The mysterious epidemic of worker disabilty

Via Kevin Drum, the Wall Street Journal says:

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

Thank goodness we let in all those illegal immigrants to do the jobs Americans are just too disabled these days to do. Who knew that working class Americans would suffer an epidemic of vague back pain and balky knees after decades of business, political, and economist elites conspiring to hammer down their wages through non-enforcement of immigration laws? Fortunately, our political, economic, intellectual, and moral betters somehow sensed that their fellow citizens would be getting more disabled in the future (apparently, arthroscopic surgery has been disinvented, or something), so our leaders brilliantly took action ahead of time to make sure America had an ample supply of unskilled foreign laborers to replace the Americans overwhelmed by this mysterious epidemic of disability. 

Archie and Jughead time travel to the future of music

Apparently, my popular music sensibility is derived from old Archie and Jughead comic books.

Charlotte Allen's expose of the SPLC

Charlotte Allen writes in The Weekly Standard:

King of Fearmongers 

Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, scaring donors since 1971

... Irony turns out to be what the SPLC is all about. Thanks to the generosity of four decades’ worth of donors, many of whom—as SPLC president Richard Cohen himself noted in a telephone interview with me—are aging Northern-state “1960s liberals” who continue to associate “Southern” and “poverty” with lynchings, white-hooded Klansmen, and sitting at the back of the bus, and thanks also to what can only be described as the sheer genius at direct-mail marketing of Dees, the SPLC’s 76-year-old lawyer-founder, who was already a multimillionaire by the late 1960s from the direct-mail sales of everything from doormats to cookbooks, the SPLC is probably the richest poverty organization in the history of the world. From its very beginning the SPLC, thanks to Dees’s talent for crafting multi-page alarmist fundraising letters, has not only continuously operated in the black, but has steadily accumulated a mountain of surpluses augmented by a shrewdly managed investment portfolio. Today the SPLC’s net assets total more than $256 million (that figure appears on the SPLC’s 2011 tax return, the latest posted on the organization’s website). ... 

So impressed was the Direct Marketing Association in 1998 with Dees’s superb fundraising talents that it inducted him into its Hall of Fame, where he shares honors with Benjamin Franklin, first postmaster general, and catalogue retailer L. L. Bean. ... The new SPLC building, a postmodernist parallelepiped faced in steel and black glass, has been variously described by its critics as a “small-scale Death Star” and a “highrise trailer.”  

The SPLC turned the original Poverty Palace into a museum that complements another of its Montgomery monuments, the Civil Rights Memorial, where an imposing granite circle designed by Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, records the names of such iconic martyrs to the civil rights cause as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., neither of whom was ever a client of the SPLC. In 2010 the Montgomery Advertiser published a 60-photo online slideshow of Morris Dees’s lavishly appointed neo-Mediterranean home, whose eclectic architectural and interior-decor influences seemingly included the Alhambra, David Hockney’s swimming-pool paintings, the Etsy home page, and a 1970s shag-rug revival. In one slide Dees’s fourth wife, artist and weaver Susan Starr, modeled a floor-length evening coat that she had stitched out of transparent vinyl sheeting and fake fur. 

There's much more here.

Still, there may soon come a day when the SPLC’s donation-generating machine, powered by Dees’s mastery of the use of “hate” to coax dollars from the highly educated and the highly gullible, finally breaks down. That is why, according to Cohen, the SPLC has no intention of soon spending down much of that $256 million in stockpiled assets that has earned the center an “F” rating from CharityWatch. “We’ve tried to raise a substantial endowment, because our fundraising is on a downward trend,” Cohen told me. “Those 1960s liberals—they’re getting older, and the post office is dying. We’re likely to be out of the fundraising business within 10 years.” What the SPLC wants to do is to ensure that “hate” is forever. 

Eh, I figure the SPLC has a long fundraising future in front of it. Just to run an idea up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes, how much of that $256 million would it cost, say, to donate blankets to homeless people near liberal arts colleges? And how much more would it cost if the blankets were, you know, white snuggies with maybe sleeves for convenience and a hood built in to keep the homeless folks' heads warm? Think of the ROI! There's a market out there and somebody is going to meet the demand for the glue that holds the Democratic Party together. Why not the reigning champs of KKKraziness?

The Joy of Elderly Tourette's Syndrome: Dance Music Edition

Here are the thoughts of two Spanish brothers on the kind of music they play in the famous Ibiza disco they own:

Ricardo Urgell, the son of a Barcelona engineer, built Pacha in the early 1970s on a desolate half-acre he bought for about $14,000. After its opening in 1973 the club came to represent ultracool debauchery and an escape from the conservative moral code of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator. Native Ibicencos mixed with artists, hippies, thieves on the lam and those whose bronzed bodies were all the clothing they required. 

But as the scene grew, the elder Urgells eventually became disenchanted by the music that made them millionaires. 

“It’s monotonous sound and volume; it’s bodies squeezed together, it’s a little masochistic,” Ricardo Urgell said in a 2011 interview. “The great defect of this music,” he added, “is that it has to be accompanied by drugs. I took Ecstasy just one time in my life and found that out for myself.” 

Electronic music, Piti Urgell said last month, “hasn’t evolved in 20 years and is for idiots.”

Elderly Tourette's Syndrome helps make family gatherings full of interest. 

Anyway, I'm struck that it's older people these days who are the ones who most object to the relative lack of change in popular music. Perhaps us old fogeys are wrong and music is changing as fast today as in, say, the mid-1960s. But, it doesn't seem that way.

My general theory of 20th Century pop music is the spectacular changes in taste in the middle decades of the century were driven less by the much discussed sociological changes (e.g., Baby Boomers, racial changes, etc.) and more by technological changes. For example, Bing Crosby was the first to figure out that the microphone meant that singing was no longer as much of an athletic feat and now a more intimate medium. Similarly, the evolution of the electric guitar from the 1930s through the 1950s had much to do with The Sixties.

In contrast, the electronic synthesizer, which began to appear on records in the 1960s, has proved (at least so far) to be the ultimate instrument. The subsequent digitalization of sound generation and recording now allows anything to be done. But this complete creative freedom has led to perhaps less creativity as musicians less often have to deal with collective challenges, such as the electric guitar and multi-track recording revolutions of the 1960s. Moreover, audiences want, and can now get, their precise subgenre of music. 

The result is a more stable popular music landscape. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste.

The g factor and Ulam's challenge to Samuelson

The mathematician and thermonuclear bomb designer Stanislaw Ulam famously challenged economist Paul Samuelson to come with up a social science theory that was both true and nontrivial. After a few years, Samuelson replied with Ricardo's 1817 theory of comparative advantage in foreign trade: if Portugal is worse than Britain at making both steam engines and corks for wine bottles, Portugal should still concentrate on making corks because it's comparatively less bad at corks than at steam engines. (These may not be the precise examples Ricardo used in 1817, but they get his point across.)

