November 19, 2012
Drilling down on the Marriage Gap
My new VDARE.com article explores the Marriage Gap in the 2012 election results, which turned out about as huge as I predicted it would be a few weeks ago.
Could it be that the Marriage Gap is just a byproduct of some other gap, such as race, age, education, or homeownership?
My new piece has lots of graphs I created from data in the Reuters-Ipsos American Mosaic Polling Explorer, which lets you drill down into crosstabs to look at apples to apples comparisons. (Here's an explanation of the Reuters poll.)
The one above shows the best alternative hypothesis I can find in this demographic data: it's not marriage that influences people to vote Republican, it's homeownership. As you'll recall, that was the big idea of Karl Rove and George W. Bush for converting minorities and working class whites into Republican voters: make it easier for them to get home loans.
The basic idea wasn't ridiculous, but the implementation set off the Housing Bubble and Bust. But, when you drill down to make apples to apples comparisons, the Marriage Gap appears to be stronger in driving voting to the GOP as the Homeownership Gap. For example, in the above graph we're looking just at white women ages 35-44. Those who own their home vote Republican at rates 6.7 percentage points higher if single and 9.5 percentage points higher if married. But the Marriage Gap for SWF 35-44 renters is 15.0 points, and 17.8 points for SWF 35-44 homeowners.
Read the whole thing there.
November 18, 2012
Lewontin: "Is There a Jewish Gene?"
The New York Review of Books is the intellectual institution least changed since my childhood. Big names I read in the 1970s, such as Garry Wills, Russell Baker, and Joyce Carol Oates, are still writing for the NYRoB.
Richard Lewontin, a prominent Harvard geneticist, was much incensed by the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s, co-authoring Not In Our Genes with Leon Kamin and the secret policeman's pal Steven Rose, and signing many a petition with Stephen Jay Gould. Lewontin is now 83 and is in no mood to admit that anybody has learned anything over the last 35-40 years.
Is There a Jewish Gene?
DECEMBER 6, 2012
Richard C. Lewontin
Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
by Harry Ostrer
Oxford University Press, 264 pp., $24.95
The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology
by Nadia Abu El-Haj
University of Chicago Press, 311 pp., $35.00
The question of ancestry has been of human concern in virtually all cultures and over all times of which we have any knowledge. Whether it be a story about the origin of a particular tribe or nation and its subsequent mixture with other groups, or curiosity about a family history, there is always the implication that we understand ourselves better if we know our ancestors and that we, within ourselves, reflect properties that have come to us by an unbroken line from past generations. As treasurer of the Marlboro Historical Society in Vermont
Marlboro, VT: sounds pretty vibrant ...
, I am the recipient of requests for printed copies of the Reverend Ephraim Newton’s mid-eighteenth-century history of our town, 70 percent of whose pages consist of “Genealogical and Biographical Notes” and a “Catalog of Literary Men.” Over and over our correspondents write of the “pride” they have in descending from these early settlers.
Surely pride or shame are appropriate sentiments for actions for which we ourselves are in some way responsible. Why, then, do we feel pride (or shame) for the actions of others over whom we can have had no influence? Do we, in this way, achieve a false modesty or relieve ourselves of the burdens of our own behavior? As a descendant of late-nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrants I cannot depend on Reverend Newton’s pages to explain my frequent contributions to The New York Review, but neither have the extensive “begats” in Genesis 10 or Matthew 1 been more enlightening.
My own skepticism notwithstanding, the belief is widespread that knowledge about the personal characteristics of ancestors who have never directly entered into our lives is relevant to our own formation. Moreover, that relevance is seen not simply as arising from our conscious knowledge about those ancestors, but from a deeper source, our genetical inheritance, which also would operate to form us in part, irrespective of our consciousness of the past. That belief is summed up in the title of Harry Ostrer’s book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. It is also implied in the title of a book by Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of the Jews, whose English translation from the Hebrew original has yet to appear. While the term “race” is not used explicitly in these titles, in large part because the term is so loaded, there is considerable discussion of the Jews as a race or, using a less charged word, as a “people.”
“Race” is a term of uncertain etymology and many meanings. It may refer to a whole species (the “human race”), a collection of loosely related individuals with a common appearance (the “white race”), a nation (the “race of Englishmen”), or a single family (“he was the last of his race”). Compounding the ambiguity is the substitution of “people” or “tribe” that seems to shed the historical fardels with which “race” is burdened. Are the Navajo a tribe, a people, or even a race?
For casino purposes, the Navajo are a "nation."
In a former time, when the classification of humans depended on manifest physical features like skin color, facial and hair form, and skull shape, members of a “race” as opposed to a “people” were claimed to be recognizable as such by the external physical features common to all individuals of the same “race.”
As opposed to today, when everybody ... well ... no doubt we're much more enlightened, but let's not go into any specifics, shall we?
In all these usages the implication is one of common ancestry tracing back ultimately to some relevant founding group, but obviously all such ancestries must incorporate members of other groups at various times in their histories. Even Cain managed to find a wife in the Land of Nod or else he married his sister. For the German National Socialists, having more than two Jewish grandparents was sufficient to define a Jew. But if every defined human group necessarily has, at any moment in its history, some ancestry from a variety of other collections of humans, how are we to delineate those groups and reconstruct their family histories?
