December 6, 2011

The other Pasadena

The Houston Chronicle reports on the demographic transition of the Other Pasadena, the oil refining town east of Houston that once represented the pinnacle of blue collar prosperity:
In the late 1970s, nationally renowned magazine writer Aaron Latham was captivated by a young Texan who mounted a mechanical bull in the Pasadena honky-tonk Gilley's. A few years later, Hollywood transformed Latham's report into the iconic Urban Cowboy, a film tribute to the culture of the "hard hat days and honky-tonk nights" of that era.

When I was at Rice in 1979-1980, I went to Gilley's when it was America's biggest nightclub. It was owned by country singer Mickey Gilley, who was a first cousin of 50s rocker Jerry Lee Lewis and TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart. My main memory is playing pool on the edge of the dance floor. I somehow managed to knock the cueball clear off the table. It started rolling across the world's largest dancefloor, with maybe five hundred couples on it. I scurried for maybe 50 yards after the rolling cueball trying to pick it up before some dancer fell down on it, as it accidentally got kicked around like the Indiana Jones's vial of antidote in the opening nightclub scene of Temple of Doom. I almost got punched by a few oilfield roughnecks for running into their girlfriends during my chase, and I can't say I blame them.

After that, I wasn't in the mood to ride the mechanical bull.
If Latham returned today, however, he'd have to adopt a Latin soundtrack, swap "vaquero" for "cowboy" in the movie's title and maybe even sub Antonio Banderas for John Travolta.

Funny how, after all these years, the reporter can't think of a Mexican-American movie star. (Banderas is a Spaniard.)
According to a San Antonio judicial panel - not to mention demographic studies - the Texas town that once embodied all things redneck is overwhelmingly Hispanic, a fact that no longer can be ignored in voting districts. 
Last week, two judges, with a third dissenting, adopted a voting district map that divides the city of Pasadena among several Texas House districts, all now represented by Anglo Republicans. But one district, represented by Republican Ken Legler, lost most of its Republican voters and now will be dominated by Hispanic neighborhoods. 
By all analyses, the new House District 144 now can easily be taken by a Democrat, especially if that candidate has a Spanish surname. According to political consultant Robert Jara, the new district backed former Houston Mayor Bill White over Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 gubernatorial election by a margin of 57 percent. 
Students in the Pasadena Independent School District, he noted, are more than 80 percent Hispanic.
... "No force in the world is going to stop Houston, Texas, from becoming majority Latino," Klineberg noted. In the Houston area, over 70 percent of Anglos are over age 65 [huh?], while 75 percent of non-Anglos are under age 30. Those numbers, Klineberg says, speak to the "absolute inevitability of this transformation."

In contrast, those free enterprise-hating Vermont Democrats with their Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders don't enjoy Texas's economic dynamism. What a bunch of idiots those Vermonters are! Of course, they still get to live in their hometowns near their relatives and old friends, but that just shows how liberal they are. True conservatives know that the essence of conservatism is shattering communities and crushing ties between people and places that have grown up over the years. 

Here's a clever trick

From the NYT, an article that naively recounts a clever trick to play anytime you want to discredit the public. But you have to have deep pockets because polling agencies don't like to do this:
Perceptions of the impact of migration in some countries are so distorted that their citizens estimate that there are as many as three times the number of immigrants living there than is actually the case, a global migration body says in a report being released on Tuesday. 
In “World Migration Report for 2011,” the International Organization for Migration, a 132-member intergovernmental body based in Geneva, warns that misinformation about migration fans “harmful stereotypes, discrimination and xenophobia.”  ...

Your taxpayer dollars at work! This International Organization for Migration spent $1.4 billion dollars in 2010.
People in destination countries tended to significantly overstate the size of the migrant population, the organization said, based on polling from an annual survey, “Trans-Atlantic Trends.” 
The actual percentage of migrants in Italy in 2010 was around 7 percent, the report said, “yet polls showed that the population perceived this percentage to be around a staggering 25 percent.” 
Some surveys in the United States showed that the public believed that immigrants made up 39 percent of the population in 2010. That estimate, the report said, was “a far cry” from the actual 14 percent.

What a bunch of idiots immigration skeptics are!

