October 23, 2013

Tyler Cowen: "Why Texas Is Our Future"

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
Is Texas about the best fate that a heavily Hispanicized America can hope for? In a future United States that won’t be able to generate all that much per-capita wealth, is Texas‘s system of cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes, and cheap government the only plausible future for the economy? 
These are questions I’ve kicked around for much of the 21st century. My long-time readers will note that several of my old ideas on affordable family formation and the differences between red states and blue states comprise the backbone of Tyler Cowen’s cover story in the current issue of TIME, “Why Texas Is Our Future.” The parts of Cowen’s article that aren't derived from me are not all that well thought out, but his long feature is interesting as an example of the weird, almost Straussian influence I seem to have on what’s considered cutting-edge thought in the mainstream media.

Read the whole thing there.

Pot v. Kettle, Greenspan v. Fannie Mae

Alan Greenspan has a new book out, and he puts part of the blame for the Recent Unpleasantness on Fannie Mae. Of course, this outrages Democratic pundits like Brad DeLong.  

It's depressing that more than a half decade later, few seemed to have learned anything to help them move beyond the tired talking points. How can it not be important to develop a non-partisan, non-ideological history of the Housing Bubble and how that contributed to the great crash?

The usual liberal v. conservative categories don't work well to explain what happened. We need a new understanding that in the 21st Century, the Top Dogs, like Angelo Mozilo and Kerry Killinger of WaMu, regularly use the moral symbolism of oppressed minorities to bend traditional restraints to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.

Below is some documentation on Fannie Mae's role at the key moment in late December 2004-early January 2005 when the Bubble metastasized, to allow you to judge for yourself the culpability of the various players.

Fannie Mae was hamstrung by an accounting scandal for a few years that kept it from participating fervently in the nascent Housing Bubble of 2002-2004. But late in 2004 Daniel Mudd became interim CEO and quickly made a deal with Angelo Mozilo to buy up Countrywide's crummy mortgages. You can see a major inflection point in the Housing Bubble following this. 2004 was a bubble year, but the bubble went wild in 2005 when Fannie came back in aggressively and financed Mozilo's wildest ambitions. So Bush and Mozilo and the like launched the bubble in 2002-2004, claiming to be loosening downpayment and documentation requirements it in the name of home ownership equality for Hispanics and blacks. With regulators told to stand down, private enterprise got the party rolling. But then Fannie jumped in just when we needed some adult supervision to take away the punch bowl.

From the New York Times on October 4, 2008:
"Shortly after he became chief executive [in December 2004], Mr. Mudd traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation’s largest mortgage lender. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else. 
But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher’s son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide’s riskier loans. 
Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors — bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly. 
“You’re becoming irrelevant,” Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors. 
“You need us more than we need you,” Mr. Mozilo said, “and if you don’t take these loans, you’ll find you can lose much more.” 
Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.

Apparently, quickly after this historically catastrophic meeting between Countrywide and Fannie Mae, Mozilo issued a pledge to lend a trillion dollars to minorities and lower income borrowers:
"ORLANDO, Fla., Jan. 14 [2005] /PRNewswire/ -- Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., a national leader in expanding homeownership across America, today announced an extension of its We House America(R) initiative to fund $1 trillion in home loans to minorities and lower-income borrowers and communities through 2010. 
"The $1 Trillion We House America Challenge, expanded from $600 billion announced in 2003, embodies Countrywide's long-standing commitment to lead the mortgage industry in closing the homeownership gap for minority and lower-income families and communities," said Countrywide Financial Corporation Chairman and CEO Angelo Mozilo, who announced the initiative at the International Builders' Show in Orlando.
"For several years now, Countrywide has been a leading lender to minorities and lower-income households," Mozilo said. "I am proud of our lending record and pleased to announce the expansion of our lending commitment to $1 trillion. ... 
The company will continue to develop innovative programs emphasizing non-traditional lending criteria, thus helping to address challenges Mozilo has made to the industry, such as calling for improved underwriting systems that eliminate the over-reliance on traditional credit scores that can mask a borrower's true credit-worthiness. Countrywide is already responding to this challenge with the launch last year of its successful Optimum Loan program. That program addresses major obstacles for hard-to-qualify borrowers, such as allowing for non-occupant co-borrowers, other secondary income, and pooled funds for down payments. 
Mozilo said. "We have also called upon one of our esteemed directors, the Honorable Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a former mayor of San Antonio. Henry will put to use his long and respected experience as an advocate for affordable housing who understands the benefits to communities of homeownership. He has graciously agreed to lend his support and expertise to this effort with the goal of assuring Countrywide's continued leadership in innovative, responsible and flexible mortgage products." 
Secretary Cisneros said of the initiative, "Countrywide's $1 trillion commitment is very tangible proof of this company's commitment to fair, affordable and responsible lending. This company is leading the industry in closing the homeownership gap ...