Degree of inbreeding, obviously.
Ordinary genetics is not sufficient. Each of us has one copy of our chromosomes from our mother and one copy from our father. But of the chromosomes I got from my mother, half of those came from her mother and half from her father so, roughly speaking, I resemble my maternal grandmother only in a quarter of my genes. It doesn’t take many generations before I resemble a particular remote great-grandparent in a very small fraction of my genes. If one of my ancestors four generations ago were black
I would bet a considerable amount of money that none of Lewontin's ancestors four generations ago were black.
, there is a good chance I would have inherited none of her pigment genes or so few that they would not be apparent in my own skin color.
Because, obviously, blackness is solely about skin color.
This random inheritance of genes makes it very difficult to reconstruct the variety of ancestors in remote past generations.
But not impossible. It's a daunting statistical problem, but we're getting better at daunting statistical problems ever year. Lewontin may not be quite up to speed on post 1975 developments, but there are these things called chips, which, I've heard, keep getting faster and cheaper.
Fortunately for those interested in the reconstruction of ancestry there are two useful exceptions to the rule that we inherit only a random one of the two sets of genetic information possessed by each of our parents. One of those exceptions is the single Y chromosome carried by males but not by females. ...
The other exception to random inheritance is not in the chromosomes, but in cellular particles called ribosomes that contain not DNA but a related molecule, RNA, which has heritable variation and is of basic importance to cell metabolism and the synthesis of proteins. Although the cells of both sexes have ribosomes, they are inherited exclusively through their incorporation in the mother’s egg cell rather than through the father’s sperm. Our ribosomes, then, provide us, both male and female, with a record of our maternal ancestry, uncontaminated by their male partners.
Harry Ostrer, who is a professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Raphael Falk, who is one of Israel’s most prominent geneticists, depend heavily on our ability to trace ancestry by looking at the DNA of Y chromosomes and ribosomes. Their books are responses to the widespread desire to trace that ancestry and to describe the degree to which the world’s present distribution of Jews consists, with a few possible exceptions like the Kaifeng Jews of China, of people with ancient common roots. For Falk, as the child of German Jews threatened with the Final Solution, the longing for Zion was expressed, as in his parents’ case, “primarily as a wish for relief from the persecutions and other hardships of Jewish life in the Diaspora.” For Ostrer, on the other hand, as he writes in his preface:
Having a 3000-year genetic legacy can be a source of group identity and pride in the same way that having a shared history, culture, and religion can be sources of pride.
As Walter Sobchak noted in The Big Lebowski, "Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax* ..."
Once again we have the question of why having knowledge of remote ancestors and a shared history makes us “proud.” Is it that preening ourselves before the glass of history seems less egotistical than inspecting our images in the glass of fashion?
The difference between the motivations of the authors is manifest in the properties each assigns to heredity. The element of “pride of ancestry” that permeates Ostrer’s text leads him, especially in his chapter on “Traits,” to extensive discussions of intellectual and professional accomplishment and the degree to which they may reflect innate biological capacity. While he can hardly be described as a naive biological determinist, it seems clear that he leans in the direction of attributing some importance to the biology of the Jews in forming their social accomplishments. He asserts that
accidents of birth, wealth, privilege, and education are not sufficient to explain who will become outstanding lawyers or physicists.
Nevertheless, Ostrer does not offer any evidence that the intellectual qualities that make so many Jews into lawyers and physicists are a consequence of their genetic superiority. Indeed, we know nothing about the genetics of nonpathological variation in the cognitive capacities of the brain.
Well, we didn't back in 1975. And that's what counts.
An attempt to determine whether intellectual life is genetically heritable would require a large adoption study in which infants would be reared in a controlled environment in circumstances that prevented their caretakers from knowing their family or social origins. Moreover, given the sensitivity of central nervous system development to nutritional and other external factors, the study would have to begin with newborn infants and we would still miss the effects of prenatal circumstances. We should not be surprised that such a study has not been done.
Or, we could do lots of imperfect but highly informative adoption and twin studies of naturally occurring experiments and see what those tell us. Oh, wait, those have been done ...
Ostrer’s view of the causes of the high frequency of intellectual careers among Jews is purely speculative. After more than a century of claims that high intellectual or artistic accomplishment is somehow rooted in heredity and, more specifically, in the possession of “genes for high intelligence” or “genes for creativity,” there is no credible evidence for their existence.
Well, not in 1975, there wasn't.
Indeed, the search for genetic superiority has largely given way to an extensive effort to find the genetic basis for a host of physiological debilities. There is a certain irony in claiming an undemonstrated biological superiority for a group, six million of whom were slaughtered for their claimed natural degeneracy.
Despite this interest in the social and intellectual characteristics of Jews, to which he devotes about a fifth of his text, Ostrer’s chief concern is with the history of the Jews, as revealed in their actually known genetic similarities to and differences from other populations. These similarities and differences occur thanks to various proportions of alternative genetic forms rather than being absolute differences between populations. There is no known “Jewish gene,” and the same comments I have made about the evidence concerning genes for “high intelligence” and “creativity” apply to the existence of those properties in alternative genetic forms.
Democrats love to make fun of Republicans as anti-science, but the anti-science stance of a famous leftist scientist-intellectual goes unremarked.
