Nate Silver isn't cynical enough

Nate Silver, a baseball statistics analyst turned electoral analyst, has an article in the NYT Magazine entitled "Let's Play Medalball."

It’s been almost a decade since the publication of “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s famous book-turned-movie about how the small-market Oakland Athletics used statistical artistry to compete against their (much) richer rivals. Billy Beane is still the A’s general manager, but here’s a modest proposal for his next act. He could become the head of another budget-strapped sports organization like, say, the Olympic Committee of Kyrgyzstan — or another small-market country with limited resources. Bishkek is nice this time of year! 

How might Beane turn “moneyball” into “medalball”? Channeling him, I’ve identified three measures that, when weighted equally, suggest the sports in which the Kyrgyzstans of the world could direct their energy and resources to maximize their medal count.

The underlying problem with Silver's suggestions is a lack of cynicism. Anybody familiar with Olympic history would realize that lots of countries have tried to maximize medals over the years, often with much success.

The most obvious strategy is one followed by East Germany and China: it's much easier to win medals in women's events. Outside of gymnastics and a few other sports, the number of girls who, deep down inside, really want to do what it takes to win is smaller. So, focus on macho sports for women, such as women's weightlifting.

I recall an interview with a lady shotputter from China at a recent Olympics. She said she'd always wanted to be a veterinarian when she was a child, but a bunch of state athletic experts came to her elementary school, measured all the children in various ways, and then told her she was going to grow up to be a shotputter. She didn't want to be a shotputter, she wanted to be a veterinarian, but nobody cared about her opinion. So, now she was a lady shotputter.

Women's Olympic sports are full of uplifting and empowering stories like that.

Also, as East Germany demonstrated, giving your women lots of male hormones helps more than giving your men lots of male hormones.

For sports, such as "women's" gymnastics that have a minimum age for female competitors, because T&A slows down how fast a girl can spin, lie (as China does).

It also helps to have a totalitarian system. For example, Cuba is a poor country, but it wins lots of Olympic medals. One reason is because the government channels youths into various Olympic sports, instead of letting them all play soccer like in other countries. Cuba is too small to win the soccer World Cup, but it can win gold at less popular sports.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NPR: Women scientists find science boring to talk about, so men must be at fault. Or maybe Society.

From NPR:

How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science 

by SHANKAR VEDANTAM 

It isn't just that fewer women choose to go into these fields. Even when they go into these fields and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit. 

"They tend to drop out at higher rates than their male peers," said Toni Schmader, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "As women enter into careers, the levels of advancement aren't as steep for women as for men. ... 

When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women. 

"For women, the pattern was just the opposite, specifically in their conversations with male colleagues," Schmader said. "So the more women in their conversations with male colleagues were talking about research, the more disengaged they reported being in their work." 

Disengagement predicts that someone is at risk of dropping out. 

There was another sign of trouble. 

When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent. 

One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game. Mehl and Schmader checked the tapes.
"We don't have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen," Schmader said. 

But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren't talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged. 

For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The White Jeremy Lin

The Washington Post reports:

Jeremy Lin’s move to Rockets could give team financial windfall from China 

By Scott Soshnick, Published: July 17 

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- Jeremy Lin’s marketing potential is best cultivated by the Houston Rockets, whose experience with Chinese center Yao Ming has them better positioned and prepared than any other National Basketball Association team to reap a financial windfall from Asia.

There's been much talk that the New York Knicks should have matched the Houston Rockets contract offer for point guard Jeremy Lin just on economic grounds alone. The widespread theory is that it would be easy for the Knicks to continue to profit off Chinese racial pride in Lin. I don't know how true that theory is (here's a post that argues that it's hard for the individual franchise, as opposed to the league, to cash in on overseas racial affinity). 

But what strikes me as more interesting is that nobody in the press seems to think that there is anything objectionable about Chinese racial bias in favor of Lin. 

Keep in mind that this isn't Chinese nationalism at work. Lin was born in America and his parent are from Taiwan. This is Chinese racialism. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

In contrast, eight years ago the great Larry Bird mentioned in an interview:

"… as we all know, the majority of fans are white America. If you just had a couple of white guys in there [in the NBA], you might get them a little excited."

In response, sportswriters went berserk:

Mike Vaccaro in the New York Post hyperventilated about "logic-challenged hayseeds like Larry Bird espousing his own strange brand of sociology." 

Other outlets printed stories entitled "Bird's comments leave us at a loss," "When it comes to race, best to shut up," and "Bird comes off looking like bigot."

One interesting question is whether American whites really would be more interested in the NBA if there were more white stars. 

