March 24, 2013

Evolutionary theorists: Migration bad for evolution of cooperation

The "selfish gene" paradigm of evolution raises a lot of fascinating conundrums about how human beings got so cooperative. If you look at chimpanzees, for example, mothers are nice to their children and members of the same group will reciprocate in picking lice off each other. But, that's about it. Their general attitude toward helping their fellow ape is: "We're chimps, not chumps." 

How could altruism evolve under the rules of natural selection? Did it? Well, taking a broad view of "altruism," dogs seem more altruistic toward humans than wolves do. Of course, that probably was the result of artificial rather than natural selection. But then how do we know that humans didn't get artificially selected for being nice, just like their dogs?

Anyway, I'm not the one to work out the ultimate theory of this. So, here's the latest game theory of how an instinct for friendliness could evolve. 

From Nature:
How Natural Selection Can Create Both Self- and Other-Regarding Preferences, and Networked Minds 
Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek & Dirk Helbing 
Biological competition is widely believed to result in the evolution of selfish preferences. The related concept of the ‘homo economicus’ is at the core of mainstream economics. However, there is also experimental and empirical evidence for other-regarding preferences. Here we present a theory that explains both, self-regarding and other-regarding preferences. Assuming conditions promoting non-cooperative behaviour, we demonstrate that intergenerational migration determines whether evolutionary competition results in a ‘homo economicus’ (showing self-regarding preferences) or a ‘homo socialis’ (having other-regarding preferences). Our model assumes spatially interacting agents playing prisoner's dilemmas, who inherit a trait determining ‘friendliness’, but mutations tend to undermine it. Reproduction is ruled by fitness-based selection without a cultural modification of reproduction rates. Our model calls for a complementary economic theory for ‘networked minds’ (the ‘homo socialis’) and lays the foundations for an evolutionarily grounded theory of other-regarding agents, explaining individually different utility functions as well as conditional cooperation. 
... In conclusion, we offer an over-arching theoretical perspective that could help to overcome the historical controversy in the behavioural sciences between largely incompatible views about human nature. Both, self-regarding and other-regarding types of humans may result from the same evolutionary process. Whereas high levels of intergenerational migration promote the evolution of a ‘homo economicus’, low levels of intergenerational migration promote a ‘homo socialis’, even under ‘Darwinian’ conditions of a survival of the fittest and random mutations. The significance of local reproduction for the evolution of other-regarding preferences is striking and may explain why such preferences are more common in some parts of the world than in others.
Our modelling approach distinguishes between the evolution of individual preferences and behaviours. This makes cooperation conditional on the level of cooperation in the respective neigh-bourhood. Hence, when a few ‘idealists’ are born, who cooperate unconditionally, this can trigger off cooperation cascades, which can largely accelerate the spreading of cooperation33. Our model can also serve as a basis to develop an economic theory of other-regarding agents. The advantage is that it does not need to assume certain properties of boundedly rational agents—these properties rather result from an evolutionary process. In fact, our model naturally explains the evolution of individually different utility functions, as they are experimentally observed (see Figs. 3 + 4), and also the evolution of conditional cooperators9, 34. 

I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether their entire theory works or not. But it sounds like a game theoretic version in reverse of Stephen G. Bloom's book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. Even though the New York media devotes a lot of effort to telling us all the time about Hate in small towns, you might start to suspect there's a bit of projection in that. Just walking down the street, you might think that people seem friendlier in smaller, more rooted places where they have to deal repeatedly with the same limited number of people.

Post: Nonwhites don't care about environment, whites at fault and must bribe minorities more to pretend to care

From the Washington Post:
Within mainstream environmentalist groups, diversity is lacking 
... But Tutman is not unique in his feelings of isolation. Minorities in the nation’s largest environmental organizations said in interviews that they feel the same way. 
In fact, they say, the level of diversity, both in leadership and staff, of groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind. 
Some of the groups say they are working toward greater diversity. “I think that the concerns are absolutely well founded,” said Adrianna Quintero, a lawyer for the NRDC. “It’s taken too long for environmental groups to work closely enough with minority communities.” 
Kim Coble, vice president of environmental protection and restoration for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the organization strives for inclusion, even though the percentage of minorities on its full-time staff is only 4.5 percent in a region where they represent nearly half the population.
“The environmental movement has a bit of a reputation as being a wealthy white community, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation works hard to counteract that,” Coble said. 
The reputation is deserved, said Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association. 
“This goes back a long way,” McDonald said. “It’s why I founded the [association] in 1985. . . . White groups weren’t hiring black professionals, and when they did, it was a hostile atmosphere. There were a handful of black professionals in the environmental groups then, and there are a handful now.” ...
The Sierra Club, whose director, Allison Chin, is Asian American, did not respond to requests for interviews. Spokeswoman Maggie Kao said the group has had an environmental justice arm for at least a decade. Still, several minorities who work for Sierra Club said it lacks diversity.

At no point in the article does anybody suggest that non-whites ought to care more about the environment. It's all about nonwhites getting more jobs and grants to cash in bigger on the environment racket.

Presumably, environmental organizations pay a little less than the corporations they pester. So, trustfunders tend toward Greenpeace and diversity hires gravitate toward BP. The only way to alter this is for the environmental organizations to devote less of their budget to doing whatever it is they do and more toward bidding wars for diversity hires.

It's fascinating how in the 21st Century, ancestry trumps just about everything else. It's kind of like the era of the divine right of hereditary monarchs in that who you are descended from seems to be considered the most important trait in determining your moral worth.

Will Andrew Sullivan finally get a break on the price of his AndroGel?

One of the big changes in my lifetime has been the slow undermining of antitrust law due to the triumph of econ majors. Back in the lefty/populist 70s when I was in college, the conventional wisdom was that the only thing keeping big corporations from conspiring to raise prices were the anti-trust laws (for the benefit of non-American readers who are baffled by the historical relic word "trust:" anti-monopoly/cartel and anti-price-fixing laws).

As I majored in economics at Rice U., however, I learned that the need for anti-trust laws is mostly a big myth, and the magic of the market would take care of all but the most egregious cases. A true believer, I quickly came to scoff at at lawsuits such as the "notorious Utah Pie case" in which the courts upheld antitrust laws despite obviously being Bad for the Economy.

Then I got into business myself, and discovered that competition wasn't perfect like in the Econ textbooks. From the point of view of corporate employees, competition was awful, and that anybody with a brain in his head would negotiate a price-fixing deal or set up a cartel or monopoly with his competitors if the government didn't ban it. 

But, as experience was teaching me the opposite of what I'd learned in college, enlightened opinion (driven heavily by people who got a good grade in Econ 101) was moving toward what I had believed so whole-heartedly in 1978.