... Once again, as in works on the genetics of race, we encounter the concept of an “authentic” self that lies hidden and unexpressed, but which in some sense is the essence of what I am, even if unperceived and without a basis in any scientific demonstration. The concept of a self that is an authentic essence, but not clearly perceived, suggests that my manifest properties and attitudes are a mere patina and that, in ways that I do not recognize, my inherited inner self is struggling to assert itself.
As the late David Foster Wallace said, "Although of course you end up becoming yourself."
And here's Greg Cochran on a couple of Lewontin's basic science mistakes.
-----------------
* By the way, I found this piece in the Forward charming:
Koufax has always been mildly reclusive and reticent, which makes him, in an era when celebrities are out selling themselves 24x7, enigmatic and thus seemingly fascinating on the limited number of occasions when he does show up at a public event. I suspect that he would say that he just doesn't have all that much to say. I think his real secret is that he values his dignity.
And here's Greg Cochran on a couple of Lewontin's basic science mistakes.
-----------------
* By the way, I found this piece in the Forward charming:
Sandy Koufax Is Belle of White House's Jewish Ball
By Nathan Guttman
True, it was an opportunity to shake hands with President Obama, to shmooze with Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and to count more than 30 Jewish lawmakers who showed up for the first ever White House Jewish American Heritage Month reception.
But for many, the most thrilling moment was getting to shake hands with and ask for an autograph from baseball legend Sandy Koufax. At 75, Koufax was the biggest attraction in a room filled with accomplished Jewish Americans. Even Obama chose to make Koufax the center of the only joke he weaved into his speech. “Sandy and I actually have something in common — we are both lefties,” Obama said. “He can’t pitch on Yom Kippur; I can’t pitch.”
The guest list at the event ... included Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and athletes like Koufax, Olympic swimmer Dara Torres and former professional basketball player Nancy Lieberman. Among the journalists invited were Diane Sawyer, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Roger Cohen. And, of course, almost all Jewish senators, members of Congress and Jewish White House officials were on hand.
Koufax has always been mildly reclusive and reticent, which makes him, in an era when celebrities are out selling themselves 24x7, enigmatic and thus seemingly fascinating on the limited number of occasions when he does show up at a public event. I suspect that he would say that he just doesn't have all that much to say. I think his real secret is that he values his dignity.
November 17, 2012
Vibrant young minority sabermetricians
| Society of American Baseball Research meeting |
Ever since Obama's re-election, there has been a lot of odd chest-thumping in the press conflating minorities, youth, women, and ... sabermetricians (a.k.a., hobbyists devoted to sophisticated baseball statistics) versus the evil (but, fortunately, doomed) Old White Man demographic. Josh Levin, executive editor of Slate, pulls the entire emerging meme together:
Miguel Cabrera Is Mitt Romney
The Tigers slugger was the candidate of old white men. Lucky for him, that’s who decides baseball’s MVP awards.
Mitt Romney lost the popular vote. He lost the electoral college, too, finishing behind President Obama in every swing state but one. But the GOP nominee didn’t get crushed across the board. Sixty-two percent of white men voted for Romney, and 61 percent of white men and women 45 and older voted for the former Massachusetts governor. The problem for Romney wasn’t his opponent.
It was the electorate. If he wanted to find a bloc of voters that was more susceptible to his charms, he should’ve announced his candidacy for another fiercely contested race: most valuable player of the American League.
On Thursday, Tigers third baseman Miguel Cabrera defeated Angels center fielder Mike Trout, winning the AL MVP award with 22 of 28 first-place votes. Trout, a 21-year-old rookie, was the youthful insurgent in this contest.
Among his backers was Nate Silver, who—years before he became a political seer—made his name by inventing a system to project baseball players’ stats. Earlier this week, Silver explained why Trout, not Cabrera, was the best choice for AL MVP ...
Cabrera, by contrast, was the candidate of the establishment. While Trout led all of baseball in the sabermetrically approved Wins Above Replacement statistic, the Tigers’ slugger paced the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs, winning the first Triple Crown since 1967.
So, I thought I'd go look up the demographics of hobbyists in advanced baseball statistics. Clearly, vibrant young minorities must predominate.
Oddly, even though sabermetricians are good with numbers, they don't seem in any hurry to publish demographic statistics about themselves. So, let's just look at pictures from Society of American Baseball Research conventions. At the top is one from the NYT. Here's one from ESPN:
| Jim Bouton greets his fans at SABR meeting |
Seriously, virtually any volunteer group in modern America with an eccentric and elite taste in pushing forward the intellectual analysis of just about anything in their spare time for the sheer of love of learning is going to be dominated by white people, typically by white men. I went to a golf course architecture aficionado's weekend: same thing. I attended a couple of Amnesty International meetings in 1982 chaired by Kundera's translator Michael Henry Heim: same thing. Evolutionary psychology meetings have a higher proportion of women, but, pretty much the same thing.
America's Vibrant Future is going to be cognitively catatonic.
Ross Douthat keeps getting better and better
From Ross's op-ed column in the NYT:
Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.
Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.
Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.
UCLA 38 USC 28: Excellent, it's all falling into place ...
