October 10, 2012

Bryan Caplan's exquisite moral sensitivities are all that stand between us and the horrors of an America v. Canada war of conquest and enslavement

Economist Bryan Caplan is outraged by having to listen to (what must be a tiny handful of) citizenist economists without being able to shout the Open Borders moral revelations of Julian Simon into their thick skulls:
I was just at a conference where several eminent economists embraced the following principle: 
The United States should adopt whatever policies maximize the per-capita GDP of the existing population of the United States, and their descendants.
It was frustrating to listen.  On the one hand, any philosophy professor could instantly produce devastating counter-examples to this principle of national egoism.  For starters: 
1. If conquering and enslaving Canada would increase American per-capita GDP, should we therefore conquer and enslave Canada?
2. If we could forever end world poverty by reducing American per-capita GDP by a penny, should we refuse to end world poverty?
3. If we could costlessly exterminate all Americans who produce a below-average quantity of GDP, should we exterminate them?

Uh ...

1. No.

(Unless, of course, the Canadians really piss us off. So, just watch your step, Canadians. You know what we're talking about. Oh, where was I?)

2. Whatever.

3. I suspect reducing the income of 49.99% of Americans to zero would not, on the whole, be Good for the Economy -- it would certainly be bad for the 49.99% -- although I must admit that I don't keep up with the latest fashions in economic thought, which seem to be moving in that direction.

Seriously, Caplan's excursion into the fever swamps of why Godwin's Law exists means he completely misses the point of "The United States should adopt whatever policies maximize the per-capita GDP of the existing population of the United States, and their descendants." 

The citizenist economists who so outrage poor Dr. Caplan are drawing an obvious analogy to the principle pounded into my head while getting my MBA in finance three decades ago that the board of directors of corporations should adopt whatever policies maximize the wealth of the existing shareholders of the corporation.

That doesn't mean that the board of directors should conquer and enslave Canada. All ethical principles come with endless grown-up qualifications to fantasies hatched by childish minds.

No, the most important word in that principle of financial economics is not "whatever," it is "existing." When corporate directors forget the distinction between current and potential shareholders, corruption ensues. As I pointed out in VDARE in 2005:
By "citizenism," I mean that I believe Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners. 
Let me describe citizenism using a business analogy. When I was getting an MBA many years ago, I was the favorite of an acerbic old Corporate Finance professor because I could be counted on to blurt out in class all the stupid misconceptions to which students are prone. 
One day he asked: "If you were running a publicly traded company, would it be acceptable for you to create new stock and sell it for less than it was worth?" 
"Sure," I confidently announced. "Our duty is to maximize our stockholders' wealth, and while selling the stock for less than its worth would harm our current shareholders, it would benefit our new shareholders who buy the underpriced stock, so it all comes out in the wash. Right?" 
"Wrong!" He thundered. "Your obligation is to your current stockholders, not to somebody who might buy the stock in the future." 
That same logic applies to the valuable right of being an American citizen and living in America. Just as the managers of a public company have a fiduciary duty to the current stockholders not to diminish the value of their shares by selling new ones too cheaply to outsiders, our leaders have a duty to the current citizens and their descendants.

October 9, 2012

The War Between the Sexes and the GOP: Too much fraternizing with the enemy for there to be a final victory, but not enough formal allying with the enemy for a Romney win?

Foseti points to John Derbyshires's summary of various points made about the much discussed women's vote by me, Whiskey, and Heartiste. Here's the latter's extract from a recent poll:
Married men: for Romney by 54-35, Romney's margin 19.
Married women: for Romney, 49-42, Romney's margin 7.
Single men: for Obama, 47-38, Obama's margin 9.
Single women: for Obama, 60-31, Obama's margin 29.

Of course, it helps to remove the effects of race and so forth, but the effect of marriage is still very much there. One way to sum up the demographics of the American party system is that the Republicans are the party of married white people, and the more different somebody is from that norm, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

Or you could look at it on a continuum: the Republicans are the party of married white fathers and the Democrats are the party of single black mothers.