Thus, in recent years, huge pharmaceutical firms have been fairly openly bribing their would-be generic rivals to stay out of their markets, and the courts have been fine with this. Now, a Supreme Court case will decide this:

From the NYT:
The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, No. 12-416, centers on whether the maker of a brand-name drug can pay a generic-drug company to keep the generic version off the market. Based on antitrust law, the obvious answer would seem to be no, the view voiced by the government and most recently upheld by a federal appeals court. 
At least three other federal appeals courts have previously said those payments are legal, however, when made under the settlement of a patent infringement lawsuit. Those courts sided with drug company arguments that the payments are what Congress intended in setting up guidelines to encourage the production of generic drugs. 
The question before the justices pits a company’s constitutional right to protect its intellectual property — through reliance on a patent that excludes competitors — against antitrust law, which holds that a company cannot unfairly exclude others from legitimately entering a business with a rival product. 
When the court rules later this year, its answer could have a sweeping effect on one of the largest segments of the nation’s economy and an industry that touches the wallets of nearly every American. 
“Everybody wants to believe that the big drug companies are bad, that they’re giving us these piles of money to stay off the market,” said Paul M. Bisaro, chief executive of Actavis, whose generic version of AndroGel, a testosterone replacement therapy, is the subject of the case. “But these payments have saved consumers billions and billions of dollars.” 
The agency says in its court briefs that the opposite is true: the payment “allows the brand-name manufacturer to co-opt its rival by sharing the monopoly profits that result from an artificially prolonged period of market exclusivity.” 
The stakes in the dispute are huge. Pharmaceutical sales in the United States totaled roughly $320 billion in 2011, according to IMS Health, a research company whose statistics the agency cites in its arguments. 
Brand-name drugs accounted for only 18 percent of the total prescriptions written by doctors in 2011 but 73 percent of consumer spending, IMS reported. When a generic version of a brand-name drug comes onto the market, the F.T.C. said, it costs about 15 percent of the original, causing the brand-name drug maker to quickly lose about 90 percent of its market share.

Barone v. Sailer / Kaus

Michael Barone writes:
As blogger Steve Sailer notes, a Pew Hispanic Center survey in 2005, near the peak of the housing bubble, reported that 22 million Mexicans would immigrate to the United States as legal guest workers if that was possible. The Pew and Gallup numbers are not commensurate, since Pew asked a hypothetical question and Gallup asked about general desire to immigrate, but there’s a huge difference between 22 million and 5 million. In the debate on immigration policy Sailer and Mickey Kaus have argued that large-scale illegal immigration from Mexico will likely resume when the U.S. economy revives and if a comprehensive immigration law provides legal status for many or most current illegal immigrants. I have predicted that we will never see the kind of large-scale Mexican immigration to the United States that we saw in 1982-2007. I think the Gallup numbers tend to support my prediction. Desire to immigrate does not usually yield a decision to immigrate. People take the plunge of immigration not just to make money but to pursue dreams or escape nightmares. For Mexicans these days the United States is less of a dream and Mexico is less of a nightmare than in the years from 1982 to 2007. 

It's called convergence: Mexico becomes more like America (good in theory, although the obesity data raises a disturbing counter-example), while America becomes more like Mexico.

But, here's a suggestion. The construction industry is just starting to pick up again, and contractors are starting to make houses-rotting-in-the-fields noises about how there are "shortages" of construction workers and they need to get their workers back from Mexico. So, why don't we wait five years and see what happens with immigration before passing some massive immigration "reform" law based on suppositions about how Fortunately, It Can't Happen Again?
Test case: Puerto Rico. The huge influx of Puerto Ricans to New York City that started in the late 1940s abruptly ended in 1961, when incomes in Puerto Rico reached one-third the U.S. mainland income level. There were and are no legal barriers for Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens under an act of Congress passed in 1917. They just stopped coming. Recent years have seen some movement of Puerto Ricans to the Mainland (probably more to metro Orlando than metro New York), but it’s nothing like the magnitude of the 1949-61 migration. The data suggested that Mexicans just stopped coming to the United States in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the recession began. I’m betting—aware of the nontrivial possibility that I could be wrong—that we won’t see another massive wave of immigration from Mexico.

Perhaps, although the tax breaks given to American corporations to prop up the economy of Puerto Rico, to stop the Puerto Ricans from coming, are lavish. Bribing Puerto Ricans to not be nationalists is enormously expensive on a per capita basis.

Moreover the Puerto Rican population in the U.S. is growing steadily, despite mostly living in low birthrate East Coast cities. According to a new study, the Census Bureau found 2.7 million Puerto Ricans in 1990, 3.7 million in 2000, and 4.6 million in 2010. Over the same period, the population of Puerto Rico itself grew slightly from 3.5 to 3.7 million (but the population of Puerto Rico is down compared to 2000.)

So, that's 74% growth over two decades.

Puerto Ricans, both in P.R. and in America, have low fertility, although the population can keep growing due to "demographic momentum"? (E.g., somebody with four children can have eight grandchildren a lot more easily than somebody with two children can have eight grandchildren.)

But, it's also true that Puerto Rican immigration has been substantial for the last seven years, despite the recession here.

Here's a good 2012 article by John Marino on Puerto Ricans immigrating to the U.S.:
Puerto Rico residents continued their exodus from the island over the past year during tough economic times, with the local population shrinking by 19,099 residents, or 0.51 percent, the biggest percentage loss by far of any U.S. jurisdiction, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 
The population loss was due to migration to the U.S., with a net 35,469 residents lost to out-migration [that a net of almost 1% of the population leaving in 1 year], while island births outpaced deaths by 16,370 during the 15-month period covered by the new Census data, which runs April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011. 
The drop-more than double the average annual population loss reflected in the 2010 Census for the previous decade- is part of the first new U.S. population estimate released by the bureau since the 2010 Census, which showed the island's population had declined by 82,821 people, or 2.2 percent, over the past decade. ...
Back in October, an Ipsos poll commissioned by WAPA-TV found 45 percent of islanders have considered leaving Puerto Rico in search of a better quality of life, with the majority of those setting their sights on the States. One-quarter (25 percent) of those who have considered a move from the island have taken concrete steps to do so, the poll found. 
Projected over the entire population, the poll results indicate some 1.5 million people would consider leaving the island, while 419,000 of those have at least started a plan to move. ...
Puerto Rico's population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the local population had declined between census counts. 
The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the States, which was the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. 

Puerto Rico is richer than Mexico in terms of per capita GDP, although Puerto Rico has been declining and Mexico improving.

In contrast, the Census found the number of individuals in the U.S. self-identifying as of Mexico origin growing from 13.4 to 31.8 million from 1990 to 2010, a growth of 137% or a little less than twice as fast as the growth in the Puerto Rican population.

It's crucial to note that a huge number of births to Mexican women in the U.S. are within a decade or so of arriving in this country. That's why the Mexican Total Fertility Rate has dropped sharply since the Sand State housing bubble popped -- fewer immigrants means fewer women arriving to have the 3 or 4 kids they can't afford to have in their own country. The last amnesty caused a big baby boom among the amnestied, and there is no reason to imagine the next one wouldn't do the same.

March 23, 2013

Robert Maxwell as Lord Copper

The death of one of the Russian oligarchs in England, Boris Berezovsky, reminds me of the startling life and death of a similar personality, Robert Maxwell, who was a huge figure in the English-language media and marketing industries a quarter of a century ago. Since everybody knows that only conspiracy theorists believe in conspiracies, but since Maxwell's entire life was one conspiracy after another, his entertaining memory Does Not Compute and has largely been forgotten.