As I pointed out last month in a posting on who donates to whom, "For example, UCLA football could be a bottomless pit for Hollywood heterosexuals to toss their millions into." The only problem with my plan to distract L.A. Democratic donors has been that the UCLA team in this century usually leads the NCAA in falling down untouched, yards penalized due to not being clear on the concept, and muffing the pregame coin toss, so they haven't been fashionable among the hypercompetitive big money boys.
But now ...
But now ...
Income equality and the Canadian Border
From liberal ThinkProgress:
Gosh, the Southwest is the region with the strongest growth on income inequality. Obviously, we need some more illegal immigrations and more amnesties to fix that problem pronto.
November 16, 2012
Non-Tiger Mother Asian-Americans
At Razib's blog, commenter Spike Gomes makes a sociological observation I found interesting about Asian-Americans below the Tiger Mother class:
In Hawaii and parts of the West Coast, there’s a sort of unified “lower middle-class” pan-Asian America (at least East and SE Asian American) urban youth culture forming. It’s partially informed by black culture, particularly the music and clothes, but quite unique in its own way, with it’s souped up and customized cars and motorcycles, illegal road racing, tech bling, pan-Asian random pastiche aesthetic and b-boy dance-offs. I have far too many cousins who are into that lifestyle.
I've seen a little bit of this sort of 95 IQ Asian-American youth culture. They don't get any attention because they don't cause much trouble unless they hit somebody while drag racing.
Is there a name for this group that seems to center around Filipinos and Vietnamese, plus the lower half of the bell curve among Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese? How pan-East Asian is it?
The insanity thickens
From the Washington Post's Slate:
Miguel Cabrera Is Mitt Romney
The Tigers slugger was the candidate of old white men. Lucky for him, that’s who decides baseball’s MVP awards.
By Josh Levin
All the old white men voted for the chubby Venezuelan pardo over Mike Trout, a handome all-American white kid who resembles the second coming of Mickey Mantle, because Cabrera looks kind of like George Zimmerman. In contrast, the new diverse, vibrant America is totally into advanced baseball statistical analysis. Just look at the prophet of Sabermetrics, Bill James:
Strange new respect for Republican Super PAC
As we all know from reading the national press, Republican Super PACs are the worst things in the whole world. And, immigration amnesty is the best. So, what do you get when a lavishly funded new Republican Super PAC is formed to push amnesty?
Strange new respect.
From the Washington Post:
New super PAC hopes to give cover to pro-immigration Republicans
By Peter Wallsten, Friday, November 16, 9:51 AM
Prominent Republicans are launching a new super PAC they hope will help begin repairing the political damage left by years of anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric that has dominated GOP primaries and alienated crucial Hispanic voters.
The organization, to be called Republicans for Immigration Reform, aims to undermine what organizers call the “extremists” who have pushed party nominees to stake out far-right positions such as opposing a pathway to legalization for millions of illegal workers, students and children.
Even before it raises money and establishes target races for 2014, organizers told The Washington Post, the group will help smooth the way for wavering Republican lawmakers to vote next year for an immigration overhaul, which suddenly gained momentum last week after GOP leaders watched President Obama’s dominance among Hispanic voters help carry him to an Electoral College landslide.
Spearheading the group is Carlos Gutierrez, the Cuban American former Commerce secretary under President George W. Bush. He is joined by Washington lawyer Charlie Spies, co-founder of the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which, illustrating the very trend that the new PAC aims to thwart, aired some tough ads during this year’s primaries accusing Romney’s rivals of supporting “amnesty” and being “too liberal on immigration.”
“There’s currently only energy on the anti-immigration reform side, and we want to be able to provide some cover for Republicans that vote in support of an immigration reform approach,” Spies said.
Spies and Gutierrez declined to cite a fundraising goal, but both enjoy close ties to corporate America, which generally favors looser immigration laws. A super PAC can accept unlimited donations. Spies’s pro-Romney group raised $142 million for the 2012 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“This is not small ball,” Gutierrez said. “We’re serious, and we are going to push the debates on immigration reform to a place where I believe the Republican Party should be in the 21st century.”
Gutierrez, who was a top Romney adviser, gained attention over the weekend when he told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos that the GOP nominee lost to Obama because the party “frightened the American people” during its primaries.
He told The Post that he regretted some of Romney’s remarks on immigration during the campaign. Romney used the issue to fend of challenges from Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, accusing both men of being soft on illegal immigration. At one point, Romney endorsed a policy of “self-deportation” for immigrants in the country illegally, adopting the language of some of the country’s most ardent critics of illegal immigration.
“Mitt Romney’s comments were a symptom of the disease of the Republican Party, and the extreme far-right wing that is way out of the mainstream of Americans’ views is the cause,” Gutierrez said. “Governor Romney was forced to say things that got him into a lot of trouble. And the irony of it is that had he not said those things, he wouldn’t have been the nominee.”
The result was Romney winning just 27 percent of Hispanics — fewer than John McCain won in 2008 and far fewer than Bush’s 40percent support level for his 2004 reelection.
Bush and his senior strategist Karl Rove tried to push their party to the left on immigration, arguing that Hispanics were a fast-growing voter segment in key swing states. But conservatives rebelled when Bush tried in his second term to create a path to citizenship, and GOP orthodoxy ever since has required candidates to take a hard line against such policies.