From the Man from Mars' naive perspective, the party of married white fathers really ought to be able to beat the party single black mothers. But, perhaps the former has such an obvious advantage that it gets hijacked by special interests more? Or, perhaps the cultural industry is so bored and disgruntled with the natural ruling party that it makes vast efforts to make people feel that voting for the party of black single mothers is cool.

How George W. Bush's Bushllit Economy drove up illegitimacy rates

From my new column in Taki's Magazine on the quantity and quality of births in America:
Yet most articles about birthrates assume intellectual underpinnings that could be based upon talking points from, say, the Toilet Paper Manufacturers Association: As with opinions, everybody’s got one, so the more the better. More toilet-paper consumption is Good for the Economy, and that’s all you need to know. 
One irony is that the quality of births has perhaps been improving during Barack Obama’s tenure. At minimum, quality has not been in a free fall as it was during George W. Bush’s disastrous second administration. But not only can’t Obama mention this on the campaign trail, he probably can’t even formulate the idea without his head exploding.
And yet, illegitimate births are bad for the GOP in the short and long runs.

Read the whole thing there.

2012 iSteve Fundraising Drive

Dear Readers:

I want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years. I hope I've provided in good measure. Looking at some stats, I see:

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New NYC Gifted test expected to be easier for African Americans because it emphasizes "abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language"

Any news story about New York kindergartens is guaranteed to be pure comedy gold. Here's a tragically hilarious article in the WSJ about an expensive new test that New York City has signed up for to get more blacks into Gifted kindergartens. Yet, judging from the description, this new test is just going to demolish poor African-American kids.

In New York, the smart, ruthless people always win in the end. Especially when it comes to kindergarten.
Big Change in Gifted and Talented Testing

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER 
A new test for admission into New York City's gifted and talented program will account for the bulk of a student's score, upending a testing regime that a growing number of children had appeared to master. 
In a broader overhaul than previously announced, the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, also known as the NNAT, will count for two-thirds of a student's score, said city officials, who signed a three-year, $5.5 million contract with the testing company Pearson earlier this year.

Man, there's money to be made in the test racket! Nothing new is being invented, but there's constant lucrative churn from one testing company to another as institutions thrash about blindly trying to buy their way to racial equality of results.
The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or OLSAT, which increasing numbers of children had prepared for intensely, will drop to a third of the total from 75%.

City officials hailed the new test as a vast improvement. It relies on abstract spatial thinking and largely eliminates language, even from the instructions, an approach that officials said better captures intelligence, is more appropriate for the city's multilingual population and is less vulnerable to test preparation.

Oh, great, this new test will work out swell for African-Americans.

As everybody seems to know lately, African-Americans aren't very good with language (the Word Gap), but they're aces with "abstract spatial thinking." Hart and Risley proved it! Plus, African-Americans don't speak English, so how can they compete with people from China on a test in English?
As a result, they expressed the hope that it would "improve the diversity of students that are recognized as gifted and talented," said Adina Lopatin, the deputy chief academic officer for the city's Department of Education. City officials said they were currently compiling data on the program's racial breakdown but students who qualified tended to be concentrated in wealthier districts. Areas such as the South Bronx produced few candidates. 
Some experts have raised doubts about the NNAT's ability to create a racially balanced class. Several studies show the test produces significant scoring gaps between wealthier white and Asian children and their poor, minority counterparts.

Really? You think?
... The shift marks the latest attempt by city officials to address a seemingly intractable problem: How to create equity in the admissions process for its gifted and talented program, which begins in kindergarten and goes through third grade. .... 
The abstract nature of the exam actually makes it more susceptible to test preparation, some argue. On the NNAT, often students "don't understand what they're supposed to do," said David Lohman, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Iowa and the co-author of a rival test, called the CogAT.

Well, give Lohman $5 million, too. That should fix the problem.
The NNAT is significantly harder than the tests city has previously used, with some questions confusing even for adults, tutoring companies reported. "We've known for some time that, on these sorts of tests, understanding what to do is half the battle," Mr. Lohman said. "You solve one problem and create another." Mr. Naglieri dismissed the idea that preparation could unduly reward students on his test.
"You're not going to be able to solve a really hard question on my test because you know how it works," he said. "You have to intellectually manage the demands of the task."