"The Bouncing Czech" had, apparently, been some kind of Soviet agent off and on, and the basis of his fortune was the Soviets giving him the copyright of all their scientific journals for publication in English.

Maxwell also seemed to be some kind of Israeli spy. Wikipedia explains:
Shortly before Maxwell's death, a former Mossad officer named Ari Ben-Menashe had approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the United States with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nick Davies, were both long-time agents for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that in 1986 Maxwell had told the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear capability to the Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently lured from London to Rome by Mossad, where he was kidnapped and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for 18 years. 
No news organisation would publish Ben-Menashe's story at first but eventually the New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. ...
The close proximity of his death to these allegations heightened interest in Maxwell's relationship with Israel, and the Daily Mirror published claims that he was assassinated by Mossad after he attempted to blackmail them.[22]
Maxwell was given a funeral in Israel better befitting a head of state than a publisher, as described by author Gordon Thomas: 
On 10 November 1991, Maxwell’s funeral took place on the Mount of Olives Har Zeitim in Jerusalem, across from the Temple Mount. It had all the trappings of a state occasion, attended by the country’s government and opposition leaders. No fewer than six serving and former heads of the Israeli intelligence community listened as Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: "He has done more for Israel than can today be said" (Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, St. Martin's Press, 1999).[23]

Or, maybe Shamir was talking about something else. Who knows?

Back in 1994, I watched a C-SPAN Booknotes interview by Brian Lamb of Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson promoting his book about his misadventures as a writer trying to fit into the business world after he left politics and got an MBA at Stanford. Lamb asked him about how he got personal job interviews with Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Maxwell:
Robinson: And so Bill Buckley was a friend of Robert Maxwell, the British media baron, and Bill was kind enough to write a letter of introduction to Maxwell on my behalf. Actually, a business school classmate's father did business with Rupert Murdoch and was kind enough to write a letter to Rupert Murdoch on my behalf. And then a classmate was dating Steve Jobs and has since become Mrs. Steve Jobs ... 
Lamb: Who's Steve Jobs? 
Robinson: Steve Jobs -- that's right -- at his company ... 
Lamb: Who is he? 
Robinson: Who is Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs is the founder, in 1977, of Apple Computer Company. ... 

That was a classic Brian Lamb interview technique. My assumption is that Lamb assumed that viewers, even of C-SPAN, don't know anything about anything, so he asked all these Man-from-Mars questions that frequently rattled his subjects who were used to being interviewed by people who liked to show off how much they already knew, much to the bafflement of viewers. Lamb, instead, would ask the author of, say, a new Lincoln biography:

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author of new Lincoln biography [Baffled]: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author [Unnerved, but rallying]: "Well ... that's a very insightful question. I'm glad you asked that because that really gets to the heart of what my new biography of Lincoln is all about. We all think we know who Abraham Lincoln was, but do we fully grasp what it was to like to be Lincoln, to be a son of the prairie suddenly --"

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author [Finally sort of catching on]: "He was the President. ... During the Civil War."

I was particularly interested in Robinson's meetings with Robert Maxwell, who jumped off his yacht not long afterwards, about a month before Maxwell's embezzlement of many hundreds of millions dollars of his employees' pension funds was uncovered. I like this long segment because I'd dealt with Maxwell's company, and because Robinson's story sounds so much like how William Boot is hired as a war correspondent by Lord Copper in Waugh's Scoop. (Presumably, Robinson had read Scoop too, and thus his story of his meeting with the press lord is refracted through his delight in literature coming to life.)
Robinson: I had an interview -- in fact, two interviews with Robert Maxwell ... I met him in New York, and he had a suite at the top of the Helmsley Palace Hotel, which was the biggest hotel suite I have ever seen. I buzzed at the door and a little man came, opened the door, in a suit. It was a butler, a real butler, and he bowed to me from the head and said, “Good afternoon, sir.” And then a huge voice from around -- “Ah, that would be Robinson. Show him in. Show him in.” And this gigantic man -- Maxwell must have weighed 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce -- came padding around the corner in khaki trousers and a checked shirt and bare feet. 
He motioned me in, and I was now in a room that was two stories high. A curving staircase went up to the right, and off to the left was a kind of two-story bank of windows looking out on the Manhattan skyline with a grand piano, and if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had come high-stepping down those stairs, it wouldn't have seemed out of place to me at all. Maxwell was -- I had been warned that he was abrasive, he was difficult, he liked to humiliate people. He was, in fact, during that half-hour or so, absolutely charming, wanted to know all about me, where was I from, and we just chatted. ... At the end of the conversation, he said, “Well, I would not be averse to continuing this discussion. You must come to see us in London. See so-and-so and she will make the arrangements.” So ...