Spies said the new PAC will most likely favor whatever immigration plans are backed by House Speaker John A. Boehner and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a Cuban American and possible 2016 presidential candidate who is expected to be a central GOP player on the issue, though both lawmakers have staked out conservative stances in the past.
"Don't Trust the B**** in Apt. 23"
It's a seriously funny sit-com (ABC, Tuesdays 9:30pm) about a sociopathic Manhattan party girl / scam artist, who is like the bad acquaintance who leads the narrator astray in old Jay McInerney novels. Created by Nahnatchka Khan, who used to work for Seth McFarlane on the American Dad animated series, it's kind of a live-action cartoon the way Malcolm in the Middle was a sort of live-action Simpsons. But the jokes are on a higher level of interest than McFarlane's usual stuff.
By Any Means Necessary
From the NYT on the 8-7 decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz's 2006 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative to ban racial preferences in Michigan government policy (e.g., racial preferences in U. of Michigan admissions), which was approved by 58% of the vote in that blue state in November 2006.
People trying to change any other aspect of university admissions policies, the court said, had several avenues open: they could lobby the admissions committee, petition university leaders, try to influence the college’s governing board or take the issue to a statewide initiative. Those supporting affirmative action, on the other hand, had no alternative but to undertake the “long, expensive and arduous process” of amending the state Constitution.
“The existence of such a comparative structural burden undermines the equal protection clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority.
This is an extraordinarily unpersuasive argument by the Sixth Circuit majority. Before this ruling, proponents of affirmative action faced exactly the same burdens as the opponents of affirmative action faced in 2006 when they got their initiative approved. Heck, proponents don't need 58% of the vote like the ban got, they just need 50% +1 vote to amend the state Constitution.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
Oh, wait, gender equality is part of the War on Women, just like racial equality is racism. Sorry, my Newspeak is a couple of weeks behind the times, so my apologies.
Seriously, if Romney had won last week, do you think we'd see this particular decision this week? The majority's reasoning (such as it is) seems like a particularly blatant middle finger extended to the white and Asian voters of Michigan to demonstrate to them that racial preferences for blacks and Hispanics will be protected By Any Means Necessary (the title of the thuggish plaintiffs who triumphed in the Sixth Circuit.)
Christopher Caldwell once said: "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." We may have permanently made that transition last week, especially if Obama gets to replace a Republican Supreme Court justice over the next four years.
Certainly, the atmosphere has changed since Election Day toward media displays of naked racial animus. Partly this is the veil dropping once the need for politeness was over, but it's also, as Gen. Patton said, that Americans love a winner.
Certainly, the atmosphere has changed since Election Day toward media displays of naked racial animus. Partly this is the veil dropping once the need for politeness was over, but it's also, as Gen. Patton said, that Americans love a winner.
I believe the Hispanics are our future
As part of iSteve's continuing coverage of how I, for one, welcome our new Latino overlords, here's the Dallas News:
You can almost hear the music — Highway to the Dangerzone. San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, like a young fighter jock in Top Gun, is clearly on a fast political trajectory, straight up. After his star turn at the Democratic National Convention, where the 38-year-old politico introduced himself nationally with a keynote address, word is he’s writing a memoir. The book should be on the shelves by the midterm elections in 2014. The San Antonio Express-News reports that New York-based Little, Brown and Co. will publish the autobiography. It’ll be written in English and Spanish and there’ll be an audio version.
Little, Brown and Co. do know, don't they, that Mayor of San Antonio isn't a real job? We're all clear on the concept that being Mayor of San Antonio is not like being Mayor of Chicago, right?
San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley gets paid about two orders of magnitude more than Julian Castro to actually run the government of San Antonio. So, being the Mayor of San Antonio is more like being the Mayor of Hollywood, the King of the Hobos, or the Ayatolla of Rock 'n' Rolla. Capiche?
San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley gets paid about two orders of magnitude more than Julian Castro to actually run the government of San Antonio. So, being the Mayor of San Antonio is more like being the Mayor of Hollywood, the King of the Hobos, or the Ayatolla of Rock 'n' Rolla. Capiche?
November 15, 2012
Hey, I know the answer to this question!
The NYT has various brain trusters puzzle their puzzlers over this question:
Throughout the presidential campaign, pundits zeroed in on Latino voters: why President Obama might lose them, how Mitt Romney could woo them, whether they would even vote this year. In the end, the turnout set records, and Latinos overwhelmingly favored Obama. What never changed was the tendency to discuss Latino voters as a bloc. But the talking heads on TV didn’t devote air time to “the Irish vote” or “Korean American turnout.”
Why are some immigrants and their descendants considered simply “American,” while others are still thought of as “outsiders”? How does an immigrant group come to be thought of as native?
Hispanics are becoming an unmeltable ethnicity because Hispanics are legally classified by the Office of Management & Budget as entitled to affirmative action, while Irishmen are not. *
Of course, contrary to this question about why nobody talks about Korean American turnout, we do talk about "Asian turnout." A major reason is that Asians are entitled to some affirmative action benefits, but not to others. So they fall in between Latino immigrants and European immigrants in salience.

* Yes, I realize that raises all sorts of fascinating questions about the affirmative action eligibility of Charlie Sheen ** v. his brother Emilio Estevez. Fortunately, the Pew Hispanic Center can answer all your questions.