For example, last winter a 21-year-old white rookie had a season fairly similar statistically to the 23-year-old Lin's injury-shortened 2012 season. But, in contrast, it made very little pop culture splash. 

Lin played in 35 games, starting 25, while the Spaniard Ricky Rubio of the Minnesota Timberwolves played in 41, starting 31. They are both big (Rubio 6'4", Lin 6'3"), athletic, energetic point guards. Both seemed to greatly improve their teams (the Timberwolves had been an awful 17-65 the previous season), and both went down with season-ending injuries that appeared to badly hurt their teams, perhaps Rubio's even more than Lin's. Moreover, Rubio is a genius at passing (video here).

For each 36 minutes they played, Rubio (who is two years younger than Lin) was a little better than Lin in assists, steals, rebounds, personal fouls, free throw percentage, 3-point percentage, and was a lot better in turnovers. Lin, in contrast, was a lot better at total scoring and 2-point shooting percentage. Rubio is an awful 2-point shooter, while Lin, for a couple of weeks last February, was a lights out 2-point shooter, although he was regressing toward the mean as his season went on. Whether he can keep it up for a career will be an interesting question.

You could argue that the Lin story was just so much more interesting than the Rubio story because Rubio has been famous in European basketball circles since he was 14. (Here's a 2008 highlight video of Rubio's teenage exploits.) On the other hand, a former child prodigy / living legend finally arriving on the big stage ought to be pretty interesting. But outside of hard core NBA fans, nobody in America much cared about Rubio.

I think a couple of things are going on. While nobody has a problem with Chinese rooting for an American-born Taiwanese out of sheer racialism, practically zero American whites will admit even to themselves that they would find it cool to see a foreign white do well in the NBA just because they are white. 

On the other hand, white Americans in the Obama Age are slowly, quietly getting a little tired of blacks. So, a Chinese-American "victim of stereotypes" makes an ideal proxy for white fans who are horrified by the thought of themselves being even a little bit racialist (but who, deep down, are). The only thing that could have made Lin more perfect for them is if he were also gay.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Race, IQ, and Wealth"

Ron Unz has a big article in The American Conservative on a perennially interesting and important subject:

Race, IQ, and Wealth 

What the facts tell us about a taboo subject 

By RON UNZ • July 18, 2012 

At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled “Dumb and Dumber,” with the accusatory subtitle “Are development experts becoming racists?” Kenny charged that a growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic human traits as a central explanation of national economic progress, often elevating these above the investment and regulatory issues that have long been the focus of international agencies. 

Although Kenny suggested that many of his targets had been circumspect in how they raised these highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001 by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend. These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and hereditary, and that these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend to determine the long-term wealth of a given country. 

Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply offensive but had also long been debunked by scientific experts—notably the prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1980 book The Mismeasure of Man.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Conspiracies and Connections

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

The flagrant stupidity of most conspiracy theories popular during my lifetime, as epitomized by Oliver Stone’s 1991 masterpiece/fiasco JFK (in which the entire military-industrial complex plots to murder John F. Kennedy by hiring some flaming French Quarter homosexuals), serves to inoculate the powerful against the suspicion that they have influence (or responsibility) regarding events. 

It wasn’t always like this. Until recently, it was widely understood that numerous turning points in history—such as the assassinations of Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand—were the results of conspiracies.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Absolute Nuclear Families

In the New York Times, Frank Jacobs offers a map of Europe based on traditional family structures that fans of HBD Chick will find familiar from the work of French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd.

The "absolute nuclear family" around the North Sea, where parents look forward to being empty-nesters, appears to map pretty closely to the lands of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. 

On the other hand, the development of this family structure appears to be post-Beowulf, but pre-Chaucer. British cabinet minister David Willetts wrote in his fine book The Pinch (as I summarized in my review in VDARE):

"Instead, think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. … Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work …You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. … You can choose your spouse … It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties. ... A small, simple family structure not driven by the need to pass on an inheritance or to sustain ties with brothers and cousins in a clan can be more personal, intense, and emotional—a clue to England's Romantic tradition."

This Anglo-Saxon absolute nuclear family structure is conducive to the highest levels of personal freedom and individualism. But, it requires a lot of land and wealth to expect your sons to be able to afford houses of their own when they find their brides. The Anglo-Saxon nuclear family model where young adults are not under the thumbs of their parents or grandparents or aunt's husband thrives, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, in underpopulated places with cheap land and high wages, but, as Franklin also noted in the 1750s, it gets undermined by high rates of immigration, which drive up land costs and lower wages. Those who follow the liberty-loving Anglo-Saxon model tend to get outcompeted by groups willing to pile an extended family into one house, as is happening across many of the metropolises of America today.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Things Fall Apart: Greg Cochran's new theory of the cause of racial differences in IQ

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran has been introducing a a fairly new and potentially important theory of the genetic origins of race differences in IQ.  It's less a theory of evolution than of devolution. The mechanism causing effective differences, he argues, is less selection for higher IQ due to differences in the environment (e.g., winter versus tropics selecting for forethought); instead, a large driver is differential rates in random mutation leading to differences in average level of deleterious genetic load, which tend to correlate with climate warmth.