Robinson then explains why he changed the name of Maxwell's personal assistant to "Wilkes." (Poor Wilkes sounds like the forlorn and battered Mr. Salter, who works for newspaper baron Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, in Waugh's Scoop.)
Robinson: Robert Maxwell was a difficult enough man to deal with, and so I felt some sympathy for this fellow ["Wilkes"]. He was American and I was the one who was in need of a job, but he was trying very hard to sell me. He said, “Oh, Maxwell is -- he's a genius. This company is growing. What would you like to do here?” He just asked me what I would like to do. And then it was clear he kind of would give me any job I asked for, and it suddenly clicked that Maxwell must have told this person to hire me no matter what. 
As we were talking, the windows started to shake -- huge “whoop, whoop, whoop” sound -- and this fellow said to me, “Well, the helicopter's landing. He's here. We'll give him five minutes and go up and see the great man.” Waited five minutes; upstairs we went in the elevator. And there -- the anteroom or hallway outside Maxwell's office was this sort of cavernous place with a huge Maxwell logo, which was a map of the world with a gigantic M imprinted on it. And I noticed in the carpet -- this logo was repeated all through the carpet, stretching off into -- sort of into the distance. And the secretary said, “He's waiting for you.” So this fellow, Wilkes, as I call him in the book, opened the door. Just a gigantic room again -- tall windows looking out on the London skyline, Maxwell seated at a desk, and he stands up and he's wearing an electric blue suit, a hot pink bow tie, a bright blue shirt. He comes padding over to us. “Mr Robinson” -- shakes my hand -- “take a seat,” and he motions to a kind of conference table. 
... And his hair -- I'm sensitive to this. I'm getting gray myself now. His hair was absolutely jet black -- shoe-polish black -- as were his eyebrows. ... He was just a huge, bizarre, colorful figure. And my first impression was this kind of circus bear. 
And Maxwell turned to the fellow I had been dealing with and he said, “Well, what are we going to do with this young man?” And Wilkes said, “Well, Mr. Maxwell, Peter and I have been talking about his career” -- of course, not true. We hadn't been talking in any serious way at all. And he spins out this story about how I should start with the media group -- or the television group -- and after a year or two I could be running a chunk of the business on my own. I thought, this sounds remarkably good -- in fact, surreal. It can't be that good.
I was now 33 years old with not a whit of business experience. 
And Maxwell listens to this, and pauses for a moment and he says, “No. Wrong use to make of Robinson entirely.” Then he said that I would be his personal assistant. Maxwell said, “For example, this weekend I am flying to Moscow. Mr. Wilkes will accompany me. When Robinson joins the company, he will accompany me instead. He will sit in on the meetings, take notes -- notes on the negotiations -- return to the firm, and tell you and others what actions need to be taken as a result of the decisions I have reached.” This is almost exactly the way he talked. And this fellow turned ashen. Suddenly not only was I being brought into the company, I was, in effect, being made his superior. 
And [Wilkes] tried to object and Maxwell said, “No, no, no. Negotiate a starting date with Mr. Robinson and a salary. If he wants to join the firm, good, and if he doesn't,” waved his hand again. And just then the secretary walked in and said it was -- Ariel Sharon was on the line for Maxwell. So he got up and walked back to his desk and I heard him say, “Aric, how is the weather in Tel Aviv?” as we then went out of the office. Now he had flown me to London and he had spoken exactly five words to me: “Robinson, take a seat,” and then discussed me as though I was a kind of side of beef hanging in a shop window, and I decided that whole experience was just a little bit too bizarre. 
Oh, Mr. Wilkes -- we got out and down the hallway we went, and he kind of called me over to an alcove and he said, “You don't want this job. You don't want this job. Why don't you say it right now: ‘I don't want this job.’ Go ahead, say it.” 
Yes, he did. He said, “Maxwell is a madman.” I mean, he took back everything he had told me half an hour before. “Personal assistant -- he'll leave you on a runway in Moscow.” And I had subsequently found out stories -- someone was hired for a similar position by Maxwell, given a two-year contract, and Maxwell fired her the first day, gave her two years' salary, but said he didn't want to see her again. So he was just very mercurial. That was my experience with Robert Maxwell.
Lamb: By the way, the Maxwell estate turned out to be -- what? -- bankrupt? 
Robinson: I don't know that it's ever been decided clearly and for certain. What happened was that Maxwell -- it became clear that he was facing huge debts and it also began to become clear that he had effectively stolen about a billion dollars from his company's pension funds to pay off debts elsewhere in the corporate structure. And he retired to his huge yacht and one night -- it's still a little bit unclear, but it now seems as though he jumped into the ocean. He either fell into the sea or jumped into the sea, and that was the end of Robert Maxwell.

Robinson then had a job interview with Rupert Murdoch:
... And finally, I realized he'd offered me a job. I said, “Well, thank you very much.” He said, “I'd be tempted to make you my personal assistant,” and my heart sank. I thought, “Oh, no, back into the Maxwell problem.” “But,” he said, “I think that would be a disservice to you. I'd like you to come here and learn the company, and I'm hiring some young people to learn various aspects of the company, and in 10, 15 years they'll move up into management positions.” It all seemed very, very plausible to me. And then at the end he said, “By the way, I understand you've also talked to Robert Maxwell. Go to work for anybody else other than me if you want to, but don't go to work for Robert Maxwell. He chews people up and spits them out, and I've seen it again and again.” So that seemed to me the sanest alternative, and I went to work for Rupert Murdoch.

You'll notice that Rupert Murdoch, unlike Robert Maxwell, is still around.

Maxwell is about as forgotten as Armand Hammer, whose great-grandson Armie is now a movie star.

Russian oligarch in exile dies suddenly

From the BBC:
Exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has been found dead at his home outside London. 
A police investigation has been launched into the death of the 67-year-old - a wanted man in Russia, and an opponent of President Vladimir Putin. 
A former Kremlin power-broker whose fortunes declined under Mr Putin, Mr Berezovsky emigrated to the UK in 2000. 
Thames Valley Police said the death, at a property in Ascot, Berkshire, was being treated as unexplained. 
... Last year, Mr Berezovsky lost a £3bn ($4.7bn) damages claim against Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.

Mr Berezovsky claimed he had been intimidated by Mr Abramovich into selling shares in Russian oil giant Sibneft for a "fraction of their true worth". 
The allegations were completely rejected by the London Commercial Court judge, who called Mr Berezovsky an "inherently unreliable" witness.

Suicide? Murder? Did Putin have him rubbed out like Berezovsky's colleague who died from polonium poisoning? Am I being a Conspiracy Theorist by thinking Mr. Berezovsky probably didn't just keel over from a heart attack?

Back in 1989, I spent about six hours on a trans-Atlantic call negotiating a business deal with a minion of Robert Maxwell (the press baron initialed R.M. who wasn't Rupert Murdoch). At the last moment, Maxwell intervened to try to cheat on a point already agreed upon, so my boss and I immediately broke off negotiations. Two years later, when I heard that Maxwell had fallen off his yacht, being an inveterate conspiracy theorist I assumed there was more to the story than just the slip in the dark that the Responsible Authorities agreed upon before Maxwell's vast embezzlement of his workers' pensions was discovered.

To the Washington Post, it's always Clarksdale in 1965

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the Washington Post splashed so heavily the ludicrous story about the "mysterious" murder of the black, gay politician in Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi? The black killer crashed the black victim's stolen car, then confessed to the Coahoma sheriff department, headed by a black sheriff, where he had stashed the body of the black man running against the black mayor's black son. But who cares about the facts of the case when the story gives you a chance to talk about Mississippi's “dark history of racial brutality"?

I eventually surmised:
A theory about this week's Media KKKraziness 
Why has the last week seen the national media break out into a frenzy over the specter of white racism?  
Perhaps it goes back to the February 27th oral arguments at the Supreme Court over whether or not to bid adieu to Title 5 of the Voting Rights Act after 48 years. Justice Scalia's question about the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," about how quickly we glide from a world where affirmative action can't be ended because the beneficiaries are too weak to one where they are too strong, definitely got the press's goat. Scalia suggested that the Supreme Court is the only institution left in America with the independence and the moral backbone to say Enough Time Has Passed. 

From the Washington Post yesterday:
The Voting Rights Act should be left alone 
By Gregory B. Craig, Published: March 22 
Gregory B. Craig, a Washington lawyer, was White House counsel from January 2009 to January 2010. 
On Aug. 6, 1965, I was working in Coahoma County, Miss., trying to register new voters at the courthouse in Clarksdale. ... 
That summer, we persuaded 500 African American citizens in Coahoma County to try to register to vote. ... The summer of 1965 was hot and tense, but it was not as violent as the previous summer, when three workers were murdered in Neshoba County and when the chief of police in Clarksdale, Ben Collins, reportedly shot a black boy in the head in a public playground. Nonetheless, I lived in fear ... on the dusty streets of these small Delta towns ...  
Just before we left Clarksdale to drive out to Friars Point the night of Aug. 6, we learned that President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and that the U.S. government would be sending federal registrars to Mississippi. 
That was a moment of real hope and change.

You know how the neoconservatives view the whole world as if it's always Czechoslovakia in 1938? For the Washington Post editorial board, among others, various ramshackle overseas menaces (Iran/q, Hezbollah, etc.) are always the new Nazi Germany that must be crushed now before they blitzkrieg the world with their unstoppable military juggernauts.

Similarly, for the mainstream media when it comes to race, it's always Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1965. It never gets old.

What have boys who are smart at math and science ever done for humanity?

From the New York Times:
Girls Excel in the Classroom but Lag in Entry to 8 Elite Schools in the City 
By AL BAKER 
In the United States, girls have outshined boys in high school for years, amassing more A’s, earning more diplomas and gliding more readily into college, where they rack up more degrees — whether at the bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral levels. 
But that has not been the trend when it comes to one of the highest accomplishments a New York City student can achieve: winning a seat in one of the specialized high schools. 
At all eight of the schools that admit students based on an eighth-grade test, boys outnumber girls, sometimes emphatically. 
Boys make up nearly 60 percent of the largest and most renowned schools, Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, and as much as 67 percent at the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, according to city statistics. 
While studies suggest that girls perform as well as boys in math and science classes in high school, their participation in those fields drops off in college and ultimately in careers, a phenomenon that the White House, with its Council on Women and Girls, and the National Science Foundation have tried to reverse. 
The fact that girls are underrepresented in New York’s top high schools, which tend to be focused on math and science, and which have more than a dozen Nobel laureates among their alumni, worries some academics who see the schools as prime breeding grounds for future scientists and engineers. 
“It is very suspect that you don’t have as many girls as boys in New York City’s specialized schools,” said Janet S. Hyde, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who has published research on girls’ performance in math and science from elementary school through college. Individual girls might be losing opportunities, she said, “but it is also bad for society as a whole because in a global economy we need to identify the best scientists and mathematicians.” 
The racial makeup of the schools has been a combustible issue for years — 5 percent of the students accepted this month into the elite schools were black, and 7 percent were Hispanic. Civil rights groups have argued that using a test as the sole basis of admission favors students with means to prepare for the test, and have pushed unsuccessfully to have the schools adopt additional criteria, like middle school grades, for admission. 
The gender imbalance has not generated the same kind of protest. But several academics and analysts said the reliance on the test might also play a role in keeping girls out. While girls outperform boys on an array of academic benchmarks in high school and college, they still trail on standardized tests, like the SAT, according to federal Department of Education statistics. 
This year, of those who took the Specialized High School Admissions Test, 51 percent were girls. But only 45 percent of those offered seats in the schools were girls. 
... Even the specialized schools with a focus on the classics and humanities, Brooklyn Latin and the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, now have a majority of male students. It was not always that way: Girls outnumbered boys at both schools until recently. American Studies has used the specialized admissions test since it opened a decade ago. 
But in the first few years at Brooklyn Latin, founded in 2006, it had a broader admission policy based on grades and exams. Once it was made one of the specialized test schools, its population swung toward males. 
A corollary, perhaps, of the masculine leanings of the eight schools is the makeup of some of the elite high schools that do not use the specialized admissions test for admission. 
At Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, which admits students based on grades and auditions or portfolios of artwork, 73 percent of the students are girls. At Bard High School Early College, which has campuses in Manhattan and Queens, as well as at Millennium, Beacon and Townsend Harris High Schools, girls outnumber boys by at least 3 to 2. 

Has Mayor Rahm learned from Israel?

From WBBM-CBS in Chicago:
School Closing Opponents Call Mayor A Racist Liar 
CHICAGO (CBS) – The Chicago Public Schools’ plan to close 53 schools and 61 buildings, mostly in black neighborhoods, has some West Side residents vowing to fight the Emanuel administration until the end. 
As WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports, to hear some tell it on the West Side, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a racist liar who doesn’t care about the kids. And they’re just getting started. 
“I don’t see any Caucasians being moved, bussed, or murdered in the streets as they travel along gang lines, or stand on the steps of a CPS school,” said activist Wendy Matil Pearson as opponents of the school closing plans protested outside Horatio May Elementary Community Academy in the Austin neighborhood.

... Valerie Leonard, co-founder of the Lawndale Alliance, accused the mayor of trying to drive African Americans out of the city. 
“He says that he wants to turn around the city of Chicago, make a new Chicago. Does that new Chicago mean no black folks?” she said. “Where are people going to go? They’re not going to stay around in the community if there are no schools!” ...
The protesters weren’t the first to accuse Emanuel of racism in his school-closing effort. The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly said the school closing plans are racist, as most of the schools that would be closed are in African-American communities. 
On Thursday, CTU President Karen Lewis said the plan was both “racist” and “classist,” ...

I'm not up to date on Chicago, but none of this speculation about the Mayor's motivations sounds hugely implausible to me.

Mayor Emanuel is a worldly man. He's not some dweeb from Lake Forest. His family likes to emphasize how his mother was a civil rights activist for blacks in the American South, but they don't talk as much about his father. Dr. Benjamin Emanuel is an Israeli and belonged to the right-wing terrorist organization Irgun. Those are the the guys who blew up the British headquarters in the King David Hotel and committed the Deir Yassin massacre of an Arab village that did so much to improve Israel's long-term demographic position by terrifying many Palestinians into fleeing.

I'm not saying Rahm's dad was personally involved in either, but he was, by all accounts, a member of Irgun. And Irgun played a crucial role in Israeli history in the 1940s. Irgun was a predecessor of today's highly successful Likud Party. I presume that Rahm Emanuel is personally closer to Israel's non-Likud parties, but he definitely knows where Netanyahu is coming from.

The son remains so emotionally close to Israel that he served as a volunteer in Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. He's vacationed countless times in Israel, from summer camp as a child to recently vacationing there to hold his son's bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall.

Presumably, the Mayor of Chicago knows a lot about Israeli politics, and the #1 lesson that all parties in Israel understand deep in their bones, much more intensely than American politicians understand, is: Demographics Matter. The basic lesson is: You want more of your kind of people and fewer of the other kind of people. The Israeli statesman's duty is to make that happen.

The basic logic of Israeli politics is that the Palestinians are Arabs and that, while Israel is a small place, the Arab World is a huge place, so there are lots of other places for the local Arabs to move to, away from Israel.

If you are an African-American in Chicago, the suspicion that Dr. Emanuel's son might view Chicago as a small place and view you as somebody who has a big place to move somewhere else in (namely, the rest of America), would be uncharitable but not unreasonable. Deep down, perhaps Rahm feels: "We're not racist: we've got Barack! And Oprah and Michael Jordan are welcome back any time. The rest of you ..."

A reader writes:
I'm wondering if you could do a blogpost in the near future on any future possibility on the next Detroit(or several new Detroits), what time frame and for what sociological reasons.  
As you've written about before, there's a quiet quest by white liberals to chase out blacks. This is happening in NYC, D.C. and perhaps now in Chicago too.

Personally, I think St Louis is a good candidate [to become another Detroit], as is Memphis. Milwaukee is also right there on the list. Basically cities that are 2nd and 3rd tier, often populated by naïve and communitarian Germanics in the Midwest or abandoned by devil-may-care Southern whites like Memphis. Birmingham is another candidate in the latter category.

1st tier cities like Chicago or NYC understand that they could go down that path, which is why they're pricing out, or in the case of Chicago, just zoning people out from their homes. 

I'm not an expert on cities these days. It would seem like a fascinating subject to statistically model as a way of predicting real estate prices. The problem is that a big chunk of the model would involve using Census Bureau race statistics. Somebody would have to come up with a way to launder the racial aspect so that corporations could pay you lots of money for your insights without getting them into trouble.

Another aspect would seem to be airports. Winner cities tend to have airports with direct connections to lots of other cities, while loser cities don't. The arrow of causation points both ways, obviously, but some of it is that frequent fliers want to live near direct connection airports, such as Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and, perhaps, Denver. You can have an inadequate airport if you are San Francisco, but don't risk it otherwise.

But it's not really a build it and they will come situation either. I used to fly in to Cincinnati a lot, and the airport was halfway across Kentucky. Presumably, they put it there so it would have a lot of room for expansion, but nobody seemed to be expanding, perhaps because the airport was way the hell out in Kentucky.

Also, it helps to have two airports, one for the masses (e.g., LAX or Dulles) and one for the elites (e.g., Reagan or Burbank, which is turning into a high-priced convenience for the entertainment industry. LAX is full of tattooed proles, while Burbank is full of successful-looking middle-aged couples picking up their lovely daughter flying in from Georgetown U., via Reagan).

March 22, 2013

The best defense is a good offense: Quebec

One of the funnier outgrowths of 1960s minoritarianism was Quebec's successful campaign to get speakers of the language of King Louis XIV declared an oppressed minority deserving of as many special breaks from the government as the wounded amour propre of indignant French-speakers could demand. Granted, in picking on English-speaking Canadians -- the nicest, least desirous of trouble people on Earth -- French Canadians weren't exactly banging heads with Menachem Begin.

Not surprisingly, the separatist party in Quebec is upping the ante again. And why not? All in all, it's been a pretty successful ploy.

In the National Post of Toronto, Barbara Kay writes:
Barbara Kay: Quebec’s Bill 14 is a pathological attack on the sin of speaking English 
Thanks to Bill 101, Quebec’s 1977 Charter of the French language, no language in the world is as regulated as French is in Quebec. 
But Pauline Marois’ young minority PQ government was not satisfied with French merely being protected from erosion. This government seeks to establish the primacy of French in a way that will reduce the presence of English in every walk of public and private life. To that end Bill 14, the first substantial revision of Bill 101,  was conceived, written up and prepared for passage. 
Bill 14 contains 155 proposed amendments to the Charter of the French Language. The government considers them necessary because the French language “constitutes a stronger vector for social cohesion…and maintaining harmonious relations.” What Bill 14 is essentially designed for is to elevate the wish of francophones never to speak a language other than French — even the other official language of Canada — to a human right on the same level as the right to medical care.

To this end Bill 14 would co-opt all public institutions, municipalities, school boards, unions, private enterprises and even ordinary Quebecers as participants and – not to put too fine a point on it – occasional spies in the great common project of suppressing English. That the project would radically diminish the freedoms and quality of life of non-francophones seems irrelevant, perhaps even a matter of satisfaction, to this government. 
Francophones’ opportunities to become fluently bilingual would be curtailed.
Some examples of the proposed amendments: 
· A government regulation that allows English-speaking members of the Armed Forces who are in Quebec temporarily to have their children schooled in English would be rescinded. ...
· Officially bilingual municipalities could lose their bilingual status against their democratic will because of slight demographic shifts. 
· Daycares would have to facilitate the acquisition of French-language skills by infants. 
· Employers would be required to justify the need for employees to speak any other language than French. An employee required to communicate in a language other than French would have the right to sue his or her employer for monetary damages. 
The PQ is obsessed with language domination to a degree that is in political terms pathological. The devastation of English school boards; the linguistic hardships imposed on the men and women who protect our country from harm; the cultural and psychological marginalization of fellow citizens for the Original Sin of being anglophone: What we are seeing with this government makes the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the years before the Quiet Revolution seem anodyne by comparison. 
In throwing off the Church’s domination, and with it all the trappings of their religion, Quebec also divorced itself from its cultural roots. 
The religious metaphor is apt. In throwing off the Church’s domination, and with it all the trappings of their religion, Quebec also divorced itself from its cultural roots. Without roots, there can be no new branches. All Quebec has that may be called culturally unique is language. The moral panic we have seen over the years – first to preserve French from disappearance, but now the push by Quebec’s new high priests to sanctify it and keep it safe from the pollution of other languages – is unjust to non-francophones, but arguably more harmful to francophones, whose aspirations have been appropriated as burnt offerings to the language gods.

Why are they doing this? Well, why is the NCAA holding a basketball tournament right now, even though 67 of 68 teams will end their seasons as losers? Because coming together with your team to fight is fun. Defeating the foe is even more fun. As John Milius phrased it:
Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life? 
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair. 
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life? 
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. 

Look, very few people have gotten killed in Quebec's language wars over the last 45 years. And it's not as if Quebec has fallen into ruin because the Québécois have been slowly shoving out the Scots and Jews who used to run Montreal's businesses. Quebec isn't Zimbabwe. The Québécois can run their own country.

Sure, it's annoying to see the winners win by being nasty and the losers lose because they are nice, but such is the way of the world.

Meet the new Bush, same as the old Bush

With apologies to Townshend and Daltrey.

Here's the Derb on Jeb Bush's immigration book.

Gallup: 138 million foreign adults want to immigrate to USA

The Gallup organization just released the results of a poll of 500,000 people worldwide. It turns out that America is the first choice destination for 138 million adult would-be immigrants. (Their children would no doubt add scores of millions more, bringing the total up to around, say, 200,000,000.)

And America Jr. (i.e., Canada) is the first choice of 37 million adults, and America's nephew Australia is the first choice of 26 million. Most of those would likely go to America instead if they could get in.
About 13% of the world's adults -- or about 630 million people -- say they would like to leave their country and move somewhere else permanently. For roughly 138 million people, that somewhere else would be the U.S. -- the No. 1 desired destination for potential migrants. The U.K., Canada, and France also rank among the top choices for potential migrants.
top desired destinations.gifThese findings are based on a rolling average of Gallup interviews with 501,366 adults in 154 countries between 2010 and 2012. The 154 countries represent more than 98% of the world's adult population; 3% of that population would like to relocate to the U.S. permanently. 
Approximately 19 Million in China Want to Move to the U.S. Permanently

Potential migrants who would like to move to the U.S. are logically the most likely to come from some of the most populous countries in the world. Roughly 10 million or more adults would like to move to the U.S. permanently from China, Nigeria, and India.
countries from which the most migrants to the US would likely come.gif
However, other populous countries such as Iran and Pakistan do not have large groups of people who say that they would like to move to the U.S. permanently. Instead, Pakistanis most desire to relocate to Saudi Arabia and the U.K. and Iranians would prefer to move to Jordan or Lebanon. This is not surprising, as Iranians and Pakistanis have some of the lowest U.S. leadership approval ratings in the world. 
The percentage of people in each country who would like to move to the U.S. permanently is perhaps more interesting. A staggering 37% of Liberians say that they would like to relocate to the U.S. permanently. One in four adults or more in Sierra Leone, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti would also like to move to the U.S. permanently. Three countries with the highest percentages of people who would like to relocate to the U.S. permanently are in Africa, seven are in Central America and the Caribbean, with the remaining country, Cambodia, in Asia. 
countries from which the highest percentage of population would like to move to the US.gif
Back in 2005, during Bush's Housing Bubble when their were lots of jobs in the Sand States, Pew found that 22 million Mexicans would like to illegally immigrate to the U.S. and about twice that many would come legally. But, convergence between Mexico and America has, at least temporarily, reduced the desirability of life in America to Mexicans. The way Mexicans look at the situation today, America is just too damn full of Mexicans to bother with.

So, even though it looks like about, say, a quarter of a billion foreigners and their kids would like to move here, that wouldn't actually happen even if America's immigration policy was as ethically sophisticated as our moral exemplars, taxpayer-supported libertarian economic theorists, suggest. Pretty quickly, the advantages of the U.S. as a place to live over even Liberia would start to wash away and the foreigners would go pester, maybe, New Zealand instead.

The EB-5 Visa ripoff of Americans

From the Washington Post:
They looked like any other family here in rural Michigan, but they are Dutch citizens. And they are faces of a fast-growing U.S. visa program in which foreigners can gain permanent residence by investing $500,000 in a U.S. project that creates at least 10 jobs. 
Through the program, known as EB-5, the Dekkers have a half-million-dollar stake in the Marriott Marquis Hotel rising in the District next to the Washington Convention Center. 
In return for their investment — and filing a foot-high stack of documents that includes bank and tax records, criminal background checks and even syphilis tests — they got five shiny new green cards in November. 
The cards, emblazoned with their photos and an image of the Statue of Liberty, give them temporary residency that will become permanent in two years — so long as the Marriott project succeeds. 
The Dekkers need it to keep their family together. Although they have lived on their farm off a country lane called Bad Axe Road since 2000, they had temporary visas that required their children to leave the country upon turning 21. Investing in the Marriott was their way to prevent that . 
“We love our life here,” said Judith Dekker, 48. “We have invested so much money because we want to live here in Michigan. And we don’t want to split up our family.” 
The EB-5 program is booming in popularity, driven largely by a struggling U.S. economy in which developers are searching for new sources of capital. It is also fueled by rising demand from foreigners looking for access to U.S. schools, safe investment in U.S. projects and — in the case of China, where most of the investors are from — greater freedom. 
The program has broad bipartisan support in Congress, and key senators who are negotiating an overhaul of the immigration system have said they are leaning toward expanding visa programs that provide an immediate boost to the economy. 
But others argue that the EB-5 program amounts to buying citizenship, and that it unfairly allows wealthy foreigners to cut the visa line ahead of others who have waited for years. ...

Nobody notices the most cogent objection that citizenship is being sold too cheaply. This is the direct analog of the huge violation of fiduciary duty when a corporate executive creates new stock in a publicly traded company and sells it too cheaply. But economists are largely impervious to grasping this analogy.
 Three-quarters of all those visas have been issued since 2008, when the recession hit and developers started having trouble finding capital. 
The program also provides cheap financing for U.S. developers. EB-5 investors are offered very small returns on their investment — usually about 1 to 3 percent — rather than the much higher rates developers would have to pay for traditional financing.

In other words, these foreigners didn't pay $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury to reduce our tax burden in return for diluting the scarcity value of U.S. residency. Instead, they invested $500,000 with Marriott, which they reasonably expect to get back, just with lower than market interest rate payouts. In other other words, under this plan, you and me are subsidizing Marriott's financing of its hotel by diluting the scarcity value of U.S. citizenship. 

What's the net benefit to current American citizens in general? Nobody seems to know, but it would appear that Marriott shareholders pocket the great bulk of the financial benefit. Excluding Marriott shareholders, the benefit to the general American citizenry of giving out five greencards is probably in the range of a few thousand dollars. Basically, this program consists of Marriott and foreigners conspiring to benefit each other at the general citizenry's expense.

Is that really the market price for green cards? Couldn't this program, with an annual limit of 10,000, be replaced with an auction that auctions off the same number of green cards per year, with the cash going directly to the U.S. Treasury? What would annual auction of 10,000 green cards net for the Treasury? Maybe a couple of orders of magnitude more benefit for the average American than this program.

Now, you could say that this program isn't as destructive as other immigration programs, but, as you learn in Econ 101, you are supposed to think in terms of opportunity cost. The forgone benefit to the average America taxpayer adds up to many billions per years. But, basic Econ 101 thinking like opportunity cost, supply and demand, and scarcity value is, for never explained reasons, verboten when thinking about the economics of immigration. Instead, you're supposed to just lie there and think about the Statue of Liberty.

Surprise: Obama Administration not actually trying to keep out future Democratic voters

From the New York Times:
Officials Still Seek Ways to Assess Border Security 
By JULIA PRESTON 
More than two years after Homeland Security officials told Congress that they would produce new, more accurate standards to assess security at the nation’s borders, senior officials from the department acknowledged this week that they had not completed the new measurements and were not likely to in coming months, as the debate proceeds about overhauling the immigration system. 
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers were taken aback at a hearing on Wednesday in the House of Representatives when Mark Borkowski, a senior Homeland Security official, said he had no progress to report on a broad measure of border conditions the department had been working on since 2010. The lawmakers warned that failure by the Obama administration to devise a reliable method of border evaluation could imperil passage of immigration legislation. ...
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, a Democrat and strong a supporter of President Obama’s immigration proposals, was more blunt. “I would say to the department, you’ve got to get in the game,” she said. 
Amid contentious discussions in Congress over immigration, one point of wide agreement is that an evaluation of border security will be a central piece of any comprehensive bill. A bipartisan group in the Senate is working to write legislation that includes a “trigger,” which would make the path to citizenship for more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the country contingent on measurable advances in security at the borders. 
Lawmakers have been pressing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to devise a measure they can use to judge if the Obama administration’s claims of significant progress in border enforcement are justified. Republican senators in the bipartisan group have said a border standard is pivotal to their efforts.
“We need to have a measurement,” Senator John McCain of Arizona insisted at a hearing in the Senate last week. ...
Obama administration officials said on Thursday that they had resisted producing a single measure to assess the border because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. 

This shouldn't be terribly shocking. The President is a loyal member of his party and tries, when he can, to act in the long term interest of his party, which is to have the government elect a new people.

Can the same intelligent partisanship be attributed to the Republican grandees?