Okay, seriously, this is a sure-fire ploy because on the rare occasions when public opinion polls ask questions with objective answers, the public always overestimates the share of the population comprised by the group being asked about. For example, a 2011 Gallup Poll found that the mean estimate of the homosexual share of the population was 24.6 percent. Or, as I wrote
A 2001 Gallup survey, right after the release of 2000 Census results, found that the average American estimated that 33% of the population was black and 29% were Hispanic. That adds up the two main minorities accounting for 62%, or a majority of the population, but who's counting? Not most people.
In that 2001 survey, nonwhites estimated that 40% of the population was black and 35% was Hispanic (adding up to 75%). In contrast, people claiming postgraduate degrees estimated that 25% were black and 24% Hispanic (only about double the Census numbers), which proves the value of advanced education.

Of course, another aspect of this trick that the IOM is doing is to not count children of immigrants as immigrants.

The spokesman for the 132-country governmental organization with a $1.4 billion annual budget goes on:
Meanwhile, foreign workers in Europe suffered higher unemployment in 2010 than their counterparts in the citizenry. While Spaniards suffered 18.1 percent unemployment in 2010, the rate for foreigners in Spain was 30.2 percent, the organization’s data show. In Germany, migrants were nearly twice as likely as locals to be jobless (12.4 percent versus 6.5 percent) during the summer of 2010. Europe, for its part, was the generator of new outflows, with net emigration from Ireland reaching 60,000 people at the end of 2010, after 7,800 in 2009.

Swell.

Facts on Left-Handers

Lefthanded people are interesting, in part because they don't make up a strong identity politics group and thus don't benefit from legal protection. There is no Lefthanders History Month of PBS documentaries on Lefthander Pride. This is despite a stringent period of anti-lefthanded bias in the early 20th Century. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was a natural lefthander converted to writing righthanded accordign to the advanced thinking of his time. At some point, before WWII, I believe, there was something of a Lefthander's Liberation movement that reversed this pattern of oppressing natural lefties to switch, but unlike other such movements, this one has almost completely disappeared from media memory. 

Here are some facts from the WSJ on lefties:
About 10% of people are left-handed, according to expert estimates. Another 1% of the population is mixed-handed. What causes people not to favor their right hand is only partly due to genetics—even identical twins, who have 100% of the same genes, don't always share handedness.
... More important, researchers say, are environmental factors—especially stress—in the womb. Babies born to older mothers or at a lower birth weight are more likely to be lefties, for example. And mothers who were exposed to unusually high levels of stress during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to a left-handed child. A review of research, published in 2009 in the journal Neuropsychologia, estimated that about 25% of the variability in handedness is due to genetics.

Handedness is a form of human biodiversity that is only moderately heritable, which explains much about about their lack of political power as a group. Identity groups are largely constructed from relations of blood and marriage, language (e.g., signing deaf people are a strong identity group despite their problems because they have Deaf Culture, while deaf people who don't sign aren't really politically deaf), sexual relations (homosexuals), and sex.
On average there is no difference in intelligence between right-and left-handed people. But lefties do better on an element of creativity known as divergent thinking.

Six of the last 12 U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, have been lefties. 
Left-handed people earn on average 10% lower salaries than righties, according to a recent study. Findings of some earlier studies on income have been mixed. 
Despite popular misperceptions, lefties aren't more accident prone than right-handed people and don't tend to die at a younger age. 
Left-handedness has been linked to increased risk of certain neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD. Mixed-handedness is even more strongly associated with ADHD. 
Most people's brains have a dominant side. More symmetrical brains of mixed-handed people may explain the link to some neural disorders.

While lefties make up about 10% of the overall population, about 20% of people with schizophrenia are lefties, for example. Links between left-handedness and dyslexia, ADHD and some mood disorders have also been reported in research studies.

Recall, the standard thing nice white people always say about race -- "He just happens to be black." As George Carlin pointed out, if somebody has two black parents, "Where does the surprise part come in? I would think it would be more unusual if he just "happened to be" Scandinavian!"

But, it's much truer to say "He just happens to be lefthanded." But, because it's true, hardly anybody ever says it.

The Good Fence

As we all know from reading the Northeastern press, a fence along the Mexican border couldn't possibly restrain illegal border-crossers. It's a law of physics, or something!

For some reason, however, the laws of physics don't apply in Israel, which, over the last decade, has been industriously building fences that have proven quite successful at keeping out suicide bombers and other highly motivated would-be intruders. Now, to cut down on illegal immigration of Africans passing through Egypt, Israel is building a 5-meter tall razor wire fence on its 140-mile border with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The Washington Post complained yesterday about the colossal expense and waste of sending all of 1,200 National Guardsmen to protect America's border, but its recent article on Israel's latest fence is much more respectful of Israeli justifications for securing its border.

