March 20, 2013

The Harry Dexter White Award for Economists' Ethics

There should be an award given each year to the taxpayer-supported American economist who most lives up to the high standards of cosmopolitan morality established by economist Harry Dexter White (1892-1948).

From the New York Times:
A Profession With an Egalitarian Core 
By TYLER COWEN 
ECONOMICS is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated. And that core may guide us in some surprising directions. ...
Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people. The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently. ... 
Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives — common around the globe — that postulate natural hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender, often enforced by law and strict custom. Economists too often forget that we are part of this broader battle of ideas, and that we are winning some enduring victories.
So where will a cosmopolitan perspective take us today? 
One enormous issue is international migration. A distressingly large portion of the debate in many countries analyzes the effects of higher immigration on domestic citizens alone and seeks to restrict immigration to protect a national culture or existing economic interests. The obvious but too-often-underemphasized reality is that immigration is a significant gain for most people who move to a new country. 
Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, quantified these gains in a 2011 paper, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” He found that unrestricted immigration could create tens of trillions of dollars in economic value, as captured by the migrants themselves in the form of higher wages in their new countries and by those who hire the migrants or consume the products of their labor. For a profession concerned with precision, it is remarkable how infrequently we economists talk about those rather large numbers. 
Truly open borders might prove unworkable, especially in countries with welfare states, and kill the goose laying the proverbial golden eggs; in this regard Mr. Clemens’s analysis may require some modification. Still, we should be obsessing over how many of those trillions can actually be realized. 
IN any case, there is an overriding moral issue. Imagine that it is your professional duty to report a cost-benefit analysis of liberalizing immigration policy. You wouldn’t dream of producing a study that counted “men only” or “whites only,” at least not without specific, clearly stated reasons for dividing the data.

I constantly read studies about how policies are good or bad for blacks or women or immigrants or gays or Jews. The fact that I don't see many studies about how policies affect men or whites has more to do with Who? Whom?.
So why report cost-benefit results only for United States citizens or residents, as is sometimes done in analyses of both international trade and migration? The nation-state is a good practical institution, but it does not provide the final moral delineation of which people count and which do not. So commentators on trade and immigration should stress the cosmopolitan perspective, knowing that the practical imperatives of the nation-state will not be underrepresented in the ensuing debate. 
Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let’s cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people — even most economists — expect. 
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

As time goes by, the brighter sort of economists are less often promising that mass immigration is good for Americans and have turned instead to insisting that submitting to mass immigration is Americans' moral duty to Mexicans. Otherwise, they'd starve!

Mexicans illegally immigrate to avoid starvation

I'm now thinking the striped shirt wasn't a good idea
From the McClatchy Newspapers:
Mexico facing a diabetes 'disaster' as obesity levels soar 
By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers 
Last updated: November 21, 2012 06:41:34 AM 
MEXICO CITY -- With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease. 
A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence. 
Public health experts blame changes in lifestyle that have made Mexicans more obese than anywhere else on Earth except the United States. They attribute changes to powerful snack and soft drink industries, newly sedentary ways of living and a genetic heritage susceptible to diabetes, a chronic, life-threatening illness. 
... Somewhere between 6.5 million and 10 million Mexicans now have diabetes, the Health Secretariat says. While the numbers are fewer than the 20 million who suffer from diabetes in the United States, Mexico carries the seeds of an unfolding tragedy linked both to soaring obesity and shifting demographics that will heavily burden health systems. 
... The once-languid pace of Mexican life has undergone radical transformation in recent decades. Crowded urban areas force long commutes on workers, and public security concerns keep them cooped up at home. 
Workers who once would return to their homes for long lunch breaks, eating freshly prepared foods, no longer can do that. 
“It is practically impossible to go home to eat lunch now,” said Dr. Gabriela Ortiz, a department director at the National Center for Preventative Health and Disease Control. “We ask for food to be delivered to our office. Some employees go out to the taco stands on the corner or to the street markets.” 
Since tap water is widely considered unsafe, and public drinking fountains rare, most Mexicans swill a sugary drink with their meals. The average Mexican consumes 728 eight-ounce sugary drinks from Coca-Cola per year, an average of two a day, far more than the 403 eight-ounce drinks that are consumed per person annually in the United States. 
“Coca-Cola is a great villain, but it is not the only one,” Avila said, adding that some 30 of Mexico’s 500 largest businesses produce snacks or other types of junk food, carbonated or sugary beverages. He said their total annual sales top $80 billion and their advertising and lobbying budgets easily trump public health campaigns. 
A 2012 federal health and nutrition survey found that 64 percent of men and 82 percent of women in Mexico were overweight or obese. Obesity levels have tripled in the past three decades. 
“I’m looking out my window,” said Dr. Stan De Loach, an American-certified diabetes educator who has lived most his life in Mexico, “and I see two, three, four, seven, eight people out of maybe 20 people who are obese.” 
Mexico now has higher obesity rates among children ages 5 to 11 years than any other country. According to a 2012 health survey, 34.4 percent of children are obese, Ortiz said. The comparable figure in the United States is 16.9 percent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. 

WaPo completely unbiased on immigration

From the Washington Post tonight:

Visas for high-skilled foreign workers could double under Senate plan

Visas for high-skilled foreign workers could double under Senate plan
Bipartisan plan would be major win for tech industry which argues visa limits impede qualified employees.