Yup, that's been the problem with previous tests: not enough intellectually managing the demands of the task for poor black kids to shine.
Tutoring companies across the city have reported a frenzy since the NNAT was announced, with families signing children up for private tutoring sessions, enrolling them in multiweek boot camp classes, and buying test preparation booklets in droves—even though the test won't be administered until January.
... Bige Doruk, the founder of Bright Kids NYC, another tutoring company, said she had no trouble selling NNAT Boot Camp packages—eight to 10 sessions, plus preparation materials—which start at more than $1,000.
Some educators said that as long as standardized tests remained the sole criteria for admissions, little would change.

I think Who You Know, not What You Know, should be the criteria.
"They can keep switching tests from now until doomsday and it's not going to make a difference," said James Borland, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. "The rationale behind the process is fatally flawed." Others said that even if they maintained testing, the city could still address other barriers for disadvantaged children. Currently, parents must sign up their children to take the test, screening out those whose families are less engaged or savvy. ... Others said the city isn't doing enough to promote diversity in the gifted program.  "You have to believe that what they're doing is a failure or you have to believe that African-American and Latino kids are less gifted," Mr. Borland said. "One of those has to be true."

October 8, 2012

The black hole of American comedy (continued)

One of the secrets of Saturday Night Live's long-running success is that its boss Lorne Michael's run-of-the-mill liberalism is offset by SNL's main political writer Jim Downey's Republicanism. Downey has been especially good at making sure loser Republicans like Bob Dole into crotchety minor heroes. 

But, Obama is off limits. Last month, Michaels announced that he hadn't been able to figure out anything funny about Obama yet. But, don't worry, he's still working on it and will probably come up with something in two or three months.

Now, you might think that last week's bomb by Obama in the Presidential debate would offer a comic gold mine. But, you're forgetting the Prime Directive: satire of The One We've Been Waiting For is off-limits.

So, here's a tick-tock of the agonies Downey had to go through to come up with a Presidential debate sketch that (unmentioned premise) wouldn't violate the Prime Directive.

Which section of the Sunday newspaper would the candidates turn to first?

It's the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day and not much is going on. Which section of the Sunday newspaper would various famous politicians turn to first because it's most personally interesting?

Richard Nixon: Reports from foreign capitals, followed by the NFL news.

Ronald Reagan: The op-eds

Adlai Stevenson: The society page.

Bill Clinton: The movie news. (Maybe there's an Air Force One sequel in the works! Air Force One IIAir Force Two? Hmmmhmm ... needs work.)

George W. Bush: The sports page to catch up on the baseball Hot Stove League news.

Lyndon Johnson: Politics

Mitt Romney: The business section

Barack Obama: The book reviews, especially new upper middle-brow fiction. Obama has good taste in novels (better than mine), such as David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. (That's a Shogun-like story of the Dutch trading outpost in Japan on an island in Nagasaki harbor in 1799. It really takes off toward end when a British navy ship arrives, as in the Nagasaki Harbor Incident of 1808 when an improvising British captain almost conquered the Dutch entrepot. Mitchell is tremendous at explaining the real-time decision making of an Age of Nelson captain. Mitchell would make a good successor to C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian as a writer of sea stories.)

2012 iSteve Panhandling Drive

Dear Readers:

I want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years. I hope I've provided in good measure. Looking at some stats, I see:

7,200 posts at this site alone.

234,000 published comments.

29,000,000 page views

Now, though, I have some sizable bills to pay and I need to turn to you again for financial assistance. Thus, I'm kicking off my first fund-raising drive since 14 months ago in August 2011. 

There are a few ways to support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
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Thank you.

Why elite college presidents love racial preferences

With affirmative action back in the news, it's worthy recycling my 2005 explanation in The American Conservative of why elite college presidents always proclaim the necessity of preferences for politically powerful organized victim groups. Writing about the Larry Summers Brouhaha at Harvard, I noted:
[Larry] Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century. 
Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't. 
Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb. 
Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities. 
So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ. 
What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else. So, Summers bought peace fast.