March 21, 2013

Learning from NYC: Only frisk "the right people"

As part of an ongoing series at iSteve trying to explain to clueless flyover folk how their moral betters in New York actually manage things, here's a funny news story out of New York about the class action discrimination lawsuit against the NYPD's highly effective policy of stopping and frisking huge numbers of shifty-looking young black and Hispanic males. An underperforming, malcontent Hispanic cop secretly taped his Irish sergeant trying to explain to him that he needed to make more stops on his South Bronx beat, and make them of "the right people." Officer Serrano succeeded once in goading Sergeant McCormack into spelling out who "the right people" are:
The commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, urged the officer to be more active, emphasizing the need to conduct more street stops. “We go out there and we summons people,” Inspector McCormack said. The way to suppress violent crime, he said, was for officers to stop, question and, if necessary, frisk “the right people at the right time, the right location.”
The officer, who surreptitiously recorded the conversation last month, began pressing Inspector McCormack about who he meant by the “right people.” The conversation grew heated.
After an exchange about Mott Haven, a particularly crime-prone neighborhood, the inspector suggested that the police needed to conduct street stops of the people creating “the most problems” there.
“The problem was, what, male blacks,” Inspector McCormack said. “And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21.”

But that's the only time:
... The question of what commanders mean by “the right people” is central to the trial. 
Civil rights lawyers have long maintained that the term “right people” is police code for young black and Hispanic men, who make up an overwhelming share of those stopped. But the police, on the other hand, say that they use this phrase to describe habitual lawbreakers, and that by focusing on the “right people,” they are trying to avoid giving tickets to the construction worker drinking a beer on his way home or the couple strolling through a park that is closed for the night. 
The officer who made the recording, Pedro Serrano, 43, testified on Thursday that he believed his supervisors used the expression to pressure officers to stop blacks and Hispanics without reasonable suspicion. 
... When he went to Inspector McCormack’s office last month to complain about his work evaluation, he immediately came under criticism for having reported only a couple of street stops for all of 2012. 
“It seems like you are purposely not doing anything to help prevent the shootings, the robberies and the grand larcenies,” Inspector McCormack said. To conduct so few stops in a year, amid so much crime, he said, was “not fair to the public.” 
“I could see in Central Park maybe that would be fine, but this ain’t Central Park,” Inspector McCormack said. 
Officer Serrano explained that his interactions with the public did not always rise to stops, as a matter of law, and so he rarely filled out the UF-250 form, which officers are supposed to fill out each time they conduct a stop. 
At first, Inspector McCormack can be heard lecturing Officer Serrano about how “99 percent of these people in this community are great, hardworking people” who deserve to go about their days in peace. But the citizens, he said, were troubled by crime, and he went on to describe how a woman in her 60s was shot coming out of an elevator at 10 a.m. 
The ambiguity in how the phrase “stopping the right people” is used by police commanders, and how it may be interpreted by patrol officers, was evident in the recordings played in court. 
Pressed by the officer on what he meant, Inspector McCormack offered examples of people who should not be stopped, like an elderly person violating a parks rule by playing chess. He also cited the stop of a 48-year-old woman who was intercepted on her way to work as she took a shortcut through a park that was closed for the night. 
“You think that’s the right people?” Inspector McCormack asked the officer skeptically. 
But with Officer Serrano challenging him, the inspector never offered a clear answer. 
“So what am I supposed to do?” Officer Serrano asked, after Inspector McCormack used that expression again. “Is it stop every black and Hispanic?” 
The exchange continues until the inspector brings the conversation to a close, telling the officer, “You’re very close to having a problem here.” 
The inspector continued, “The problem is that you don’t know who to stop and how to stop.” 
In a later passage of the recording, which was not played in court, Inspector McCormack seemed to suggest to others there that Officer Serrano was trying to put words in his mouth. “He’s adding on that I wanted him to stop every black and Hispanic.” 

New Yorkers slowly starting to notice Mexicans aren't Ellis Island Italians

From the NYT:
Mexican New Yorkers Are More Likely to Live in Poor Households 
By KIRK SEMPLE 
People of Mexican descent in New York City are far more likely to be living in poor or near-poor households than other Latinos, blacks, whites or Asians, according to a study to be released on Thursday. 
Nearly two-thirds of the city’s Mexican residents, including immigrants and the native-born, are living in low-income households, compared with 55 percent of all Latinos; 42 percent of blacks and Asians; and 25 percent of whites, said the report by the Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group in New York City that focuses on poverty. 
The rates are even more pronounced for children: About 79 percent of all Mexicans under age 16 in New York City live in low-income households, with about 45 percent living below the poverty line — significantly higher percentages than any other major Latino group as well as the broader population. 
While the Mexican immigrants enjoy exceptionally high rates of employment, their salaries are not sufficient to support young families, the study’s authors said. 
“Immigrant Mexicans appear to be having great difficulty making ends meet as they start families here,” said the study, which sought to assess socio-economic trends among young people of Mexican origin in New York City. “Incomes that might support one individual on their own or in a shared household are not enough to support a family.” 
“The result could be a cycle of poverty that will pass down from generation to generation,” the authors warned. ...
The study was commissioned by the Deutsche Bank Foundation following the publication of an article in The New York Times in 2011 about extraordinarily low educational achievement among Mexican immigrants in New York City. 

Mexicans tend to make enough to live as singles, but not enough to have families, but our Anchor Baby legal interpretation makes it stupid for them not to have the children they can't afford.

Iraq War Fatalities: The White Man's Burden

With the most spectacular element of the Bush Administration's Invade the World - Invite the World grand strategy now a decade old, it's worth taking a look at the U.S. military death tolls by ethnicity and sex. This is an infrequently covered subject of scant interest to the press because women and minorities were not hit hardest. 

In the mid 2000s, non-Hispanic whites made up about 61% of the 25-year-olds in the U.S. But through this 2009 report by Hannah Fischer of the Congressional Research Service, whites made up 74.7% of Iraq war fatalities, while minorities only accounted for 25.3%. So, whites gave the last full measure of devotion at an 89% higher per capita rate than nonwhites in Iraq.

The sacrifice gap was even larger in Afghanistan through 2009, with whites dying at a per capita rate 146% higher than nonwhites.

And, of course, the white man's rate was even higher compared to the rest of the population of young adults of both sexes: roughly 500% higher in Iraq, and over 650% higher in Afghanistan.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. 
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain. 
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Next time, maybe not?

America's most successful industry ignores diversity

From a CNN special report:
How diverse is Silicon Valley? Most tech companies really, really don't want you to know, and the U.S. government isn't helping shed any light on the issue. 
In an investigation that began in August 2011, CNNMoney probed 20 of the most influential U.S. technology companies, the Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filing two Freedom of Information Act requests for workforce diversity data.

A year and a half, a pile of paperwork, and dozens of interviews later, we have a little more insight -- but not much. 
Most of the companies stonewalled us, but the data we were able to get showed what one might expect: Ethnic minorities and women are generally underrepresented, sometimes severely so -- particularly in management roles. 
White and Asian males often dominate their fields. 
Our investigation demonstrated how difficult -- and sometimes impossible -- gaining any insight into Silicon Valley's employee diversity can be. It shows a general lack of transparency in an industry known for its openness.

It's not clear why Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, gets special treatment. Big campaign donations? Or a genuine fear of killing the goose that lays the golden egg?

Anyway, I thought Diversity Is Our Strength ... so, how come the celebrated supermen of Silicon Valley, like the late Steve Jobs, don't agree? Do they know something we don't know?