Of course, Portugal's corkocentrism helps explain why the Portuguese Navy was such a decisive strategic element in the Age of Steam, but the advantages of having a navy that rules the waves are not considered relevant in conventional economics. 

Samuelson wrote to Ulam:

That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.

Whether Ulam, co-inventor with Edward Teller of staged radiation implosion, responded by pointing out the advantage of making nuclear weapons and not trading them is unknown. Compared to the Hussein family of Iraq and the Qaffathy family of Libya, two ruling clans that didn't find the economics of making nuclear weapons rational, the Kim family of North Korea has enjoyed a comparative advantage at avoiding violent death.

I've long thought that Spearman's 1904 g (for general) factor theory of intelligence is reasonably comparable in nontriviality.

I've always had a hard time grasping it myself. Back in 1998, I wrote a review of Arthur Jensen's magnum opus, The g Factor, that considered some of the paradoxical social and political implications:

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, a 1981 book that continues to shape the non-scientific intelligentsia's feelings about IQ, demonized g as the "rotten core" of Prof. Jensen's 1969 article documenting the white-black IQ gap. The g Factor's overwhelming vindication of g, drawing on 15 years of new research, might seem likely to end the debate. It won't, of course, for reasons good and bad. The book sheds light on crucial new issues beyond the narrow scope of g (such as racial differences in nerdishness). More depressingly, few will grasp either its strengths or its limitations due to fundamental confusions rampant among American intellectuals about how to think about humanity. 

For example, nobody noticed that Gould's assertion that human equality is a factual (rather than a moral, legal, or spiritual) reality centered on denouncing g; yet, g is the only concept that could conceivably make sense of his claim. 

Ironically, the g-ocentrists are among the last students of human nature making important discoveries within the egalitarian world-view. The one technique capable of uncovering mental equality is Jensen's: minimize the number of data points by measuring only the single most important factor (g) across only a few vast groups. Thus, Jensen, the Great Satan to egalitarian fundamentalists, delivers in Chapter 13 the most important pro-equality finding in recent decades: Men and women really do possess the same average g. Their equal average IQ's scores aren't just an artifact of IQ tests being rigged to produce this result. Jensen's finding is hugely important in itself: it's the best explanation of the splendid performance of women in many white-collar jobs. 

Still, this example also shows that g, like any successful reductionist theory, has its limits. Males and females, while similar on mean g (but not on the standard deviation of g: guys predominate among both eggheads and knuckleheads), differ on several specific cognitive talents. Men, Jensen reports in passing, tend to be better at visual-spatial skills (especially at mentally rotating 3-d objects) and at mathematical reasoning. Women are generally superior at short-term memory, perceptual speed, and verbal fluency. Since the male sex is stronger at logically manipulating objects, while the female sex prevails at social awareness, that explains why most nerds are male, while most "berms" (anti-nerds adept at interpersonal skills and fashion) are female. Beyond cognition, there are other profound sex dissimilarities in personality, motivation, and physiology. All this helps explain the sexes' different patterns in career choices. 

Because Jensen's simple, single-factor model can detect intellectual equality between men and women, it can also detect intellectual inequality between whites and blacks, if that's what the facts are. Although most responses to Jensen's equality/inequality model haven't risen above name-calling, obfuscation, guilt-by-association, and professional cowardice, there is a logical, fruitful alternative: develop a complex, multi-factor "diversity" model that rather than concentrating upon one difference among a very few groups, focuses on the many differences visible among many groups. Emphasizing the trade-offs necessary for achieving different goals, it makes toting up an overall winner look a little pointless. 

The diversity perspective has much to offer, but only when it's thoroughly understood that it's inherently less empirically egalitarian than Jensenism. The diversity model's current popularity, however, stems from the wishful thinking that it discredits racial differences, on the assumption that since Diversity and Equality are both Good Things, they must be synonyms rather than antonyms. One particularly fashionable defense of empirical equality is to combine the doctrine that there "are no such things as races" (just swarms of little ethnic groups) with Harvard professor Howard Gardner's speculations about seven "multiple intelligences." Ergo, all groups must be equal, QED. 

Let's do the math: assume, say, 100 ethnic groups and seven "intelligences." That's 700 data points. No way, no how could they all be equal -- our universe doesn't work like that. The more complex your model, the less equality and the more diversity you'll perceive in the world. 

Interestingly, when I pointed this out to Gardner, he agreed with me.

Douthat: "Secrets of Princeton"

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:

The Secrets of Princeton 

By ROSS DOUTHAT 

SUSAN PATTON, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she’s something much more interesting: a traitor to her class. 

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class. 

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. 

And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding. 

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next. 

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”? 

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it! 

Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing! (What Richard Florida called “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places” is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.) We don’t need well-meaning parents lecturing us about the advantages of elite self-segregation, and giving the game away to everybody else. ...

Lots more good stuff here.

Is the g Factor a myth?

At Human Varieties:

Is Psychometric g a Myth? 

Posted by Dalliard

As an online discussion about IQ or general intelligence grows longer, the probability of someone linking to statistician Cosma Shalizi’s essay g, a Statistical Myth approaches 1. Usually the link is accompanied by an assertion to the effect that Shalizi offers a definitive refutation of the concept of general mental ability, or psychometric g. 

In this post, I will show that Shalizi’s case against g appears strong only because he misstates several key facts and because he omits all the best evidence that the other side has offered in support of g.

Shalizi has a lively intelligence, but he has a little too much confidence in his own g Factor. He begins his essay:

Attention Conservation Notice: About 11,000 words on the triviality of finding that positively correlated variables are all correlated with a linear combination of each other, and why this becomes no more profound when the variables are scores on intelligence tests. ... To summarize what follows below ..., the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. 

But why are there only positive correlations among cognitive skills? That's hardly a trivial question. Many things in life come with tradeoffs, such as risk v. reward. 

Shalizi gives an example about cars, in which he misses this crucial point:

One of the examples in my data-mining class is to take a ten-dimensional data set about the attributes of different models of cars, and boil it down to two factors which, together, describe 83 percent of the variance across automobiles. [6] The leading factor, the automotive equivalent of g, is positively correlated with everything (price, engine size, passengers, length, wheelbase, weight, width, horsepower, turning radius) except gas mileage. It basically says whether the car is bigger or smaller than average. The second factor, which I picked to be uncorrelated with the first, is most positively correlated with price and horsepower, and negatively with the number of passengers — the sports-car/mini-van axis.