Sanctuary 

What would happen if people moved somewhere where the mutation rate was far lower? 

Their genetic load would decrease with time, assuming that they were still subject to much selection. Today, everybody has hundreds of nicked or broken genes:  selection keeps eliminating them, while mutation keeps creating them.  The suspicion is that their effect is quite large.  This hypothetical population would have fewer and fewer.  In a few thousand years, they would lose most of the variants that decrease fitness by 1% or more.

Cochran's next post looks at some data on the rates at which random mutations creep into the reproduction process.

Too Darn Hot? 

Posted on July 14, 2012 by gcochran9 

Several recent papers  give me the impression that there is regional variation in mutational load.   One can slice this a number of ways. Dan MacArthur and company looked for mutations that knocked out genes – loss-of-function or LOF mutations.  Mutational load is the sum of all deleterious mutations – LOF mutations are a clear-cut subset of total mutational load. 

Some of the LOF mutations they are found are common, and are presumably neutral, maybe even beneficial, but most are rare and likely deleterious.  The kicker is that they found significantly more LOF mutations in their African population sample than in their European and East Asian samples – 25% higher.  That was unexpected. 

Population history (and mutation rate) determine the variation you expect to find in neutral genes, but significantly deleterious mutations should be in mutation-selection balance.  A neutral variant might easily be a million years old, but a deleterious variant will  last, on average, 1/s generations, when s is the decrease in fitness caused by that variant.  A mutation that decreases fitness by 1% should disappear in  100 generations or so, about 2500 years.  Ancient bottlenecks should not influence the frequency of such noticeably deleterious mutations. 

Another related paper, by Jacob Tenessen et al,  looked at a large set of coding genes, sequencing many times (average depth of 111x)  for high accuracy. As in in MacArthur’s paper they found that the average person carries many probably-deleterious mutations, mutations which are individually rare.  Each person carried, on average, mutations expected to change function (almost always for the worse, although usually only a little for the worse)  in 313 genes (out of the 15,585 they studied. 

They looked at African-Americans and Americans of European descent, about a thousand of each.  They saw what MacArthur’s group did: there were significantly more probably-deleterious mutations in the 80%-African population.  When they used a loose definition of functional variation, about 20% more : with a more conservative definition,  which should have a higher fraction of truly deleterious genes, about 29% more. 

...    The only simple explanation (that I can think of)  is a higher mutation rate.

One possibility is that heat tends to cause a higher mutation rate.

Henry Harpending then summed up:

Pre-term Births 

Posted on July 16, 2012 by harpend= 

The model that Greg is dancing around suggests (1) that there is variation in mutation rate dependent on temperature or something correlated with temperature, (2) higher mutation rates cause a higher genetic burden in human populations, (3) leading to IQ reduction and other minor dings

Here's my model of this theory (which is probably pretty woozy):

Imagine, say, a factory that builds a complex product, such as a car, according to a complicated set of instructions. But, the instructions on how to build the next car are passed on via the Game of Telephone, with mistakes inevitably creeping in. Sometimes, big mistakes are made, and the resulting car is such a disaster that it can't function at all and has to be scrapped. But, most of the individual mistakes are minor and just mean, say, that instead of delivering 268 horsepower, the engine generates 267. Over time, the Telephone Game build up mistakes until a car is completely unusable and has to be scrapped. At that point the workers go find a better car and get the instructions for that car relayed to them. So, on average, most cars don't come off the assembly line performing at spec, but they perform well enough to make it through a test drive. 

Now imagine two factories making the same car from roughly the same overall design. One is in Nagoya and the other in Lagos. It's so hot and humid alla the time in Nigeria, unfortunately, that the workers get distracted during their Game of Telephone and have a higher rate of errors when transmitting plans from one generation to the next. 

In the comments, commenter extraordinaire Jason Malloy writes:

See these posts from February and April for the conceptual background. 

While not fully or explicitly articulated, this is the first New Big Theory of race differences in quite a while, and an interesting alternative to the reigning sociobiological models available since the 1980s. In the latter models intelligence and reproductive differences are seen as consequences of natural selection in divergent latitudes, but this new model replaces natural selection with accumulated mutational burdens. The differences at lower latitudes are not selectively advantageous, but dysfunctional. 