"The Most Hated College Basketball Players of the Last 30 Years"

With the NCAA basketball tournament underway, Grantland has a feature entitled "The Most Hated College Basketball Players of the Last 30 Years." It's a bracket of 32 (apparently) hated players, divided up into four sectors: the 1980s, the 1990s, 2000s, and Duke U.
"Name someone you hate." 
... It's Wojo. 
Yes, Wojo. Hardcourt-slapping, charge-drawing, pass-and-cut-awaying Steve Wojciechowski, the honorable-mention All-American who played point guard for Duke from 1994 to 1998. I'm probably not alone in feeling this way — the Washington Times called him "the most reviled 6.6-point scorer in NCAA basketball history." ... In the moment, however, few things make my blood boil like some ACC pretty boy or deadeye shooter or egregious flopper or hard-nosed defender — or some unholy amalgamation of all these qualities. ...
The 32-player competition has four regions — one each for players from the 1980s, 1990s, and 21st century, and another for Duke Blue Devils. Before Coach K and the Cameron Crazies get too worked up about being singled out, let me explain the decision to turn part of this bracket into a mini-tournament of Duke hate. For starters, imagine the alternative. Think of all the Dukies who didn't make the cut: Carlos Boozer, Kyle Singler, Trajan Langdon, Brian Zoubek, Ryan Kelly, the Brothers Plumlee, Chris Collins, Thomas Hill, Alaa Abdelnaby, and many, many more. If Duke weren't confined to its own quadrant, half the athletes in the competition might be Blue Devils. And if they were peppered throughout all the regions, an all-Duke Final Four wouldn't just be a possibility — it would be a likelihood.
... There's not much mystery to what turned us off about Bill Curley and Eric Montross — they were white stiffs with terrible haircuts. And does anyone bring it all together in one package better than Tyler Hansbrough? Psycho T had it all — accolades galore, 4,000 percent effort, and those bugged-out, demonstrative, lunatic eyes. Plus, during an era in which few players with serious NBA futures spend more than two years in school, it felt like Hansbrough never left.

Much of the anti-Duke hate, of course, is the twisted mirror image of Chinese people liking Jeremy Lin for being Chinese: Duke hate is a phenomenon of white fans hating a mostly white team for being mostly white and winning at the black man's game. Six of the eight Duke players are white (and Shane Battier has a white mother. Update: so does Austin Rivers). My vague recollection is the inflection point in Duke Hate came in the early 1990s when Duke upset a black-dominated U. of Nevada Las Vegas team that the press had been extolling as the greatest college team ever.

Much of the hatred seems to be directed at the more genetically inferior players who succeed in college basketball based more on work ethic and character.

Judging from the racial makeup of the three decades, anti-white hatred appears to be a growing phenomenon. Only one (Danny Ainge) of the eight widely hated players from the 1980s is white. Only two of eight from the 1990s are whites. But of the 2000s, six are white (and Joakim Noah has three white grandparents).

P.S. Here are the results among Grantland readers (not a particularly vibrant bunch):

Most hated: Christian Laettner (white)
Runner-up: Tyler Hansborough (white)
Semifinalist: Eric Montross (white)
Semifinalist: Rick Fox (half-white half-black, good-looking)
Quarterfinalist: J.J. Redick (white)
Quarterfinalist: Danny Ainge (white)
Quarterfinalist: Mateen Cleaves (black)
Quarterfinalist: Joakim Noah (3/4th white 1/4th black, oddly feminine-looking)

So, one of the eight Most Hated has two black parents, two have one, five have none. Not exactly representative of the racial demographics of college basketball stars.

Human beings enjoy hating other human beings, but they are sensitive to the messages their society sends them about whom it is okay to hate.

WSJ: Good news on Hispanics: Argentine immigrants assimilating! (Bad news: American-born Mexicans not so much)

South Americans, including Argentines and Venezuelans, have the highest levels of education and are the least segregated from other ethnic groups in the U.S., even if they are more recent arrivals, according to the study
Every group except Mexicans has experienced a substantial decline in residential segregation from whites since 1990, according to the most common measure of segregation, the "dissimilarity index," which measures the distribution of two groups in a neighborhood and how much one group is over- or under-represented in relation to the other. 
"One would have thought that the newer groups, which are faster-growing, would be the ones maintaining boundaries and that Mexicans, with so many second and later generations, would be dispersing," said John Logan, co-author of the report, "Hispanics in the United States: Not Only Mexicans."

March 19, 2013

Who should be blamed for the cult of microaggressions: women or men?

From my new Taki's Magazine column:
While reading up a couple of weeks ago on the Oberlin College KKK fiasco, I became fascinated by the various Web pages at colleges such as Oberlin, Smith, Scripps, and similar progressive, lesbian-heavy institutions for the documenting of “microaggressions.” Since the Ku Klux Klaxon can’t be sounded every week (at least not yet), in the meantime young people are encouraged to fondle and document for posterity the subtlest of slights they feel they’ve suffered. 
As I pored over the microaggressions endured by victims/students at expensive liberal-arts colleges, it struck me that this ongoing dumbing down of America is a joint project of both sexes, with men and women each contributing their own special something.

Read the whole thing there.

Chait: "GOP Candidates Form Pro-Immigration Cartel"

From New York magazine, via Ross Douthat:
GOP Candidates Form Pro-Immigration Cartel 
By Jonathan Chait
 
The Republican Party’s leadership has collectively decided that its political future requires the party to support immigration reform. Republicans made a similar calculation under George W. Bush, but a conservative grassroots revolt killed the legislation. Now the party elite is attempting to tamp down a potential revolt and allow a bill to pass. 
Almost certainly there will be some kind of conservative revolt. Stirring of it could be heard at CPAC, where figures like Jim DeMint, Donald Trump, and Ann Coulter issued fiery denunciations. What’s interesting is that, as of now, anti-reform conservatives have no standard bearer. All of the major 2016 figures — Paul, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker — support comprehensive reform. Somebody will surely emerge to represent the conservative base in an open field, but so far the political marketplace has not supplied a candidate to fill that anticipated demand. 
Instead, the field looks a lot like a kind of cartel. All of the major candidates support reform, so none of them can undercut each other by appealing to anti-reform sentiment. Whichever candidate eventually emerges to speak for the anti-reform base — and one will; the lure of a mass followership and free time on Fox News is too great to pass up — will probably be a Herman Cain–esque huckster running a protest race rather than a serious candidacy. 
And that potential dynamic, in turn, will shape the prospects for the passage of a bill. The key factor in passing a law is for leading Republicans in Congress, especially Rubio, to stay solid in their support. They’ll continue to support a bill as long as they feel secure that fellow Republicans won’t attack them as an Obama-loving sellout willing to let hordes on Mexicans pour forth over the border. If figures like Rubio look around and see other Republicans edging for the exits, they’ll in turn beat a retreat. 
As of now, though, all the 2016 contenders can support a bill in the anticipation that their major rivals will be locked in to the same stance. The most plausible vehicle for a grassroots insurgent candidacy was Paul, who had harnessed his father’s grassroots appeal with shrewd cultivation of the party elite. With Paul signed up with the pro-reform cartel, nobody is going to make Rubio, Bush, or Ryan nervous, which means there’s little right now to stop a bill from passing the House this summer.