** Have you noticed how Charlie increasingly looks like the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team logo?
* Yes, I realize that raises all sorts of fascinating questions about the affirmative action eligibility of Charlie Sheen ** v. his brother Emilio Estevez. Fortunately, the Pew Hispanic Center can answer all your questions.
** Have you noticed how Charlie increasingly looks like the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team logo?
Asian Obama supporters continue to be rewarded
All racial groups are legally equal, but some are more legally equal than others.
From Reuters:
From Reuters:
Michigan Affirmative Action Ban Unconstitutional, Appeals Court Rules
A Michigan law that bans affirmative action in public college admissions violates the Constitution, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, adding to a growing debate on preferential treatment for minorities.
A sharply divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati found that a 2006 amendment to the Michigan Constitution imposed burdens on racial minorities in violation of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.
Voters passed this initiative to ban racial preferences 58-42 in November 2006, an election day that was otherwise quite pleasant for Democrats.
The decision comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether colleges and universities can continue to give special preference to minority candidates in admissions policies, specifically in a case involving the University of Texas.
In Thursday's ruling, the 6th Circuit said that, unlike the Supreme Court, it was not considering whether race-conscious admissions policies were constitutional or worthwhile.
Rather, the only issue before the court was whether the Michigan law violated the constitution by barring university officials from considering race as a factor in admissions decisions, Judge Guy Cole wrote for the 8-7 majority.
Michigan voters passed the measure, known as Proposition 2, in 2006, prohibiting public educational institutions from giving a preference to any applicant based on race.
A coalition of supporters of affirmative action sued that same year, saying the change harmed racial minorities in violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
A district court upheld the law in 2008, ruling for Michigan's attorney general.
The affirmative action supporters appealed and a divided three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit reversed that decision last year. At the request of the state, the full appeals court reheard the case.
The majority of the court on Thursday said the Equal Protection Clause does more than guarantee equal treatment under the law. It also prevents laws from being passed that change the political process to impose extra burdens on minorities, the court said.
In other words: Who? Whom? And anti-majority rule.
A child of alumni trying to get a school to adopt a policy that favors legacy applicants could lobby the admissions committee or petition the school's leadership, the court said. In contrast, a black student advocating for a race-conscious admissions policy would have to amend the state's constitution.
"The existence of such a comparative structural burden undermines the Equal Protection Clause's guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change," wrote Cole.
Seven judges dissented, with Judge Richard Griffin calling the majority's decision the "antithesis" of the Equal Protection Clause.
"The post-Civil War amendment that guarantees equal protection to persons of all races has now been construed as barring a state from prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race," Griffin wrote. ...
The case is Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action et al v. Regents of the University of Michigan et al, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 08-1387.
I wrote about this case in VDARE last year.
The name of the case is coyly shortened. The full name of the victors in this case is "COALITION TO DEFEND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, INTEGRATION AND IMMIGRANT RIGHTS AND FIGHT FOR EQUALITY BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (BAMN)".
"By Any Means Necessary," the group's preferred form of address, is a not-so-veiled threat of violence.
Natural Republicans Watch: "Latino Poverty Rate Climbs to 28%"
From Fox News Latino:
Latino Poverty Rate Climbs to 28%
While Latinos are gaining in political clout, they are also falling down the economic ladder, new Census numbers show.
This is a misleading topline in that it suggests a change over time, when the main story here is really about an important change in methodology.
The official "poverty line" was dreamed up in the early 1960s (?), but was quickly criticized for not including government transfer payments. A half century later, the feds have finally gotten around to announcing poverty rates inclusive of certain welfare payments (but not including stuff like public schools, emergency rooms, policing, etc.) Also, living expenses are counted, too.
Economists long have criticized the official poverty rate as inadequate. Based on a half-century-old government formula, the official rate continues to assume the average family spends one-third of its income on food. Those costs have actually shrunk to a much smaller share, more like one-seventh.
The official formula also fails to account for other expenses such as out-of-pocket medical care, child care and commuting, and it does not consider noncash government aid, such as food stamps and tax credits, when calculating income.
Under the new, alternative methodology:
Latinos poverty rates climbed to 28 percent after the census reconfigured its algorithm to take into account medical costs and government programs. The Hispanic poverty level rose after the government took into account safety-net programs such as food stamps and housing, which have lower participation among immigrants and non-English speakers.
Especially among illegal immigrants. The Gingrich House of the mid-1990s had the opportunity to actually do something to restrict immigration, but they punted on the larger question. On a lesser question, fortunately, they did take constructive action, restricting welfare for illegal aliens. I suspect that this has had a positive impact on the quality of illegal aliens and their likelihood to turn into welfare sponges.
... The numbers released Wednesday by the Census Bureau are part of a newly developed supplemental poverty measure. Devised a year ago, this measure provides a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out.
Based on the revised formula, the number of poor people exceeded the 49 million, or 16 percent of the population, who were living below the poverty line in 2010. That came as more people in the slowly improving economy picked up low-wage jobs last year but still struggled to pay living expenses. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent also is higher than the record 46.2 million, or 15 percent, that the government's official estimate reported in September.
