October 11, 2012

The latest car crash in trendy economics: "The Out of Africa Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development" by Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

Recently, Science and the American Economic Review teamed up to splash a paper by two economists correlating the wealth of nations with genetic diversity. Here's the abstract:
The Out of Africa Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development 
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

Forthcoming in the American Economic Review 
Abstract 
This research advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a long-lasting hump-shaped effect on comparative economic development, reĆ”ecting the trade-offs between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While intermediate levels of genetic diversity prevalent among Asian and European populations have been conducive for development, the high diversity of African populations and the low diversity of Native American populations have been detrimental for the development of these regions. 

Not surprisingly, Nature is promoting a backlash against the paper splashed in Science on the grounds of political incorrectness. 

From Nature (via Marginal Revolution)
Economics and genetics meet in uneasy union 
Use of population-genetic data to predict economic success sparks war of words. 
Ewen Callaway 
10 October 2012 
The United States has the right amount of genetic diversity to buoy its economy, claim economists. 
“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.” Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was referring to purported links between genetics and an individual’s intelligence when he made this familiar complaint in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man.  

Oh, boy, here we are in 2012 and “Nature” is still citing the authority of Stephen Jay Gould’s dopey and discredited 1981 bestseller as an unquestioned authority text …

Are we ever going to make any intellectual progress?
Fast-forward three decades, and leading geneticists and anthropologists are levelling a similar charge at economics researchers who claim that a country’s genetic diversity can predict the success of its economy.
To critics, the economists’ paper seems to suggest that a country’s poverty could be the result of its citizens’ genetic make-up, and the paper is attracting charges of genetic determinism, and even racism. But the economists say that they have been misunderstood, and are merely using genetics as a proxy for other factors that can drive an economy, such as history and culture. The debate holds cautionary lessons for a nascent field that blends genetics with economics, sometimes called genoeconomics. The work could have real-world pay-offs, such as helping policy-makers to set the right level of immigration to boost the economy, says Enrico Spolaore, an economist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, who has also used global genetic-diversity data in his research. 

Spolaore then writes in to Nature to say that he never ever said anything about the I-word.

Here's Spolaore's upcoming review of all non-crimethink theories of why some countries are richer than others. It's pretty good, but the only marginally non-PC thinker it cites is Gregory Clark. Lynn & Vanhanen and Rindermann are conspicuous by their absence, as is Michael Hart, whose theory that winter makes people smarter due to natural selection seems to be the most plausible explanation of Spolaore's own research showing a major role for "absolute latitude." Spolaore's main focus is "long-term genealogical relatedness," which is a very good thing to think about, but intellectual life has gotten so thuggish that anybody thinking useful thoughts has to tread carefully these days to not attract the thugs.

To return to Nature:
But the economists at the forefront of this field clearly need to be prepared for harsh scrutiny of their techniques and conclusions. At the centre of the storm is a 107-page paper by Oded Galor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts1. It has been peer-reviewed by economists and biologists, and will soon appear in American Economic Review, one of the most prestigious economics journals.
The paper argues that there are strong links between estimates of genetic diversity for 145 countries and per-capita incomes, even after accounting for myriad factors such as economic-based migration. High genetic diversity in a country’s population is linked with greater innovation, the paper says, because diverse populations have a greater range of cognitive abilities and styles. By contrast, low genetic diversity tends to produce societies with greater interpersonal trust, because there are fewer differences between populations. Countries with intermediate levels of diversity, such as the United States, balance these factors and have the most productive economies as a result, the economists conclude. 
The manuscript had been circulating on the Internet for more than two years, garnering little attention outside economics — until last month, when Science published a summary of the paper in its section on new research in other journals. This sparked a sharp response from a long list of prominent scientists, including geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and Harvard University palaeoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman in Cambridge. 

Mostly anthropologists at Harvard. Unfortunately, the PC critique is intellectually lame and misses the actual flaws in Galor and Ashraf's paper.
In an open letter, the group said that it is worried about the political implications of the economists’ work: “the suggestion that an ideal level of genetic variation could foster economic growth and could even be engineered has the potential to be misused with frightening consequences to justify indefensible practices such as ethnic cleansing or genocide,” it said. 
The critics add that the economists made blunders such as treating the genetic diversity of different countries as independent data, when they are intrinsically linked by human migration and shared history. “It’s a misuse of data,” says Reich, which undermines the paper’s main conclusions. The populations of East Asian countries share a common genetic history, and cultural practices — but the former is not necessarily responsible for the latter. “Such haphazard methods and erroneous assumptions of statistical independence could equally find a genetic cause for the use of chopsticks,” the critics wrote. 
They have missed the point, responds Galor, a prominent economist whose work examines the ancient origins of contemporary economic factors. “The entire criticism is based on a gross misinterpretation of our work and, in some respects, a superficial understanding of the empirical techniques employed,” he says. Galor and Ashraf told Nature that, far from claiming that genetic diversity directly influences economic development, they are using it as a proxy for immeasurable cultural, historical and biological factors that influence economies. “Our study is not about a nature or nurture debate,” says Ashraf. 

Even less surprisingly, the most interesting question is whether the paper or its critics are more wrong, because the economists' paper simply assumes as truth one of my Seven Dumb Ideas about Race: that the old saw about how Africans are the most genetically diverse is really meaningful, when population geneticists try hard to find the least important genes to track.

I’ve only read the abstract of the paper, but it’s not encouraging: “the most homogeneous country, Bolivia, placed at 0.63 and the most diverse country, Ethiopia, at 0.77.” How does Bolivia pass any kind of reality check as the “most homogeneous country”?

Heck, Bolivia and Ethiopia are oddly rather similar in some ways: both have isolated highlands and both feature some population groups that are part-Caucasian, part indigenous to the continent.

My guess is that the way they came up with Bolivia as the least genetically diverse and Ethiopia as the most is that they got fooled into naively focusing on the so-called junk genes that population geneticists study to determine racial groups’ genealogies. 

And they may have also followed the population geneticists’ rule of thumb of ignoring everything from 1492 onward — e.g., you sample DNA extensively from isolated indigenous tribes in Bolivia’s Amazon and mountains, you don’t sample much from the big cities where most people have both Caucasian and Amerindian background.

Population geneticists try hard to avoid looking at economically useful mutations, such as lactose tolerance, because those get selected for and thus can be misleading about the past. Instead they prefer to study mutations on parts of the genome that don’t have much effect on anything important, because those genes tend to get passed down according to the laws of statistics governing random phenomena.

Those are much easier to project than economically powerful genes, such as lactose tolerance, which can set off wildly contingent consequences (e.g., the spread of the Indo-European languages may, or then again may not, have been caused by some Eurasian group getting that mutation and setting off on a career of conquest -- see Cochran and Harpending for details).

Looking at junk genes, sub-Saharan Africa has the most genetic diversity since most sub-Saharans’ ancestors didn’t get squeezed through the Out-of-Africa event. Pre-1492 South America had the least junk gene diversity because its ancestors were squeezed through both the Out of Africa and Out of Siberia events.

Here's how the two economists reason: Africa is the poorest continent so you assume that’s because of its high rate of junk gene diversity, and South America is kind of poor, so that must be because of its low rate of junk gene diversity. Europe is rich and it’s in the middle in terms of junk gene diversity, so all you have to do is fit an upside down U-shaped curve to your datapoints and voila, you have a cause celebre paper.

