get elected Mayor in order to be manipulated by obscure underlings.

So, let me take a wild guess and throw out a name of somebody in Pakistan who might have decided to host Osama bin Laden: Pervez Musharraf. Granted, I might just be tossing that name out because he's one of the few Pakistanis whose name I know. But, I know his name because he was Chairman of the Pakistan Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1998 to 2007 and President of Pakistan from 1999 to 2008. He resigned a little over a half year after his rival Benazir Bhutto got machine gunned and blown up after returning to Pakistan to challenge him for the Presidency. Maybe that was just a rogue element, too.

Here's a new interview on Fox News in which Musharaff concedes incompetence at catching bin Laden, but denies complicity.

Now, I don't know anything about Pakistan. It seems more disorganized than Chicago, so maybe President Musharaff really was a feeble figurehead. On the other hand, maybe not.

May 4, 2011

Our Man in Islamabad (and Kabul, too) ...

... is Marc Grossman, who was appointed special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan by Hillary Clinton following Richard Holbrooke's death last December.

Where have I heard the name Marc Grossman before? Oh, yeah, he's the former American ambassador to Turkey (1994-1997) who is the central subject in former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' accusations. (Here's Philip Giraldi's interview with her in 2009 in The American Conservative. I've talked to Giraldi, an ex-CIA man who is AmCon's espionage gossip columnist. He seems like a level-headed guy.)

Very, very few people in the U.S. think about Turkey much. To us, it's either the Mexico of Europe or the Canada of the Middle East, and people who follow the news in America don't pay much attention to Mexico or Canada, much less to Turkey. Yet, it's actually a very interesting and important place -- look at a map.

And, Turkey is byzantine. It has always had connections to old school American deep staters like Scowcroft and Baker through Cold War NATO membership and the like. And it is of great interest to neocons due to the once strong Israeli alliance. Josh Klemons writes:
Israel has viewed Turkey as an ally since before it declared statehood. Turkey, along with Ethiopia and Iran (the latter of course being a much different story) made up Ben-Gurion’s Periphery Doctrine. Recognizing that in the short-term, Israel would not be able to work with its Arab neighbors, he looked to reach out to Israel’s “periphery” as a means of having allies in the region.

The neocons have been uneasy about Turkey, however, since the rise of Prime Minister Erdogan a decade ago.

I don't know whether Edmonds' accusations are true, but nobody seems to deny them very much or put forward evidence against them. Instead, they are just treated as nonexistent. It's not like there's an Official Story on the subject. There's just no story.

One interesting theory a commenter put forward was that the least disturbing explanation for all this would be that Edmonds happened to stumble upon a CIA sting operation in which Grossman was just pretending to be a corrupt secrets dealer in order to lure in the bad guys.

Did some sort of memo go out to never talk about any of this? If so, who sends it and who gets it? Or are you just supposed to know about what not to think about?

By the way, speaking of knowing what not to know, here's the May 5th list of most popular stories on WashingtonPost.com:

  1. Who shot bin Laden? Former SEALs fill in the blanks
  2. Osama bin Laden buried at sea after being killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan
  3. Why Glenn Beck lost it
  4. Pakistan did its part
  5. Obama owes thanks, and an apology, to CIA interrogators

Capital Punishment

No body, no photos, no autopsy report.

A theory: it wasn't much of a firefight, it was more of an execution.

I'm okay with that.

Most of the time, I care about cost-benefit analysis. But with Osama bin Laden, I care most about vengeance.