In this case, the analysis makes up some variables which aren't too implausible-sounding, given our background knowledge. Mathematically, however, the first factor is just a weighted sum of the traits, with big positive weights on most variables and a negative weight on gas mileage. That we can make verbal sense of it is, to use a technical term, pure gravy. Really it's all just about redescribing the data.

The first factor is less bigness than an axis of affordability v. something like "impressiveness." If you look closely at the components, you can see the tradeoffs: for example, Shalizi implies that horsepower and price are positively correlated, but it's more insightful to think of them as inversely correlated. Restate "price" as, say, "change left over from a $100,000 bill" and the affordability v. impressiveness trade-off is obvious. This inherent tradeoff is one that automobile engineers and marketers struggle with everyday.

In contrast, we don't see these the same levels of tradeoffs on cognitive abilities. Sure, autistic savants might have some amazing skills because they lack others. And blind people sometimes are better at, say, music or other tasks involving mentally processing nonvisual inputs. What's surprising is we don't see these tradeoffs as much.

But, with cognitive tasks, on average, we don't see the kind of tradeoffs you see with most engineering problems. People who are above average on math skills are not, on average, below average on verbal skills. On average, they are above average on both. 

That's kind of strange when you think about it. Presumably, there are trade-offs involving, say, head size, ease of childbirth, nutrition needs, hip width and running speed, tendency to fall over, tendency to get abstracted, and so forth. But the lack of overall tradeoffs just within cognitive tasks is pretty odd. 

Strange New Disrespect for Marco Rubio

The term "strange new respect" was coined by Tom Bethell to describe the terms with which Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices are hailed by the prestige media after they arrive in Georgetown and start to Go Native.

Of course, the process works in the opposite direction, too. In the last couple of weeks, our media-appointed Dictator of Demographic Destiny, Marco Rubio, has expressed hints that he's having cold feet about this whole amnesty/citizenship juggernaut.

Hence, from the NYT:

WASHINGTON — When Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, last appeared with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss their plans for a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, he looked optimistic, apple-cheeked — and slightly nervous. 

Given the disdain some conservatives reserve for Republicans who consort publicly with Democrats, he had reason to be. 

The next time Mr. Rubio is likely to appear with his colleagues in the eight-person bipartisan group could be an even bigger moment, when its members officially introduce joint immigration legislation this month. The probable tableau seems ready-made for problems in the 2016 Republican presidential primary fight in which many expect Mr. Rubio to partake: images of Mr. Rubio, smiling and celebrating alongside Democratic senators and maverick Republicans as he claims co-authorship of an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that many Republicans will reject. 

And so the question percolating on Capitol Hill has become: Will Mr. Rubio, an up-and-coming young conservative elected on a 2010 Tea Party wave, ultimately sign onto the immigration bill that he has been helping to draft ever since the November election? 

“We have to see if the Boy Wonder plays ball or not,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group.

Can anybody imagine the Boy Wonder won't ultimately kow-tow?

The cyberspace delusion

About 20 years ago, the buzzphrase "The Information Superhighway" became all the rage. Soon, it was prophesied, ambitious people wouldn't have to move to expensive places like Silicon Valley or Route 128 outside Boston to get ahead in the cyberspace business. They could just log in from anywhere!

Now, the technology developed spectacularly, but the geographical prophecy turned out backward. Rather than two, three many Silicon Valleys, even Route 128 withered, leaving Silicon Valley as all conquering. 

This is not a unique development either. Instead of the Internet empowering people all across the landscape, real estate trends suggest that instead, power is centralizing. Ambitious young white people are pouring into Washington D.C.. The financial industry sprawls no farther than just across the Connecticut border. 

As judged by relative real estate prices, who you know matters even more than what you know than it did 20 years ago.

Various theories have been suggested to explain this:

Engineering Serendipity

By GREG LINDSAY

WHEN Yahoo banned its employees from working from home in February, the reasons it gave had less to do with productivity than serendipity. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” explained the accompanying memo. The message was clear: doing your best work solo can’t compete with lingering around the coffee machine waiting for inspiration — in the form of a colleague — to strike. 

That same day, Google provided details of its new campus in Mountain View, Calif., to Vanity Fair. Buildings resembling bent rectangles were designed, in the words of the search giant’s real estate chief, to maximize “casual collisions of the work force.” Rooftop cafes will offer additional opportunities for close encounters, and no employees in the complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk away from one another. “You can’t schedule innovation,” he said, as Google knows well, attributing the genesis of such projects as Gmail, Google News and Street View to engineers having fortuitous conversations at lunch. ...

ONE reason structural holes persist is our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interactions. Almost 40 years ago, Thomas J. Allen, a professor of management and engineering at M.I.T., found that colleagues who are out of sight are frequently out of mind — we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as we are with someone 60 feet away, and almost never with colleagues in separate buildings or floors. 

And we get a particular intellectual charge from sharing ideas in person. In a paper published last year, researchers at Arizona State University used sensors and surveys to study creativity within teams. Participants felt most creative on days spent in motion meeting people, not working for long stretches at their desks. 

Depends upon who you are meeting, I suspect.

Or, at least, chatting is more fun and makes you feel creative.

I'm sure there's some truth to this, although I have a somewhat different perspective.

First, my experience is that I'm most creative when I stop socializing and finally apply hands to keyboard, usually late at night, all by myself. But, that could be an idiosyncrasy.

What I think is a more general truth is that much of what gets called creativity is actually more influence. People pay more attention to and are nicer to the people they meet in person.

Consider the prominent theorist of the "creative class," Dr. Richard Florida. He is widely viewed as brilliantly creative in his insights, despite a track record of written work that belies that notion. But, he has been relentless at getting his handsome face and his pleasing message in front of other influential people -- in person. Malcolm Gladwell is an even more well-known genius who regularly wows sales conventions.

In contrast, I'm a homebody. Business travel wears me out and makes me less creative. I get bored too easily to bother honing a single presentation that I'd do over and over. I'd rather come up with something new. Since I don't get my face out there much, it's easy to assume I'm a terrible person.

Darwin: Are the races of man separate species or merely separate subspecies?

Charles Darwin's promotion to secular sainthood over the last generation (combined with his cousin Francis Galton's demonization) adds interest and irony to reading Darwin. For example, below is an extract from his 1871 bestseller The Descent of Man on whether human races should be considered separate species or merely separate subspecies.

An unanticipated consequence of the 1973 Endangered Species Act is that the epistemological obscurity and metaphysical fuzziness at the heart of the concept of the word "species" turns out to have billion dollar consequences. Vast legal-scientific-development battles are fought over whether the California gnatcatcher and the Baja gnatcatcher are separate species or merely subspecies. Is the San Fernando Valley spineflower a different species or not from the San Bernardino spineflower?