Okay, but the same logic applied in 2006 and 2007, with John McCain teaming up with Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush to push amnesty. Senator Jeff Sessions, among others, stepped up. Overall, though, it was the citizenry that got the job done. 

Latest Breaking KKK Menace News

The 2013 news media KKKraziness kontinues. From the NYT:
Olen Burrage Dies at 82; Linked to Killings in 1964 
Olen Burrage, a Ku Klux Klan member who owned the Mississippi farm where the bodies of three slain civil rights workers were found in 1964, died on Friday in Meridian, Miss. He was 82.

And it goes on for around 1000 words about a farmer.

Who controls the past ...

How teachers think

A Midwestern reader writes:
You are one of the few conservative-leaning authors out there that seem to really understand what that world is about.  Before a career in corporate management, followed by a return to B-school and a third career in academics, I did a stint as a teacher in a public elementary school.   
Although they will not generally say so publicly, every reasonably aware public-school teacher knows the operative rules.  Urban teaching jobs suck, rural jobs suck a little less, and the suburban jobs in prosperous areas are where you want to work.  In prosperous areas the patrons usually love the schools their kids attend and they like the teachers and administrators.  There really are schools out there with little dysfunction, low levels of violence, and where kids really do learn something.   
This is why I find it ironic that many conservatives lump the entire structure together and make [public] education the enemy.  The advocated solutions seem to involve some form of economic starvation combined with higher (and universal) performance standards, and additional requirements to track and report performance data.  This while complaining about the greater number of administrators required to meet these mandates.  I think conservatives are making a huge mistake here.  It's analogous to the phenomenon of everyone professing to hate congress while reelecting the same congressman they have had for 30 years.  They like their congressman, its all the others that they hate.  
It might also be important to note that every state is not like New York, Wisconsin, or California.  Not every teacher is a communist, lazy, a union member, or possessor of a gigantic pension.  There is real risk, especially in more conservative states, of alienating people that are in these professions but generally conservative.  I tell this to my state legislators all time time, but they ignore me.

One thing I try to do is to look at political issues in the news partly from the perspective of property values in my neighborhood. From this angle, the GOP's Randian maker v. taker rhetoric seems strange. Granted, my approach of being sympathetic toward people who would make good neighbors (while being hard-headed about who would make good neighbors) is totally orthogonal to all standard ideologies, but I think the emotion  is widely shared if seldom articulated.

If schoolteachers, firemen, cops, or civil servant bureaucrats move into your neighborhood, is that good for your property values or bad? For all but the top 10% or 20% richest neighborhoods, government employees are fairly desirable neighbors: law-abiding, had to pass some kind of test to get their jobs, stably employed, usually there for the long term, don't work too many hours so they can coach kid teams at the park, and so forth. (I'm just repeating basic Chicago real estate logic.)

In other words, government employees tend to be one core element of the "small c" conservative American middle class. 

Moreover, these are people who tend to have influence with their neighbors and with your children. Teachers talk to children all day long. And they have some influence on other adults in part because they tend to be articulate and outgoing, plus they often have taught people who now vote. Similarly, neighbors who are firemen and cops are listened to at backyard barbecues with some respect and interest because their jobs entail bravery and their jobs make for interesting stories. Even government office paper shufflers can help their neighbors navigate the bureaucracy.

So, Republicans, why demonize them? Republican budget cutters have very legitimate gripes -- firemen and cops have often abused the pension system, for example, with various tricks, and most cities probably employ more firemen than they need -- but the GOP ought to look for carrots as well as sticks. Stand up for government employees against abuse by affirmative action, for instance. 

Little stuff, too: back during Hurricane Katrina, my son's scoutmaster, a fire chief, dropped everything and flew to Louisiana to help rescue people in New Orleans. But before he could be allowed into the field to save lives, he had to sit through a two hour seminar on sexual harassment!

Sure, the Republicans aren't going to win over many votes from members of government employees unions. But, you might win over, say, their in-laws if you treat them fairly on what ought to be Republican issues. But, instead, the GOP has largely given up on Reagan Democrat issues in favor of, say, talking about the estate tax.

Indeed, the Bush Administration went the other way and attacked Reagan Democrats. Alberto Gonalez filed in 2007 a discrimination lawsuit against the Fire Department of New York -- of whom 343 died on 9/11 and who are among the more culturally conservative bloc of voters in the state of New York. Thanks, GOP! I'm sure McCain and Romney did much better among Hispanics and blacks in New York because of this, right?

The new official GOP report on how the party will revive echoes the conventional wisdom of such GOP-friendly institutions as the editorial board of the New York Times: Hispanics! But, if you actually look at the Electoral College map, it's clear that the GOP's biggest Presidential election problem is not appealing enough to whites in the North Central states. 

Whole KKK assault blanket thing works out well for Oberlin dean

Oberlin College's one-man Ku Klux Klan rally nervous breakdown of a couple of weeks ago has largely disappeared down the media memory hole, with, for example, apparently no information about the identities of two students removed from campus being released by anybody. (But who is even asking? Why would you want to know? All you need to know is that hate crimes at Oberlin were national front page news a couple of weeks ago, but now they aren't. If you are supposed to be curious about what actually happened, you'll be informed that being interested is appropriate through the proper channels.) 

Still, it all seems to have worked out well for one Oberlin higher-up. The local Chronicle-Telegram reports:
Kenyon College taps Oberlin dean for president

 Filed by Lisa Roberson March 19th, 2013 in Top Stories.