Falser words were never spoken: "It's not’s racist if it’s true”

From Wikipedia's article on the annual West Indian Day Parade and Carnival in Brooklyn on Labor Day:
In 2003, a man was fatally shot and another was stabbed in the neck.[4][5] In 2005, one man was shot and killed along the parade route. In 2006, one man was shot and another was stabbed. By the 2007 parade, there was only one report of violence, when a man was shot twice in the leg.[6][7]. In 2011 pre-dawn marches took a violent turn with the murder of one person, five instances of gunshot victims and three instances of stabbings coupled with sporadic shooting at crowds of people.

Two of the five victims this September were NYPD flatfoots who were winged by bullets. 

Not surprisingly, New York cops don't like being assigned to this wingding. A whole bunch made comments on a Facebook page devoted to protesting their having to risk their lives at the West Indian Day event, without realizing the implications of Facebook demanding your real name. The New York Times was properly aghast at what they said:
It offered a fly-on-the-wall view of officers displaying roiling emotions often hidden from the public, a copy of the posting obtained by The New York Times shows. Some of the remarks appeared to have broken Police Department rules barring officers from “discourteous or disrespectful remarks” about race or ethnicity. 
The subject was officers’ loathing of being assigned to the West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn, an annual multiday event that unfolds over the Labor Day weekend and has been marred by episodes of violence, including deaths of paradegoers. Those who posted comments appeared to follow Facebook’s policy requiring the use of real names, and some identified themselves as officers.

The NYT's link in the above paragraph on the routine violence among parade-goers goes not to an NYT news story, as most NYT links do, but to a Yahoo News story from the AP. Apparently, the pattern of gunplay at the parade is not news that's fit to print.

One naive soul argued on Facebook:
... “It’s not racist if it’s true,” yet another wrote.

Haven't we all learned by now that that's close to the opposite of today's dominant mindset? Today, the more you get punished for racism the more truth you tell and the more credible of a witness you are.

For example, when America's most prominent man of science said in 2007, ""[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really," James D. Watson got Watsoned for racism precisely because that's what all the testing says and he is America's most honored scientist.

Next month's GOP frontrunner?

After Newt Gingrich's frontrunnership implodes as people get bored for the umpty-umpth time with Newt's incessant yammering, Republicans will need somebody new to fill the Anybody But Romney hot seat. Obviously, Ron Paul is unthinkable, so I've found the perfect modern Republican candidate. He's handsome, he's a successful politician, he has a Spanish-surname to appeal to the Hispanic Electoral Tsunami, and he appears to be as dumb as a box of rocks. 

Granted, he's not, technically, an American, but that kind of nativist prejudice should have no place in our forward-looking GOP. I suppose you could also object that Enrique Peña Nieto is currently busy being the favorite for president of Mexico on the former ruling party's PRI ticket, but clearly the GOP should make him an offer. You don't find a perfect fit like this everyday. From the LA Times:
The front-runner in Mexico's presidential race stumbled in a high-profile way at a world-class book festival on Saturday, when, over several minutes, he appeared unable to correctly name a book that's influenced his life, besides the Bible. 
And even then, Enrique Peña Nieto fumbled, not citing an "author" or a prophet whose biblical verse has particularly touched him. Instead, he merely made a vague reference to "some passages of it." 
He also confused the names of two well-known Mexican authors, Enrique Krauze and Carlos Fuentes, in a four-minute episode that ended with the candidate red-faced, saying, "The truth is, when I read a book I often don't fully register the titles."

He's such a synergistic fit that maybe Peña Nieto could run on both the PRI and GOP tickets simultaneously. After all, as a great man from Texico might have said, "Literary values don't stop at the Rio Grande."

Breaking News: The affirmative action President backs affirmative action

My new VDARE column considers the Obama Administration's new guidelines on racial preferences in education, which the NYT's article considers to be a radical change from the anti-affirmative action Bush policy. The Times writes that in pursuit of diversity:
“Even in addressing the same principles, the framework is practically reversed. 
“Bush guidelines: ‘Before using race, there must be a serious good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives.’ 
“Obama guidelines: ‘Institutions are not required to implement race-neutral approaches if, in their judgment, the approaches would be unworkable.’”

Uh, I’m no logician, but I think those two statements mean basically the same thing in practice: Public educational institutions can use blatant racial quotas (excuse me, blatant racial goals) if more devious ways of hurting whites aren’t workable (or are unworkable).

Read the whole thing there.

December 5, 2011

Can adults pass school achievement tests?

About a half-dozen years ago, the Gates Foundation talked the L.A. school board into passing a rule that nobody could graduate from high school without passing Algebra II (as well as Algebra I and Geometry). Each year since, implementation of that edict has been delayed for a year, although, supposedly, this year's class of high school freshmen will absolutely have to pass Algebra II to avoid going through life as high school dropouts. We're Not Kidding This Time!