Due to medical expenses, higher living costs and limited immigrant access to government programs, people 65 or older, Hispanics and urbanites were more likely to be struggling economically under the alternative formula. Also spiking higher in 2011 was poverty among full-time and part-time workers.
The portrait of poverty broken down by state notably changed. California tops the list, hurt by high housing costs, large numbers of immigrants as well as less generous tax credits and food stamp programs to buoy low-income families. It is followed by the District of Columbia, Arizona, Florida and Georgia.In the official census tally, it was rural states that were more likely to be near the top of the list, led by Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona and Louisiana.
Under the new calculations that include cost of living (but not cost of homeownership) and some government benefits:
Hispanics and Asians also saw much higher rates of poverty, 28 percent and 16.9 percent, respectively, compared with rates of 25.4 percent and 12.3 percent under the official formula. In contrast, African-Americans saw a modest decrease in poverty, from 27.8 percent under the official rate to 25.7 percent based on the revised numbers. Among non-Hispanic whites, poverty rose from 9.9 percent to 11 percent.
We still need an official calculation of middleclassness, which would involve the cost of buying a home in a decent public school district.
iSteve readers will be shocked SHOCKED to learn that when cost of living is entered into the equation, it turns out that immigrant-heavy states lead the True Poverty list.
Yet, the idea that California, home to the vast wealth generating industries of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, leads America in poverty ought to be a wake-up call to the conventional wisdom.
When Esquire sent Tom Wolfe to California in 1963-64 to write about the local hot rod scene, he found the opposite of what the government is reporting today. Michael Anton writes in City Journal in "Tom Wolfe's California:"
... the core insights on which Wolfe built his career—the devolution of style to the masses, status as a replacement for social class, the “happiness explosion” in postwar America—all first came to him in California. ...
That piece—“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”—represents the first time that Wolfe truly understood and was able to formulate the big idea that would transform him from an above-average feature writer into the premier cultural chronicler of our age. Those inhabiting the custom car scene were not rich, certainly not upper-class, and not prominent— indeed, they were almost invisible to society at large. Wolfe described his initial attempt to write the story as a cheap dismissal: “Don’t worry, these people are nothing.” He realized in California that he had been wrong. These people were something, and very influential within their own circles, which were far larger than anyone on the outside had hitherto noticed. ...
“Practically every style recorded in art history is the result of the same thing—a lot of attention to form plus the money to make monuments to it,” Wolfe wrote in the introduction to his first book. “But throughout history, everywhere this kind of thing took place, China, Egypt, France under the Bourbons, every place, it has been something the aristocracy was responsible for. What has happened in the United States since World War II, however, has broken that pattern. The war created money. It made massive infusions of money into every level of society. Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles.” If Wolfe’s oeuvre has an overarching theme, this is it.
Well, 1963 was a long time ago in California. (Here's Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic on what has been lost in California.)
"But, Mr. Lincoln, sir, everybody knows that paying the lowest wages possible is good for the economy"
I'm walking down Ventura Boulevard and see a big "Paramount Studios" truck parked in front of a rented boutique. A half dozen crew guys, probably the first wave of what will be 50 or 100 workers who will arrive soon and work all night to film a minute or less of a movie, TV show, or commercial, are setting up equipment to convert it into a location set.
They're working quickly and surehandedly, carrying on a variety of technical conversations about how they will perform their next steps while they're finishing their initial tasks. They're not a NASCAR pit crew, but they're veterans who know that while making movies involves a lot of hurry up and wait, the hurry up part is what keeps them getting hired.
Now, some Hollywood crafts unions don't have a good reputation. From The Simpsons' "Radioactive Man" episode:
Homer: You guys work on the movie?
Teamster: You sayin' we're not working?
Homer: Oh, I always wanted to be a Teamster. So lazy and surly... mind if I relax next to you?
But the Teamsters are close to being the exception that proves the rule that members of these specialized unions tend to be competent and cooperative.
Not surprisingly, I made sure to check the demographics. The uniformed security guard who was there to stand around making sure passer-bys like me didn't walk off with a Red video camera was a young Latino. The five technicians, however, were blue collar white guys in the 35 to 55 age range, a demographic you don't see much of in L.A. anymore, except on movie sets.
They had beer guts and the kind of facial hair that guys who own Harley-Davidsons (maybe two or three) espouse. They look like the kind of tough guy craftsmen with high five or low six-figure incomes who, if the Oakland Raiders announced they were moving back to the L.A. Coliseum tomorrow, would shell out for season tickets the next day.
They had beer guts and the kind of facial hair that guys who own Harley-Davidsons (maybe two or three) espouse. They look like the kind of tough guy craftsmen with high five or low six-figure incomes who, if the Oakland Raiders announced they were moving back to the L.A. Coliseum tomorrow, would shell out for season tickets the next day.
When Tom Wolfe came out to North Hollywood 49 years ago to check out the Kustom Kar scene in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he reported that the post-WWII profusion of broad wealth in Southern California was inspiring all sorts of strange and rather beautiful blue collar creativity
Later in the 20th Century, Los Angeles pioneered the current national dogma of driving down wages via immigration "for the good of the economy." And "diversity," never forget "diversity."
One major exception, however, has been Hollywood. Sensitive artists with large but fragile egos don't take well to cost-cutting among the people who are supposed to make them look good.