An Oberlin College dean who was at the center of the college’s response to incidents of hate and bigotry has been tapped to be the next leader of Kenyon College, another of Ohio’s liberal arts colleges. Sean Decatur, 44, will be Kenyon’s 19th president and will assume the position in July. Kenyon’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously Sunday to hire Decatur after conducting a national search.

Who said, "If you wish to live and work in America, then we will find a place for you"?

From the Associated Press:
Rand Paul Endorses Immigrant Path to Citizenship 
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is endorsing a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants, a significant move for a favorite of tea party Republicans who are sometimes hostile to such an approach. 
In a speech to be delivered Tuesday morning to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the potential 2016 presidential candidate declares, "If you wish to live and work in America, then we will find a place for you." 

Like I've said a million times before, once the GOP decides it wants to talk about "amnesty," it winds up talking about a suicidal "path to citizenship." White people are suckers for high-mindedness, and "a path to citizenship" just sounds more idealistic than plain old amnesty.

The essential duty of American statesmanship is to preserve for Americans the advantages of being American. But does anyone in politics even know what I'm talking about anymore?

March 18, 2013

The best defense is a good offense

From the New York Times:
Obama’s Visit to Israel Renews Effort to Free Spy 
By ISABEL KERSHNER 
JERUSALEM — When President Obama lands here on Wednesday, he may encounter some Israelis staging a hunger strike in support of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American serving a life term in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel. 
But the call for Mr. Pollard’s release will not be restricted to the strident, right-wing protests that have previously greeted American officials. 
Instead, it will come from Israel’s dovish president, Shimon Peres, and some of the country’s most respected public figures: Nobel Prize-winning scientists, retired generals, celebrated authors and intellectuals who have signed, along with more than 175,000 other citizens, an online petition appealing for clemency for Mr. Pollard. 
After years of being viewed as a somewhat marginal and divisive issue here, the campaign to free Mr. Pollard has become a mainstream crusade. Prominent Israelis are shedding the shame long felt over the affair, one of the most damaging, painful episodes in the annals of the American-Israeli relationship, and recasting it as a humanitarian issue ready to be resolved. 
The effort has gathered momentum, and many Israelis consider Mr. Obama’s visit to be the perfect opportunity for a gesture of good will.

Right, because America owes Israel a gesture of good will over the Pollard Case for, uh, ...

The full details of the crime committed by Pollard and Israeli intelligence against the U.S. remain secret, but it appears likely that Pollard gave American secrets on the ultimate line of defense in case of nuclear apocalypse, boomers -- ICBM submarines -- to the Israelis, who traded them to the Soviets. That's really, really bad.

I suppose you could argue: "Well, World War III never got around to happening, so ... no harm, no foul!" But that's not a sound argument.

Therefore, you might think that the Israeli attitude toward the Pollard Affair would be: "We shall never speak of this again." In terms of the manners and morals that your mother taught you, what Israeli society is doing in rubbing America's nose in Israel's crime against America sounds like lunacy.

But, that's naive. The best defense, it turns out, is a good offense. Stay offensive and take offense. Intimidate skeptics with your sheer brass.

P.S., So far, Obama has shown some backbone in not pardoning Pollard:
In an interview shown Thursday on Israel’s Channel 2, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Pollard had “committed a very serious crime” and was “serving his time.” He said he was sympathetic to Israelis’ emotions and would ensure that the usual rules of review were applied in his case. 
But he added, “I have no plans for releasing Jonathan Pollard immediately.”

Keep it up, Mr. President.

P.P.S. Pollard, by the way, is not a selfless martyr to any higher cause. He wanted money for drugs and jewelry. He's a horrible person. The Wikipedia article on him has a good depiction of his character, such as attempting to sell U.S. secrets to Pakistan on multiple occasions. Here's my favorite bit of Pollardania, on Pollard as an adolescent:
Pollard made his first trip to Israel in 1970, as part of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. While there, he was hospitalized after a fight with another student. One Weizmann scientist remembered Pollard as leaving behind "a reputation of being an unstable troublemaker, the worst case of this kind in the history of the summer camp".[13]

P.P.P.S. Anyway, the point is not Pollard, it's how widespread shameless Pollardmania has become in Israel that a member of the Nobel-certified Global Great and Good like Shimon Peres has come down with it. The usual explanation for this kind of seemingly knuckleheaded obnoxiousness is that "Israelis are their own worst enemies."

And yet, Israel, which has plenty of real enemies, seems to be doing quite well. So, maybe Israelis aren't their own worst enemies. Maybe this tendency to demand gestures of good will from the victims of your bad will serves useful purposes? Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from Israel's success?

Fred Buenrostro: White guy in the news

Fred Buenrostro
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System is a state agency that, unsurprisingly, manages the largest public pension fund. So being the boss is a nice job. You're in charge of a couple of hundred billion dollars. Thus, there's a lot of competition for the post and to get selected for it, you need a little extra oomph. A Spanish surname wouldn't hurt, for example.

But, apparently, the standard perks that come with being head of CALPERS were not quite nice enough for Fred Buenrostro. From the L.A. Times:
Federal prosecutors in San Francisco indicted former CalPERS Chief Executive Fred Buenrostro and former board member Alfred J.R. Villalobos on Monday afternoon as part of a years-long investigation into possible influence-peddling and corruption. 
The two former officials of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System were charged with fraud and obstruction of justice, according to the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco. 
Alfred J.R. Villalobos
The federal investigation has been probing Villalobos' alleged influence-pedding in winning lucrative contracts for private equity funds that wanted to do business with CalPERS, the country's largest public pension fund. 
Villalobos and his Nevada firm earned tens of millions of dollars in commissions on the deals. Villalobos and Buenrostro also have been sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the state attorney general over fraud claims.

Okay, Villalobos has something of a PRI oligarch look going for him, like his great-grandfather was a bandit turned general in the Mexican Revolution a century ago, but Buenrostro ...

White guys pretty much built the modern world and mostly still rule it, but everyone is agreed that that's awful. So, the best thing in the world to be right now is a white person who has some claim to being a member of a Designated Victim Group, like Gerald McRaney-lookalike Señor Buenrostro.