It's amusing to contemplate school board members trying to pass Algebra II.

Marion Brady writes in the Washington Post about a wealthy friend who is on a school board. He decided to take his district's test for 10th graders. 
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction. 
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. 
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities. 
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession."

My view is that it's very important that our society identify and educate the kids who can handle the standard algebra-calculus-and beyond math track required to be an engineer or the like. That justifies humiliating and wasting the time of the majority who can't master the standard math track through calculus ... up to a point. But there are huge costs, out of pocket and opportunity, to trying to lead horses to the well of higher mathematics and trying to make them drink.

For one thing, there are other kinds of math, such as statistics, that some people are relatively better at. More broadly, there are lots of  people who can't learn arithmetic at the fast clip necessary to get through calculus by 12th grade. But stuff like fractions and percentages are hugely valuable in life. 

But, does anybody know of a study of what % of jobs require somebody to use Algebra II level math?

Invade the World / Invite the World in a nutshell

Today's banner headline featured as the #1 "news" story on WashingtonPost.com, the company newsletter of Empire, Inc., is:

Critics target cost of Guard troops on border


(Getty Images)
President Obama’s decision last year to send 1,200 National Guard troops to U.S.-Mexico border may have been smart politics, but a growing number of skeptics say the deployment is an expensive and inefficient mission.

Ah, yes, the crushing cost of deploying 1,200 National Guardsmen to the 1,952-mile southern border. Don't you see this vast expense might endanger the Pentagon's budget for deploying over 100,000 troops in strategically crucial Afghanistan in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world? What's more important to America? Afghanistan or Arizona? Afghanistan, obviously. Those Arizonans are racist.

Furthermore, while you immigration skeptics have been proven right that massive illegal immigration would be bad for the economy and would be cost-effective to diminish with fences and guards, the fact that you were right and we at the Washington Post were completely wrong just goes to prove that everybody should ignore you. Instead, we want America to open up the borders wide so if the economy ever recovers, then there will be another massive influx of undocumented workers just in time for the next recession. What could make more sense than that?

The Costs of Inequality: Pull from the Top or Push from the Bottom?

Economist Robert H. Frank (as Half Sigma likes to point out, there are a whole bunch of commentators named Robert Frank, so it's important to use the middle initial) writes in Slate:
Because many continue to deny that income inequality has been growing, it’s useful to start with a brief review of how income growth patterns have changed since World War II. The three decades after the war saw incomes grow at an almost uniform 3 percent annual rate for families up and down the income ladder. Since the early 1970s, however, virtually all income gains have accrued to those whose incomes were highest to begin with. 
It’s a striking fractal pattern. Most of the gains have gone to the top 20 percent of earners, but the lion’s share of the gains within that group have gone to the top 5 percent. And within the top 5 percent, most of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and so on.

Is this new pattern something to worry about? Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who’ve fallen behind feel impoverished. But it’s done much more than that. It has also raised the real cost to middle-income families of achieving many basic goals. 
It’s done that through a process that I’ve elsewhere called “expenditure cascades.” The process begins with the completely unremarkable fact that top earners have been spending at a substantially higher rate than before. They’ve been building bigger mansions, staging more elaborate weddings and coming-of-age parties for their kids, buying more and better of everything. 
... The important practical point is that when the rich build bigger, they shift the frame of reference that shapes the demands of the near rich, who travel in the same social circles. 
Perhaps it’s now the custom in those circles to host your daughter’s wedding reception at home rather than in a hotel or country club. So the near rich feel they too need a house with a ballroom. And when they build bigger, they shift the frame of reference for the group just below them, and so on, all the way down.  
There’s no other way to explain why the median new house built in the United States in 2007 had more than 2,300 square feet, almost 50 percent more than its counterpart in 1980.

Yes, there actually is another way to explain bigger houses. Are people being pulled by the top or pushed by the bottom? Bigger houses, especially when mandated by developers and / or zoning, are not only an attempt to get closer to the top, they are very much an attempt to get farther away from the bottom, to physically escape to neighborhoods and school districts where the bottom can't afford to live.

Neither the pull nor the push explanation is sufficient by itself, but it's obtuse of Frank to ignore the obvious complementary explanation. (There are also other, non-inequality related explanations, but I'll skip over them here.)
Certainly, it’s not because the median earners are awash in cash. (The median real wage for American men was actually lower in 2007 than in 1980.) Nor is there any other way to explain why the inflation-adjusted average cost of an American wedding had grown almost threefold during the same period.