I, for one, welcome our new Natural Republican overlords

Thomas Edsall writes:
There is a fundamental disagreement along racial and ethnic lines about what causes poverty. This is demonstrated in a June 2012 Pew survey that asked “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor, lack of effort on his or her own part, or circumstances beyond his or her control?” Whites were split, 41-41, but strong majorities of blacks and Hispanics answered “circumstances beyond his or her control,” 62-28 and 59-27, respectively. 

Hispanics: They are only 18/21st as economically liberal as blacks!

All the GOP has to do to win the Latino vote is Get Our Message Out.

Open Borders update from U.N.

With our intellectual vanguard looking forward to increased immigration and putting average Americans on a bean-based diet, it's worth considering just how many relatively poor foreigners there might turn out to be in the future. 

The U.N. puts a lot of effort into projecting populations. Obviously, they should be taken with a grain of salt, but reading them is better than putting your fingers in your ears and chanting "I can't hear you!"

The Daily Mail reported in June:
Global population to soar to 11 billion by 2100 as African population quadruples 
Projection is 800 million more than a previous UN forecast of 10.1 billion  
Researchers had expected fertility in Africa to more fall quickly  
By JILL REILLY 
PUBLISHED: 10:29 EST, 13 June 2013  
The world’s population will reach almost eleven billion by the end of the century because of soaring birth rates in Africa, according to new research. 
... Researchers had expected fertility on the poorest continent where a woman will give birth to an average of 5.2 children in her lifetime, to fall more quickly than it has. 
The current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion, nearly a fourfold increase, by 2100.

Professor Adrian Raftery, of the University of Washington, said: 'The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted, and as a result the African population will go up.'

The UN's tables make interesting reading. 

For example, the population of Tanzania was 7.7 million in 1950, and it's now 49.3 million. The projection for 2025 (in 12 years) is 69.3 million, in 2050 (in 38 years) is 129.4 million, and in 2100 it's seven googol gazillion 275.6 million.

Nigeria, in contrast, isn't expected to grow as fast as Tanzania, in percentage terms:

1950: 37.9 million
2013: 173.6 million
2025: 239.9 million
2050: 440.4 million
2100: 913.8 million

I certainly don't take these UN projections as gospel, but you have to say they are interesting. I realize, however, that's not a universal opinion. Even though immigration is on the table in the House, few in American public life seem aware of these UN projections or their implications for immigration policy.

I would suspect, however, that the government of Israel pays closer attention to UN population forecasts than does the government of the United States. Perhaps rather than the government of Israel trying to hire failed American officials like Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke, the government of the United States should try to hire successful Israeli officials with strong track records of preventing illegal immigration?

October 22, 2013

A vision for America's future: Let them eat beans!

Popular economist Tyler Cowen has provided us with a vision for the future of average Americans whom all elements of responsible opinion -- Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Bill Gates, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the strawberry growers, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, Ted Cruz, and Michael Bloomberg -- can unite behind:


Of course, the stage after that of converting America to a globalist economists' utopia will be:

Assume a can of beans!

And, finally, America will reach the the nirvana of the economists:



(These are all from the comments on this and theprevious post, where there a lot of other good one-liners.)