Of course, the $50 million Larry handed to Drew Gilpin Faust as reparations didn't save his job, but it did help Dr. Faust acquire the presidency of Harvard. (By the way, you've got to hand it to Ms. Gilpin Faust: she can play the feminist resentment card or she can play the feminine wiles card. Her early career at Penn was, let's just say, not hurt when, as a young woman, she divorced her first husband and married the chairman of her department.)

What terrifies elite universities is the kind of anti-discrimination solution imposed on many fire departments, such as in Chicago where the hiring test has been made so easy that about 96% of white applicants pass, after which fire cadets are chosen at random.

In New Republic, Nicholas Lemann calls Obama "The Cipher"

"The Cipher" is the print title of The New Republic's review (by veteran liberal Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism) of the massive biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. Lemann's review confirms, from a different political standpoint, much of my recent review of Maraniss's biography in VDARE. 

Lemann writes:
... If you belong to an extended family that gets together for holiday dinners, most of whose members are not active participants in the national political conversation, you surely can’t make it through a single gathering without some uncle or cousin saying something that, if it came out of the mouth of a member of Congress, would be treated as an instantly career-ending mistake. And if—less likely—you actually know a member of Congress well, you may have seen that even many of them, when feeling relaxed, haven’t fit the entirety of their views inside the acceptable range of the moment. 
It isn’t so easy or natural to stay eternally within the white lines. Some people may be so naturally conventional that the project takes no effort. But what about the rest? Do they do it by calculation? By control? By willing themselves, like actors, into character? Questions like these come to mind especially in the case of Barack Obama, who spent his early life in circumstances where he was unlikely to imbibe and absorb standard-issue American politics from the people around him. “First black president” doesn’t begin to capture the improbability of Obama’s getting where he has gotten. The son of a teenage mother and an almost completely absent father, raised off the American mainland and in Indonesia, with relatives all over the cultural, geographic, and political map, wanting for any real homestead or hometown....

Obama didn’t start striking people as a future president until he was at Harvard Law School. Here he is a sensitive, searching, occasionally mesmerizing young man—as he was in Dreams from My Father. How and when did the big transition happen? We’ll have to wait for Maraniss’s next volume to find out.  
... The many details that Maraniss has unearthed about Obama fall into two main categories: first, Obama’s childhood circumstances were more emotionally difficult than he has made them out to be; second, his narrative of finding a comfortable, lasting cultural identity by embracing his African Americanness seems too pat. ... 
Obama’s mother was a remarkably determined and independent person who, under difficult circumstances, built a significant life for herself as an anthropologist in Indonesia, but Maraniss insistently points out what Obama himself was too diplomatic to say outright in Dreams from My Father: she consistently decided, from the time he was about ten, to structure her life so that she spent almost no time with him, and there is some evidence that he sensed this and resented it deeply. The current, therapeutically driven assumptions governing American upper-middle-class culture would surely lead to a prediction, from the evidence we have, that the adult Obama would be a complete basket case. He cannot possibly be as imperturbable as he appears to be, but it is still remarkable and unexplained how he wound up with both an unstoppable drive to power and complete self-control, a rare combination even in successful politicians. 
... MARANISS HAS carefully established the true identities of the pseudonymous composite characters in Dreams from My Father, and found, in a couple of cases, that people whom Obama presented as crucial guides on his journey to blackness were actually not black. One can’t gainsay the genuineness of the feeling of homecoming Obama got from finding his way into the heart of the African American experience, most notably through his marriage, from a point completely outside it. But it is also a sign of the weirdness of America’s racial customs—most whites assume that anybody who has dark skin also has a set of identical, deeply ingrained experiences and attitudes that just weren’t part of Obama’s life growing up—that Obama has been able to sell this version of himself so successfully. As Maraniss puts it, “It does not diminish the importance of race to note that the formation of his persona began not with the color of his skin but the circumstances of his family—all of his family, on both sides, not just the absent father, as the title of his memoir suggests. All of his family—leaving and being left.” Being black serves in part as an effective cover for something else that is as deeply, or perhaps more deeply, part of him—a fundamental guardedness and unknowability. 