To illustrate this, I think a good sketch comedy scene could be set on the set of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. As you've no doubt heard, the delightful English eccentric Method ham actor Daniel Day-Lewis insisted upon staying in character as Honest Abe throughout filming. Spielberg dressed in a suit to direct for the first time in his career and always addressed his star as "Mr. President."
I'd like to see a sketch in which, halfway through the shoot, Spielberg, as producer, fires his expensive crew of American veterans and replaces them with minimum wage Mixtec-speakers who not only don't know that they have to address Day-Lewis as "Mr. Lincoln," but don't know who "Mr. Lincoln" was, and thus don't see anything odd about it. Miffed, Day-Lewis complains so irately to Spielberg over dinner that he punches his hand through his stovepipe hat. Spielberg then has to explain to his sensitive star / Free Soil Free Labor President that firing Americans and replacing them with lower paid foreigners is just being "good for the economy."
Nate Silver on rookie sensation v. Triple Crown Winner for AL MVP
Nate Silver's 538 blog has a clear exposition of why advanced baseball statistics state that 20-year-old rookie phenom Mike Trout of the California Angels should win the American League Most Valuable Player award instead of the favorite, Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers, who is the first ballplayer since Yaz in 1967 to win the Triple Crown of batting average, homers, and RBIs.
Sabermetricians often preen themselves when sportswriters give the MVP award to the wrong guy because there have been some dumb votes in the past.
But it's not like nobody would have noticed that Trout was having an amazing season without advanced statistics. Trout absolutely electrified fans who watched him. He had all sorts of crazy feats like stealing four home runs from batters by leaping to catch balls over the fence. Cabrera, in contrast, had certain unglamorous deficiencies, such as a tendency to ground into double plays because he's a slow runner who hits the ball hard, which dedicated Tiger fans would notice.
It's not that hard to tell who's the most valuable player on a team if you watch the team every day. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching." But, when trying to pick the most valuable player in the entire league, sportswriters tended in the past to look to simplifying statistics, most notoriously the highly contextual runs-batted-in counter.
Still, picking between Trout and Cabrera is a complicated question. The difficulty raises questions about everybody's favorite panacea for fixing the schools: value-added testing of teachers.
As I've pointed out before, although the world has largely come around to the theory I propounded in the 1990s that teachers should be measured upon "value added,", almost nobody, including me, has much specific knowledge of how that ought to work in practice. And we're probably not going to get there all that soon, either.
For baseball statistics to reach the level of sophistication in Silver's posting has taken quite a few generations.
And, yet, there are still baseball conundrums that aren't clearly resolvable with statistics. For example, Silver deducts runs from Cabrera's overall performance for being a lousy third baseman. But Cabrera's fans write in to point out that he is a natural first baseman who volunteered during the offseason to lose weight and take lots of grounder so he could play third this season so the Tigers could sign the even fatter Prince Fielder to play first.
Playing a defensive position you are not cut out for can take a psychological toll on your hitting -- an old time example is Pedro Guerrero's slump in the first two months of 1985 due to the Dodgers insistence that he continue to humiliate himself at 3rd base. Finally, when they let him move to his natural left field, he responded to his liberation with one of the great hitting months in history, setting a record for most homers in one month.
(I have a general theory that sabermetric logic points baseball in an ugly direction: kind of like semi-pro slowpitch softball. Don't worry much about defense or baserunning, just get a bunch of hulks who can hit homers or get walks. But I don't think this kind of reductionism works in practice for a psychological reason: you put too many Dr. Strangegloves on the field at once, it cuts the heart out of a team. Sure, statistics might say that fielding isn't really that important, but botching too many balls embarrasses teams and causes bad feelings in the dugout. Errors depress teams, like they depressed Guerrero.)
Also, it's not clear how to account for the fact that Mike Trout spent the Angels' first 22 games in the minors (during which they went only 8-14). As soon as he came up he jumpstarted the Angels' offense.
It's easy to say that if he'd played the whole season instead of just 139 games, he would have scored even more than 129 runs and hit even more than 30 homers.
No doubt about it.
On the other hand, he likely would have regressed somewhat more toward the mean in on-base and slugging percentages -- after a superhuman start, his averages were slipping during the last two months of the season.
I suspect that it will turn out that there are all sorts of analogies to advanced teacher evaluations. If you, say, offer a $10,000 bonus for the school's Most Valuable Teacher based on value-added test scores, you will start to see all sorts of complex but not uninteresting arguments from interested parties for why more factors need to be taken into consideration.
While we have an extraordinary number of baseball statistics fans, we have almost no education statistics fans. So, we're still a long ways away from figuring out teacher statistics.
November 14, 2012
Ted Cruz
Since everybody has decided that the Hispanics are our future, it's worth catching up on the Spanish surnamed crowd.
Texas just elected Republican Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate by a healthy margin. Ted's father came from Cuba in 1957 and went into the oil business. His mother, a Rice grad is Irish and Italian. One possible impediment to his Presidential hopes is that he was born in the Calgary oil patch, but his parents returned to Houston when he was 4.
Ted has the usual academic superstar track record: He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law, then clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist. His wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, works for Goldman Sachs.
As you may have noticed, he looks rather like a younger Pat Buchanan.
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