Tyler Cowen: 90% of Americans will (and should) have a more bean-centric Mexican lifestyle

To sum up, Mr. Cowen believes that America is dividing itself in two. At the top will be 10% to 15% of high achievers, the “Tiger Mother” kids if you like, whose self-motivation and mastery of technology will allow them to roar away into the future. Then there will be everyone else, slouching into an underfunded future of lower economic expectations, shantytowns and an endless diet of beans. I’m not kidding about the beans. 
Poor Americans, writes Mr. Cowen, will have to “reshape their tastes” and live more like Mexicans. “Don’t scoff at the beans,” he says. “With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasure from the beans, which I cook with freshly ground cumin and rehydrated, pureed chilies. Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason why they are eaten so frequently in low-income countries.”
So what am I to do to save my sons from this bean-filled future?  

I realize I'm a wacko extremist, unlike all the mainstream intellectuals such as Tyler, but maybe instead of 85 or 90% of Americans living more like Mexicans, the government should try to, you know, restrict immigration

NYT: "Skill Gap Among 1-Year-Olds Adds to Push for Pre-K"

Here's the front page headline in the NYT for the Hart-Risley study redux article I mentioned earlier:
Skill Gap Among 1-Year-Olds Adds to Push for Pre-K
By MOTOKO RICH 4:18 PM ET 
A study found that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify images of simple words they knew much faster than children from low-income families. 

Uh, how is the President's plan for universal public schooling for four-year-olds going to solve The Gap among one-year-olds?

By the way, wouldn't "Motoko Rich" be a great name for the Bad Girl in a James Bond movie?

An Oscar-nominated look at life in a Roma village

With the culture of the Roma much in the news, it's worth recalling that the famous opening scenes of a critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film were shot in the Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) section of the Romanian village of Glod:
From the Associated Press:
GLOD, Romania (AP) — The name of this remote Romanian village means "mud," and that's exactly what angry locals are throwing at comedian Sacha Baron Cohen
Cohen used Glod's Gypsies as stand-ins for Kazakhs in his runaway hit movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Now offended villagers are threatening to sue the film's producers for paying them a pittance to put farm animals in their homes and perform other crude antics. 
Residents and local officials in the hardscrabble hamlet 85 miles northwest of Bucharest said Tuesday they were horrified and humiliated to learn their abject poverty and simple ways were ridiculed for a movie now raking in millions at box offices worldwide. 
"We thought they came here to help us — not mock us," said Dana Luca, 40, sweeping a manure-stained street lined with shabby homes of crumbling brick and corrugated iron sheeting.

October 21, 2013

Destination 8 Months and 29 Days Before Birth

Breaking news in the New York Times:
Language-Gap Study Bolsters a Push for Pre-K 
By MOTOKO RICH 
Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study [Hart-Risley] found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs. 
Now a follow-up study has found a language gap as early as 18 months, heightening the policy debate. 
The new research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew — “dog” or “ball” — much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes. 
The new findings, although based on a small sample, reinforced the earlier research showing that because professional parents speak so much more to their children, the children hear 30 million more words by age 3 than children from low-income households, early literacy experts, preschool directors and pediatricians said. In the new study, the children of affluent households came from communities where the median income was $69,000; the low-income children came from communities with a median income of $23,900.

The next study will find that rich children and poor children are on average different at birth. And eventually a study will find that rich children and poor children are different at 8 months and 29 days before birth.

But not a day sooner!

NYT tries to deal with gypsy child-stealing

The New York Times gets around to reporting on the Greek gypsy story:
Roma Couple Ordered Jailed by Greek Authorities 
By NIKI KITSANTONIS and DAN BILEFSKY 
ATHENS — A Roma couple was ordered jailed on Monday over the alleged abduction of a child who was found during a police raid on an encampment in central Greece last week. The case has fueled speculation about human trafficking and illegal adoption rackets, and heightened scrutiny of Roma populations across Europe. 
The couple, identified by the police as Christos Salis, 39, and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, insisted during five hours of testimony that they adopted the child from a Bulgarian woman.

The crucial detail being left out at this point is that they offered multiple stories about the child before, apparently, now settling on the Bulgarian one.

On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out completely the idea that the gypsy scamsters may have gotten the girl in some kind of quasi voluntary transaction with the girl's mother or other relations rather than through sheer kidnapping.

First, the idea that they may have obtained the little blonde girl voluntarily from a part-gypsy mother, perhaps a drug addict or prostitute, is not wholly implausible.