Dr. Cochran notes that complex adaptive systems, involving the functioning of many genes, should be the most vulnerable to genetic load, so this would obviously be the brain and probably reproductive physiology. So in addition to higher general mortality, dysfunctions associated with mutational burdens might include: 

Mental
- Lower intelligence
- Higher retardation
- Higher mental illness 

Reproductive
- Lower birthweight
- Higher premature births
- Higher infertility
- Higher reproductive deformities
- Higher miscarriage (and general obstetric complications)
- Lower sperm quality 

Of course there is a difference between establishing population differences in genetic load, and proving that this is related to population differences in socially valued traits. I’m not sold on this as a replacement for sociobiological models, although there are aspects that make it useful and attractive in different ways. For example, I recently found that ethnic differences in rate of homosexuality are inversely correlated with latitude. Since theories of selectively advantageous homosexuality fall flat, this theory seemed like a better fit.

In the comments to Henry's post, I offer a couple of tentative criticisms, which you can read there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who says all NPR fans are dweebs?

NPR profiled their own impoverished unmarried white lady with three mulatto kids last week:

Take the case of 29-year-old Jennifer Stepp, who lives in Reading, Pa. Like 14 million other people in the U.S. who live in families headed by single mothers, she's poor. And she faces incredible odds. 

Stepp has three children by three different fathers. The father of her eldest child, 10-year-old Isaiah, is serving 30 years in federal prison for armed robbery. 

"He's met my son one time, when he was a baby. And he decided that he didn't want him," she says. 

Stepp's middle child, 8-year-old Shyanne, usually sees her father every other weekend. But the father of her younger son is also in prison. Stepp says he's been behind bars for selling cocaine since she was pregnant. He has never met 1-year-old Makai. 

"He writes letters back and forth, and he wants to be a part of his son's life," she says. "I'm just waiting for him to get out and get his life together." 

Stepp says she was the victim of youthful optimism. She kept thinking that the next guy had to be better than the last, and that the relationships would last. 

Now, that's all behind her, and she's wiser.

This provoked the following comment on NPR's website:

Big Ern (BigErn77) wrote: 

If I am to pay to support these children, I also want a piece of the action from these broads, every now and then. I mean, I'm basically doing some husbandy duties, puttin' food on the table and all that, I correspondingly deserve a little of the 'ol husbandy benefits package, if you know what I mean. 

Then again, since most of these 'women' are horribly disfigured by obesity, I take it all back - I want nothing to do with them. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What are the odds?

Jason DeParle's article in the New York Times, "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do,'" about a white woman who had three kids with her black boyfriend, who has now abandoned his offspring without a penny was interesting for multiple reasons. One is that out of the voluminous comments that were either NYT Picks or Readers' Favorites, very, very few, if any, mentioned that perhaps society ought to try to do a better job of letting young women know that black guys are, statistically speaking, more likely to:

- heedlessly impregnate them

- not marry them

- not support their offspring

Has anybody ever calculated the odds?

Smart girls seem mostly to figure this kind of thing out for themselves, but not so bright girls ... not so much. Women are pretty good at conforming to social norms, but when the smart people keep the norms a secret, the not-smart women (and, more importantly, their children) suffer.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT article hurts lady writer's feelings

From Slate:

New York Times, Stop Moralizing About Single Mothers 

No, their households are not always sad and falling apart. 

Yes, but, as sportswriter Damon Runyon said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."

By Katie Roiphe

It is disheartening to see that the New York Times has run yet another puritanical and alarmist rumination on the decline of the American family disguised as a straight-news story. The piece, in tender, gloomy detail, compares the slatternly home of the single mother, all struggle and chaos, to the orderly, promising, more affluent home of her boss, who is married. The moralizing portrait that emerges is not surprising: The single mother and her children have a terrible life, and the married mother and her children have a great one. 

One of the most laughable elements of the story is that it hinges on the idea that the single mother’s children are suffering because of a lack of extracurricular activities: It lingers on the idea that the swimming class, and Boy Scouts meetings, and trips to Disney that the children of the single mother are deprived of will somehow turn them into dropouts and teenage parents. But surely, after Cheever and Updike and The Lonely Crowd, we have moved on from the facile ’50s, Norman Rockwell fantasy that camping badges can save our children from pain? Who knew that fraternizing with life sized Ariels and Cinderellas was so important, so pressing, in raising your children to be healthy, upstanding citizens? And what is so shocking to the reporter about the terribly deprived, endangered Steavon, the son of the single mother, is that he has to choose one extracurricular, and this year chose football, rather than getting to do karate and swimming and Boy Scouts. 