WaPo: GOP can't object to Obama's nomination of Xochitl Hinojosa's old boss because he's Hispanic

Thomas E. Perez and his boss Eric Holder
Greg Sargent explains in the Washington Post:
Attacks on Thomas Perez will do wonders for GOP Latino outreach 
This morning the Republican National Committee released a report that purports to examine everything that’s wrong with the GOP, one that has a heavy emphasis on repairing relations with Latinos. “By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now,” the report laments, adding that unless Republicans “get serious” about tackling their minority outreach problem, “we will lose future elections.” 
Only a few hours later, it is now clear thatsome Republicans will do all they can to block Obama’s first Latino pick for his second-term cabinet — and the right is gearing up for a campaign against him that will make the effort to block Chuck Hagel look like a knitting seminar. Given Thomas Perez’s background as the son of Dominican immigrants, plus his role running the Justice Department’s civil rights division, this isn’t going to make the RNC’s “outreach” to Latinos any easier. 
Senator David Vitter announced today that he will put a “hold” on Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez as labor secretary, partly on the grounds of his work on … the New Black Panther case. Other Republican Senators plan to paint Perez as a “radical legal activist” who has “tried to help illegal immigrants avoid detection,” as the New York Times puts it. 
To be clear, it is fair game for Republicans to use the nomination process to ask legitimate questions about a nominee, and to raise substantive objections to that nominee. But if the attacks on Perez veer into the lurid and racially charged, it will be very interesting to see how Republicans who agree with the RNC’s analysis of the GOP’s problems handle it.

Of course, any and all criticism of Perez's handling of the civil rights division in Obama's first term will be denounced as "racially charged."

P.S., for newcomers, here's the explanation of the Xochitl Hinojosa reference.

March 17, 2013

Remembering Stephen Jay Gould: Bully and Boob

Natural History magazine, in which the late Stephen Jay Gould went on at such length for so many years, offers a perspective on Gould's career by the distinguished physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall that's outwardly celebratory, but is actually a pretty funny account of Gould's penchant for projection of all his own intellectual inadequacy, ethical shortcomings, and ethnic hostility on to the morally and technically superior scientists that he fulminated against. (Of course, you have to read it closely and all the way to the end to notice this.)
Remembering Stephen Jay Gould 
By Ian Tattersall 
... Principally in the 1970s—when memories of the struggle for civil rights in the United States during the previous decade were still extremely raw

Or, in other words, when the battles were already won
—Gould devoted a long series of his columns to the subject of racism, as it presented itself in a whole host of different guises. In his very first year of writing for Natural History, he ruminated on the “race problem” both as a taxonomic issue, and in its more political expression in relation to intelligence. He even made the matter personal, with a lucid and deeply thoughtful demolition in Natural History of the purportedly scientific bases for discrimination against Jewish immigrants to America furnished by such savants as H. H. Goddard and Karl Pearson.

A historical farrago, of course, but one that millions of people still believe: Jews didn't score well on IQ tests. A simple historical reality check, such as noting the vast rise of Jewish students at Harvard in the first two decades of the 20th Century and the subsequent imposition of admissions quotas, would suggest that Gould got the story backwards (as indeed he did).
Gould also began his long-lasting and more specific campaign against genetic determinism, via a broadside against the conclusions of Arthur Jensen, the psychologist who had argued that education could not do much to level the allegedly different performances of various ethnic groups on IQ tests. And he began a vigorous and still somewhat controversial exploration of the historical roots of “scientific racism” in the work of nineteenth-century embryologists such as Ernst Haeckel and Louis Bolk. 
But Gould’s most widely noticed contribution to the race issue began in 1978, with his attack in Science on the conclusions of the early-nineteenth century physician and craniologist Samuel George Morton, whom he characterized rather snarkily as a “self-styled objective empiricist.”

It's important to keep in mind this in mind about Gould's jihad against Morton: it's not as if Gould was courageously attacking some giant figure in the history of science with numerous still active defenders. Barely anybody outside of physical anthropologists had heard of Morton when Gould started his crusade against him. The only reason Morton was famous in the 1970s was because Gould was so angry about him. Gould wasn't picking a fight with the current state of the art skull expert, he was picking a fight with a guy who had been dead for 127 years, who had been dead for 8 years when The Origin of Species was published. It was absurd, but it made Gould a lot of money.
In three voluminous works published in Philadelphia between 1839 and 1849—on Native American and ancient Egyptian skulls, and on his own collection of more than 600 skulls of all races—the widely admired Morton had presented the results of the most extensive study ever undertaken of human skulls. The main thrust of this study had been to investigate the then intensely debated question of whether the various races of humankind had a single origin or had been separately created. Morton opted for polygeny, or multiple origins, a conclusion hardly guaranteed to endear him to Gould. Along the way, Morton presented measurements that showed, in keeping with prevailing European and Euro-American beliefs on racial superiority, that Caucasians had larger brains than American “Indians,” who in turn had bigger brains than “Negroes” did. 
After closely examining Morton’s data, Gould characterized the Philadelphia savant’s conclusions as “a patchwork of assumption and finagling, controlled, probably unconsciously, by his conventional a priori ranking (his folks on top, slaves on the bottom).” He excoriated Morton for a catalog of sins that included inconsistencies of criteria, omissions of both procedural and convenient kinds, slips and errors, and miscalculations. And although in the end he found “no indication of fraud or conscious manipulation,” he did see “Morton’s saga” as an “egregious example of a common problem in scientific work.” As scientists we are all, Gould asserted, unconscious victims of our preconceptions, and the “only palliations I know are vigilance and scrutiny.” 
That blanket condemnation of past and current scientific practice was a theme Gould shortly returned to, with a vengeance, in his 1981 volume The Mismeasure of Man. Probably no book Gould ever wrote commanded wider attention than did this energetic critique of the statistical methods that had been used to substantiate one of his great bêtes noires, biological determinism.

Gould was in over his head when it came to the kind of statistics required to contribute to psychometrics.
This was the belief, as Gould put it, that “the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.” 
In Mismeasure, Gould restated his case against Morton at length, adding to the mix a robust rebuttal of methods of psychological testing that aimed at quantifying “intelligence” as a unitary attribute.

Think about how colleges use SAT scores in admission. Do they look at a unitary SAT score: Most do. Do they look separately at Math and Verbal scores separately: Usually. Do they look at the newer Writing score? Some do, some don't. Do they look at SAT Subject Test scores? Some do, most don't. Do they look at subtest scores on the SAT? Maybe a few do, but I've never heard of it.

In other words, we have the usual Lumper and Splitter situation. I.Q. works the same way. The military won't let you enlist if you are in the bottom 30% on the IQ-like AFQT test used in The Bell Curve. But, if they do let you enlist, they are fairly interested in your subtest scores on the AFQT's superset ASVAB in helping determine what kind of job you'll get.

This isn't really that complicated, but Gould was too knuckleheaded to get it.
One of his prime targets was inevitably Arthur Jensen, the psychologist he had already excoriated in the pages of Natural History for Jensen’s famous conclusion that the Head Start program, designed to improve low-income children’s school performance by providing them with pre-school educational, social, and nutritional enrichment, was doomed to fail because the hereditary component of their performance—notably that of African American children—was hugely dominant over the environmental one.

As you can see by looking around you, everything has changed since the publication of Jensen's Harvard Education Review article in the 1960s. Since then, The Gap has completely disappeared, proving Jensen wrong and Gould right.
A predictable furor followed the publication of Mismeasure, paving the way for continuing controversy during the 1980s and 1990s on the question of the roles of nature versus nurture in the determination of intelligence. 
This issue of nature versus nurture, a choice between polar opposites, was of course designed for polemic, and attempts to find a more nuanced middle ground have usually been drowned out by the extremes.

Who exactly are these extremes on the purported Nature Only side that had their hands on the Megaphone to do the drowning? Jensen was on the side of Nature and Nurture, and he sure didn't have the Megaphone. Gould did, and he was the extremist on the Nurture Only side.
So it was in Gould’s case. An unrepentant political liberal, he was firmly on the side of nurture. As a result of his uncompromising characterizations of his opponents’ viewpoints, Gould found himself frequently accused by Jensen and others of misrepresenting their positions and of erecting straw men to attack. 
Yet even after Mismeasure first appeared, the climax of the debate was yet to come. In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published their notorious volume, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. At positively Gouldian length

but with unGouldian heapings of data, correctly analyzed
, Herrnstein and Murray gave a new boost to the argument that intelligence is largely inherited, proclaiming that innate intelligence was a better predictor of such things as income, job performance, chances of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are factors such as education level or parental socioeconomic status. They also asserted that, in America, a highly intelligent, “cognitive elite” was becoming separated from the less intelligent underperforming classes

But as we can see 19 years later, it's totally clear that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong because society is so much more egalitarian today. Oh, wait ...
, and in consequence they recommended policies such as the elimination of what they saw as welfare incentives for poor women to have children.
To Gould such claims were like the proverbial red rag to a bull. He rapidly published a long review essay in The New Yorker attacking the four assertions on which he claimed Herrnstein and Murray’s argument depended. In order to be true, Gould said, Herrnstein and Murray’s claims required that that what they were measuring as intelligence must be: (1) representable as a single number;

See "Splitter-Lumper" above
(2) must allow linear rank ordering of people;

Which is what Gould's Harvard does in evaluating applicants, what the U.S. Army does, what everybody does. Obviously, rank ordering people has its faults, but the point of The Bell Curve is that tests do have some degree of predictive power, which is what science is about. Gould, however, was far less interested in predicting the future than in controlling the past to control the future.
(3) be primarily heritable;

Or partly heritable. Remember, Gould was the Nurture Only extremist.
and (4) be essentially immutable.

Or, as Herrnstein and Murray said, IQ gaps appear to be "intractable" by plausible government remediation programs. For example, today you see that the most fashionable solution for The Gap is to more or less kidnap tiny black children and hand them over to college graduates to raise during almost all of their waking hours, then drop them off with their kin only for sleeping. Maybe that will work, maybe not, but you can see how far fashion has gone for the Borrowed Generation to be the conventional wisdom of the moment.
None of those assumptions, he declared, was tenable. And soon afterward he returned to the attack with a revised and expanded edition of Mismeasure that took direct aim at Herrnstein and Murray’s long book. 

The funny thing about Gould is that he seemed to have a very high impression of his own IQ, and lots of people shared that view, but there were always doubters, such as Paul Krugman. I doubt if Gould was as smart as Dave Barry.
There can be little doubt that, as articulated in both editions of Mismeasure, Gould’s conclusions found wide acceptance not only among anthropologists but in the broader social arena as well. But doubts have lingered about Gould’s broad-brush approach to the issues involved, and particularly about a penchant he had to neglect any nuance there might have been in his opponents’ positions. Indeed, he was capable of committing in his own writings exactly the kinds of error of which he had accused Samuel Morton—ironically, even in the very case of Morton himself. 
In June 2011, a group of physical anthropologists led by Jason Lewis published a critical analysis of Gould’s attacks on Morton’s craniology. By remeasuring the cranial capacities of about half of Morton’s extensive sample of human skulls, Lewis and colleagues discovered that the data reported by Morton had on the whole been pretty accurate. They could find no basis in the actual specimens themselves for Gould’s suggestion that Morton had (albeit unconsciously) overmeasured European crania, and under-measured African or Native American ones. What’s more, they could find no evidence that, as alleged by Gould, Morton had selectively skewed the results in various other ways. 
The anthropologists did concede that Morton had attributed certain psychological characteristics to particular racial groups. But they pointed out that, while Morton was inevitably a creature of his own times, he had done nothing to disguise his racial prejudices or his polygenist sympathies. And they concluded that, certainly by prevailing standards, Morton’s presentation of his basic data had been pretty unbiased. What is more, while they were able to substantiate Gould’s claim that Morton’s final summary table of his results contained a long list of errors, Lewis and colleagues also found that correcting those errors would actually have served to reinforce Morton’s own declared biases. And they even discovered that Gould had reported erroneous figures of his own. 
It is hard to refute the authors’ conclusion that Gould’s own unconscious preconceptions colored his judgment. Morton, naturally enough, carried all of the cultural baggage of his time, ethnicity, and class. But so, it seems, did Gould. And in a paradoxical way, Gould had proved his own point. Scientists are human beings, and when analyzing evidence they always have to be on guard against the effects of their own personal predilections. 
There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation.

In other words, the more science advances, the more Gould is left behind.
As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

The ends justify the means.

This essay is fairly damning, but I wonder: how many readers noticed. I have to imagine that Tattersall (or the editors) calculated this pretty nicely: Nick Wade will notice it's a takedown of Gould, but 98% of the subscribers will just take away "side of the angels."

Video: Pinker on Political Correctness

Here's an eight-minute video from last year of Steven Pinker being interviewed by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE on "Taboos, Political Correctness, and Dissent."

Latest breaking KKK news hot off the wires

Fortunately, the media is diligently keeping us up to the moment on all the Stop-the-Presses Ku Klux Klan news. From the National Journal, a 3,800 word article:
In Mississippi, the Mysterious Murder of a Gay, Black Politician 
It’s tempting to think Marco McMillian was killed because of his race, his sexuality, or because he was running for mayor. By Ben Terris

Granted, the case isn't actually terribly "mysterious" at all, but who cares? It's "tempting."

And from the New York Times, a 2,600 word article, When Cold Cases Stay Cold, on how the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2006 just didn't give the FBI  a big enough budget to satisfactorily resolve long ago cases of Southern white-on-black violence -- not just unsolved cases, but unsatisfactorily solved cases where juries acquitted white suspects (or even where coroners rightly reported no foul play, like the man who died of a heart attack at Lover's Lane). Who cares about the Constitutional provision against Double Jeopardy when what is at stake is keeping the public sufficiently riled up about an increasingly distant past?

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Nutter: 1st Amendment doesn't protect "Being White in Philly"

Mayor Nutter
From Philly.com
Nutter rips Philly mag race story, calls for "rebuke" 
At Mayor Nutter's request, the city Human Relations Commission will conduct an "inquiry" into race relations in the city, following Philadelphia magazine's widely criticized cover story, "Being White in Philly." 
In a letter, Nutter tore into the magazine and the story, which quoted anonymous white Philadelphians about their view on race and has been attacked for promoting negative stereotypes and not including the views of minorities. 
"This month Philadelphia Magazine has sunk to a new low even for a publication that has long pretended that its suburban readers were the only citizens civically engaged and socially active in the Philadelphia area," Nutter wrote. He called the piece "pathetic" and said it didn't rise "to the level of journalism." 
He also called for a "rebuke" of the magazine and writer, Bob Huber, saying that while he recognizes the 1st Amendement protects "the media from censorship by the government," free speech is "not an unfettered right." 
"I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the 'speech' employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of 'shouting, "fire!" in a crowded theater,' its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction," Nutter wrote. 

On Reddit, I found a text version of Nutter's letter to the Human Rights Commission, which doesn't seem to be widely available elsewhere:
Dear Ms. Landau: 
This month Philadelphia Magazine has sunk to a new low even for a publication that has long pretended that its suburban readers were the only citizens civically engaged and socially active in the Philadelphia area. Its March cover piece, "Being White in Philly," aggregates the disparaging beliefs, the negative stereotypes, the ignorant condemnations typically, and historically ascribed to African-American citizens into one pathetic, uninformed essay quoting Philadelphia residents, many of whose names either the author or the speakers themselves were too cowardly to provide. 
That the magazine thought a collection of these despicable, over-generalized, mostly anonymous assumptions rose to the level of journalism is unfortunate enough. Worse, some of the residents of the nation's fifth-largest city who are quoted in the piece seem to have ignored every positive anecdote they might otherwise have shared about a positive experience with African-Americans in favor of negative stories, many of them not even clearly attributable to African-Americans at all, to allow the author to feed his own misguided perception of African-Americans -- notwithstanding his own acknowledged daily experience on his own block as an ethnic group that, in its entirety, is lazy, shiftless, irresponsible, and largely criminal. Moreover, compounding the sin of having allowed this article to be published in the magazine - and as a cover story, no less the magazine cynically and hypocritically distributed its March issue with two different covers : reportedly one, for its subscribers, with the provocative article as the cover story; the other, with an attractive woman of color on its cover, for Philadelphia hotel guests and visitors. 
Anyone who reads a newspaper or walks through some of the city's poorer neighborhoods knows that the "vast and seemingly permanent . . . underclass" is not only black; the poverty rate in the City of Philadelphia is 28.4% and comprises not only African-Americans but Caucasians, Latinos, and members of other ethnic groups as well - ethnic groups that are suspiciously absent from an essay that purports to decry the inability for white Philadelphians to have an "honest" conversation about "race." 
More egregiously, the author of this essay, who notes that "[w]hat gets examined publicly about race is generally one-dimensional, looked at almost exclusively from the perspective of people of color," commits the same sin in reverse, by examining race exclusively from the perspective of, apparently, fifteen white people who have used isolated negative experiences to draw pervasive generalizations that the author then ascribes to the belief system of Philadelphia's entire white population. 
Philadelphia Magazine editor Tom McGrath defends his decision to publish the story by declaring, first, that it "is a story" merely because it features white Philadelphians, as opposed to Philadelphians of color, talking about race, as if merely saying that an article quoting the random thoughts of a random collection of people in selected areas of the city is worthy of publication makes it so. McGrath's second contention is that refusing to publish a piece about race would have rendered the problems of the city's "underclass" theirs, and theirs alone, to fight, as if the city's African-American population and its underclass are one and the same. Indeed, perhaps McGrath's description of Bob Huber's essay as a "story" is accurate. The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus defines "story" as "1. an account of imaginary . . . events." Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, American Edition (Oxford University Press, 1997). However, trying to deconstruct the article's many logical fallacies not only is an exercise in futility but offers the piece unearned credibility. Obviously, unless the resident whose chair was stolen or pumpkin smashed actually witnessed these acts of vandalism being committed by an African-American person, an assumption by the victim or the author about the ethnicity of the perpetrator is patently foolish. 
Obviously, the many positive, crime-free experiences of the thousands of Temple University students of all ethnic groups, bursting outward on the campus' ever-expanding footprint that has for decades included fraternity houses and University-owned rental housing, belie the cynical presumptions of a police officer whose job, after all, is to focus attention on the criminals rather than the law-abiding citizens. Surely Dennis, the math teacher in Kensington, might have used the criticism he received for calling his young male student, "boy," as a learning experience about the history of the relationship between Caucasians in the United States and African-American males, and identified a different way to discipline or speak sternly to the young man in the future, rather than interpreting it as evidence that "no one at the school could do anything, no matter how badly [the young man] misbehaved." Is it "possible" that Anna from Moscow just doesn't know that much about African Americans in America or our country's complicated racial history than does Dennis' young student? Rather than raging against the abject ignorance reflected in this uninformed, ill-advised, ill-considered, uninspired, and thoroughly unimaginative lament, I believe we should take the opportunity this essay offers to conduct a more comprehensive, fact-intensive evaluation of the racial issues and attitudes that provide the prism through which not only Philadelphians, but Americans across the country, view the many challenges that confront us as a community and as a nation. 
I therefore request that the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which is charged by the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter with a mandate, among other duties, to "institute and conduct educational programs to. . . promot[e] . . understanding among persons and groups of different races, colors, religions and national origins," conduct an inquiry into the state of racial issues, biases, and attitudes within and among the many communities and neighborhoods in the City of Philadelphia. Also, because the performance of its duties the Commission may cooperate with interested citizens and with public and private agencies," I ask that the Commission take testimony from individual citizens and from organizations including but not limited to community groups, non-profit organizations, community development corporations, law enforcement agencies, and religious organizations — perhaps citizens and organizations representing the ethnic, economic, and social diversity easily found in our great city -- for the purpose of submitting to me and our city a report on the state of racial issues in Philadelphia, identifying the racial attitudes, both positive and negative, that pervade our civic interaction and our discourse; the obstacles and opportunities that those attitudes present; and recommendations for the improvement or enhancement of racial interaction and the encouragement and embrace of the diverse culture that Philadelphia enjoys. Finally, I ask that the Commission consider specifically whether Philadelphia Magazine and the writer, Bob Huber are appropriate for rebuke by the Commission in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and the reckless endangerment to Philadelphia's racial relations possibly caused by the essay's unsubstanfated assertions. 
While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the "speech" employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater," its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction. Only by debunking myth with fact, and by holding accountable those who seek to confuse the two, can we insure that the prejudices reflected in the essay are accorded the weight they deserve: none at all.
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cc: Council President Darrell Clarke and All Members of Philadelphia City Council Representative Cheryl Parker, Chair of Philadelphia House Delegation and All Members Senator Shirley Kitchen, Chair of Philadelphia Senate Delegation and All Members Honorable Robert Brady, Congressman Honorable Chaka Fattah, Congressman Honorable Allyson Schwartz, Congresswoman Rob Wonderling, President - Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce Steven Bradley, Chairman - African American Chamber of Commerce Varsovia Fernandez, President & CEO - Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Julie Wong, President - Asian Chamber of Commerce Rev. Terrence Griffin, President - Black Clergy of Philadelphia & Vicinity Bishop Gregory Ingram, First Episcopal District of AME Church Rabbi David Straus, Jewish Community Relations Council Elisa Goldberg, President, Philadelphia Board of Rabbis All Members of Philadelphia Council of Religious Leaders Archbishop Charles Chaput - Archdiocese of Philadelphia Chris Satullo, Vice President News — WHYY Craig Ey, Editor - Philadelphia Business Journal Tom McGrath, Editor - Philadelphia Magazine William Marimow, Editor — Philadelphia Inquirer Michael Days, Editor — Philadelphia Daily News Harold Jackson, Editor — Editorial Page - Philadelphia Inquirer Sandy Shea, Editor — Editorial Page - Philadelphia Daily News Bob Bogle, President & CEO - Philadelphia Tribune Theresa Everline, Editor - Philadelphia City Paper Stephen Segal, Editor - Philadelphia Weekly Pedro Ramos, Chair SRC and All Members Dr. William Hite, Superintendent — School District of Philadelphia Neil Theobald, President - Temple University Dr. Amy Gutmann, President - University of Pennsylvania John Fry, President - Drexel University Dr. C. Kevin Gillespie, President - St. Joseph's University Brother Michel McGinnis, President - LaSalle University Dr. Stephen Spinelli, President - Philadelphia University Dr. Stephen Curtis, President - Community College of Philadelphia Jill Michal, President & CEO - United Way of Pennsylvania Helen Davis Picher, Interim President - William Penn Foundation Rebecca Rimel, President & CEO - Pew Charitable Trusts Bruce Melgary, Executive Director - Lenfest Foundation R. Andrew Swinney, President - Philadelphia Foundation Jerry Mondesire, President - NAACP Barry Morrison, Regional Director - Anti-Defamation League Sherrie Savette, President - Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia Patricia Coulter, President - Urban League of Philadelphia Sharmaine Matlock-Turner, President & CEO - Urban Affairs Coalition Joanna Otero-Cruz, Executive Director - Concilio Nilda Ruiz, CEO — Asociacion Puertoniquenos en Marcha Cynthia Figueroa, President — Congreso de Latinos Unidos Thomas Morr, President & CEO — Select Philadelphia/CEO Council for Growth John Chin, Executive Director - Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation Rick Sauer, Executive Director - Philadelphia Association of CDC Convenors, The Forum of Pennsylvania John McGowan, Business Operations Manager - ACLU

I was kind of under the impression that freedom of speech was a "human right," but I guess that's so 20th Century.