These convoluted inquiries were anticipated in The Descent of Man. Darwin himself ultimately viewed human races as separate subspecies, but it took him a lot of arguing with himself to get there:

We will first consider the arguments which may be advanced in favour of classing the races of man as distinct species, and then the arguments on the other side. If a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian, or Mongolian, were to compare them, he would at once perceive that they differed in a multitude of characters, some of slight and some of considerable importance. On enquiry he would find that they were adapted to live under widely different climates, and that they differed somewhat in bodily constitution and mental disposition. If he were then told that hundreds of similar specimens could be brought from the same countries, he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names. This conclusion would be greatly strengthened as soon as he had ascertained that these forms had all retained the same character for many centuries; and that negroes, apparently identical with existing negroes, had lived at least 4000 years ago.* He would also hear, on the authority of an excellent observer, Dr. Lund,*(2) that the human skulls found in the caves of Brazil entombed with many extinct mammals, belonged to the same type as that now prevailing throughout the American continent. 

  Our naturalist would then perhaps turn to geographical distribution, and he would probably declare that those forms must be distinct species, which differ not only in appearance, but are fitted for hot, as well as damp or dry countries, and for the arctic regions. He might appeal to the fact that no species in the group next to man- namely, the Quadrumana, can resist a low temperature, or any considerable change of climate; and that the species which come nearest to man have never been reared to maturity, even under the temperate climate of Europe. He would be deeply impressed with the fact, first noticed by Agassiz,* that the different races of man are distributed over the world in the same zoological provinces, as those inhabited by undoubtedly distinct species and genera of mammals. This is manifestly the case with the Australian, Mongolian, and Negro races of man; in a less well-marked manner with the Hottentots; but plainly with the Papuans and Malays, who are separated, as Mr. Wallace has shewn, by nearly the same line which divides the great Malayan and Australian zoological provinces. The aborigines of America range throughout the continent; and this at first appears opposed to the above rule, for most of the productions of the Southern and Northern halves differ widely: yet some few living forms, as the opossum, range from the one into the other, as did formerly some of the gigantic Edentata. The Esquimaux, like other arctic animals, extend round the whole polar regions. It should be observed that the amount of difference between the mammals of the several zoological provinces does not correspond with the degree of separation between the latter; so that it can hardly be considered as an anomaly that the Negro differs more, and the American much less from the other races of man, than do the mammals of the African and American continents from the mammals of the other provinces. Man, it may be added, does not appear to have aboriginally inhabited any oceanic island; and in this respect, he resembles the other members of his class. ... 

  Our supposed naturalist having proceeded thus far in his investigation, would next enquire whether the races of men, when crossed, were in any degree sterile. He might consult the work* of Professor Broca, a cautious and philosophical observer, and in this he would find good evidence that some races were quite fertile together, but evidence of an opposite nature in regard to other races. Thus it has been asserted that the native women of Australia and Tasmania rarely produce children to European men; the evidence, however, on this head has now been shewn to be almost valueless. The half-castes are killed by the pure blacks: and an account has lately been published of eleven half-caste youths murdered and burnt at the same time, whose remains were found by the police.*(2) Again, it has often been said that when mulattoes intermarry, they produce few children; on the other hand, Dr. Bachman, of Charleston,*(3) positively asserts that he has known mulatto families which have intermarried for several generations, and have continued on an average as fertile as either pure whites or pure blacks. Enquiries formerly made by Sir C. Lyell on this subject led him, as he informs me, to the same conclusion.*(4) In the United States the census for the year 1854 included, according to Dr. Bachman, 405,751 mulattoes; and this number, considering all the circumstances of the case, seems small; but it may partly be accounted for by the degraded and anomalous position of the class, and by the profligacy of the women. A certain amount of absorption of mulattoes into negroes must always be in progress; and this would lead to an apparent diminution of the former. The inferior vitality of mulattoes is spoken of in a trustworthy work*(5) as a well-known phenomenon; and this, although a different consideration from their lessened fertility, may perhaps be advanced as a proof of the specific distinctness of the parent races. No doubt both animal and vegetable hybrids, when produced from extremely distinct species, are liable to premature death; but the parents of mulattoes cannot be put under the category of extremely distinct species. The common mule, so notorious for long life and vigour, and yet so sterile, shews how little necessary connection there is in hybrids between lessened fertility and vitality; other analogous cases could be cited. 

  *(4) Dr. Rohlfs writes to me that he found the mixed races in the Great Sahara, derived from Arabs, Berbers, and Negroes of three tribes, extraordinarily fertile. On the other hand, Mr. Winwood Reade informs me that the Negroes on the Gold Coast, though admiring white men and mulattoes, have a maxim that mulattoes should not intermarry, as the children are few and sickly. This belief, as Mr. Reade remarks, deserves attention, as white men have visited and resided on the Gold Coast for four hundred years, so that the natives have had ample time to gain knowledge through experience.

This observation by West Africans may have had something to do with malaria defenses. British military personnel assigned to West Africa in the early 19th Century died like flies from disease. Their life expectancy was something like two years. In contrast, their life expectancy in New Zealand was longer than back home.

  Even if it should hereafter be proved that all the races of men were perfectly fertile together, he who was inclined from other reasons to rank them as distinct species, might with justice argue that fertility and sterility are not safe criterions of specific distinctness. We know that these qualities are easily affected by changed conditions of life, or by close interbreeding, and that they are governed by highly complex laws, for instance, that of the unequal fertility of converse crosses between the same two species. With forms which must be ranked as undoubted species, a perfect series exists from those which are absolutely sterile when crossed, to those which are almost or completely fertile. The degrees of sterility do not coincide strictly with the degrees of difference between the parents in external structures or habits of life. Man in many respects may be compared with those animals which have long been domesticated, and a large body of evidence can be advanced in favour of the Pallasian doctrine,* that domestication tends to eliminate the sterility which is so general a result of the crossing of species in a state of nature. From these several considerations, it may be justly urged that the perfect fertility of the intercrossed races of man, if established, would not absolutely preclude us from ranking them as distinct species.

  Independently of fertility, the characters presented by the offspring from a cross have been thought to indicate whether or not the parent-forms ought to be ranked as species or varieties; but after carefully studying the evidence, I have come to the conclusion that no general rules of this kind can be trusted. The ordinary result of a cross is the production of a blended or intermediate form; but in certain cases some of the offspring take closely after one parent-form, and some after the other. 

Darwin wasn't aware of the quantum aspect of Mendelian genetics (Mendel's work wasn't rediscovered until 1900, a couple of decades after Darwin's death.) Darwin knew that there was a problem with the genetic models he had in mind, but he didn't know the solution.