Hint: what proportion of Americans are married in 2007 compared to 1980? Higher or lower?
Middle-income families have also been struggling to meet sharply higher tuition bills and health insurance premiums. To make ends meet, they’ve taken on substantial debt, worked longer hours, and endured longer commutes to work. In the parts of the country where inequality has grown most, we’ve seen the biggest increases in bankruptcy filings and the biggest increases in divorce rates. 
Many have been harshly critical of families that borrowed more than they could reasonably hope to repay. If they couldn’t afford larger houses and more expensive weddings for their daughters, these critics say, they should have just scaled back. But that charge ignores the importance of context in meeting basic goals. 
All parents, for example, want to send their children to the best possible schools.

I see little evidence for that assertion. It would be much truer to say most parents don't want to send their kids to the worst possible schools. Economists have long distinguished between maximizing and satisficing, and it would seem pretty clear that most parents do more of the latter when it comes to schools. For example, how many American parents apply their children to Eton or Harrow? Instead, Americans put huge efforts into getting their kids into good enough school districts, where the public schools are reasonably safe, where classes aren't bogged down by the children of illegal immigrants who don't speak English well, and so forth. Parents have criteria: e.g., If I send my daughter to this school, how likely is she to fall in love with a gangbanger?
But a good school is a relative concept. It’s one that’s better than most other schools in your area.

To some extent, true, but to a perhaps greater extent, parents try to get into a sufficiently good area and then are satisfied with sending their kids to an average or even below average school in that district. For example, I seriously considered buying the cheapest house in the cheapest neighborhood in Lake Forest and Wilmette, IL. I'm sure my kids would have been stuck in the worst neighborhood public school in Lake Forest or Wilmette, but that seemed like something we could live with. No doubt, if we had lived there, over time we would have noticed that our kids' classmates weren't the offspring of the town's creme-de-la-creme, but the urge to go deeply into debt to move from the poorest neighborhood school to a better one in Lake Forest is a lot smaller than the urge to get your kids out of Chicago public school and into a Lake Forest public school. Economists have a concept called diminishing marginal returns. Economist Frank should use it here.
In every country, the better schools are those that serve students whose families live in more expensive neighborhoods. So if a family is to achieve its goal, it must outbid similar families for a house in a neighborhood served by such a school. Failure to do so often means having to send your kids to a school with metal detectors at the front entrance and students who score in the 20th percentile in reading and math. Most families will do everything possible to avoid having to send their children to a school like that.

Exactly. And the growth in the number of billionaires has only the most distant connections with the growth in the population of students who don't read English well. Granted, some billionaires agitate for more low wage immigrants, so they deserve some political blame, but it's not billionaires' kids who are directly causing the need for metal detectors and dumbing down the public school curriculums.
But because of the logic of musical chairs, many are inevitably frustrated. No matter how aggressively everyone bids for a house in a better school district, half of all students must attend schools in the bottom half of the school quality distribution.

Sure, but how bad in an absolute sense is the bottom half of the distribution in quality of students? In Finland, not so bad. In Lake Wobegon, not so bad. In Lake Forest and Wilmette, not so bad.

In Chicago or Los Angeles, not so hot.

Now, most Americans tend to view education through the lens of diminishing marginal returns. Getting their kids out of the 20th percentile school is a high priority. Getting their kids from the 98th to the 99th percentile schools is a lower priority. The least satisficing / most maximizing behavior in education tends to be found among Tiger Mothers like Amy Chua. Professor Frank teaches at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. The Census reports that Ithaca has more Asian residents than blacks and Hispanics combined, so it's not surprising that he doesn't have a realistic view of the country as a whole.
As in the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand, hoping for a better view, only to discover that no one sees any better than if all had remained comfortably seated.

Indeed. So why cram more people without tickets into the stadium?

Parents confront similar dilemmas when deciding how much to spend on a child’s coming-of-age party or wedding. The expenditure cascades spawned by higher spending at the top in those categories have raised expectations about how one should mark important social milestones. Of course, a family always has the option to spend considerably less on such events than most of its peers do. But it can do so only by disappointing loved ones, or by courting the impression that it failed to appreciate the importance of the occasion they were celebrating.

Coming of age parties? My impression is that spending by white Catholics and Protestants on coming of age parties is not enormous. For my son's 18th birthday, we took him to dinner at The Cheesecake Factory and gave him a laptop computer to take off to college.