What makes this particular bourgeois focus especially ironic is that it occurs alongside a contemporaneous cultural discussion of whether college-educated parents are spoiling their children, or over hovering. Apparently there is a very fine line between giving your children enough swimming lessons and too many swimming lessons.

Considering the rate at which African-American boys (such as this white single mother in the NYT's three sons) drown in motel pools, giving your kids enough swimming lessons is important. You can also, no doubt, give them too many. The notion that the good life is typically found somewhere between too little and too much may be too complicated a concept for Ms. Roiphe, but guys like Aristotle and Confucius found it sensible.

The innate self-congratulation of the Times piece, the smug sense that the average college-educated New York Times reader is enriching their children, insuring their mental health, while the sluttish, struggling, single mother is ruining theirs is— whatever the truth of the situation, which I humbly suggest is more complicated than that—extremely repellent. In the guise of writing a well-intentioned liberal piece—oh the poor single mothers! And their poor children!—the New York Times is recycling truly retrograde and ugly moral judgements.The idea that this unconventional, struggling household might sometimes be fine is so astonishing that the piece reports as news that the single mother, Jessica Schairer, sometimes records “happy moments on her Facebook page.” 

The contemporary mind, as illustrated by Ms. Roiphe's, has fundamental problems grasping useful concepts like "on average" and "tends to."

The demographic changes that are alarming the editors of the New York Times are unquestionable: In the middle class the family is breaking down, there is a steep rise in single mother households and women supporting their families, but the judgmental tone is outdated and wrong. The anxious need to assert that the traditional two-parent family is better has outlived its usefulness. It’s time to run a story about the resourcefulness, energy, and intensity of these homes, a fair, open-minded exploration of these new family structures and the independent, tough women who run them, not yet another unimaginative comparison with a family whose dad takes his son to Boy Scouts.

You go, girl!

Shouldn't Roiphe use the word "empower" somewhere?

Moving into the future, the college-educated, traditional families will need to understand that, though of course it is easier to have money, money is not the only thing that matters in raising children well (nor are vacations or swimming lessons). They will also have to understand that they do not have a monopoly on joy or healthy environments or thriving children.

But that's the way to bet.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'"

The NYT has a long article on two women, one a red-haired single mother with three children, who makes $12.35 an hour as a manager in a day care facility, the other her boss, who is married and reasonably comfortable.

After many hundreds of words, the article finally gets around to explaining something that's obvious from the pictures of the fair-skinned single mother's children:

Although she grew up in the 1990s, Ms. Schairer’s small-town childhood had a 1950s feel. Her father drove a beer truck, her mother served as church trustee and her grandparents lived next door. She knew no one rich, no one poor and no one raising children outside of marriage. “It was just the way it was,” she said. 

William Penn University, eight hours away in Iowa, offered a taste of independence and a spot on the basketball team. Her first thought when she got pregnant was “My mother’s going to kill me.” Abortion crossed her mind, but her boyfriend, an African-American student from Arkansas, said they should start a family. They agreed that marriage should wait until they could afford a big reception and a long gown. 

Their odds were not particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends. 

Ms. Schairer has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting. They lived with family (his and hers) and worked off and on while she hoped things would change. “I wanted him to love me,” she said. She was 25 when the breakup made it official: she was raising three children on her own.

As Dennis Dale once commented, Barack Obama slid through the rapidly closing Novelty Window. His parentage could be sold to a gullible public as representing Hope and Change. Here's the opening to his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic Convention, which set him on the road to the White House:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. 

My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. 

OBAMA: But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that's shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him. 

(APPLAUSE)
While studying here my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. 

(APPLAUSE)
Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor, my grandfather signed up for duty, joined Patton's army, marched across Europe. Back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA and later moved west, all the way to Hawaii, in search of opportunity. 

(APPLAUSE)
And they too had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream born of two continents. 

OBAMA: My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success. 

(APPLAUSE)
They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential. 

(APPLAUSE)
They're both passed away now. And yet I know that, on this night, they look down on me with great pride. 

And I stand here today grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my two precious daughters. 

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. 

(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy; our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal... 

(APPLAUSE)
... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

That is the true genius of America, a faith...

But now, kids with a struggling white mom and a black dad who isn't around are rapidly becoming just a depressing commonplace.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Salon: Detroit now run by unelected white person, and that's a good thing

From Salon:

Welcome to the age of non-profit city government [link fixed]
Can NGOs run cities?
BY ANNA CLARK

This is a long, laudatory article about some nice white lady named Sue Mosey, who heads one of those quasi-governmental Community Development Corporations invented during the Great Society. Sue is portrayed as the real power in Detroit these days, as evidenced by her getting a Whole Foods to open in the gentrifying neighborhood where she lives.