So, who is the President really on the inside? The Muslim Manchurian candidate? An Alinskyite socialist? The committed follower of Rev. Wright, as he portrayed himself in his first autobiography? A U. of Chicago academic slightly to the left of Richard Epstein? A WASPish golfer?  Or maybe there's not much there there ... 
... [Girlfriend] Genevieve Cook’s diary brims over with frustration about her inability to breach the defenses Obama had erected around himself. “[A] wall—the veil,” she calls it at one point; “[b]ut he is so wary, wary ... resents extra weight,” she says at another.  
... In his resistance to being pinned down in any way, there is a lot of his mother. As Maraniss puts it: “Ann had the will to avoid the traps life set for her, and she infused that same will in her son.” 
THIS CAMPAIGN hasn’t cleared up the fundamental mysteriousness of Obama very much. He has been uncannily successful at making Mitt Romney, not himself, the main subject of the campaign. Ask yourself: what portion of your personal campaign conversational time this season has been devoted to Romney, and what portion has been devoted to the man who is far more likely to be our president for the next four years? On Election Day 2008, would you have predicted that Obama would soon move his whole stack of chips onto the venerable liberal cause of universal health care? How clear a sense do you have now of what Obama’s second term will look like? 
The portion of Obama’s life story we get here gives us full satisfaction if the question is how he was able to give his celebrated and career-launching keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he proposed that there could be a way of bridging all political and cultural divisions.

The way: Elect me President!
Otherwise, Obama as president—what drives him, how he makes choices—is fundamentally mysterious, and neither Maraniss’s book nor this presidential campaign has done much to clear it up. If there is a politically applicable impression that emerges from the great mass of material, it is how much Obama is a child of the postcolonial era. Hawaii, Kenya, and Indonesia were all former colonies or possessions of the West, one of which was absorbed into a larger democratic nation, the other two of which became independent. The careers of Obama’s grandparents, his parents, and his stepfather all can be seen as workings out of the ways in which post-colonialism plays itself out in individual lives.

 So, I guess Dinesh D'Souza isn't totally crazy like everybody said he was.
And though the term “post-colonial” reads as “left,” both of Obama’s parents, though they probably would have been comfortable with that equation as applying to them politically, chose to work not as lifelong rebels but in the sorts of establishment roles that the end of colonialism opened up: his mother, in Indonesia, at the Ford Foundation; his father, in Kenya, at Shell Oil and then in a government bureau meant to promote the tourist business.  

Right. Obama's roots are in America's Cold War strategy to co-opt the Third World left by giving jobs and influence to people just to the right of the KGB.
... After the election, the chance that Obama will feel that he has finally been set free to let the world see who he really is and what he really believes is nil. 
But it’s also a safe bet that his core convictions are not those of the old Democratic Leadership Council. Romney palpably wishes to restore American hegemony in the world; Obama (drone attacks and dead Osama bin Laden or not) does not. Romney believes in business as the core institution in society in a way that Obama does not. We will surely find out something more about Obama’s convictions and his priorities in the six months after Election Day—not before.

Indeed.
As to what that will be, it’s hard to think of any politician running for reelection about whom the question is more difficult to answer.  
Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and is the author, most recently, of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article appeared in the October 25, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline "The Cipher."

One possibility is that Obama is intermittently worn down by the phoniness of his life. Here he is pretending to be the Heroic Man of Action when he's really a passive observer, an elegant writer undermined by his inability to come up with anything original to write in that prose-poetry style of his. He wrote a vast autobiography at age 33 to claim the advantages of being black in modern America, but by upbringing he doesn't feel black at all on the inside, and thus only associates with a tiny stratum of the most bourgeois blacks. 

The main stereotypically black aspect about Obama is his vast self-esteem, which greatly enjoys the acclaim of being President. But he also has a skeptical underside -- he doesn't like to flat out lie if there is some lawyerly language with which to trick the vast majority of his listeners and readers. And that part, the best part of him, perhaps finds his absurd career to be kind of depressing. 