Further, my impression is that increases in bar/bat mitzvah spending are driven more by Jewish immigrant families from the Middle East or Russia. I can't tell you about high end entertainment industry bar mitzvahs, but in my experience, the celebrations put on by typical American-born Ashkenazi families are not disproportionate to their substantial wealth.

The big money pit in Southern California is Quinceanara parties. My wife has pointed out the strip of shops in North Hollywood that cater to the Quinceanara business. Side by side there is a dress shop, a tuxedo shop, a limousine rental outlet, a beauty parlor, a nail salon, a florist, and a bail bondsman: everything for your Quinceanara needs, other than maybe a payday loan outlet and a gun shop for all your firing into the air Pancho Villa-style needs (fortunately, the LAPD has pretty successfully cracked down on that over the last decade by shooting a few celebratory shooters to discourage the others).

As for wedding costs, one of the mechanisms driving up the average cost of weddings is the decline in the number of first weddings. As marriage becomes more of an upper-middle class phenomenon, expenditures naturally go up. Moreover, weddings are becoming a class marker -- people wish to disassociate themselves in clear terms from the non-marrying classes, and the most obvious way to publicly do that is by throwing a huge wedding. By no means is this the only explanation, but it's one of the explanations.

In Los Angeles among gentile whites, coming-of-age parties are considered kind of de classe because they are associated with Quinceanaras, while weddings are considered classy because they are common only among the upper middle class.
By creating runaway demands for credit, growing income disparities also helped spawn the housing bubble that gave us the financial crisis of 2008 ...

Indeed, but the the great bulk of foreclosures took place in neighborhoods, such as California's Inland Empire, among people who don't even know anybody who is super-rich. A classic driving force in the run-up of home prices was working class people using subprime and Alt-A mortgages to try to get their kids out of the 'hood.

The median home foreclosed in California was about 1500 square feet. Professors and journalists have a hard time grasping the scale of the various factors because they spend so much more of their time around the hugely rich than anybody else in their pay grade. They also try to avoid spending time with the 85-100 IQ working class, so they are pretty clueless.

None of this is to serve as an all-purpose defense of the billionaire class. But, for many social problems such as the poor quality of the student bodies in many public schools, you really can't blame billionaire's kids for being a big part of the problem.

The most general problem is the legitimacy granted to high-low coalitions: e.g., Angelo Mozilo announcing in 2005 that Countrywide is going to loan a trillion dollars to minorities and the poor to fight racial inequality. So, don't get persnickety with questions about whether the borrowers can pay the mortgages back, you racist, you.

This concept of billionaire-NAM coalitions simply doesn't register on the media radar yet.

December 2, 2011

Work hard, study hard, riot hard

Here's an amusing article by Amanda Ripley in Time:
On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. 
In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. ... 
But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."

In other news, South Koreans are the world's best organized rioters.

December 1, 2011

Do college quotas hurt NAMs?

George Will has a column on some new research supporting the mismatch theory that racial quotas in education hurt their beneficiaries by putting them into overly elite schools:
A second brief, submitted by three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow and Todd Gaziano), argues that racial preferences in law school admissions mean fewer black lawyers than there would be without preferences that bring law students into elite academic settings where their credentials put them in the bottom of their classes. A similar dynamic is reducing the number of minority scientists and engineers than there would be under race-neutral admissions policies. 
There are fewer minorities entering high-prestige careers than there would be if preferences were not placing many talented minority students in inappropriate, and discouraging, academic situations: “Many would be honor students elsewhere. But they are subtly being made to feel as if they are less talented than they really are.” This is particularly so regarding science and engineering, which are, as Heriot, Kirsanow and Gaziano say, “ruthlessly cumulative”: Students who struggle in entry-level classes will find their difficulties cascading as the academic ascent becomes steeper. Hence the high attrition rates. 

I used to think this was true, but I now have doubts. You know whose perspective I'd like to get on this issue?: A widowed black lady named Marian Robinson. See, she repeatedly saw her daughter go to elite schools on racial quotas -- Whitney Young HS, Princeton, Harvard Law, and then off to a Big Law firm -- But her daughter was in over her head at most of these places, felt like her peers were looking down upon her, struggled with spelling and with passing the bar exam, and quickly gave up practicing law for lower brow jobs in the fixer industry in Chicago. So, the question I'd ask Mrs. Robinson is how did  affirmative action work out for your daughter?

But I probably won't be able to go over to her house and knock on the door and ask Mrs. Robinson, because she and her daughter, two granddaughters, and her son-in-law, live in the White House. So, I'm just going to guess that, despite some rough patches, overall it worked out pretty doggone good for Michelle Robinson Obama.