I must admit I couldn't manage to read the whole article intently, suffering from SWPL overdose, but I didn't see much concern for concepts like democracy, enfranchisement of blacks, and so forth. In the SWPL mind, apparently, Cheap Urban Real Estate + Whole Foods + Unelected Nice White Lady Rulers sounds a whole lot better in 2012 than more Black Self-Rule.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

You were lied to by your Penthouse magazines

In the Huffington Post, a lesbian sex counselor, Glenda Corwin, explains that the lesbian long-term monogamous sex glass is, when you stop and think about it the right way, not just 80% empty, but also 20% full!

When I first heard about "lesbian bed death" I was puzzled. What's the point in coming out if you're not going to have sex? Because let's face it -- being lesbian isn't just about having wonderful emotional connections with other women. It's about having sex with them. That's what gets us in trouble with the rest of the world. So how could we walk away from something we fought so hard to have? 

At first I was overwhelmed, and a little depressed, about how many of my lesbian clients and friends were rarely -- if ever -- having sex with their partners. But when I started doing research on this subject, I found reason to hope. There's some evidence that a minority (maybe 20 percent) of long-term lesbian partners sustain sexual intimacy after 10 or 20 or more years together. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James "Flynn Effect" Flynn: Man Smart, Woman Smarter

The World's Most Interesting Newspaper*, the Daily Mail, reports:

Women overtake men in IQ tests for the first time in 100 years (but is it all down to multitasking?) 

By CRAIG MACKENZIE 

IN the battle of the sexes women have always believed they are cleverer than men.
And now it would appear they are justified in thinking they are superior after psychologists found female IQ scores have risen above men's for the first time in 100 years. 

Women have been as much as five points behind men since testing began a century ago, but that gap has narrowed in recent times. 

This year women finally came out on top - and it may be because they are better at multitasking. The breakthrough has been uncovered by James Flynn, the world-renowned authority on IQ tests. 

He told the Sunday Times: 'In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women's have risen faster.This is a consequence of modernity.
'The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ. The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging.' 

One theory is women's ability to multitask as they juggle raising a family and going to work, while another explanation is that they are finally realising they have a slightly higher potential intelligence than men. 

Flynn will publish his findings in a new book, but said more data was needed to explain the trend because tests have consistently shown differences between gender and race.

A forgotten bit of history is that early 20th Century IQ experts, most notably the endlessly-demonized Sir Cyril Burt and the Grandfather of Silicon Valley and Evil Eugenicist Lewis Terman, argued, based on the results of IQ tests, that males and females were about equal in intelligence. That was quickly established as orthodoxy among IQ mavens in the first half of the 20th Century. You are always supposed to believe that the IQ & Eugenics WASP scientists of the early 20th Century, being the Worst People in History, were mere playthings of the prejudices of their age. This example suggests the opposite, so it has been shoved down the memory hole.

So, Flynn isn't breaking any ground here, he's just upholding the IQ Orthodoxy endorsed by, among others, Arthur Jensen in 1998.


The main heretic in recent years has been Richard Lynn, so this is a Flynn v. Lynn argument. It's important to note that it's not the Evil IQ Establishment v. Flynn, it's the IQ Establishment (including Flynn) v. Lynn. 


Personally, I don't have a strong opinion on the subject. The male-female gap in median IQ, if it exists, is relatively small. The issues in the discussion quickly become highly technical. Psychometrics is a field in which sizable differences (e.g., median black v. white) show up under just about every conceivable measurement approach, but measuring small differences accurately is dependent upon a lot of technical testing issues.

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* Not necessarily the World's Most Reliable Newspaper, however ...

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"How D.C. Became a District of Corruption"

From the Washington Post:

By Kojo Nnamdi, Published: July 13 

Vincent C. Gray’s election as mayor in 2010 was the result in no small measure of his success in tapping a deep well of resentment in the black community over Adrian M. Fenty’s perceived aloofness. Gray was helped along in this effort by Marion Barry. 

I wrote in this section at the time that if the template for black mayors who connect with black voters is Barry and Newark’s Sharpe James, who have both served prison terms, then “Vincent Gray needs to hurry up and get himself locked up so he can keep it real, too.” 

I now regret those words, as prophetic as they appear. I still think that Gray is a decent and thoughtful man, but he stands at the center of a political culture that is corrupt and broken. 

At a contentious city council meeting this summer, Barry spoke about the council’s credibility problem and voters’ doubts about the D.C. government. “The stain is deep,” he said. He’s right. 