...  We have now seen that a naturalist might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species; for he has found that they are distinguished by many differences in structure and constitution, some being of importance. These differences have, also, remained nearly constant for very long periods of time. Our naturalist will have been in some degree influenced by the enormous range of man, which is a great anomaly in the class of mammals, if mankind be viewed as a single species. He will have been struck with the distribution of the several so-called races, which accords with that of other undoubtedly distinct species of mammals. Finally, he might urge that the mutual fertility of all the races has not as yet been fully proved, and even if proved would not be an absolute proof of their specific identity. 

  On the other side of the question, if our supposed naturalist were to enquire whether the forms of man keep distinct like ordinary species, when mingled together in large numbers in the same country, he would immediately discover that this was by no means the case. In Brazil he would behold an immense mongrel population of Negroes and Portuguese; in Chiloe, and other parts of South America, he would behold the whole population consisting of Indians and Spaniards blended in various degrees.* In many parts of the same continent he would meet with the most complex crosses between Negroes, Indians, and
Europeans; and judging from the vegetable kingdom, such triple crosses afford the severest test of the mutual fertility of the parent forms. In one island of the Pacific he would find a small population of mingled Polynesian and English blood; and in the Fiji Archipelago a population of Polynesians and Negritos crossed in all degrees. Many analogous cases could be added; for instance, in Africa. Hence the races of man are not sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country without fusion; and the absence of fusion affords the usual and best test of specific distinctness. 

  Our naturalist would likewise be much disturbed as soon as he perceived that the distinctive characters of all the races were highly variable. This fact strikes every one on first beholding the negro slaves in Brazil, who have been imported from all parts of Africa. The same remark holds good with the Polynesians, and with many other races. It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant. Savages, even within the limits of the same tribe, are not nearly so uniform in character, as has been often asserted. Hottentot women offer certain peculiarities, more strongly marked than those occurring in any other race, but these are known not to be of constant occurrence. In the several American tribes, colour and hairiness differ considerably; as does colour to a certain degree, and the shape of the features greatly, in the negroes of Africa. The shape of the skull varies much in some races;* and so it is with every other character. Now all naturalists have learnt by dearly bought experience, how rash it is to attempt to define species by the aid of inconstant characters. 

  But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory de St-Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.* This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them. 

  Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases (I speak after experience) precisely like that of man; and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, under a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give names to objects which he cannot define. Cases of this kind occur in the Order which include man, namely in certain genera of monkeys; whilst in other genera, as in Cercopithecus, most of the species can be determined with certainty. In the American genus Cebus, the various forms are ranked by some naturalists as species, by others as mere geographical races. Now if numerous specimens of Cebus were collected from all parts of South America, and those forms which at present appear to be specifically distinct, were found to graduate into each other by close steps, they would usually be ranked as mere varieties or races; and this course has been followed by most naturalists with respect to the races of man. Nevertheless, it must be confessed that there are forms, at least in the vegetable kingdom,* which we cannot avoid naming as species, but which are connected together by numberless gradations, independently of intercrossing.
  Some naturalists have lately employed the term "sub-species" to designate forms which possess many of the characteristics of true species, but which hardly deserve so high a rank. Now if we reflect on the weighty arguments above given, for raising the races of man to the dignity of species, and the insuperable difficulties on the other side in defining them, it seems that the term "sub-species" might here be used with propriety. But from long habit the term "race" will perhaps always be employed. The choice of terms is only so far important in that it is desirable to use, as far as possible, the same terms for the same degrees of difference. Unfortunately this can rarely be done: for the larger genera generally include closely-allied forms, which can be distinguished only with much difficulty, whilst the smaller genera within the same family include forms that are perfectly distinct; yet all must be ranked equally as species. So again, species within the same large genus by no means resemble each other to the same degree: on the contrary, some of them can generally be arranged in little groups round other species, like satellites round planets.*

Darwin then takes up the question of whether humanity arose from a single or multiple sources:

  The question whether mankind consists of one or several species has of late years been much discussed by anthropologists, who are divided into the two schools of monogenists and polygenists. Those who do not admit the principle of evolution, must look at species as separate creations, or in some manner as distinct entities; and they must decide what forms of man they will consider as species by the analogy of the method commonly pursued in ranking other organic beings as species. But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term "species" is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city. We have a practical illustration of the difficulty in the never-ending doubts whether many closely-allied mammals, birds, insects, and plants, which represent each other respectively in North America and Europe, should be ranked as species or geographical races; and the like holds true of the productions of many islands situated at some little distance from the nearest continent. 

Those naturalists, on the other hand, who admit the principle of evolution, and this is now admitted by the majority of rising men, will feel no doubt that all the races of man are descended from a single primitive stock; whether or not they may think fit to designate the races as distinct species, for the sake of expressing their amount of difference. ... 

Nevertheless, so arbitrary is the term of species ... 

  Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the Beagle, with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.

He who will read Mr. Tylor's and Sir J. Lubbock's interesting works* can hardly fail to be deeply impressed with the close similarity between the men of all races in tastes, dispositions and habits. This is shown by the pleasure which they all take in dancing, rude music, acting, painting, tattooing, and otherwise decorating themselves; in their mutual comprehension of gesture-language, by the same expression in their features, and by the same inarticulate cries, when excited by the same emotions. This similarity, or rather identity, is striking, when contrasted with the different expressions and cries made by distinct species of monkeys. There is good evidence that the art of shooting with bows and arrows has not been handed down from any common progenitor of mankind, yet as Westropp and Nilsson have remarked,*(2) the stone arrow-heads, brought from the most distant parts of the world, and manufactured at the most remote periods, are almost identical; and this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers. The same observation has been made by archaeologists*(3) with respect to certain widely-prevalent ornaments, such as zig-zags, &c.; and with respect to various simple beliefs and customs, such as the burying of the dead under megalithic structures. I remember observing in South America,*(4) that there, as in so many other parts of the world, men have generally chosen the summits of lofty hills, to throw up piles of stones, either as a record of some remarkable event, or for burying their dead. 

  Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes, and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that they are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man. 

  As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure andmental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who had these same characters. We thus gain some insight into the early state of man, before he had spread step by step over the face of the earth. The spreading of man to regions widely separated by the sea, no doubt, preceded any great amount of divergence of character in the several races; for otherwise we should sometimes meet with the same race in distinct continents; and this is never the case. Sir J. Lubbock, after comparing the arts now practised by savages in all parts of the world, specifies those which man could not have known, when he first wandered from his original birthplace; for if once learnt they would never have been forgotten.* He thus shews that "the spear, which is but a development of the knife-point, and the club, which is but a long hammer, are the only things left." He admits, however, that the art of making fire probably had been already discovered, for it is common to all the races now existing, and was known to the ancient cave-inhabitants of Europe. Perhaps the art of making rude canoes or rafts was likewise known; but as man existed at a remote epoch, when the land in many places stood at a very different level to what it does now, he would have been able, without the aid of canoes, to have spread widely. Sir J. Lubbock further remarks how improbable it is that our earliest ancestors could have "counted as high as ten, considering that so many races now in existence cannot get beyond four." Nevertheless, at this early period, the intellectual and social faculties of man could hardly have been inferior in any extreme degree to those possessed at present by the lowest savages; otherwise primeval man could not have been so eminently successful in the struggle for life, as proved by his early and wide diffusion. 

  From the fundamental differences between certain languages, some philologists have inferred that when man first became widely diffused, he was not a speaking animal; but it may be suspected that languages, far less perfect than any now spoken, aided by gestures, might have been used, and yet have left no traces on subsequent and more highly-developed tongues. Without the use of some language, however imperfect, it appears doubtful whether man's intellect could have risen to the standard implied by his dominant position at an early period. 

  Whether primeval man, when he possessed but few arts, and those of the rudest kind, and when his power of language was extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called man, must depend on the definition which we employ. In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term "man" ought to be used. But this is a matter of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or sub-species; but the latter term appears the more appropriate.

Since the 1990s, I've been arguing that the naturalists' approach to classifying humans into races / subspecies based on visible characteristics, which Darwin found so conundrum-generating, is more of a proxy for what we really want to know: who is related to whom? And how?

Eight months and twenty-nine days

From the New York Times:

Investments in Education May Be Misdirected 

By EDUARDO PORTER 

James Heckman is one of the nation’s top economists studying human development. Thirteen years ago, he shared the Nobel for economics. In February, he stood before the annual meeting of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed the assembled business executives a chart, and demolished the United States’ entire approach to education. 

The chart showed the results of cognitive tests that were first performed in the 1980s on several hundred low-birthweight 3-year-olds, who were then retested at ages 5, 8 and 18. 

Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments. 

More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3. 

“The gap is there before kids walk into kindergarten,” Mr. Heckman told me. “School neither increases nor reduces it.” 

If education is supposed to help redress inequities at birth and improve the lot of disadvantaged children as they grow up, it is not doing its job. 

It is not an isolated finding. Another study by Mr. Heckman and Flavio Cunha of the University of Pennsylvania found that the gap in math abilities between rich and poor children was not much different at age 12 than it was at age 6. 

The gap is enormous, one of the widest among the 65 countries taking part in the Program for International Student Achievement run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

American students from prosperous backgrounds scored on average 110 points higher on reading tests than disadvantaged students, about the same disparity that exists between the average scores in the United States and Tunisia. It is perhaps the main reason income inequality in the United States is passed down the generations at a much higher rate than in most advanced nations. 

That’s a scandal, considering how much the government spends on education: about 5.5 percent of the nation’s economic output in total, from preschool through college. 

And it suggests that the angry, worried debate over how to improve the nation’s mediocre education — pitting the teachers’ unions and the advocates of more money for public schools against the champions of school vouchers and standardized tests — is missing the most important part: infants and toddlers.

In truth, Heckman's focus on preschool is too late. The real gap in environment that leads to different IQs is prenatal. It begins exactly 8 months and 29 days before birth. 

But not a day earlier!

The Current Understanding

At West Hunter, Gregory Cochran sums up the conventional wisdom, c. 2013:

It seems that the talking classes in this country think that human biology mostly doesn’t matter.  The sexes have exactly equal mean abilities and interests – more than that, even the standard deviation must be the same in men and women.  Presumably the third moments as well. 

Race doesn’t exist, so there can hardly be cognitive or personality differences between races. There are no average differences in  mental capabilities between classes.   IQ is not heritable, so eugenics cannot work. Intelligent women should eschew reproduction – that’s something poor people can do just as well, and with the usual 10,000 hours of practice, their kids can be anything they want to be – cowboy, fireman,  or Indian chief. Lest I forget, low test scores in black children are caused by laconic parents, which is why the few children of those career women should be raised by Guatemalan maids. 

Homosexuality is the only genetically-determined personality trait – as well as being a valid lifestyle choice, and a floor wax.  So slash fiction should be the law of the land.

The current assumption that Hart and Risley proved that blacks don't talk enough (but indio childminders from Guatemala are perfectly fine for maximizing Verbal SAT scores) would have struck Charles Darwin as a tad odd. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, in Chapter VII "On the Races of Man:"

There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,- as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body,* the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.*(2) But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristies are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the lighthearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans,*(3) who live under the same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea.

How they reduce crime in New York City

From the NYT:

Kelly Said Street Stops Targeted Minorities, Senator Testifies 

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 

During a legislative debate in 2010 over the Police Department’s use of stop-and-frisk encounters, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, met with the governor at the time, David A. Paterson, to defend the tactic’s importance as a crime-fighting tool. 

According to a state senator, Eric Adams, who was at the meeting at the governor’s office in Midtown Manhattan, the commissioner said that young black and Hispanic men were the focus of the stops because “he wanted to instill fear in them, every time they leave their home they could be stopped  by the police.” 

Senator Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat who is a former captain in the New York Police Department, recalled the meeting as he testified in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, as a trial over the constitutionality of the department’s use of the tactic entered its third week. 

Commissioner Kelly, who is not being called to testify, said in remarks to reporters on Monday that Senator Adams’s characterization of what he said was “absolutely, categorically untrue.” Commissioner Kelly has also filed an affidavit in court, saying, “At that meeting I did not, nor would I ever, state or suggest that the New York City Police Department targets young black and Latino men for stop-and-frisk activity.” 

But if blacks and Hispanics eventually decide that rather than getting randomly humiliated by The Man when they walk the streets of New York, they'd rather move to Georgia or Florida, well, don't let the doorknob hit you on the way out.

Construction industry admits it will cheat on "immigration reform" law

With the Obama Administration trying to get a new housing bubble going, it's interesting to see that the construction industry has already announced that it will continue to use illegal immigrants. From the NYT:

Construction Groups Criticize Limits in Guest Worker Deal 

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE 

Several major construction industry groups are criticizing the agreement reached last week over how many low-skilled guest workers should be granted visas each year, complaining that the proposed limits were “unrealistic.” The trade associations, including Associated Builders and Contractors and the National Electrical Contractors Association, issued a statement late Wednesday highlighting their concerns about the proposal between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. 

Many immigration experts expect that deal — or much of it — will become part of the immigration bill being developed by a bipartisan group of eight senators, and a representative of the trade associations stressed on Thursday that the statement was not an effort to jettison the immigration proposals but to suggest improvements. 

The Chamber-labor deal calls for admitting 20,000 guest workers the first year, with the total climbing to 75,000 after four years, and future numbers adjusted according to the unemployment rate and industry needs as determined by a new federal bureau. The agreement caps the number of guest construction workers admitted each year at 15,000, and in a bow to labor unions, bars admission for any higher-skilled workers like electricians, crane operators or elevator repair technicians. 

“We are deeply concerned with the size and the scope of the temporary guest worker program in the proposal now being drafted by the ‘Gang of Eight’ senators,” the groups wrote in a statement first reported by Politico. “Capping the amount of visas for the construction industry at only 15,000 in an industry that currently employs nearly six million workers is simply unrealistic and destined to fail.” 

The trade associations added that a program that fails to provide enough visas to meet demand “will inevitably make it harder to fill critical labor openings and make it impossible to secure the border.” 

Associated General Contractors of America, Leading Builders of America, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Roofing Contractors Association also signed the letter. 

Union leaders pushed hard to minimize the number of guest workers allowed, arguing that they hold down wages and take jobs away from Americans, especially when including 1.3 million people in the construction industry who are unemployed. ...  

On Thursday, Geoff Burr, vice president of federal affairs for Associated Builders and Contractors, tried to tamp down worries that some trade groups were trying to kill the legislation. 

“The construction industry strongly supports comprehensive immigration reform, and the last thing we want is for current reform efforts to fail,” Mr. Burr said in a statement. “Our statement yesterday was an attempt to help improve the Senate reform package.”

In other words, go ahead and pass your law because it will help hold down construction wages, but we're just going to ignore the enforcement parts that we don't like.

Which is the worst mortgage default: refi or purchase?

I've been looking at some more foreclosure statistics, this time divided between defaults on types of mortgages, and I want to raise a question in the abstract. Which is worse: refinance defaults or home purchase defaults?

Defaulted mortgage can be divided into purchase v. refinance mortgages. In the former case, you get a loan in order to buy a house. In the latter, you already own the house and you get a new mortgage. 

In turn, refis can be divided conceptually into ones where the homeowners makes the likelihood of default lower (e.g., you have a fixed mortgage at 9 percent interest rate and, when interest rates drop, you refinance with a mortgage of the same length and size but with a 6 percent interest rate), ones where the refinance makes the likelihood of default higher (e.g., you switch from a prime to a subprime mortgage in order to take out $100,000 in cash to scratch your Vegas itch), or all sorts of complicated combinations of the two.

Leaving aside the no-brainer case where the only motivation of the refinance is to get a lower interest rate, what's worse: defaulting on a refi or a home purchase? From a moral standpoint, I'd be inclined toward the refi case.

But from a systemic standpoint of understanding cause and effect in the Housing Bubble and Bust, I think cash-out refis were mostly an effect of rising home prices. The more important question is what caused the increase demand for houses that drove up prices, right? And dubious purchase mortgages were the main engine of prices rising above what could be paid off out of income. Does that make sense?

Oberlin and Marco McMillian updates

A month ago, the prestige press was convulsed over the KKK riding roughshod over Oberlin College and Clarksdale, Mississippi. What have we learned since then?

About Oberlin, nothing. As far as I can tell from Google News, the Oberlin story has vanished. This is a little odd because Oberlin officials made a big deal about how just before the KKK assault blanket sighting, they had removed two students from campus. Who were they? What had been their motivation? Nobody knows, nobody cares.

The Marco McMillian case, in contrast, continues to generate stories on Google News, each dumber than the last. For example, here's a a long Huffington Post story: 

Marco McMillian's Life And Death A Test For Civil Rights In The Mississippi Delta 

... In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, Mississippi law enforcement agencies collectively reported just one of the nation’s 6,222 hate crimes to the FBI. This year, Mississippi legislators decided against expanding the state’s hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by anti-gay bias. The state also has no laws prohibiting discrimination against anyone in housing, the workplace or other key functions of life. 

“Does that strike you as a place where an honest and thorough examination of hate crime is really happening?” said Mark Potok, a hate crimes and hate group expert with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “If anti-gay bias crimes are happening, where would law enforcement find the motivation, the time, the investigative skills needed to give that possibility a serious look?”

Thanks, Mark. Keep up the good work.

A reader points out that the perfect candidate for Oberlin College Chaplain has been found.

Immigration & real estate: "twin get-the-rich-richer-quick-schemes"

As I've been pointing out this week, in the rest of the English-speaking world, the intellectual tide is moving against mass immigration.

Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, writes in The Telegraph:

In David Goodhart’s new book The British Dream he argues that “Hampstead liberals” like himself got it wrong over immigration and chose universalism (looking after the whole world) over looking after their fellow citizens. 

I’ve also got a book out (I might have mentioned it once or twice), and in it I argue that the Right is also responsible, too willing to see mass immigration as an economic benefit while ignoring the social costs. 

The pro-globalisation Conservative view of immigration tends to be that: 

a. If we have free markets we must have free movements of people. 

b. Fears about jobs are based on the lump-of-labour fallacy. 

c. If we’re short of houses, we should build more houses (besides which immigrants account for a small proportion of social housing). 

d. In order to grow, the economy requires more immigrants. 

Although many Liberal Democrats and a small number of Labour politicos hold this opinion, I would argue that it’s an economically liberal, Right-wing view. 

Look at it this way: imagine that Britain had had mass immigration from the 1860s onwards. How do you think the rights of British workers would have panned out over the late 19th and early 20th century? Would housing conditions have universally improved as far as they did? Would inequality have declined? ...

It’s been too easy for Conservatives to see immigrants simply as good workers at reasonable prices, without looking at the short-term economic or long-term social costs. 

Regarding to wages, most of the commentariat are not threatened by immigration, because to become a columnist or radio presenter requires culturally specific skills that immigrants do not posses. But in many industries the availability of cheap immigrant labour has kept wages down. 

Likewise, many Conservatives feel that if we have free trade we should have free movement of people. Why, exactly? Japan’s foreign trade is worth $1,678 billion a year, and they manage to do without much immigration. Britain’s trade expanded exponentially in the 19th century without much internal movement. Out of principle? The reason it’s okay to move around goods but not people is because once we’re finished with goods we can chuck them out; we can’t do the same with people, who marry and have children and have rights and agency and humanity. 

One of the arguments I often hear is that, although immigration over the last 15 years has been wonderful and smashing and everything, what we didn’t do is prepare for the expansion by building the houses. And yet the people expressing this view tend to live in upmarket parts of London, exactly the areas that will not be troubled. Few people want more housing on their back door; almost no one wants social housing. You can’t just say, “hey presto, build!” ...

Finally, we have the argument that the economy will only continue to grow if we import more people. I can see one small problem with this idea. Like all Ponzi schemes, it has to end at some point. The closest parallel is that other Thatcherite yellow brick road, the housing market; last week Chancellor George Osborne signalled his cunning plan to revive our fortunes by re-inflating the housing bubble and so make housing ever more unaffordable for millions of people. 

Many Conservatives have put their faith in a low-wage, high-churn economy based on the twin get-the-rich-richer-quick-schemes of mass immigration and property inflation. Both of these policies continue to lead to ever expanding inequality levels, static or even declining spending power towards the bottom of society, and shifting sands for those struggling in the middle. Personally, that's not a society I feel very comfortable living in.

Men with Gold Chains: Rich Gypsies

Caption in the New York Times:
"A Roma man's prominent gold jewelry"

Immigration restrictionism is growing in popularity in Britain because Romanians and Bulgarians are supposed to get complete freedom to move to Britain in 2014. Brits are particularly worried about Roma Romanians: i.e., Gypsies. If you want to see what Gypsies typically live like, check out Borat's hometown in the 2006 movie. Simon Baron Cohen filmed "Borat" in an Eastern European Gypsy village. (Of course, later on in the film he portrayed stereotyping Gypsies as obviously irrational and evil.)

However, some Gypsies have gotten rich, as depicted in this fabulous pictorial in the New York Times devoted, as always, to Smashing Stereotypes:

Kings of the Roma 

By JESSE NEWMAN 

To reach a surprising place, follow Route 6 south of Bucharest as it unwinds across the Romanian countryside, past fields of wildflowers and flocks of sheep. Turn west before the Danube River and head toward a grid of neatly laid streets, set down among farms. 

This is Buzescu, where a small, prosperous group of Roma live among mansions and Mercedeses. 

Like most visitors to Europe, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky had never heard of Buzescu or met any wealthy Roma. They thought most Roma — often pejoratively called Gypsies — were poor and lived in slums on the fringes of big European cities. On a trip to Europe from their home in Ecuador in 2010, they learned about the Roma of Buzescu and set out to see the town. 

“We wanted to break the image of Gypsies in the street, begging where the cars stop, stealing whatever they can and living in total poverty,” said Mr. Kashinsky, who lived with his wife, Ms. Gachet, in Buzescu for six weeks to document daily life in the thriving community. “Here, the Roma were not the maids of Romanians, but the Romanians were the maids of the Roma. It was an amazing switch.”

So, how did they get rich? The same way a lot of people got rich after the fall of the Berlin Wall:

... The palatial homes belong to the Kalderash, a once-itinerant group of Roma who made their fortune trading metal across Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism. 

“When Communism fell,” a Roma man told the photographers, “you had to be dumb not to make money.” 

So the Kalderash, whose name means “coppersmith” in Romani, went to work, traveling across Eastern Europe, dismantling abandoned factories and selling the scrap metal for handsome profits.

Up to a point, Lord Coppersmith. Not all those factories were abandoned, and even if they were, the value of the scrap metal belonged to the nation, not to looters.

That's also how Marc Rich, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton in January 2001, made a bundle: "dismantling [not necessarily] abandoned factories and selling the scrap metal for handome profits." So, maybe Yuri Slezkine's opening conceit about Roma being Mercurians too had some basis in reality?

The Kalderash Gypsies, however, appear to be a little more hands-on than metal-trader Marc Rich was -- one of the photographs is of the funeral of a local man who "was electrocuted while stripping copper from power lines in Spain."

... Today, the lavish mansions lining the streets of Buzescu, an otherwise modest farm town, are a testament to the wealth of a people deeply impoverished elsewhere in Europe and widely condemned as beggars and thieves. 

The Roma have faced oppression and violence since their ancestors came to Europe from India centuries ago. During the Holocaust, the Nazis exterminated Romani people by the hundreds of thousands. In 2010, France’s president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, deported thousands of Roma and bulldozed their encampments. His successor, François Hollande, has continued the expulsions. Roma communities face discrimination in Romania too, as evidenced by recent forced evictions across the country. 

Given their painful history, many families in Buzescu are wary of new arrivals like Ms. Gachet and Mr. Kashinsky. Even after one family offered the couple a place to stay, many of the wealthiest residents refused to let them inside their houses. 

“A lot of people were scared of us,” Ms. Gachet said. “They thought we were thieves.” 

But the couple persisted, slowly gaining trust and access. Luckily, they shared a language with the residents of Buzescu. Like Ms. Gachet, who is from Quito, Ecuador, and Mr. Kashinsky, who is from Los Angeles, many Roma speak Spanish — they have been traveling back and forth to Spain for work since Romania joined the European Union in 2007.

Spanish Gypsies, by the way, seem on average to be less Bad News than other Gypsies.

As the doors of Buzescu swung open, Ms. Gachet and Mr. Kashinsky said, they revealed fantastic abundance — winding staircases that led to vast rooms with marble floors and heavy chandeliers — but also great emptiness. 

“They build these giant houses,” Mr. Kashinsky said. “But they don’t really use them.” 

Many parents and teenagers still have to leave Buzescu to find work or conduct business elsewhere in Europe, leaving only elders and young children to live in the outsize homes. Even when families do reunite for holidays or funerals, they tend to congregate in small rooms toward the back of their houses, using outdoor kitchens and bathrooms rather than those inside.  

...“Being Roma, they can’t just go out there to the world and get a job anywhere,” Ms. Gachet said. “The lady we lived with said: ‘Karla, my kids are not going to be lawyers and doctors. You need to understand that. We need to give them tools to survive in our world, and that’s money.’ They don’t get the opportunities that everybody else gets. They’re so discriminated against in their own country.”

I wrote about Gypsies in general and the EU's immigration policies back in 2004 for VDARE.

And here is John Updike in The New Yorker reviewing a book on Gypsies:

Though her six years of living in Roussillon may have left her with “the same attraction to their intractable difference,” readers of her account, if this reviewer is an example, will be cured of any faint desire they may ever have entertained to live like a Gypsy. 

Evidently it’s a miserable life, for the shiftless, jobless, largely illiterate men, and twice as bad for the homebound women, generally married in their teens to other teens, who will bully, betray, tyrannize, and most likely beat them. As for their children, they stay up so late watching television and hanging out on the street that they are usually too sleepy to go to school; Gypsies must be the only significant ethnic group in France that actively discourages literacy and encourages truancy. Compared with them, the embattled immigrants from the Muslim world are models of aspiration to bourgeois order and enlightenment. 

One of Eberstadt’s more hallucinante chapters describes a conference on education held at Collège Jean Moulin, a junior high school for preponderantly Gypsy students. “The occasion is pretty merry,” she writes. “People who work with Gypsies tend to laugh a lot. It’s a laughter of hysterical exasperation, because if you didn’t laugh, you’d hang yourself or quit.