Or, I may have this all wrong, but this is the terrible feeling I got from reading their abstract.

UPDATE: 
Here’s economists Ashraf and Galor’s defense of their study.

Their critics are pretty silly, but Ashraf and Galor screwed up almost exactly the way I figured they did, only maybe even more so: instead of using diversity of junk genes in isolated pre-Columbian tribes like I assumed, they went one step farther and used a measure of migratory distance from the ancient Out of Africa event to come up with a stylized version of how much Out of Africa junk gene diversity there _would_ be if there hadn’t been any post-1492 admixture with Europeans or Africans!
“To this end, our work employs migratory distance from East Africa (i.e., distance along land-connected routes) as an “exogenous” source of variation in intrapopulation diversity across regions. Put differently, rather than directly employing the observed diversity measure, which may be tainted by genetic admixtures resulting from movements of populations across space in response to spatial differences in economic prosperity, we employ the variation in the diversity measure that is predicted by distance along prehistoric migration routes from East Africa.”

Oh, dear …

So, that’s how Bolivia comes out genetically most homogeneous in their study. To you and me, Bolivians may look pretty genetically diverse, with major contributions from Europe and the indigenes, with maybe some African in there in the lowland.

But, to Ashraf and Galor, Bolivia _has_ to be the most homogeneous because it’s just about the hardest place to walk to from the Olduvai Gorge. You have to get out of Africa, then you have to get out Siberia, then you have to get past the Panamanian isthmus, then you have to climb high into the Andes. I’m tired just typing all that.

The funny thing is that genetic differences in non-junk phenotypic genes obviously play an economic role in Bolivia. Real estate prices in La Paz are strongly negatively correlated with altitude. The richest, whitest people tend to live at the bottom of the canyon in La Paz where the air is thickest because white women tend to have pregnancy problems at over 10,000 feet, while the upland suburbs are cheap and almost all Indian. Cynthia Beall of Case Western has discovered the mutation that allows the indigenous people of the Altiplano to get by there better than outsiders.

If economists want to study the impact of genetic differences on economic life, just look at life as it really is in Bolivia.

October 10, 2012

Let's invent some new quotas

A reader writes:
As you’ve written earlier, I think the value of affirmative action is that it co-opts dissent by including the most intelligent from every ethnic group. This reinforces the ability of the elite to continue discriminating ruthlessly on intelligence for the jobs “that matter” in law, finance etc. As such, it is unlikely that AA would be banned outright. Even a restriction would just push it “into the shadows” – eg, it will still happen, just in another way or form.

Because I think the above is true, it seems like the only way affirmative action would end is if it is taken to its ridiculous logical conclusion, whereby admissions test are made easy and applicants are chosen randomly. A better strategy for folks opposed to AA would probably be to try and achieve these ends – to push on elite institutions with disparate impact (universities and corporations).

The downside case to this strategy, is that there is a social benefit to have a cluster of very smart people in one place, so they can feed off one another and do more interesting things together than they might do alone.

With places that focus on engineering (Stanford etc) this results in tangible and incredible technologies. The ivy league seems to be the font of financial engineering, so clusters can also produce products that more focused on the clever taking advantage of the clueless. (Yes, the economy benefitted from the additional leverage that was available from these innovations, but it has now left us with major structural problems).

The upside case from this strategy, for the folks who are disadvantaged by the practice, is that it would undermine the value placed on “elite” credentials, making the individual’s performance more important. This is a form of equalizing outcomes by lowering the standard. Not pretty, but it would have a big effect.

For society - if smart folks were more evenly spread throughout various industries and fields, rather than concentrated into a few value transference sectors, we might see a very different country 25 years from now.

An alternate way to achieve this last outcome would be to mandate reverse quotas – no single university can have no more than x% of their students from the top y% of scores. This would force the spread of our smart fraction and ensure we have smart people working in more fields. Safer for society since the “next big thing” is always unpredictable.

I can recall visiting Stanford as a high school student in 1974 or 1975 and being suitably impressed Why would anybody want to go anywhere else, I thought at the time, what with the weather, the beautiful campus, the easy grades, and now the rise around Stanford of this thing that was then starting to be called "Silicon Valley," where guys get rich living out science fiction dreams?

As far as I can tell, Stanford has fulfilled my exorbitant expectations of 37 years ago, but has it even moved up in the rankings since then? Not particularly. And that's mostly because Wall Street has sucked up more and more of the wealth, making the Ivy League colleges with the best pipelines to Wall Street ever more desirable, which in turn encourages Tigermothermania and so forth.

The sensible thing would be to take concrete actions to rein in Wall Street, but that may turn out to be politically unfeasible because they are, after all, Wall Street. So, perhaps we could nibble away at the Ivy League via Wall Street? 

We're all supposed to be worked up over inequality, right, so why is it so important which college you get into at 18? 

The Ivy League takes in about 15,000 freshmen per year out of an annual cohort of 4,000,000. Obviously, they do a pretty good job of selecting people likely to write them big checks in future fundraising drives, but, still ...

Perhaps regional hiring quotas could be imposed on firms in proportion to how much TARP money they took in 2008. For example, Goldman Sachs got a ten billion dollar loan in 2008 from the feds, so why not guidelines for Goldman Sachs about diversifying their hiring, showing that they are now recruiting at Big Ten and at SEC campuses. It's not like Goldman can't afford the airfare.

Amazon will deign to take your money again!

My apologies to all the readers who attempted to give me money via Amazon on Wednesday afternoon, only to find that Amazon had once again decided that their money wasn't good enough or something. As of ten minutes ago, Amazon is now deigning to pass your contributions on to me (minus their 2.9% and $0.30 transaction fee).

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 to me via VDARE by clicking here. You can use PayPal for that.

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

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Thanks.

More high comedy at the High Court

More from the transcript of oral questions at the Supreme Court in the Fisher affirmative action case today:

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General Verrilli. 

[General Verrilli is the Obama Administration's Solicitor General]

... JUSTICE ALITO: Does the United States [i.e., the Obama Administration] agree 
with Mr. Garre that African American and Hispanic 
applicants from privileged backgrounds deserve a 
preference?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I understand that 
differently, Justice Alito. Here's how we understand 
what is going on with respect to the admissions process 
in the University of Texas, and I am going to address it 
directly.  I just think it needs a bit of context to do 
so.
 The Top 10 Percent Plan certainly does 
produce some ethnic diversity. Significant numbers get 
in. The problem is the university can't control that 
diversity in the same way it can with respect to the 
25 percent of the class that is admitted through the 
holistic process.
 So my understanding of what the university 
here is looking to do, and what universities generally 
are looking to do in this circumstance, is not to grant 
a preference for privilege, but to make individualized 
decisions about applicants who will directly further the 
educational mission. For example, they will look for 
individuals who will play against racial stereotypes 
just by what they bring: 

[In other words, economically privileged blacks and Hispanics should also be personally given special legal privileges in order to undermine the stereotype of blacks and Hispanics as disprivileged. It's a tough job but somebody's gotta do it!]

The African American fencer; 
the Hispanic who has -- who has mastered classical 
Greek. 