I came to D.C. in 1969, and the future I imagined for it when the Home Rule Act was signed in 1973 was that the city, home to some of the smartest people and most innovative civil rights activists I knew, would provide a shining example of a democratic revolution. Some of that has come to pass. From qualified blacks who have new access to senior positions and contracts, to the revival of downtown and other areas, from new restaurants and theaters to green spaces and bike lanes, the District has indeed improved, often in ways I couldn’t have imagined. 

The political culture, however, has deteriorated. It has what is clearly a pay-to-play political process, with personal corruption and campaign fraud now at the center of the system. 

The latest example of this came on Tuesday, when federal prosecutors said that Gray’s 2010 mayoral run was funded, in part, by a “shadow campaign” of $653,000 from a prominent District contractor. Three Gray campaign consultants have pleaded guilty to corruption-related charges. 

This shadow over the Gray campaign comes after former council member Harry Thomas Jr. pleaded guilty to charges of theft of government money and falsifying tax returns. In May, he was sentenced to three years in prison. And in June, Kwame Brown resigned as D.C. Council chairman after federal prosecutors charged him with bank fraud. 

The question is:How did it come to this? How did we come to this?

You can see a big reason why the Washington-based white press corps worked so hard to contrive Obamamania a half decade ago. For their own sakes, they really, really want to end black rule in Washington, but that's embarrassing to admit even to your own conscience. So, pushing Obama on the whole country served to salve the white national media's consciences about what they want to do with their own city.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Learning from Israel's Example, Part CXXXVII

From the Jerusalem Post:

Israel approved only one asylum application out of 4,603 received in 2011, according to a report recently released by the US State Department.

I'm all in favor of taking in refugees like, say, Einstein, Fermi, or Solzhenitsyn, but, let's be frank, most refugees from Third World conflicts can be accommodated in other Third World countries at vastly less expense. If tribesmen in South Sudan are slaughtering each other, well, places like Kenya or Tanzania would put the losers up for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to accomodate them in some naive close-to-the-Canadian-border American town like Minneapolis, Burlington, or Lewiston, where they'll just suffer miserably from the cold.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Forbes 400 by ethnicity

A couple of years ago, the philanthropy reporter for the Jewish Telegraph Agency tried to divvy up by ancestry the Forbes 400 of America's richest individuals and came up with the headline "At least 139 of Forbes 400 are Jewish."

It was an interesting start, but was also bogged down by obvious errors. (E.g., No, George Lucas isn't Jewish.) 

The blogger n/a of "race / history / evolution notes" then took on the task of improving the Jewish Telegraph Agency's published list, which he did in 2009. His latest version is the 2010 Forbes 400 list. 

Obviously, this kind of thing isn't easy to do. I'm sure there are mistakes in it, but I haven't noticed any glaring ones. The most likely source of errors is when some obscure rich guy happens to have a name that doesn't align well with his ancestry. But those are hard to catch.

His task is simplified by using a group called "Northwestern Europeans" that makes up 50.75% of the 2010 Forbes list, down from 72% in Nathaniel Weyl's count of the 1987 list. "Northwestern Europeans" lump together English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Irish (Catholic and Protestant), Scandinavians, French, Belgians, Swiss, Germans, and Austrians. It's not much of a bloc.

A more subtle pair of methodological problems are what to do with people of mixed ancestry and with people who were adopted. A dual example is the late Steve Jobs. He's listed as one of the eight (2.0%) who are "Middle Eastern" because his biological father is Syrian. 

I think it would be better to divide up ancestry into fractions when possible. 

And, though trans-ethnic adoptions are fairly rare, when they are known about, I think it makes sense to treat Nature and Nurture as, more or less, equally important. So, ideally (by my lights), Jobs would be classed as 1/4th Middle Eastern (i.e., half nature, no nurture) and 3/4th NW European (half nature, all nurture).

It's not clear how much these refinements would alter the list. It would depend if interethnic marriages tend to be skewed by sex. 

Overall, I doubt if the summary percentages would be changed a whole lot by refinements.  For example, the JTA count was pretty laughable in part, but the overall number of Jews the JTA reporter came up with was almost identical to what n/a's much more careful study arrived at. That's because random errors tend to neutralize each other.

Here are n/a's 2010 percentages:

Northwestern European 50.75%

Jewish 35.75%

Italian 4.25%

East Asian 2.0%

Middle Eastern 2.0%

Greek 1.75%

Eastern European 1.75%

South Asian 1.0%

Hispanic 0.5% (one of the two is actually a Basque)

Black 0.25% (Oprah)

The low Eastern European percentage is interesting. There are a fair number of Slavs in the U.S., but they tend to maintain a low profile. Moreover, they have a fairly high rate of Anglicizing their names to make them easier to spell. For example, I know two Polish-American identical twin millionaires (not Forbes billionaires) from Chicago who, upon setting out to make their fortune agreed to ditch "Wojtyla" (as in the late Pope) for a much easier to pronounce and spell English name. In contrast, while Italian names are recognizably non-English, they are reasonably easy to spell and pronounce, plus have more glamor associated with them due to all the Italian celebrities since the Renaissance. 