Say I'm a black high school student with a 700 SAT math score and my options are:

1) Without affirmative action, go to Purdue and become an engineer.

2) With affirmative action, go to Penn, major in economics or finance, maybe get an MBA, and go into corporate management

Why would I choose what's behind door #1? My dad was an engineer. A friend of his designed the fastest airplane of all time. But, he was never that kind of genius, so he spent 40 years worrying about whether or not the wings were going to snap off the planes designed by the geniuses.

There are a lot of worse jobs than engineer, but there are better jobs, too.

To compare this topic to my next blog post below, I'd say that getting into a college a little over your head is likely to be a lot less disastrous than getting into a financial transaction a little over your head. Not for profit colleges, especially the elite ones, are pretty coddling places, at least outside of sci-eng departments. If you don't graduate, that will look bad on their USNWRs, so they will help you find a Plan B.

In contrast, you don't want to get into a for-profit educational institution to study something above your brainpower. You'll just wind up with a lot of inescapable debt and nothing to show for it.  

Why understanding ethnic differences in IQ matters: Part CMXII

Nicholas D. Kristof writes in the NYT:
One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans. 
These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up. 
Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

Way back in 2000, I wrote a 5-part series for VDARE on How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve. In it, I protested: "America's growing IQ stratification, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless, is one of the great unmentionables."

The subsequent subprime disaster exemplified this. The conventional wisdom on increasing minority homeownership, as promoted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Henry Cisneros, and Angelo Mozilo, was that mortgage lenders who followed traditional credit standards were stupid racists who were overlooking lots of blacks and Hispanics who were smart enough to make enough money to pay off their mortgages even if they put down a tiny or nonexistent down payment and didn't quite have all their documents. (Hey, they're undocumented! Don't be prejudiced against the undocumented for not having documents proving that that they make six figures picking strawberries.)

What happened instead, of course, was that sharp pencil guys, in the name of fighting racist redlining, pushed people who weren't good with numbers and weren't good at coolly assessing the long term implications of financial decisions, people who were disproportionately blacks and Hispanics, into complicated loans that just raped them, and ended up raping the country.

This is much like the long-running debate in the middle of the last decade between Malcolm Gladwell v. Judge Richard Posner and myself. Gladwell, the herald of multi-culti capitalism, defended the ethics of car salesmen against the scoffing of Posner and myself. I think the definitive word belongs to an outstanding 2001 article in Edmunds by Chandler Phillips called Confessions of a Car Salesman, in which Edmunds car magazine hired a journalist to work at two L.A. area new car dealerships:
"My manager had, at one point, described the different races and nationalities and what they were like as customers. It would be too inflammatory to repeat what he said here. But the gist of it was that the people of such-and-such nationality were "lie downs" (people who buy without negotiating), while the people of another race were "roaches" (they had bad credit), and people from that country were "mooches" (they tried to buy the car for invoice price).  
"I'll repeat what Michael, my ASM, told me about Caucasians. He said white people never come into the dealership. 'They're all on the Internet trying to find out what our invoice price is. We never even get a shot at them. I hate it. I mean, would they go (to a mall) and say, "What's your invoice price on that beautiful suit?" No. So why are they doing it here?'"

Awhile ago, I went into a certain dealership on Van Nuys Blvd. that sells a prominent brand of Japanese cars to mostly Latino customers. 

That place struck me as an abode of evil, from the ridiculously lavish atrium lobby with huge trees indoors, to the high pressure sales tactics, which are designed to trigger Mexican males' insecurities about their machismo. Aren't they man enough to buy this absurdly overloaded car at a monthly payment that, if you do the numbers (but nobody does), turns out to include a 21% interest rate? What kind of maricon are you who can't show the salesman you can afford what he's offering? I brought my son along and, rather than walk out, we sat through an hour of unbelievably hostile sales tactics as a lesson to him. 

And that explains a lot about the motivations behind the businesses in the immigration lobby: more uneducated, innumerate, insecure Mexicans are more fresh meat for their salesmen. They can't rip off educated white people who subscribe to Consumer Reporters and use the Zag system reserved for CR subscribers, so they want to bring in millions of new people they can outsmart and cheat.

November 30, 2011

Andrew Sullivan fights the good fight

Andrew Sullivan, who published a symposium on The Bell Curve when he edited The New Republic in 1994, has bravely returned to the fray of defending Herrnstein and Murray, exciting many lowbrow denunciations from the likes of Gawker.

Yet, clearly, stunning new developments in the real world over the last 17 years have proven Herrnstein and Murray wrong. For example, there are all those countless black Silicon Valley start-up founders who have made so much money in high-tech. And, we constantly read articles in the newspaper these days about how the Test Score Gap has vanished in one school district after another, which is why the No Child Left Behind act is right on schedule to make everybody proficient within 2.5 years. 

Today, everything is completely different than when I started following social science statistics in 1972 (see here for my first letter to the editor back in 1973 when I was 14, which was on sociologist Christopher Jencks' book Inequality, a re-analysis of the data in the 1966 Coleman Report).

In 1972, it looked like the rank order of average intelligence was Oriental, Caucasian, Chicano, and black. But, in 2011, of course, we now see from endless studies and real world examples that the actual rank ordering appears to be Asian, non-Hispanic white, Latino, and African-American. So, everything has changed!

November 29, 2011

Why Clinton's book is worse than Bush's: Bill wrote it himself

At the VDARE blog, I write:
Central to contemporary Democrats' self-image is their conviction that they are more intelligent and refined than Republicans. Thus, millions of Democrats fell hard after their 2000 and 2004 Presidential defeats for an absurd hoax claiming that Blue States like Connecticut have average IQs as much as 26 points higher than Red States like Utah. 
This may help explain why Bill Clinton is insistent that he personally “wrote and rewrote” his lumpish new book, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy. Since, as the subtitle implies, Democrats are smart, a super-successful Democrat like Bill Clinton must be a natural prose stylist in little need of a competent ghostwriter. In reality, however, Clinton’s verbiage is embarrassingly amateurish, especially when compared to George W. Bush's 2010 bestseller Decision Points. 
Clinton seems to believe that being able to extrude long sentences demonstrates intelligence. Thus, on p. 6 of Back to Work, I tripped over a sentence of 85 words. Forewarned, I began to track Clinton's XXXL-size sentences. By page 20, I had found additional leviathans of 91, 105, 110, 98, 118, and a full 200 words. On pp. 23-24, Clinton discharged a blue whale of a sentence lasting 346 words, after which I gave up looking.

Read the whole thing there.

November 28, 2011

Democrats abandon white working class

From the NYT, a lengthy explication of the high-low versus middle coalition:
The Future of the Obama Coalition 
By THOMAS B. EDSALL 
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. 
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

The obvious question is whether Republicans will, in response, do anything to motivate working class whites to go to the polls other than to promise to cut taxes on billionaires?

We know what one successful campaign that mobilizes the less intellectual white voters to get off the couch and vote looks like: George H.W. Bush in 1988: Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance, and other small but evocative issues that succeeded in defining, crudely but not inaccurately, Dukakis. We also know the fear and loathing this successful effort to engage mass interest in the election inspired in media elites, who have demonized that strategy ever since. We also know what an impotent Republican strategy respectful of media taboos looks likes: John McCain in 2008.

Perhaps someday, we might even see a substantive campaign to offer positive policy solutions to benefit the broad middle of the American public.

Bill Clinton's "Back to Work"

My new VDARE column is a review of the ex-President's new book Back to Work. 

November 27, 2011

Shocking News

From the NYT comes one of those Local News articles about The Gap that are always breathlessly reported as if local disparities reflect some unique problem:
In New York, Mexicans Lag in Education 
By KIRK SEMPLE 
In the past two decades, the Mexican population in New York City has grown more than fivefold, with immigrants settling across the five boroughs. Many adults have demonstrated remarkable success at finding work, filling restaurant kitchens and construction sites, and opening hundreds of businesses. 
But their children, in one crucial respect, have fared far differently. 
About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data. 
No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.

I find "9 percent" implausibly low, but, whatever.
This crisis endures at the college level.

How exactly is it a "crisis" if it "endures?" There's very little evidence that Mexican-Americans en masse consider their children's or grand-children's or great-grandchildren's relative lack of education to be a crisis. 

Much of the punditry on immigration coming out of the dominant NY-DC Axis of Obliviousness assumes that immigration from Mexico is a brand new phenomenon, so the future is wide open. Anything could happen! To New York journalists, the most plausible model would be Mexicans as not the new Jews, but at least as the new Italians. After all, their names sometimes end in vowels, so they must be pretty similar. Thus, we should be seeing tons of Mexican-American Scalias, Mondavis, Gianninis, Scorseses, Giamattis, Coppolas, and Paglias any day now.

From a Southwestern U.S. perspective, however, as amply documented by social science research, none of this looks like a crisis, a crossroads where something has to change. Instead, a relative lack of education among Mexican-Americans just looks like Situation Normal for at least four or five generations at a stretch.