[I love the General's pause before coming up with the example of the Hispanic who gets into UT despite presumably mediocre grades and test scores but "who has -- who has mastered classical Greek." His pause as he tries to come up with an example reminds me of Waugh's Scoop where novice foreign correspondent William Boot is shown into the office of newspaper magnate Lord Copper and gets some advice on covering wars in Africa:
There are two valuable rules for a special correspondent — Travel Light and Be Prepared. Have nothing which in a case of emergency you cannot carry in your own hands. But remember that the unexpected always happens. Little things we take for granted at home, like...” he looked about him, seeking a happy example; the room, though spacious, was almost devoid of furniture; his eyes rested on a bust of Lady Copper; that would not do; then, resourcefully, he said: “...like a coil of rope or a sheet of tin, may save your life in the wilds. I should take some cleft sticks with you. I remember Hitchcock — Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, a man who used to work for me once; smart enough fellow in his way, but limited, very little historical backing — I remember him saying that in Africa he always sent his despatches in a cleft stick. It struck me as a very useful tip. Take plenty.]

They can also look for people who have a 
demonstrated track record of -­

JUSTICE ALITO: If you have two applicants 
who are absolutely the same in every respect: They both 
come from affluent backgrounds, well-educated parents. 
One falls within two of the groups that are given a 
preference, the other doesn't. It's a marginal case. 
It's the last -- the last position available in the 
class. Under the Texas plan, one gets in; one doesn't 
get in. Now, do you agree with that or not?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: No. I think -­

JUSTICE ALITO: Do you agree with -- do you 
agree that that is an incorrect statement of the facts, 
or do you agree that that's an incorrect understanding 
of the Equal Protection Clause?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I think it's both. I 
think the -- there is no automatic preference in Texas. 
And I think this is right in the -- it says at page 398a 
of the Joint Appendix -- the -- they describe the 
process as saying, "An applicant's race is considered 
only to the extent that the applicant, viewed 
holistically, will contribute to the broader vision of 
diversity desired by the university."

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Yes, but -- but the 
hypothetical is that the two applicants are entirely the 
same in all other respects.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: Right. But the point -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: And if -- if the ability to 
give a racial preference means anything at all, it 
certainly has to mean that, in the -- in the 
hypothetical given -- given by Justice Alito, the 
minority student gets in and the other one doesn't.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I disagree, 
Justice Scalia. What the -- Texas, I think, has made 
clear -- and I think this is a common feature of these 
kinds of holistic approaches -- that not everyone in an 
underrepresented group gets a preference, gets a plus 
factor.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: It's not a matter of not 
everyone; it's a matter of two who are identical in all 
other respects.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: Right.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: And what does the racial 
preference mean if it doesn't mean that in that 
situation the minority applicant wins and the other one 
loses?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: There may not be a racial 
preference in that situation. It's going to depend on a 
holistic, individualized consideration of the applicant.

 JUSTICE KENNEDY: I don't understand this 
argument. I thought that the whole point is that 
sometimes race has to be a tie-breaker and you are 
saying that it isn't. Well, then, we should just go 
away. Then -- then we should just say you can't use 
race, don't worry about it.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I don't think it's a 
tie-breaker. I think it functions more subtly than 
that, Justice Kennedy. 

[C'mon, that's the best you can do, General? "More subtly"? What about "more ineffably"? "More transcendentally"? Lay it on thick, man! You have to get Kennedy's vote.]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: It doesn't function 
more subtly in every case. We have findings by both 
courts below -- and I'm reading from the court of 
appeals opinion at Petitioner appendix page 33.
 "The district court found that race is 
indisputably a meaningful factor that can make a 
difference in the evaluation of a student's 
application." If it doesn't make a difference, then we 
have a clear case; they're using race in a way that 
doesn't make a difference. The supposition has to be 
that race is a determining factor.
 We've heard a lot about holistic and all 
that. That's fine. But unless it's a determining 
factor, in some cases they're using race when it doesn't 
serve the purpose at all. That can't be the situation.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: It can make a difference. 
It just doesn't invariably make a difference with 
respect to every minority applicant, and that's the 
key -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You have to agree 
that it makes a difference in some cases.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes, it does.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: But it doesn't 
necessarily make a difference in the situation that 
Justice Alito posited -­

JUSTICE GINSBURG: But that's the same -­
the same would be true in -- of the Bakke plan, that in 
some cases it's going to make a difference. The same 
would be true under Grutter. The same would be true 
under the policies now in existence at the military 
academies.

[In other words, we've been BSing Americans since Bakke in 1978 and we'd better not stop now, or embarrassing questions might be asked.]

 GENERAL VERRILLI: That -- that is exactly 
right, Justice Ginsburg, but the point is that it's not 
a mechanical factor.

[It's an organic factor! No, it's a supernatural factor! I've got it, it's a metaphysical factor!]

 Now, with respect to the implementation 
of -- and the narrow tailoring inquiry, with respect to 
the University's implementation of this -- of its 
compelling interest, I do think it's clear that, 
although the Petitioner says she's challenging 
implementation, that this plan meets every requirement 
of Grutter and addresses the concern of Justice Kennedy 
that you raised in dissent in Grutter. Whether Texas 
had to or not, it did address that concern.
 There's no quota. Everyone competes against 
everyone else. Race is not a mechanical automatic 
factor. It's an holistic individualized consideration. 

[Yeah, that's the ticket: It's a holistic factor! It's an holistic individualized consideration!"]

And because of the way the process is structured, they 
do not monitor the racial composition on an ongoing 
basis. 

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: General, I think, as I 
take your answer, is that the supposition of 
Justice Alito's question is truly impossible under this 
system. There are not two identical candidates because 
there are not identical mechanical factors that -­
except the 10 percent plan.
 Under the PIA, the factors are so varied, so 
contextually set, that no two applicants ever could be 
identical in the sense that they hypothesize.

[It's a contextual factor!]

 GENERAL VERRILLI: That's correct. They 
make specific individualized judgments about each 
applicant -­

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Because no two people 
can be the same -­

[It's an in-the-mind-of-God factor.] 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: To get back to what 
we're talking about

[Oooh, diss ...]

, you -- as I understand it, race by 
itself is taken into account, right? That's the only 
thing on the cover of the application; they take race 
into account.
 And the district court found -- and you're 
not challenging -- that race makes a difference in some 
cases, right?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes. But the key, 
Mr. Chief Justice, is the way it makes a difference. 
And it makes a difference by casting the accomplishments 
of the individual applicant in a particular light, or 
the potential of an individual applicant in a particular 
light.
 What -- what universities are looking for 
principally with respect to this individualized 
consideration is what is this individual going to 
contribute to our campus? And race can have a bearing 
on that because it can have a bearing on evaluating what 
they've accomplished, and it can have a bearing for the 
reasons I tried to identify earlier to Justice Alito on 
what they can bring to the table, what they can bring to 
that freshman seminar, what they can bring to the 
student government, what they can bring to the campus 
environment -­

JUSTICE BREYER: All right, sir. But it is 
the correct answer to Justice Alito's -- if there are 
ever two applicants where the GPA, the test -- the 
grades, the SA1, SA2, leadership, activities, awards, 
work experience, community service, family's economic 
status, school's socioeconomic status, family's 
responsibility, single-parent home, languages other than 
English spoken at home, and SAT score relative to 
school's average race, if you have a situation where 
those -- all those things were absolutely identical, 
than the person would be admitted on the bounds of race. 

GENERAL VERRILLI: Not necessarily.

 (Laughter.)

[The audience gets the joke!]

... CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, how -- what 
is your view on how we tell whether -- when the 
University has attained critical mass?

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I don't think critical --
I agree with my friend that critical mass is not a 
number. I think it would be very ill-advised to suggest 
that it is numerical.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. I'm hearing a 
lot about what it's not. I'd like to know what it is 
because our responsibility is to decide whether this use 
of race is narrowly tailored to achieving, under this 
University's view, critical mass.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: May I answer, 
Mr. Chief Justice?

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh, yes.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: Thank you.
 I think -- I don't think that this is a 
situation in which the Court simply affords complete 
deference to the University's judgment that it hasn't 
yet achieved the level of diversity that it needs to 
accomplish its educational mission.

[Complete deference -- that's all were asking.]

 I think that the Court ought to -- has to 
make its own independent judgment. I think the way the 
Court would go about making that independent judgment is 
to look at the kind of information that the university 
considered. That could be information about the 
composition of the class. It could be information about 
classroom diversity. It could be information about 
retention and graduation rates. It could be information 
about -- that's specific to the university's context in 
history. Is it a university that has had a history of 
racial incidents and trouble or not? 

[If we haven't had any racial incidents, we can get you some quick. Our Ed School professors are very obliging when it comes to racial incidents. You want a noose? We can get you a noose, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, we can get you a noose by 3 o'clock this afternoon.]

A series of 
factors.
 And then what the Court's got to do is 
satisfy itself that the University has substantiated its 
conclusion based on that -- based on the information 
it's considered, that it needs to consider race to 
further advance the educational goals that Grutter has 
identified as a compelling interest.
 And I will say, I do think, as the number of 
minority enrollees gets higher, the burden on the 
university to do that is going to get harder to meet. 
But I don't think -- I don't think there is a number, 
and I don't think it would be prudent for this Court to 
suggest that there is a number, because it would raise 
exactly the kind of problem that I -- that I think 
Justice Kennedy identified in the Grutter dissent of 
creating hydraulic pressure towards that number.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: We should probably stop 
calling it critical mass then, because mass, you know, 
assumes numbers, either in size or a certain weight.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I agree.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: So we should stop calling 
it mass.

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I agree.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Call it a cloud or 
something like that.

 (Laughter.)

[Vapor?]

 GENERAL VERRILLI: I agree that critical 
mass -- the idea of critical mass has taken on a life of 
its own in a way that's not helpful because it doesn't 
focus the inquiry where it should be.

[In other words, nobody should think nuthin' about nuthin', the Supreme Court should just let the public universities do whatever they feel like. If you can't trust college administrators, who can you trust?]

[For the Supreme Court's questioning of the U. of Texas lawyer, which is also pretty amusing, click here.]

[It's hard not to be reminded once again of Theodore Dalrymple's insight:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. ... I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”]

Why it pays to read iSteve: Naive Hong Kong parents pay conman $2.2 million to bribe their sons into Harvard

From the Boston Globe:
To Gerald and Lily Chow, education consultant Mark Zimny must have seemed like the answer to many parents’ prayer: Please let my child get into Harvard University. 
The Chows, who lived in Hong Kong, knew little about the US educational system, but they did know that they wanted an Ivy League education for their sons. And they had money to spend on consultants like Zimny, who, they believed, could help make the dream come true. 
What transpired, however, turned out to be a cautionary tale for the thousands of parents who are fueling the growing global admissions-consulting industry. 
Zimny, whom they met in 2007, had credentials. He had worked as a professor at Harvard. He ran an education consultancy, IvyAdmit. And he had a plan to help the Chows’ two sons, then 16 and 14. 
First, Zimny’s company would provide tutoring and supervision while the boys attended American prep schools. Then, according to a complaint and other documents the Chows filed as part of a lawsuit in US District Court in Boston, Zimny said he would grease the admissions wheels, funneling donations to elite colleges while also investing on the Chows’ behalf. 
According to the suit, Zimny warned the Chows against giving to schools directly. “Embedded racism” made development offices wary of Asian donors, he allegedly advised them; better to use his company as a middleman. 
Over two years, the Chows gave IvyAdmit $2.2 million. 
Now, they are charging that Zimny lied to them repeatedly, committing fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and several other transgressions — and they want their money back.

If only the Chows had been regular readers of iSteve, they would have known what the real Harvard Number for getting your kid into Harvard is, and that anybody asking for only $1.1 million per child is a palpable fraud.

Speaking of all the useful information you learn from reading iSteve, I gratefully announced last night that the first full day of my first fundraising drive in 14 month was most encouraging.

UPDATE: It turns out the next paragraph was based on a wrong assumption. It turns out that Amazon simply turned off my account without mentioning it to me when I check in to my account on their website. They've sent me an email demanding I answer the exactly same questions I answered the last time they turned off my account in the middle of Sunday night, which is why I posted their questions and my answers on my Amazon page.

Being a former member of the marketing research industry, I hoped that would encourage fencesitters to want to jump on the bandwagon. But being a notoriously bad marketer, my strategy, perhaps unsurprisingly, has so far had the opposite effect from what I intended: donations have since slowed to a trickle. So, today, let me beg you: I really, really need to make more money off my writing. It's all I do. I'm not a good multitasker, and if I had to go back and get a real job, I wouldn't be able to write much at all.

There are a few ways to support my work:

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I tried to send you another $10 (wish it was a lot more), but when I clicked on the one-time $10 donation button, I was taken to a page that says this:
Invalid Request

Error Message:
An Amazon Payments Business account with verified email address and
credit card is required to accept payments using Amazon Simple Pay.

Which I provided last weekend.

This is extraordinarily frustrating. Here you have Amazon, a company with a $100 billion market capitalization and it can't seem to not break down every day or two. 

You might almost think it's personal. 

Nor does Amazon go out of its way to publicize where to call or email when it decides to stop working.

So, for the moment:

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.)

Here's what is still working at present:

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

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

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-4142

Thanks.

The irony of "critical mass" in the pursuit of academic diversity

After the Grutter / Gratz cases of 2003 legalized racial/ethnic preferences in college admissions to ensure a "critical mass" of minorities on campus, a lawyer complained to me that I had introduced the concept of "critical mass" to the debate in my 1995 National Review article "Where the Races Relate." I am extremely doubtful that I was the first to use the term "critical mass" in regard to college admissions quotas, but it would be ironic since I pointed out why the pursuit of diversity works against the achievement of a critical mass:
What could colleges learn from the Army and from their own athletes about race? 
(1). Selection 
(1A). Specialization and Critical Mass -- One little-appreciated reason for the impressive record of accomplishment by blacks in the Army (e.g., after Desert Storm there were 26 black generals) is their lack of success in the Navy (only two black admirals). Achievement in one field naturally breeds more success in that same field. Initially arbitrary variations self-perpetuate. Successful immigrant group like Asian Indians rise to affluence precisely by dominating niches of the economy like motel-keeping. As Adam Smith pointed out on P. 1 of The Wealth of Nations, specialization is the road to riches. 
According to Charles Moskos of Northwestern, the leading sociologist of military life, one key to the strong performance of black Army officers has been a widespread self-help organization for black officers called Rocks. In it, senior officers mentor younger men in how to live up to the demands of being an officer and a gentleman. In the Navy, however, a lack of critical mass hampers similar efforts: if, say, you are the only African-American officer on your nuclear submarine, you can't turn to another black man for advice for your entire cruise. Thus, it continues to makes more sense for an ambitious young black to join the Army than the Navy. 
On campus, however, the automatic reaction whenever an embarrassing shortfall of blacks in any field is pointed out is another affirmative action campaign. For example, architecture schools have been attempting for years to recruit more blacks and Hispanics. Now, I commend a career in architecture to any young person with a trust fund, but the less privileged should remember that architecture pays wretchedly for the first decade or two (or three or four). 
Conservative critics of quotas often argue that lowering entrance standards for minorities is Bad, but that more intensely recruiting minorities is Good. Yet, seldom does any race-based recruitment campaign stem from a hardheaded analysis of what's in the best interest of the minorities. Instead, affirmative action is an automatic response by white leaders to their discomfort over their Black Lack. African-Americans have enough problems of their own without taking on this new Black Man's Burden of helping whites feel better about themselves. 
Before affirmative action, unpopular but "unprotected" minorities tended to initially congregate at certain congenial schools: e.g., Mormons at Brigham Young, Catholic ethnics at Jesuit colleges, lesbians at Smith, or free-market economists at the University of Chicago back during the Keynesian heyday. At these havens, the minorities could be confident of ample role models, freedom from snubs, fair shots at leadership positions, courses addressing their interests, responsive audiences for their ideas, and opportunities for their future leaders to meet. The most striking example of this occurred during the Depression when the Ivy League enforced anti-Semitic quotas. So, brilliant Jews concentrated at City College of New Yorks (e.g., three Nobel Prize winners came from the class of 1937 alone). This critical mass of talent set off chain reactions that energized American intellectual life for decades. 
Today, though, a black high school senior looking for universities where blacks comprise a significant fraction of the best minds on campus would end up with the same list as his grandfather: the historically black schools like Howard. In fact, these colleges still appear to produce a disproportionate share of black high achievers, despite debilitating competition from far richer colleges for the brightest black minds. 
Why can't wealthy mainstream universities afford the critical mass of top black talent that would make them nurturing environments for black students and professors? Paradoxically, the lock-step obsession of elite colleges with appearing "diverse" has scattered the finest black thinkers in a homogeneously thin and lonely diaspora across every college town in urban and rural America. Consider the career path of the outstanding scholar of African-American literature, Henry Louis Gates. A few years ago he publicly mused about going to Princeton, where he could have teamed with Nobel Laureate Toni Morison, philosopher Cornel West, and other leading black humanists. But hiring Dr. Gates is a quick (though not cheap) way for a school with few first rate black professors to advertise its Commitment to Diversity. Bidding wars have thus carried Dr. Gates instead from Yale to Cornell to Duke to Harvard.

Down the affirmative action rabbit hole at the Supreme Court

From the justices' questions to the U. of Texas's lawyer (Mr. Garre) defending the University of Texas's racial/ethnic preference systems. It gets pretty comic.

(By the way, a couple of days ago the humor/satire site Fark linked to my annotation of a Wall Street Journal article on the the latest kindergarten contortions in New York City. It got 200+ comments on Fark, which get progressively better as more readers start to wrap their heads around it. But, if Fark is looking for humor in the news, they should check out this cross-examination of an affirmative action defender by the Supreme Court's Murderer's Row:]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel, before -- I 
need to figure out exactly what these numbers mean. 
Should someone who is one-quarter Hispanic check the 
Hispanic box or some different box?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, there is a 
multiracial box. Students check boxes based on their 
own determination. This is true under the Common 
Application -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, I suppose a 
person who is one-quarter percent Hispanic, his own 
determination, would be I'm one-quarter percent 
Hispanic.

 MR. GARRE: Then they would check that box, 
Your Honor, as is true -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: They would check 
that box. What about one-eighth?

[How about one-thirtysecond American Indian?]

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, that was -- they 
would make that self-determination, Your Honor. If
anyone, in any part of the application, violated some 
honor code then that could come out -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Would it violate the 
honor code for someone who is one-eighth Hispanic and 
says, I identify as Hispanic, to check the Hispanic box?

[Honor code? We don't need no steeenking honor code!]

 MR. GARRE: I don't think -- I don't think 
it would, Your Honor. I don't think that that issue 
would be any different than the plan upheld in Grutter 
or the Harvard plan or in Bakke.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You don't check in 
any way the racial identification?

 MR. GARRE: We do not, Your Honor, and no 
college in America, the Ivy Leagues, the Little Ivy 
Leagues, that I'm aware of.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So how do you know 
you have 15 percent African American -- Hispanic or 
15 percent minority?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, the same way that 
that determination is made in any other situation I'm 
aware of where race is taken into account.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You say the same 
way. What is that way?

 MR. GARRE: The persons self-identify on 
that form.

[The issue, obviously, is that in a country where the President is half black and chooses to identify on his 2010 Census form as only black, there are no downsides to identifying dubiously as belonging to a Designated Victim Group, other than the individual's own conscience and sense of honor. We should not underestimate the sense of honor among white people, but it's a little much to assume that it will remain wholly intact under long-term assault.

By the way, for the benefit of the Justices, here is the Pew Hispanic Center's intentionally hilarious guide to Who Is Hispanic?]

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Do they have to 
self-identify?

 MR. GARRE: They do not, Your Honor. Every 
year people do not and many of those applicants are 
admitted.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: And how do they decide? 
You know, it's -- they want not just a critical mass in 
the school at large, but class by class? How do they 
figure out that particular classes don't have enough? 
What, somebody walks in the room and looks them over to 
see who looks -- who looks Asian, who looks black, who 
looks Hispanic? Is that how it's done?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, and let me try 
to be clear on this. The university has never asserted 
a compelling interest in any specific diversity in every 
single classroom. It has simply looked to classroom 
diversity as one dimension of student body diversity.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: I don't know what you are 
talking about. I mean it is either a factor that is 
validly in this case or it isn't. Do they look to 
individual classroom diversity or not? And if so, how 
do they decide when classes are diverse?

 MR. GARRE: This Court in Grutter, Your 
Honor, and maybe the most important thing that was said 
during the first 30 minutes was, when given an 
opportunity to challenge Grutter, I understood my friend 
not to ask this Court to overrule it. This Court in 
Grutter recognized the obvious fact that the classroom 
is one of the most important environments where the 
educational benefits of diversity are realized, and so 
the University of Texas, in determining whether or not 
it had reached a critical mass, looked to the classroom 
along with -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Fine. I'm asking how. How 
did they look to the classroom?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Did they require everybody 
to check a box or they have somebody figure out, oh, 
this person looks 1/32nd Hispanic and that's enough?

 MR. GARRE: They did a study, Your Honor, 
that took into account the same considerations that they 
did in discussing the enrollment categories -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: What kind of a study? What 
kind of a study?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, it's in the 
Supplemental Joint Appendix.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: Yes, it doesn't explain to 
me how they go about, classroom by classroom, deciding 
how many minorities there are.

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, there are student 
lists in each classroom. The student lists --

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: There are student 
lists in each classroom that have race identified with 
the students.

 MR. GARRE: No, no, Your Honor. Of course, 
each classroom, the university knows which students are 
taking its classes and one can then, if you want to 
gauge diversity in the classrooms, go back -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh, you go back to 
what they checked on the form.
application form in deciding whether Economics 201 has a 
sufficient number of African Americans or Hispanics?

 MR. GARRE: That is information that is 
available to the university, Your Honor, the race of 
students if they've checked it on the application. But 
I do want to be clear on this classroom diversity study. 
This was only one of many information points that the 
university looked to.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, on the classroom 
diversity, how does the non-Top 10 Percent part of the 
plan further classroom diversity? My understanding is 
that the university had over 5,000 classes that 
qualified as small and the total number of African 
Americans and Hispanics who were admitted under the part 
of the plan that is challenged was just a little over 
200.  So how does that -- how does that -- how can that 
possibly do more than a tiny, tiny amount to increase 
classroom diversity?

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, first I think 
that 200 number is erroneous. There have been many more 
minority candidates -­

JUSTICE ALITO: Per class?

 MR. GARRE: No, not -- not on a per-class 
basis.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Individuals in class.

 MR. GARRE: I think in looking at the 
classrooms, Your Honor, what the university found was 
shocking isolation.

[I am shocked, SHOCKED.]

 JUSTICE ALITO: How many -- how many non-Top 
10 Percent members of the two minorities at issue here 
are admitted in each class?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we didn't look 
specifically at that determination. What we did -- in 
other words, to try to find whether there were holistic 
admits or percentage admits, we did conclude in 2004 -­
and again this was before -- we did the classroom study 
before the plan at issue was adopted and at that time 
there were no holistic admits taking race into account. 
And what we concluded was that we simply -- if you 
looked at African Americans, for example, in 90 percent 
of the classes of the most common participatory size -­

JUSTICE ALITO: I really don't understand 
your answer. You know the total number of, let's say, 
African Americans in an entering class, right? Yes or 
no?

 MR. GARRE: Yes, Your Honor.

 JUSTICE ALITO: And you know the total 
number who were admitted under the Top 10 Percent Plan?

 MR. GARRE: We do, Your Honor. But again at 
the time -­

JUSTICE ALITO: If you subtract A from B 
you'll get C, right?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, at the time -­

JUSTICE ALITO: And what is the value of C 
per class?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I don't know the 
answer to that question, and let me try to explain why 
the university didn't look specifically to that. 
Because at the time that the classroom diversity study 
was conducted, it was before the holistic admissions 
process at issue here was adopted in 2003-2004. And so 
that determination wouldn't have been as important as 
just finding out are African Americans or Hispanics, 
underrepresented minorities, present at the university 
in such numbers that we are not experiencing racial 
isolation in the classroom.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What is that number? 
What is the critical mass of African Americans and 
Hispanics at the university that you are working toward?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we don't have one. 
And this Court in Grutter -­

[What's going on here is that the 1978 Bakke decision more or less legalized quotas as long as they aren't referred to as quotas. Since then, quota supporters have started to use the term "critical mass" to justify quotas. Now, "critical mass" sounds very scientific and quantitative (if you have a critical mass of plutonium of a certain amount, then BOOM), but if the quota supporters ever let themselves be pinned down to putting a number to it, then it sounds a lot like a quota.

The University of Texas at Austin has 38,400 undergraduates and about 15,000 are nonwhite. A couple of thousand are black. So, keep that in mind in the subsequent gang-ups.]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So how are we 
supposed to tell whether this plan is narrowly tailored 
to that goal?

 MR. GARRE: To look to the same criteria of 
this Court in Grutter. This Court in Grutter 
specifically rejected the notion that you could come up 
with a fixed percentage. Now -­

JUSTICE ALITO: Does critical mass vary from 
group to group? Does it vary from State to State?

 MR. GARRE: It certainly is contextual. I 
think it could vary, Your Honor. I think -- let me 
first say that my friends have, throughout this 
litigation, not in this Court, asserted 20 percent as a 
critical mass and that's lumping together different 
minority groups.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But could you answer my
question? What does the University of Texas -- the 
University of Texas think about those questions? Is the 
critical mass for the University of Texas dependent on 
the breakdown of the population of Texas?

 MR. GARRE: No, it's not at all.

 JUSTICE ALITO: It's not.

 MR. GARRE: It's not at all. It's looking 
to the educational benefits of diversity on campus, and 
I think we actually agree on what that means and what 
Grutter said it meant in terms of -­

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Garre, could you 
explain -- I think you were trying to before -- what 
seems to me the critical question in this case: Why 
didn't the 10 percent solution suffice? There were a 
substantial number of minority members admitted as a 
result of the 10 percent solution. Why wasn't that 
enough to achieve diversity?

 MR. GARRE: Let me make a couple of points, 
Your Honor. First, if you just looked at the numbers -­
we don't think it's the numbers, but if you looked at 
the numbers after 7 years, racial diversity among these 
groups at the University of Texas had remained stagnant 
or worse. 2002, African American enrollment had 
actually dropped to 3 percent.

[That's about a thousand blacks among undergraduates.]

That's one part of it.
 The other part of it is if you look at the 
admissions under the top 10 percent plan, taking the top 
10 percent of a racially identifiable high school may 
get you diversity that looks okay on paper, but it 
doesn't guarantee you diversity that produces 
educational benefits on campus. And that's one of the 
considerations that the university took into account as 
well.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: I don't understand that. 
Why? Why doesn't it?

 MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, as is true 
for any group, and the Harvard plan that this Court 
approved in Bakke specifically recognized this, you 
would want representatives and different viewpoints from 
individuals within the same -- the same racial group, 
just as you would from individuals outside of that.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: What kind of viewpoints? I 
mean, are they political viewpoints?

 MR. GARRE: Anyone's experiences, where they 
grew up, the situations that they -- that they 
experience in their lives are going to affect their 
viewpoints.

 JUSTICE SCALIA: But this has nothing to do 
with racial diversity. I mean, you're talking about 
something else.

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I think it direct
impacts the educational benefits of diversity in this 
sense, that the minority candidate who has shown that -­
that he or she has succeeded in an integrated 
environment, has shown leadership, community service, 
the other factors that we looked at in holistic review, 
is precisely the kind of candidate that's going to 
come -- come on campus, help to break down racial 
barriers, work across racial lines, dispel -­
stereotypes -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: Also, the kind that is 
likely to be included within the 10 percent rule.
 And, incidentally, when was the 10 percent 
rule adopted?

 MR. GARRE: 1998, Your Honor.
 But with respect to your factual point, 
that's absolutely wrong, Your Honor. If you look at the 
admissions data that we cite on page 34 of our brief, it 
shows the breakdown of applicants under the holistic 
plan and the percentage plan. And I don't think it's 
been seriously disputed in this case to this point that, 
although the percentage plan certainly helps with 
minority admissions, by and large, the -- the minorities 
who are admitted tend to come from segregated, 
racially-identifiable schools.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the 
whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students 
who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make 
a very different argument that I don't think I've ever 
seen before.
 The top 10 percent plan admits lots of 
African Americans -- lots of Hispanics and a fair number 
of African Americans. But you say, well, it's -- it's 
faulty, because it doesn't admit enough African 
Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged 
backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of 
the child of successful professionals in Dallas.
 Now, that's your argument? If you have -­
you have an applicant whose parents are -- let's say 
they're -- one of them is a partner in your law firm in 
Texas, another one is a part -- is another corporate 
lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 
1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­
parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a 
leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant 
whose parents are absolutely average in terms of 
education and income?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor. And let me -­
let me answer the question.
 First of all, the example comes almost word 
for word from the Harvard plan that this Court approved 
in Grutter and that Justice Powell held out in Bakke.

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, how can the answer to 
that question be no, because being an African American 
or being a Hispanic is a plus factor.

 MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, our point 
is, is that we want minorities from different 
backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities 
from disadvantaged backgrounds.

 JUSTICE KENNEDY: So what you're saying is 
that what counts is race above all.

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, what counts is 
different experiences -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, that's the 
necessary -- that's the necessary response to 
Justice Alito's question.

 MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, what we want 
is different experiences that are going to -- that are 
going to come on campus -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You want underprivileged 
of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So 
that's race.

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honors, it's -- it's 
not race. It's just the opposite.
 I mean, in the LUAC decision, for example, 
this Court said that failing to take into account 
differences among members of the same race does a 
disservice -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason you're 
reaching for the privileged is so that members of that 
race who are privileged can be representative, and 
that's race. I just -­

MR. GARRE: It's -- it's members of the same 
racial group, Your Honor, bringing different 
experiences. And to say that -- if you took any racial 
group, if you had an admissions process that only tended 
to admit from a -- people from a particular background 
or perspective, you would want people from different 
perspectives.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel -­

MR. GARRE: And that's -- that's the 
interests that we're discussing here. It's the 
interests that the Harvard plan specifically adopts 
and lays out -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I understand my job 
under our precedents to determine if your use of race is 
narrowly tailored to a compelling interest.
 The compelling interest you identify is 
attaining a critical mass of minority students at the 
University of Texas, but you won't tell me what the 
critical mass is. How am I supposed to do the job that 
our precedents say I should do?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, what -- what this 
Court's precedents say is a critical mass is an 
environment in which students of underrepresented -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I know what you say, 
but when will we know that you've reached a critical 
mass?

 MR. GARRE: Well -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Grutter said there 
has to be a logical end point to your use of race. What 
is the logical end point? When will I know that you've 
reached a critical mass?

[What the University of Texas bigshots would say if they could be completely honest, not only with the Supreme Court but inside their own minds is: "Look, we know we've got a good thing going here with all sorts of smart white and Asian students wanting to come here, and we don't intend to screw it all up the way CCNY did in 1969 by letting in so many Hispanics and blacks that we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Trust us to be cynically self-serving."]

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, this question, of 
course, implicates Grutter itself. And, again, I 
understood my friend not to challenge that. They 
haven't challenged that diversity is a compelling 
interest at all.
 What -- what we look to, and we think that 
courts can review this determination, one, we look to 
feedback directly from students about racial isolation 
that they experience. Do they feel like spokespersons 
for their race.

[This "does not feel like spokesperson for his or her race" test of when a critical mass is big enough is a very weird one since racial preferences are defended by people who are professional spokespeople for their race. The Xochitl Hinojosa-type ethnic spokespersons tend to be ethnic warriors for increasing the number of people of their supposed group in the country so they can make even more money as spokesmodels.]

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, what, you 
conduct a survey and ask students if they feel racially 
isolated?

[All teenagers feel isolated. I remember watching a Britney Spears video back about 12 years ago where she plays a high school girl who feels so lonely. She really was getting into it.]

MR. GARRE: That's one of the things we 
looked at.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And that's the basis 
for our Constitutional determination?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, that's one of the 
things that we looked at.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. What are the 
others?

 MR. GARRE: Another is that we did look to 
enrollment data, which showed, for example, among 
African Americans, that African American enrollment at 
the University of Texas dropped to 3 percent in 2002 
under the percentage plan.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: At what level will 
it satisfy the critical mass?

 MR. GARRE: Well, I think we all agree that 
3 percent is not a critical mass. It's well beyond 
that.

[Three percent is about 1,000 black undergraduates on the UT Austin campus.]

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Yes, but at what 
level will it satisfy the requirement of critical mass?

 MR. GARRE: When we have an environment in 
which African Americans do not -­

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: When -- how am I 
supposed to decide whether you have an environment 
within particular minorities who don't feel isolated?

MR. GARRE: Your Honor, part of this is a -­
is a judgment that the admin -- the educators are going 
to make, but you would look to the same criteria -­

["You'll decide, Mr. Chief Justice, when self-appointed minority spokespersons damn well tell you to decide that minority students no longer feel like minority spokespersons, and not a minute before!]

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, I see -- when 
you tell me, that's good enough.

[Roberts gets the joke.]

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, not at all. You 
would look to the criteria that we looked at, the 
enrollment data, the feedback from the students. We 
also took into account diversity in the classroom. We 
took into account the racial climate on campus.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But would 3 percent be 
enough in New Mexico, your bordering state, where the 
African American population is around 2 percent?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, I don't think it 
would.

[Perhaps all the black college students in New Mexico should be bussed to Texas in order to benefit from Critical Mass. Hey, it worked in Boston!]

I mean, our concept to critical mass isn't tied 
to demographic. It's undisputed in this case that we 
are not pursuing any demographic goal. That's on page 
138 of the Joint Appendix.
 All of -- I think many key facts are 
undisputed here. It's undisputed that race is only a 
modest factor. It's undisputed that we're taking race 
into account only to consider individuals in their 
totality.

 JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Mr. Garre, I think that 
the issue that my colleagues are asking is, at what 
point and when do we stop deferring to the University's 
judgment that race is still necessary? That's the 
bottom line of this case. And you're saying, and I 
think rightly because of our cases, that you can't set a 
quota, because that's what our cases say you can't do.
 So if we're not going to set a quota, what 
do you think is the standard we apply to make a 
judgment?

 MR. GARRE: I think the standard you would 
apply is the one set forth in Grutter, and it comes from 
Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke, that you would look 
to whether or not the University reached an environment 
in which members of underrepresented minorities, African 
Americans and Hispanics, do not feel like spokespersons 
for their race, members -- an environment where 
cross-racial understanding is promoted, an environment 
where the benefit -- educational benefits of diversity 
are realized.
 And the reason why the University of Texas 
concluded that that environment was not met here, it 
laid out in several different information points that 
this Court can review -­

JUSTICE SCALIA: But that holds for only -­
only another what, 16 years, right? Sixteen more years, 
and you're going to call it all off. ...

 JUSTICE ALITO: Well, in terms of diversity, 
how do you justify lumping together all Asian Americans? 
Do you think -- do you have a critical mass of Filipino 
Americans? Cambodian Americans -­

MR. GARRE: Your Honor -­

JUSTICE ALITO: -- Cambodian Americans?

[This is hardly just theoretical. Lots of Asian spokespersons argue for more finely dividing the Asian category so that Cambodians and Hmongs and the like can be considered Underrepresented Minorities. Indeed, Pacific Islanders used to be lumped with Asians, but in the 1990s they got the Clinton Administration to give them a separate racial category so they can benefit from quotas.]

 MR. GARRE: -- the common form that's used 
has Asian American, but also, next to that, has a form 
that says country of origin where that can be spelled 
out.

 JUSTICE ALITO: But do you have a critical 
mass as to all the subgroups that fall within this 
enormous group of Asian Americans?

 MR. GARRE: Your Honor, we've looked to 
whether or not we have a critical mass of 
underrepresented minorities, which is precisely what the 
Grutter decision asks us to do.
 I think -- if I can make a quick point on 
jurisdiction -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: If I could, before we get 
to that.

 MR. GARRE: I'm sorry.

 JUSTICE KENNEDY: Suppose we -- that you, in 
your experience identify a numerical category a 
numerical standard, a numerical designation for critical 
mass: It's X percent. During the course of the 
admissions process, can the admissions officers check to 
see how close they are coming to this numerical -­

MR. GARRE: No. No, Your Honor, and we 
don't. On page 389 -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You -- you cannot do that?

[Mr. Garre must be really sweating now. He needs Kennedy's vote and that's not at all a helpful question that Kennedy just asked.]

 MR. GARRE: We -- we wouldn't be monitoring 
the class. I think one of the problems -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But isn't that what 
happened in Grutter; it allowed that.

 MR. GARRE: It did, Your Honor. It was one 
of the things -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: So are you saying that 
Grutter is incorrect?

 MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor. It was one of 
the things that you pointed out in your dissent. What 
I'm saying is we don't have that problem, because -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: I'm -- I'm asking whether 
or not you could do that. And if -­

MR. GARRE: I don't think so, because the 
Grutter majority didn't understand it to be monitoring 
for the purposes of reaching a specific demographic.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: They don't -- they 
don't monitor, but race is the only one of your holistic 
factors that appears on the cover of every application, 
right?

 MR. GARRE: Well, all the holistic factors 
are taking into account on the application, and they're 
listed at various points on the application.

 CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry. The 
question was whether race is the only one of your 
holistic factors that appears on the cover of every 
application.

 MR. GARRE: That -- that is true on the 
cover of the application.

Oral arguments in Fisher: Justice Sotomayor takes this skinny white girl's complaint very personally

Here's the transcript of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court today in Abigail Fisher's lawsuit against the University of Texas's second system of racial preferences. 

Sonia Sotomayor's questioning of Fisher's attorney reminds me of Christopher Caldwell's classic line:
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." 

True diversity

Snapperhead Soup comments:
Why is it that elite whites get to mix with the better kind of blacks like Obama who won't rob them or beat them up whereas poor whites must mix with the likes of Mike Tyson-types (via section 8 and etc)? ... 
As for elite whites, I say let's expose them to non-elite run-of-the-mill blacks. And let's see how long they remain 'progressive' and pro-'diversity'. ... 
And if we want non-elite whites to have a favorable view of blacks, I have a better idea. I say let's expose non-elite whites to elite blacks( who don't commit crime). That way, non-elite whites will have a more favorable view of blacks. 

I think this is an excellent idea. The Obamas should participate in an educational reality TV show in which various meathead white reality stars such as The Situation, Honey Boo Boo and others of that ilk, spend a month each as house guests of the Obamas in the White House.

What the Fisher affirmative action case is actually about

The University of Texas has two main affirmative action programs, only one of which is at issue in the Fisher case now before the Supreme Court.

Everybody appears to be totally A-OK with the first affirmative action method, Texas's Top Tenth plan whereby anybody in the top 10 percent of his or her class in high school, gets in. This plan was publicly designed back in the 1990s, after a Circuit Court decision temporarily banned direct racial preferences, to have disparate impact against whites and Asians.

As you may recall, however, in Judge Nicholas Garaufis's much praised decision in the Vulcan Society case, disparate impact is illegal. The city of New York was discriminating against would-be firemen by asking job applicants to take a test that presented reading selections about how to fight fires and then asking questions about how to fight fires.

For example, one paragraph was about which kind of chainsaw to use to cut through wooden doors and which kind to use to cut through steel doors. There was then a question about which kind of chainsaw to use to cut through steel doors.

Obviously, this kind of test discriminated against blacks and Hispanics because there are two ways to score well on it: either:

- You could be good at comprehending the kind of text found in the technical manuals you will be told to read as a fire cadet so you don't, say, mutilate yourself by using the wrong kind of chainsaw;

- Or, you could study up ahead of time so that you already knew what kind of chainsaw to use.

Judge Garaufis saw right through the obvious racism of hiring firefighters based on their ability to learn how to use the right chainsaw and not rip their own faces to shreds when the wrong kind of chainsaw kicks back on them.

You see, blacks and Hispanics tend to be worse at reading comprehension on average, and they tend to be less interested in learning how to fight fires. So, the NYC hiring test was an illegal subterfuge and must be thrown out!

In contrast, the Texas Top Ten Percent plan was publicly proclaimed by all in favor of it as a way to have disparate impact in favor of blacks and Latinos. So, the Fisher case isn't about that system at all.

No, Fisher is only complaining about a second set of racial/ethnic preferences added on top of the Ten Percent Plan after Justice O'Connor's scintillating opinion in the Grutter/Gratz cases of 2003. O'Connor accepted the "diversity" claim discriminating against whites and Asians is really doing a favor for whites and Asians because it allows them to be exposed to the Vibrancy of Diversity. (That the whites and Asians who get the putative benefit of associating with racial preference beneficiaries aren't, technically, the same individuals as the white and Asian victims of the preferences is one of those minor details that get brushed aside in the quest for Strange New Respect.)

The "critical mass" rationalization dreamed up in Grutter/Gratz is more than taken care of by the Top Ten Percent plan.

But ... the problem with the Top Ten Percent plan, you see, was that not enough affluent, privileged blacks and Hispanics get in under it. For example, say you are a Hispanic student attending Highland Park High School because your father is currently doing a tour as a Senior Vice President at the headquarters of a multinational corporation in downtown Dallas, from whence he hopes to move on to head the South American Division in his native Buenos Aires, before perhaps one day returning to Dallas in triumph as CEO of the whole shebang.

Now, if you were attending high school in, say, Laredo, you'd be in the Top Tenth of the class, no problem. Your 620 math SAT score would make you a prodigy in Laredo. In Highland Park, however, you are just another pretty smart rich kid who is only in the Top Half of the class. So, no taxpayer supported education at UT Austin for you! Your dad will just have to pay for you to go to SMU.

But, you are Hispanic and thus deserve freebies from the taxpayers. Your Conquistador ancestors didn't mow down the Indians to have to pay list price at SMU.

Therefore, UT has added special preferences for privileged blacks and Hispanics, which is what Ms. Fisher is complaining about.

P.S. Sure, I made this Highland Park kid up, but I was actually talking last night to the father of a former classmate of one of my sons. The father of this official Hispanic is an American-born Chinese architect, who is chief partner of a practice of about 30 architects. They mostly design hospitals. His wife is a white lady whose mother was born in Spain, so their kid was honored at their high school graduation in the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Why top universities must use racial and ethnic preferences

C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country explains:
It's necessary for elite institutions to discriminate against non-elite whites in order to expose elites to diversity, because if elites are not exposed to diversity it would undermine their ability to attack non-elite whites for being racist.

Supreme Court affirmative action oral arguments open thread

I'm sometimes asked:

Q. How do you come up with so many analyses of the latest issues by the time I get up in the morning?

A. By sleeping through most of the Eastern/Midwestern day. 

I hope to sleep dreamlessly through Wednesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court over the U. of Texas's affirmative action plan, so if you are paying attention, please feel free to submit a comment to this post. 

I am particularly interested if, in regard to Texas, where Hispanic youths outnumber black youths vastly, 100% of the legal and pundit discussion will continue to be about blacks. Or by now in 2012, have we advanced to such a level of sophistication that only 95% of the debate about Texas's indirect quota system will be about blacks?

iSteve Panhandling Drive Rumbles Onward

Dear Readers:

Thanks to all of you who contributed so generously during the highly encouraging first full day of my first fundraising drive since August 2011.

I did two panhandling stretches in 2011: I let May 2011 go on for many days as generous contributions continued to flow in. I called off August 2011 rather quickly after one very generous commitment arrived. We'll see how this one plays out, but we're off to a good start. Unfortunately, I also need to make a whole lot of money, so you can expect to see more requests like this.

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 to me via VDARE by clicking here.

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

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-4142

Thanks.