As I've mentioned before, Italians make a pretty good apples to apples comparison to Jews: they arrived about the same time in the U.S., they live in about the same parts of the country, they are both non-rural, they are both non-Protestants, and so forth. Italian-Americans strike me as pretty typical white American gentilers in terms of achievements on average. They make up about 8% of the white gentile population and about 6% of the white gentile Forbes 400. That's pretty good considering their late start in America. (For example, there are five Hearsts on the Forbes 400, and their fortune goes back to William Randolph Hearst's dad striking it rich in the Comstock Lode before the Civil War.) But it's also nothing all that special either.

Italians are usually thought to be about three times as numerous as Jews in America (roughly 6% of the total population versus 2%) , but they are almost an order of magnitude less common in absolute terms on the Forbes 400 (17 v. 143), which suggests Jews are about 20 or 25 times more likely to make the Forbes 400 on a per capita basis. That's a big difference. 

Weyl's 1987 count found Jews made up about 23 percent, which suggests that the Jewish proportion of the super-rich has grown by 50% over 23 years (keep in mind that there is a lot of turnover in the Forbes 400 list due to different sectors of the economy going in and out of fashion -- e.g., oil, tech, finance, real estate, etc.) But, there have also been a sizable number of Jews among the very richest for a long time.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

David Brooks almost goes there

In "Why Our Elites Stink," David Brooks writes in the NYT:

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites. 

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment. 

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership. 

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service. 

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this. 

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

This is not a new theme for Brooks, who wrote a similar column in 2010 ("The Power Elite.") Brooks tries to walk the fine line between being public-spirited and having a career. Now, you know and I know that what he's trying to do here, under the guise of talking about "meritocrats," is to get through to his fellow American Jews that they need to stop conceptualizing themselves so overwhelmingly as History's Greatest Victims and start developing a sense of noblesse oblige about this country in which they have become predominant, in which they dominate the worldview of the educated classes. In a response to Brooks' "Power Elite" column in VDARE.com two years ago, I wrote:

The theory behind the dusty old concept of noblesse oblige is that a powerful class that thinks of itself as being in the game for the very long run will tend to behave in a more responsible fashion than one that doesn't. As they say, nobody ever washed a rental car. 

In the early 20th Century, for example, leadership caste WASPs played a major role in setting aside National Parks and in limiting immigration. 

Even more fundamentally, they tolerated criticism of themselves by others. Criticism encourages you to behave better. 

Of course, the moribund WASP Establishment's increasing fair-mindedness had its downsides. One problem with letting other people have their say about you is that they may undermine your power. [David] Samuels writes of "my own personal sorrow about the fate of the Harvard-educated Brahmins I admired in my youth, who cherished their belief in liberal openness while licking at the bleached bones of their family romances. Their mansions are threadbare and drafty, and stickers on their salt-eaten Volvos advertise the cause of zero population growth. It's hard to imagine that their ancestors sailed clipper ships to China and wrote great books and built great companies and ran spies behind enemy lines in Europe." 

But, shouldn't new elites be held to the same standards of criticism that helped them displace the old elites? Why is it considered admirable for the new establishment to try to destroy the careers of their critics? 

For noblesse oblige to work, privileged and influential groups have to be publicly acknowledged to be privileged and influential. If, on the other hand, their main sense of collective identity is that of marginal members of society endangered by the might of the current majority, then the system doesn't operate. ...

American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. 

Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States—rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization. 

But that's unlikely to happen until the Jewish elite to begin to tolerate non-Jewish criticism, rather than to continue to try to destroy the careers of critics—or even just honest observers—in what seems to be an instinctive reaction intended to encourage the others. 

Deep down, does Brooks agree with what I said? I would assume: yes. We read each other and we are more or less on the same page.

In career terms, obviously, Brooks' euphemistic approach is better than my plain-spoken one. And it would be easy to argue that my frankness is too abrasive, that Brooks' vague euphemisms are better for getting our mutual message out.

But, here's the rub: What evidence is there that Brooks' readers grasp what he's talking about at all? I've read through a fair fraction of the 527 comments on his column, and I don't see many (if any) examples suggesting that Brooks' readers comprehend his underlying message.

What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer