September 10, 2013

Lesbian dean angry that female Harvard MBA students are looking for husbands

From my column in Taki's Magazine:
A striking feature of post-1968 liberalism is its obsession with the problems of people who don’t really have major problems. While leftists of the past worried about the fate of coal miners or the unemployed, contemporary activists find more galvanizing the troubles, such as they are, of female students at the Harvard Business School. 
I never went to Harvard, but my impression from attending a decent public B-School is that elite MBA students, male or female, have perhaps the fewest significant problems of any category of people imaginable. Still, since we’re living in the fallout of Team Obama’s decision to revive feminist resentments to turn out the vote, attention must be paid to HBS women’s oppression. 
Thus, in “Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity,” Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter and author of The Obamas, reports at length on the school administration’s experiment in micromanaging the social lives of Harvard MBA students to overcome that most pressing problem of our day: Women at HBS average lower grades than their male colleagues.

Read the whole thing there.

The last amnesty in graphical form


Federal reports on the Total Fertility Rate of expected babies per woman's lifetime seldom bother to break out Hispanics before 1989, so the impact of the 1986 amnesty on Hispanic immigrant fertility, one of the key events of recent California history (e.g., the overwhelming of public schools), is almost utterly unknown. Indeed, the linkage of unskilled immigration with fertility is barely understood. 

However, the numbers have been calculated.

This graph is from p. 26 of the Public Policy Institute of California's 2002 book, Understanding the Future of Californians’ Fertility: The Role of Immigrants by PPIC demographers Laura E. Hill and Hans P. Johnson. They calculated the TFR rates by ethnicity in California from 1982 onward, demonstrating the huge pig-in-a-python bulge among foreign-born Hispanics that followed the 1986 amnesty legislation. Hill and Johnson write on pp. 27-28:
Between 1987 and 1991, total fertility rates for foreign-born Hispanics increased from 3.2 to 4.4.

And they go on to explain how the amnesty caused this.

The important 2010 paper How High is Hispanic/Mexican Fertility in the U.S.? Immigration and Tempo Considerations by Emilio A. Parrado of the University of Pennsylvania came to a similar conclusion: illegal immigration boosts Hispanic fertility. (Interestingly, Parrado was most interested to hear from me about the PPIC work of 2002 -- in other words, even an expert in the field wasn't aware of it.)

Illegal immigrant women have lots of babies soon after arriving in America. Thus, the sharp drop in Hispanic fertility since its recent peak in 2007 is largely due to the sharp drop in illegal immigration after Bush's Housing Bubble burst. Conversely, giving amnesty to illegal immigrants today, will encourage them to invite in women and have lots of children, just as in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

No doubt, in the current mindset, we will be informed that The Economy desperately needs this boost of another baby boom among amnestied unskilled illegal immigrants (think of the increased disposable diaper sales!). But the more prudent might wish to consider what exactly the Schumer-Rubio bill portends.

As goes Australia, so goes Norway

Immigration restrictionism continues to appeal to advanced world voters, both in depressed economies and in prosperous states such as Australia and Norway. From Reuters:
Anti-Immigrant Norway Party Lays Claim to Government Role 
OSLO — An anti-immigrant populist party laid claim to a major role in oil-rich Norway's government for the first time on Tuesday after a center-right alliance won a landslide general election victory to oust a Labour administration.

San Francisco: "Crime Doesn't Climb"

Gordon Wintrob writes:
Among San Francisco's diverse neighborhoods and varied micro-climates, we've heard the phrase "Crime Doesn't Climb," meaning that the city's loftier areas are often associated with less crime. San Francisco, sometimes refered to as the "homeless capital of the United States", ranks in the bottom 10% of safest cities in the country (New York City is nearly three times safer). Although certain neighborhoods (e.g. the Tenderloin) have particularly high crime rates, we wondered if there was more granular data that could answer the question: does crime climb?

Former mayor Gavin Newsome put huge amounts of city data online as part of his technocratic philosophy of government. This doesn't seem to have done much good yet in the real world, but it's been great for moneyballers like Wintrob, who determined that, indeed, crime doesn't climb.

I've never heard the phrase "crime doesn't climb" in Los Angeles, but it nicely sums up several generations of Californian thinking about real estate. (One reason Charles Manson is still notorious 44 years after his minions murdered Roman Polanski's wife in the Hollywood Hills is that it was shocking that crime did climb that time.)

Of course, there's a high degree of self-fulfilling prophecy about the Californian belief that crime doesn't climb. In Rio de Janeiro, in contrast, crime does climb into the hillside favelas, while the rich live along the beach.

Yet, as technology continues to get the upper hand over criminals, most gentrification energies in L.A. remain focused on hilly areas, even though hills detract from that 21st Century buzzword: Walkability. (Among other reasonable reasons walkability is desired, the huge crackdown on drunk driving over the last generation means that it's nice to live somewhere where you can walk home after a drink.) Hills are even worse for bicycle riding.

At some point, there will be a phase change away from the inconvenient heights and living in the flats will come into fashion. Prescient investors will make fortunes. Remember, however, as Keynes liked to say, the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

September 9, 2013

The class divide: Did you have a Tiger Mother or a Cougar Mother?

Commenter slumber_j points to this New Yorker cartoon about "The subtext of all tattoos:" "Ask me about my parents' divorce."

A related subtext might be: "I come from a long line of rash decisionmakers." On women, tattoos often seem to imply: "Pay attention to me because I, obviously, make poor choices, so you might get lucky."

Here's a recent Australian study of tattoo psychodemographics:
Despite recent increases in the popularity of tattooing, little is known about the prevalence and characteristics of adults who have ever been tattooed. We investigated demographic and behavioral correlates of ever getting tattooed in an adult population. 
Methods 
Computer-assisted telephone interviews were completed by a representative sample of 8656 men and women ages 16–64 years in Australia. 
Results 
A total of 14.5% of respondents had ever been tattooed, and 2.4% of respondents had been tattooed in the year before the interview. Men were more likely than women to report a tattoo, but the highest rates of tattooing were found among women in their 20s (29.4%). Men and women ages 20–39 were most likely to have been tattooed, as were men with lower levels of education, tradesmen, and women with live-out partners. Tattooing was also associated with risk-taking behaviours, including smoking, greater numbers of lifetime sexual partners, cannabis use (women only) and ever having depression (men only). 
Conclusions 
Tattooing has increased in popularity during the past decade. Yet tattoos still appear to be a marker for risk-taking behavior in adults.

And from a Pew Center study:
How People Feel About Their Tattoos

Total percentage of people with tattoos who say their tattoo makes them feel rebellious: 29 % 
Percentage of people with a tattoo that say it makes them feel more sexy: 31 % 
Percentage of people with tattoos who say their tattoo makes them feel more intelligent: 5 %

Conversely, in the century or so after Darwin, it was fashionable in Europe to worry that, in essence, bourgeois family formation selected so much for sexual restraint that the life force, as it were, might be getting bred out among the upper orders. Galton, for example, famously pointed out that the richest heiresses, for whom the most dynamic men competed, tended to be the only child of only children: i.e., from generations of not very fertile couples.

Latino littering, redux

From the NYT:
If the Parks Are Strewn With Garbage, It Must Be a Monday Morning

By LISA W. FODERARO 
All summer and into the fall in Upper Manhattan

The concept of Upper Manhattan (e.g, Harlem) is hazy, but Upper Manhattan (as opposed to the Upper East Side and Upper West Side) traditionally started at 96th Street on the East. On the West Side, 108th St. was the usual boundary back in the Seinfeld Era.
, barbecuers and picnickers flock to the Riverside Park waterfront on Saturdays and Sundays to enjoy the Hudson River views and breezes. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people descend on a grassy stretch in the northern part of the park where grilling is permitted. Carne asada and barbecue chicken sizzles, children run, tattooed arms bop volleyballs and couples watch the sun settle over New Jersey. 
Then comes Monday morning, which presents a Sisyphean struggle for maintenance workers like Willie Fitzgerald — a weekly encounter with the paper plates, confetti, plastic straws and food scraps that wind up on the grass, along paths and under picnic tables. ... 
Local residents who arrive in the park early on Mondays, before cleanup crews arrive, are greeted with a jarring sight. “At first you think a flock of sea gulls is spread out on the lawn, but it’s paper plates and cups and litter everywhere,” said Nancy Maldonado, 48, who was sitting on a rock by the river. “If this was their house, they would never do this. We need better enforcement.” 
Despite such complaints, park officials say their options are limited. ... The officers, who carry clubs and mace, focus mainly on loud music and alcohol, which, he pointed out, were the source of even more complaints. 
Littering regulations are difficult to enforce for a few reasons, especially when it comes to large groups of relatives and friends who remain in the park for hours. “For the officers, it’s time-consuming to observe, and then who are you going to give the summons to?” Mr. Castro said. “If you go into a large crowd and the person resists, arguments happen and things spin out of control.” 

It's interesting to contrast this behavior to the Burning Man festival on a dry lakebed in Nevada, where the damn dirty hippies from Northern California remove at the end of the week every single thing they've brought, including their dirty water from washing dishes.

If you read this article closely, you can get a sense of who the prime littering culprits are ("carne asada" for Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans, "barbecue chicken" for African-Americans, etc.). But the sizable role of Latino culture in littering today is never explicitly mentioned.

It's not as if littering is some tragic flaw permanently inscribed in Latino DNA. It's a bad habit, a cultural defect. White Americans littered a lot during the postwar era when disposable containers and wrapping became widespread, so the manufacturers of the litter started a campaign to shame people into not littering. The culmination was that classic of racial shaming, the 1971 Crying Indian commercial showing how the White Man had made a mess of the Native American's landscape.

But, you can't shame any culture other than white Americans. Thus, when I Google the alliterative phrase "Latino littering" I just come up with references to my use of the phrase. Latino littering, while a real world problem, is just not a Thing in the indeasphere.

A reader writes:
This is funny...all about how the parks in Manhattan are covered in trash every Monday morning...well not all the parks, but the ones in Upper Manhattan are. 
I have been to parks uptown like the Dyckman Fields which on weekends are filled with a thousand drunk Mexicans watching soccer games and buying tacos from illegal food vendors.  Funny, but the parks downtown don't seem to be littered with so much garbage. 
When I worked in Corona, Queens for the city the constant refrain from Dominicans about garbage was "Look at the streets here, they are dirty...the streets in the Jewish neighborhoods don't look like this!"  They never seemed to make the jump to "maybe some people don't throw their trash in the streets."  The implication was, Everybody naturally litters...but the Jews make sure that the city cleans up their streets.  

Obviously, Jerry Seinfeld just drops trash all over the sidewalk in front of his Upper West Side home. What else is possible?

"Carlos"

Carlos is a cold but propulsive 2010 French miniseries about the 1970s Communist terrorist known in the English-speaking world as Carlos the Jackal. He was born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the son of a wealthy Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist (Ilich had brothers named Vladimir and Lenin), who adopted the Palestinian cause as the vanguard of the international proletarian revolution. 

Carlos wasn't, personally, a prole. His own lifestyle was somewhere between sub-jetset and super-grad student. The terrorism of that era was focused on creating TV spectaculars by hostage-takings and striking at international travel connections, such as skyjackings, so the multilingual Carlos's familiarity with the capitals of Europe was an asset for the Palestinians and the weird array of terrorists (with the Japanese Red Army the weirdest of the weird) who flocked to their cause. 

Carlos's most famous undertaking was kidnapping all the OPEC oil ministers from their conference in Vienna in 1975 and flying them to Algeria, where he released them for a $20 million donation to the Palestinian cause, which he may (or may not) have pocketed. He was apparently expelled from his anti-Arafat Palestinian splinter group for not murdering Saudi Arabia' Sheik Yamani (although he killed other people who fell into his clutches). The TV shows says he was working for Saddam Hussein, but the terrorist (currently in a French prison) claims Libya's Colonel G/K/C was behind it.

After Vienna, Carlos worked more directly with the Soviet bloc. The miniseries contains a stunning scene in which Carlos is visiting Saddam Hussein in Iraq and KGB boss Yuri Andropov (later Soviet supremo form 1982-84) arrives to deliver a bloodthirsty speech promising that the Soviet Union will pay lavishly for the assassination of Anwar Sadat for betraying their aid. 

It's great TV, but I can't find much online about whether or not it really happened. (I must say, the scene rather resembles the opening one in The Naked Gun, in which Lt. Frank Drebin goes undercover at the secret terrorist planning meeting of Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin.) Whether or not that meeting took place, the energetic Andropov, who became KGB top man in 1967, was an influential figure backing 1970s terrorism.

Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez plays the terrorist. There's not all that much he can do with this humorless egotist. Some of the renown of his performance is like that of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds: he speaks a wide variety of languages, all very quickly. 

About half the movie is in English (it's apparently the lingua franca of terrorists), but the main character speaks English in the mode of a classy Spaniard: i.e., with a distracting lisp. 

Unfortunately, the Netflix version doesn't come with Closed Captions during the English-language scenes, and the theatrical captions during the French, Spanish, Arabic, German, and Russian scenes are too tiny and too white-on-white to be easily readable by old tired eyes on a cheap TV. So, I can only say I more or less got the gist of the movie. 

Shot on an $18 million dollar budget, or about $3.5 million per hour, the miniseries seems pretty accurate about the mid-1970s (except for the soundtrack of songs by Wire, a British punk band that I thought sounded pretty cool in 1978, but was different from anything anybody was listening to in 1975). The show, for example, features an amazing array of 1970s automobiles. Having owned a 1970s automobile, I was impressed by how many the filmmakers could round up that still run. 

A few things that were different about the 1970s:

- Cops weren't militarized back then. A large fraction of recent mass-market movies (e.g., We're the MillersThe Heat, Now You See Me, etc. etc.) feature scenes of cops donning body armor and mounting complex raids using commando-style hand-gestures, rappelling through skylights, etc. People love that kind of stuff these days.

- Police amateurishness and befuddlement in the 1970s wasn't necessarily a good thing. Carlos wasn't exactly a terrorist mastermind, but he wasn't dealing with Seal Team Six, either. The terrorist modus operandi of the era was to carry a duffel bag full of weapons into a hotel or airport, shoot people, grab hostages, and demand a jetliner. This seemed like a foolproof plan back then (although Carlos managed to foul it up sometimes). What are the cops gonna do?

- Nobody had tattoos.

September 7, 2013

National stereotypes of business meetings

Via Business Insider, here's a chart put together by a Brit named Richard Lewis for his bestselling business advice manual. 
I don't travel enough to have strong opinions on this.

The Simon-Ehrlich Bet (and the nonbet)

From the NYT:
Betting on the Apocalypse

By PAUL SABIN 
Published: September 7, 2013

ONE day in October 1990, the iconoclastic economist Julian L. Simon walked out to get the mail at his house in the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md. In a small envelope sent from Palo Alto, Calif., he found a sheet of metal prices, along with a check for $576.07 from the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. There was no note. 
Ten years earlier, Mr. Simon and Mr. Ehrlich, joined by two scientific colleagues, had made a wager on the future prices of five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. The bet — in which the loser would pay the change in price of a $1,000 bundle of the five metals — was a test of their competing theories of coming prosperity or doom. ... 
Paul Sabin is an associate professor of American history at Yale and the author of “The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future.”

What's usually left out of this story is that Ehrlich learned from losing his first bet, and proposed a more sophisticated second bet. From Wikipedia:
Understanding that Simon wanted to bet again, Ehrlich and climatologist Stephen Schneider counter-offered, challenging Simon to bet on 15 current trends, betting $1000 that each will get worse (as in the previous wager) over a ten-year future period.[2] 
The trends they bet would continue to worsen were: 
The three years 2002–2004 will on average be warmer than 1992–1994. 
There will be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than in 1994. 
There will be more nitrous oxide in the atmosphere in 2004 than 1994. 
The concentration of ozone in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) will be greater than in 1994. 
Emissions of the air pollutant sulfur dioxide in Asia will be significantly greater in 2004 than in 1994. 
There will be less fertile cropland per person in 2004 than in 1994. 
There will be less agricultural soil per person in 2004 than 1994. 
There will be on average less rice and wheat grown per person in 2002–2004 than in 1992–1994. 
In developing nations there will be less firewood available per person in 2004 than in 1994. 
The remaining area of virgin tropical moist forests will be significantly smaller in 2004 than in 1994. 
The oceanic fishery harvest per person will continue its downward trend and thus in 2004 will be smaller than in 1994. 
There will be fewer plant and animal species still extant in 2004 than in 1994. 
More people will die of AIDS in 2004 than in 1994. 
Between 1994 and 2004, sperm cell counts of human males will continue to decline and reproductive disorders will continue to increase. 
The gap in wealth between the richest 10% of humanity and the poorest 10% will be greater in 2004 than in 1994. 

Simon refused to bet on this.

The proposed bet on ocean fisheries, for example, reflects a better awareness on Ehrlich's part of the benefits of property rights. Egg ranchers don't kill off all the chickens that lay the tasty eggs because they own the chickens. But nobody owns mid-ocean fish until they're caught (Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons), so the lack of property rights encourage overfishing and poaching right now, rather than long-term stewardship. It's not an insoluble problem, but it is a difficult one.

In general, people like to wonder about grandiose overall questions: Prosperity or Doom???

But, I'm more interested in thinking about policies ceteris paribus. Moore's Law, for example, has covered up for a lot of bad policy decisions, but the relevant question is, given Moore's Law, how much better would things be if Stupid Policy X hadn't been implemented?

Australian center-right wins big with immigration restrictionism

From the BBC:
Australia's opposition has crushed the governing Labor party in a general election that has returned the Liberal-National coalition to power for the first time in six years. 
The coalition won 88 seats to Labor's 57 in the 150-seat parliament.

From the British Independent a couple of days ago:
EDITORIAL 
Thursday 5 September 2013 
Hostility to immigration looks likely to decide the outcome of the Australian election 
The opposition leader says he wants to see "zero" boatloads of immigrants 
... What does it mean for Australia and the world if the Liberal-National coalition resumes office after a six-year gap? A victory for Mr Abbott would confirm a trend that affects many rich countries, which is that hostility to immigration is starting to shift votes. The opposition leader says he wants to get to a position where there are “zero” boatloads of would-be immigrants arriving in Australia each year.

I wonder how different are the attitudes toward immigration of Rupert Murdoch's media properties in Australia and the U.S.?

September 6, 2013

America Out of Step with the World

Australians are voting today, and a major issue is which party will crack down hardest on illegal immigration, with the ruling left-of-center Labor party playing catch-up against the the right-of-center Liberal party. 

Here's an NYT article from a couple of months ago:
July 19, 2013 
Australia Adopts Tough Measures to Curb Asylum Seekers 
By MATT SIEGEL 
SYDNEY, Australia — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd [Labor] of Australia moved on Friday to curtail the record number of people trying the dangerous boat journey to claim asylum in the country, pledging that no one who arrives by boat without a visa will ever be granted permission to settle in Australia. 
Under the tough policy, all asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat will be sent to a refugee-processing center in nearby Papua New Guinea, which like Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. If the asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees, they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea, but forfeit any right to asylum in Australia. 
Mr. Rudd, who is facing a hotly contested federal election within weeks, acknowledged that the policy was harsh and likely to face legal challenges. But he said that something had to be done to protect the lives of asylum seekers and to restore the integrity of the country’s borders. 
“Australians have had enough of seeing people drowning in the waters to our north,” Mr. Rudd said at a news conference. “Our country has had enough of people smugglers exploiting asylum seekers and seeing them drown on the high seas.” 
“As of today asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia,” he said. 
No issue looms larger over Australian politics than how to deal with asylum seekers, and it is unclear whether Mr. Rudd’s tough new policy will score him any political points.
... Under the so-called Pacific Solution of Prime Minister John Howard a decade ago, asylum seekers were transported to nearby island nations like Papua New Guinea and Nauru for a lengthy processing intended to remove the incentive for claiming asylum on Australia’s shores. The policy, which was roundly criticized by human rights advocates, was abandoned when Mr. Rudd became prime minister for the first time in 2007. 
But Mr. Rudd’s change of policy backfired spectacularly, leading to an explosion in the number of arrivals from a mere 161 in 2008 to 11,599 in just the first three quarters of 2012-13, the latest period for which official statistics have been published. The majority of arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka. 
In 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard effectively revived the Pacific Solution, opening offshore detention centers in Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. However, those two centers could not accommodate the steady stream of new arrivals and Australia is now facing a backlog of some 20,000 people awaiting processing. 
... Given the success of the opposition leader Tony Abbott’s use of the governing Labor Party’s failed refugee policies as a cudgel, and with an election approaching, the political calculus may prove more relevant than the fiscal. 
The new asylum policy appears to be part of a concerted effort by Mr. Rudd to nullify Mr. Abbott’s main lines of attack ahead of the election. Earlier in the week he announced an end to another of Ms. Gillard’s unpopular programs — a tax on carbon emissions of which Mr. Abbott was highly critical. 

First, Australia is not the outlier here, the Schumer-Rubio American establishment is the ones out of step with global opinion. The political tides in most of the world are moving against illegal immigration. 

Second, the Australian opposition to phony refugees wasn't even driven by hard times. Australia has enjoyed a huge boom due to Chinese raw materials purchasing (recently ramping down). Much of the Australian opposition to illegal immigration has to do with environmentalism: Australians are worried about carbon emissions and water conservation, and, as frequent visitor to Australia Jared Diamond noted in 2005, those concerns aren't consistent with massive immigration.

It would be worth asking how American elite opinion on immigration remains in such a bubble of provincial ignorance. Except that we already know the answer: ignorance is easy.

Death of movies greatly exaggerated

Every year you read about how the movie business is collapsing, but, then, it just keeps sort of trundling along. This summer was widely reported to be one of catastrophic flops marking tectonic shifts that will soon dump Hollywood to the bottom of the ocean, but, after a terrible start to 2013, domestic box office was up 7% for summer 2013 versus summer 2012, despite the 3D fad continuing to fizzle out. (And the summer season growth would have been 12% except that last year's The Avengers was such a giant hit.)

And that's just measuring the century old business model of getting customers to leave their homes and go to a theater, which is a downright quaint way of doing things. They have lots of other ways to make money.

The Coen Brothers are out promoting their upcoming December movie about a folk-singer in pre-Bob Dylan Greenwich Village:
Q. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. ... It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film. 
Joel Coen: It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know? 
Ethan Coen: We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they're establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too. 
Joel: And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” 

The Coen Brothers are like Woody Allen in this regard -- investors don't demand they maximize ROI as long as they don't Heaven's Gate them -- except that, in contrast to Allen, there are two of them, they are a couple of decades younger, and, on average, they take twice as long to make each movie, so with four times the amount of man-years per movie, their average film's quality/originality is much higher than Allen's last dozen.

A movie executive
The movie and TV industries are among the rare holdouts to having their cost-structures ruthlessly rationalized. Movie executives are generally not lacking in chutzpah, but even they have more dignity and self-awareness than Silicon Valley billionaires, so they don't lobby Congress about how the crippling best boy and key grip shortages mean that movies will be rotting in the soundstages unless Hollywood gets 100,000 more visas to bring in foreign workers to do the gaffering jobs Americans just won't do.

Moreover, the movie business is full of weird cross-subsidizations that any MBA with a spreadsheet would target for elimination. Most notably, teenage fans subsidize grown-up movie-goers. The wealth generated by blockbusters helps pay for Coen Bros.-type movies, both because investors lavish a fraction of their summer profits on fall movies, and because talent charges less to work on prestige pics.

Also, teenagers subsidize grown-up tastes even within summer blockbusters. The summer's biggest hit movie, Iron Man 3, for example, was a lot better than it had to be (e.g., Sir Ben Kingsley's role). 

By the way, to change the subject to sibling rivalry, over the last 29 years I've read dozens of joint interviews with the Coen Brothers (who are not twins), and I still can't tell them apart. Their public affect is not like, say, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Brothers usually take pains to distinguish themselves from each other (for instance, one identical twin recently informed me that he has 20-22 eyesight while his brother has 20-24 eyesight). In contrast, the Coens, who have gotten an awful lot of work done together, don't. I suspect they have fairly conscious strategies and rules for minimizing and managing sibling rivalry, but I don't know what they are.

My son tells me that a few years ago, the Coen Brothers came to his college to give a speech or receive an award or something, and the students buzzed for a week afterwards about the surprising fact that the Coen Brothers had arrived in separate limousines coming from separate directions. It had never occurred to the college film fans that the Coen Brothers are different individuals with distinct lives who don't live together in one big Coen Brothers House.

September 4, 2013

World War N

Milken, Gates, Kagame, Blair, and, lastly, Villaraigosa
From the NYT:
The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman 
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN 
Published: September 4, 2013 
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, agreed to meet me at 11 a.m. on a recent Saturday. Kagame’s office is on top of a hill near the center of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, and I took a taxi there, driven by a man in a suit and tie. Whenever I’m in Kigali, I am always impressed by how spotless it is, how the city hums with efficiency, which is all the more remarkable considering that Rwanda remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Even on a Saturday morning, platoons of women in white gloves rhythmically swept the streets, softly singing to themselves. I passed the Union Trade Center mall in the middle of town, where traffic circulates smoothly around a giant fountain. There was no garbage in the streets and none of the black plastic bags that get tangled up in the fences and trees of so many other African cities — Kagame’s government has banned them. 
There were no homeless youth sleeping on the sidewalks or huffing glue to kill their hunger. In Rwanda, vagrants and petty criminals have been scooped up by the police and sent to a youth “rehabilitation center” on an island in the middle of Lake Kivu that some Rwandan officials jokingly call their Hawaii — because it is so lush and beautiful — though people in Kigali whisper about it as if it were Alcatraz. There aren’t even large slums in Kigali, because the government simply doesn’t allow them.

The night before, I strolled back to my hotel from a restaurant well past midnight — a stupid idea in just about any other African capital. But Rwanda is one of the safest places I’ve been, this side of Zurich, which is hard to reconcile with the fact that less than 20 years ago more civilians were murdered here in a three-month spree of madness than during just about any other three-month period in human history, including the Holocaust. During Rwanda’s genocide, the majority Hutus turned on the minority Tutsis, slaughtering an estimated one million men, women and children, most dispatched by machetes or crude clubs. Rwandans say it is difficult for any outsider to appreciate how horrifying it was. Nowadays, it’s hard to find even a jaywalker. 
Clinton, ?, Usher?, Alicia Keyes?,
Quincy Jones, and Kagame in back
No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation. Measured against many of his colleagues, like the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who ran a beautiful, prosperous nation straight into the ground, or the Democratic Republic of Congo’s amiable but feckless Joseph Kabila, who is said to play video games while his country falls apart, Kagame seems like a godsend. Spartan, stoic, analytical and austere, he routinely stays up to 2 or 3 a.m. to thumb through back issues of The Economist ...

The story goes on to offer a number of interesting vignettes, like Kagame beating with a stick subordinates who spent too much on drapes for the office. And it has some good insights, such as that Rwandans have been fairly well organized since Burton and Speke visited them in the in 1860s. 

But, it's kind of lacking in the bigger picture of the endemic struggle between Nilotics and Bantus, in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda (where Kagame was once a right hand man to the current dictator) and the Congo, where Kagame has been plundering for decades.

I briefly wrote about it in 2008. Back in 1995, Barack Obama Jr., who is half-Luo, noted the distinction in Kenya between "tall, ink-black Luos and short, brown Kikuyus." His Luo relatives assured him, "The Luo are intelligent but lazy." 

The Bantus, by weight of numbers, tended to get the upper hand in decolonization's one-man-one-vote-once era, but the Nilotics have been making an impressive comeback, with Raila Odinga (the son of Barack Obama Sr.'s political hero) just losing the Presidency of Kenya to Uhuru Kenyatta (the descendant of Barack Sr.'s enemy) in the recent election. 

Most remarkably, even in the United States, where the African-American population is overwhelmingly Bantu, the Nilotics are doing well in World War N. The American President is half Nilotic and not at all Bantu.

Wedding Crunchers

The website Wedding Crunchers displays keyword trends from 1981 through 2013 in New York Times wedding announcements in Google nGram style. For example, back during the first Reagan administration, more NYT wedding notifications mentioned "Republican" than "Democrat" or "Democratic." Recently, however, Democrats have opened up a 3 to 1 lead.

RapGenius has an interesting analysis with lots of graphs.

Bushes as Habsburgs with better jawlines

Two from commenter Peter the Shark:
The Bushes are really reminiscent of the Habsburgs - another family of aristocrats whose primary loyalty was (is) to themselves and who were happy to take on the coloring of any group of people they could rule. Thus you had a Habsburg popping up in Mexico in the 19th century, Emperor Karl trying to make himself king of Hungary after WWI and another nephew who tried to enlist Ukrainian nationalism in support of his cause. Now of course Habsburgs are big supporters of the EU and continuously trying to find a role at the supranational level. In similar fashion a Bush can be an old New Englander (Prescott), a Texan (Dubya), or a Hispanic. Doesn't really matter to the Bush family. In some ways you have to admire the Bush clan for somehow managing to preserve an almost medieval sense of European aristocratic entitlement into the 21st century. 

And:
"30 Rock," like "Curb Your Enthusiasm." reflects a cynicism that has developed among smart urban liberals. They recognize that a lot of liberal tropes have failed, but for cultural and tribal reasons they won't abandon the ship. Liberal cynicism is probably good for the Democrats - it allows them to have a bigger tent since for the most part they are OK with being mocked from the inside as long as certain lines aren't crossed. I don't see that on the GOP where there is a constant battle to be "more true conservative than Thou!". The Dems are applying the Putin strategy to power and the GOP the North Korea strategy. 

"Obama Promises Syria Strike Will Have No Objective"

From The New Yorker:
OBAMA PROMISES SYRIA STRIKE WILL HAVE NO OBJECTIVE 
POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ 
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.” 
“Let me be clear,” he said in an interview on CNN. “Our goal will not be to effect régime change, or alter the balance of power in Syria, or bring the civil war there to an end. We will simply do something random there for one or two days and then leave.”

Actually, this parody proposal doesn't strike me as a totally bad idea, so it's worth thinking through why it would be bad. Assuming that there was use of poison gas in Syria and assuming the regime was behind it and that it's important to deter future use of poison gas, why not punish the leaders with some cruise missiles blowing up the leadership's prized possessions (does Assad have a G6?) and nicest offices, and then, point made, stop?

Well, one reason is because this kind of Olympian thunderbolt flinging is likely to lead onward. Things get personalized quickly. For example, Obama's unexpected declaration of a no fly zone over Libya in 2011 inevitably meant that the U.S. was going to overthrow Colonel Q/K/G. Obama couldn't go into the 2012 election as the President who started a war with G/Q/K and didn't win.

NYT: Strange New Respect for Bush Dynasty

"47"
Almost a decade ago, I argued that the dynastic ambition of the Bush clan is the shameful secret behind the Bushes' obsession with electing a new people. Now, the New York Times reports that the dynastic ambition of the Bush clan is the admirable secret behind the Bushes' obsession with electing a new people:
Bushes Focus on Immigration Debate to Reclaim Their Influence 
By ASHLEY PARKER 
FORT WORTH — After years of enormous power and political influence, no member of the Bush family currently holds political office. 
But as the focus on military action in Syria drags former President George W. Bush’s Iraq war policy back into the spotlight, the Bush family is quietly but forcefully gearing up for another, still-developing debate: The fight on Capitol Hill over a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws — a discussion critical to protecting the Bushes’ legacy on what has, for decades, been a defining issue for them. 
In July, Mr. Bush, who has largely avoided the political spotlight since leaving office, attended a naturalization ceremony for newly sworn-in citizens at his presidential library in Dallas. 
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, his brother, has been traveling the country delivering speeches and writing opinion pieces pegged to his recent book, “Immigration Wars,” written with Clint Bolick, which argues for change in the law. 
"48"?
And Jeb Bush’s two sons have been reaching out to Hispanics. George P. Bush, 37, is a founder of a political action committee — Hispanic Republicans of Texas — devoted to promoting Hispanics in Texas politics, and is running for office himself as a candidate for Texas land commissioner. Jeb Bush Jr., 29, is the founder of Sun PAC, a Florida group that recruits conservative Hispanic political candidates. 
For the Bushes, immigration is deeply personal. The family chose to root its political ambitions in Texas, and Jeb Bush’s wife, Columba, is from the central Mexican town of León. The elder George Bush famously, and lovingly, once referred to his three Mexican-American grandchildren as “the little brown ones.” 
What's wrong with his mouth?
Now, as the Republican Party struggles with how to attract Hispanic voters, members of the Bush dynasty seem more determined than ever to exert influence over the issue they have been helping to shape for years. 
“For generations, the Bush family has been connected to Hispanics by history, geography and family, and as a result, they have a deep understanding and acute sensitivity to important cultural nuances and political issues that affect the population,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist who worked on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “When it comes to issues affecting Hispanics, the Bush family has a strong compass.” 
The family’s outreach to Hispanics is also smart politics, likely to bolster its political future in 2016 and beyond. George W. Bush won re-election to the White House in 2004 with 44 [sic] percent of the Hispanic vote, a number neither subsequent Republican presidential nominee came close to matching, and Jeb Bush is often mentioned as a likely 2016 contender in large part because of his strong relationship with Hispanic voters and support for an immigration overhaul.
Mr. McKinnon has already nicknamed George P. Bush “47.” (His uncle, of course, is “43,” and his grandfather is “41.”) ...
George P. Bush said in a recent interview after a campaign event here that courting Hispanics has always been both the politically smart and morally right thing to do. 
“My uncle obviously thought it was an important strategy for him, not only to win, but to expand the party, expand the base,” he said. “For my dad, it might be a little bit more personal, in the sense that he married ‘una Mexicana,’ and it certainly changes one’s perspective. But you know, being in Florida, it’s similar demographics to what you see in Texas, so it’s been important both from a political and a personal standpoint.” 
In the preface to his book, Jeb Bush writes that immigration to him “means my wife and family.” 
“It’s just smart marketing; it’s just smart business,” said Henry Bonilla, who is Hispanic and is a former Republican House member from Texas. “Whether it’s political business or corporate business, there are those who understand that it’s a diverse nation and it’s wise to be inclusive, and those who don’t, and it was just innately part of the Bush culture from the get-go.” ...
And before the Sept. 11 attacks, Robert Draper, the author of a book about the younger Bush’s presidency, reported that one of the priorities of Mr. Bush’s administration was to tackle immigration; the White House was so committed, he wrote, that “throughout 2001, the subject of amnesty for illegal immigrants popped up frequently in White House meetings.” 
The fact that the 43rd president’s immigration push — which failed in 2006 and 2007 — is being attempted again today, friends say, is evidence that he was simply ahead of his time. 

It's always seemed to me that importing a lot of ringers to eventually elect your doofus nephew President is a shocking violation of the public trust (just as Marco Rubio's transparent self-dealing is grotesque). But I forgot to factor in that the ringers the Bushes and Rubio are intent on importing to put themselves in the White House are nonwhite, so that makes it not only morally forgivable, but heroic.

In 21st Century America, ethics really aren't that complicated anymore:

Who-Whom.

September 3, 2013

The joy of American unexceptionalism

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
I’ve found most talk about “American exceptionalism” pernicious because it tends to imply that America needs to be exceptional to deserve what other countries rightfully take for granted. ...
America is definitely exceptional in our recommended daily intake of flapdoodle. To Finns or Japanese or other sensible folk, their countries don’t have to be special to anybody except themselves. They need not be proposition nations, nor cities upon a hill redeeming the world, nor the rightful destinations of other countries’ huddled masses, nor the scourges of wrongdoing in the Levant. Instead, they are the past, present, and future homes of their own people. So their responsibility is to be good stewards for their heirs.
In contrast, the vague grandiosity of the ideology of American exceptionalism makes Americans easier to manipulate with contrived narratives.

Read the whole thing there.