Japanese win another Nobel

Back in 1999, I got into a discussion of Japanese creativity. For 20 years, I'd been hearing, often from the Japanese themselves, that they weren't creative. On the other hand, I owned a lot of cool gadgets that had at least been improved upon by the Japanese. On the other other hand, it was pointed out to me that the Japanese sure didn't win many hard science Nobel Prizes: only five Japanese winners up through 1999. 

Beginning in 2000, however, there have been 11 Japanese hard science Nobel Laureates. The latest is Shinya Yamanaka, age 50, for coming up in 2006 with a much less creepy way to use stem cells. (He shared it with John B. Gurdon of Britain, who was the first to clone an animal way back in 1962.)

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT:
In a brief interview today, Dr. Yamanaka, who was born in 1962 in Higashiosaka, Japan, said that he had trained as surgeon but “gave it up because I learned I was not talented.” Having seen how little the best surgeons could do to help some patients, he decided to go into basic research and did postdoctoral training at the Gladstone Institutes in California. 
“When I came back to Japan in the 90s I suffered from a disease which I called PAD — post-America depression,” he said. Another Japanese Nobel prizewinner, Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has criticized the lack of research freedom given to scientists in Japan. Dr. Yamanaka said that there were still some problems, but that conditions had become much better since Dr. Tonegawa moved from Japan. Dr. Tonegawa won an unshared Nobel Prize in 1987 for discovering the basis of antibody diversity.

The real reason Obama was no good in the first debate

Arriving everyday here at iSteve, along with my readers' many astute observations, are a vast number of spam comments. Most start off with some semi-literate gibberish apparently composed by a Third World digital sweatshop worker and end up with a sales pitch for Ugg or Christian Louboutin. Google funnels most spam comments into the Spam file, but I periodically have to go through the Spam and look for real comments. For example, Google always sends Svigor's comments to Spam, which I assume is wholly coincidental. Here's a comment from an Anonymous on the first debate that I just rescued:
Obama was jonesing for a cigarette. Smokers concentrate better when they are smoking. I'm surprised he didn't yawn. Obama should come out as a Smoker's Rights advocate, then he could smoke in public, and, reduce taxes on the poor. 

Breaking News! Obama may not be perfect after all

From the Washington Post:
Is Obama overrated as a candidate?

By Chris Cillizza, Published: October 7 
In his closing remarks at the first debate in Denver last week, President Obama uttered the following sentence: “Four years ago, I said that I’m not a perfect man and I wouldn’t be a perfect president.” 
For anyone who has watched Obama campaign for a second term this year, the phrase is old hat — part of the president’s seemingly self-effacing acknowledgment that he has, is and will continue to make mistakes but that he does so in the service of trying to do the right thing. 
But the now-familiar phrase took on a different — and more troubling — meaning for the president in the debate as it capped a decidedly desultory performance that left even his most loyal allies wondering what was wrong with him. 
Obama’s debate performance also raised a bigger question: Is he overrated as a candidate? 
Four years ago, that question would have been unimaginable. After all, this was a man who in his first run for national office not only outmaneuvered the Clinton family to win the Democratic presidential nomination but also went on to claim a 365-electoral-vote general-election landslide against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). And, oh by the way, Obama did all that while raising $750 million (including $500 million online) — a sum that shattered all fundraising records.

He beat the second string Clinton and the 72-year-old McCain and he sucked up a whole lot of Wall Street cash!

Let me make a prediction: Obama will do better and Romney worse in the next debate, as regression toward the mean kicks in.

Let me make another prediction: the reasons Obama went from nobody to President in four years without actually doing anything -- recall that it took Ulysses S. Grant eight years to go from nobody to President, during which he took Vicksburg --  will continue to go unexplored.

The Unmentionable Ethnicity: English-American

From Reuters:
Romney's English Roots Surprise Cousins Left Behind 
By REUTERS 
BARROW-IN-FURNESS, England (Reuters) - Mitt Romney's fight to become America's next president has the backing of one enthusiastic group of supporters, although they don't actually have a vote: his relatives in England. 
Few associate the Republican candidate with Britain but it was in England's industrial northwest that his ancestors lived for generations and converted to Mormonism before leaving for the United States in 1841 in search of the promised land.

In English cultural history, there's one moderately famous Romney, a distant kinsman of the candidate who shares his father's name:
Dalton has plenty of Romney-related history. Its most famous son was George Romney, who went to London and became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the 18th century. 
Two streets and a park are named after the artist, who is said to have had a secret affair with the mistress of Lord Nelson [right], the naval hero who defeated the French at Trafalgar. 
George was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church - where Mitt Romney's great-great grandparents, Elizabeth and Miles, were baptized and married before converting to the Mormon faith in 1837 and moving to the United States.

I like the first George Romney's painting of Thomas Paine.

But being English-American -- in the tradition of Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln -- is not something to be boasted of:
When he came to Britain in July this year, Romney did not visit the area where his family have their roots - unusual since emphasizing a European heritage is often seen as an electoral plus in U.S. politics. 
Barack Obama, who faces Romney in the November 6 presidential election, went down well last year when he toured an Irish village where one of his forebears once lived [O'Bama? Baroque O'Blarney?]
Romney's campaign spokeswoman made no comment when asked how the Republican challenger felt about his English origins. 

Affirmative action: Exotic India turns out to be just like the U.S.

From the New York Times:
With Affirmative Action, India’s Rich Gain School Slots Meant for Poor

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times 
CHENNAI, India — The two women both claim that affirmative action cost them coveted spots at elite public universities. Both cases have now reached the Supreme Court. 
One of the women, Abigail Fisher, 22, who is white, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas based on her race, and on Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court is to hear her plea in what may be the year’s most important decision. The other woman is from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and two weeks ago the Indian Supreme Court ordered that she be admitted to medical school pending the outcome of a broader court review. 
“When I came to know that I could not get into any medical college, I was really shocked,” C. V. Gayathri, the Indian student, said in an interview. “I didn’t speak to anyone for a week. I cried. I was very depressed.” 
Though the outlines of the two cases are similar, differences between how the world’s two largest democracies have chosen to redress centuries of past discrimination are striking. While affirmative action in the United States is now threatened, the program in India is a vast system of political patronage that increasingly works to reward the powerful rather than uplift those in need.

Exactly what purpose does the word "while" serve in that last sentence, other than that of Magician's Assistant? How does this differ from the U.S.?

From the New York Times eight years ago:
Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? 
By SARA RIMER and KAREN W. ARENSON 
Published: June 24, 2004

At the most recent reunion of Harvard University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard. But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were. 
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. 
What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges -- and with it, entry into the country's inner circles of power, wealth and influence -- African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind.

Isn't the President of the United States of America a classic example of the Gates-Guinier theorem in action? He didn't decide he was black until his mid-20s.

On the other hand, the First Lady is an exemplary African-American, with all four grandparents descended from American slaves. But her expensive Harvard Law School education turned out to be mostly a waste as she dropped her law license long ago to go into the diversity business (other than she did meet her husband through her ill-fated law career).

The rest of the article about India is pretty interesting about how the affirmative action program in India has made being an Untouchable a coveted legal distinction. However, I can never quite tell  what to make of articles about the Indian caste system since the Indians in the American media almost all come from the upper castes. There are virtually no Untouchable-Americans.

October 7, 2012

Strange New Respect for judge in FDNY case

From the New York Times:
For Judge in Firefighter Discrimination Case, an Evolving Opinion 
By MOSI SECRET

One after another, nearly 150 white firefighters approached a lectern facing a federal judge and, voices sometimes trembling with anger, decried what they called a perversion of justice. Years of hard work to make it into the ranks of the department were being tossed aside to make way for unqualified minority candidates, they said, all in a questionable effort to end discrimination.

The target of their wrath sat silently before them: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, whose expansive rulings have forced the New York Fire Department — “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege,” in his words — to overhaul its practices to hire more minority candidates.
One fireman, Sean Fitzgerald, bluntly accused the judge of playing a “social experiment” and questioned whether he was driven by “socioeconomic problems, personal ambition or inner guilt.” 
The remarkable demonstration of opposition, which played out over four days in federal court last week, underscored the degree to which Judge Garaufis has emerged as the most prominent and provocative figure in New York City’s most contentious integration battle in decades. Critics have dubbed him “Emperor Garaufis” and have accused him of being a publicity-seeking liberal crusader whose imposition of racial quotas has jeopardized public safety. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called for his removal from the case. 
But the case has also highlighted the evolution of his thinking on the government’s role in helping minorities. A product of the machine-driven world of Queens politics, he fiercely opposed federally mandated integration efforts as a young school board member from a mostly white district in the 1970s. Decades later, he pulled aside a black colleague on the federal bench and asked him searchingly, “How does it feel to be a black person in society?”

And then Judge Garaufis asked his black colleague, "May I touch your hair?"

“How does it feel to be a black person in society?” As opposed to ... what? ... A black person living with a family of wolves in the wilderness?

Seriously, judging by the quality of analysis in his Vulcan Society decision, Garaufis appears to be an innumerate dolt (here's my 2009 analysis of his decision). But who cares about that when the New York Times only cares about Who? Whom? and Whose side are you on?

A tribute to J.P. Rushton: "Jensen's bulldog"

James Thompson of University College London recently wrote of J.P. Rushton, who died last week:
Phil Rushton is tough minded, and has needed to be. Scholarly enquiry often leads to surprising answers, and expounding unpopular views is no project for the faint hearted. His key achievement has been to gather together what would otherwise have been a rag tag of disparate findings and bind them into a coherent pattern of r-K evolutionary strategies. His approach is one more example of an Eysenkian gesamtkunstwerk, to which those of hereditarian persuasion seem drawn, in which an over-arching theory provides a sweet symphony that brings order to chaos. This has given the debate about behavioural differences between genetic groups a new rationale, and for that alone Rushton deserves praise. 
In terms of his approach to the data he has shown doggedness in tracking down evidence and arguing his case. His 2005 review with Jensen sets out the hereditarian case as thoroughly and forcefully as has ever been achieved, and must be considered his shared magnum opus. In the best sense of the term he has been Jensen’s bulldog, taking on all comers with dogged persistence. 

(T.H. Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog.")
Jensen and Rushton were able to draw together the main points of a complex argument and also retain the sense of challenge and flexibility as they invited their critics to grasp the gauntlet they had thrown down. By proposing to identify the 10 major fields of contention, and by rating their own progress in each of them they challenged others to reply. 
What is most notable about Rushton is his intellectual resilience. He can grasp the big picture, and can assemble evidence in its favour. He has the capacity to understand the implications of individual findings, and to track down confirmatory or dis-confirmatory consequences. He can also link together entirely disparate publication networks, such as looking at cousin marriage in Japan to illuminate group differences in America. At every stage of discovery he believes he has done enough to convince his critics, but finds that the goal posts have been moved yet again. He has had to pick his way through a maze of imprecise hypotheses, as his critics reply to his specific proposals with a general portmanteau complaint that “these effects could be due to any number of things”.  As he himself has observed, the hard-line environmentalist position is not progressive. It does not deign to specify environmental effects in any rigorous way, but tends to multiply ad hoc objections and demand standards never yet achieved in social science. It would be enough to discourage the strongest of constitutions, but despite reverses Rushton pushes on, tracking down weak arguments, studying the implications of research results so as to take them to further levels of examination,  gathering new evidence, and as a consequence leaving well-constructed cairns of evidence along the trail-ways of exploration for other researchers to follow.

A reader has dug up some 1970s pictures of Rushton with a bass guitarist's head of hair.

Visitation will be Tuesday, funeral Wednesday in London, Ontario, Canada (not London, England, which had me momentarily confused since Rushton was a leading light of the London School descending intellectually from Darwin and Galton), Details here.

The Word Gap: blacks v. American Indians

As we all know from reading the newspapers, the reason for The Gap in school achievement, as proven by Hart & Risley, is because African-Americans don't talk enough.

But wouldn't this actually apply to New World Indians instead of blacks?
There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Everyone who has had the opportunity of comparison must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the lighthearted, talkative negroes.

Charles Darwin