While genetic studies shows that gypsies originated in India, gypsy-acting individuals come in a wide variety of phenotypes. I was once ripped off in a classic gypsy scam by two Caucasians, one of whom looked Armenian or Lebanese, while the boss looked liked a 400-pound version of Danny Devito (yes, he was as charming a sight as that sounds). The woman with them was gypsy-looking, but under the streetlights it was easy for me to assume she was just a run of the mill Mexican.

To coach each other during the scam, the scamsters occasionally switched from American-accented lower class white-style English (kind of like how the characters talk on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) to some unknown language. Interestingly, whatever this language was, they spoke the mystery language with regular American English accents. The psychological effect was quite strange: it was as if these guys were speaking English but your brain had stopped processing your own language. Perhaps it was some kind of Thieves' Cant. Were they gypsies? Irish travelers? Somebody else who had picked up gypsy culture on their own? Beats me.

It's not unknown in history for a group to take on aspects of a culture that they aren't related to by blood. For example, the great Russian novelists like Tolstoy were fascinated by how Christian Cossacks, typically Slavic serfs who had run off to Russia's southern steppe frontier, took on much of the horse-based culture of their Muslim enemies like the Kazakhs and the Chechens. (By the way, that's what Borat is ultimately about: Kazakhs = the hated Cossacks in Sacha Baron-Cohen's mind. And f you want to see what a gypsy village looks like, that's where Baron-Cohen filmed the section set in Borat's home town.)

The Irish travelers might be similar to the Cossacks in picking up traits from the gypsies. Or may not. Who knows, maybe some American carnies, say, study the gypsy style for clues on easy money? Or maybe it is all independent but convergent cultural evolution toward a lifestyle of mostly nonviolent criminal parasitism?

In summary, while it's correct to say that gypsies trace back genetically to India, their culture includes a sizable penumbra of people of various degrees of European ancestry. So, I wouldn't completely rule out that this little blonde girl had a gypsy-identifying mother and that one of the defendants' many stories of how they acquired her might be more true than the theory they they just snatched her off the street.
Ms. Dimopoulou had a second identification card giving her name as Selini Sali with a different date and place of birth. They will stand trial on charges of abducting a minor and forging official documents. ...
The case comes amid an increasingly acrimonious debate in Europe over how to integrate the Roma, a nomadic people who came to the Continent centuries ago from India, and who are also widely known as Gypsies. 
In France, President François Hollande intervened over the weekend after a 15-year-old Roma girl was removed from a school bus and expelled to Kosovo, along with her parents and five siblings who had been living illegally in France for five years. After the case led to protests by student groups across the country, Mr. Hollande said the girl, Leonarda Dibrani, could return to France to finish her studies, but that her family would not be able to join her.

The case of Maria the little blonde girl comes as an unwelcome wrench in the gears of an international elite multiculti campaign led by the NYT based around the 15-year-old gypsy girl being arrested and deported with her family back to Kosovo by French authorities. (That was an ideal case for promoting The Narrative about white bigotry: this was a 15-year-old gypsy girl who was still in school.)

This kind of unwelcome news story drives the global Establishment nuts: they've got this human interest story all lined up to push their dominance, and then suddenly the Daily Mail and economically struggling papers like the L.A. Times discover a much more interesting human interest story that undermines the Narrative.

I learned about the story last Friday from the LA Times, which splashed it big without all that many excuses for gypsies.

Why? Gypsies kidnapping little blonde girls is exactly the kind of story that would intrigue Los Angeles' immense number of Latinos. In my experience, Mexicans are fascinated by the concept of malevolent gypsy fortune tellers putting curses on people. (For example, I'd never heard of Sam Raimi's 2009 horror film Drag Me to Hell when it came out, but L.A. Mexicans love it.) In the good old days, the high-toned LAT could ignore the tabloid tastes of Mexicans as long as the Mexicans kept paying for used car adds in the LAT's giant classifieds section, but post-Craig's List, the Grey Girl has to pander to L.A.'s new lowbrow demographics that the LAT so long editorialized in favor of acquiring.
At a time of grinding austerity and persistent unemployment across Europe, minorities and migrants are facing a growing political and economic backlash. The Roma, blighted by poverty and living in squalid housing on the outskirts of some European cities, have been singled out for attention.

An alternative interpretation of the sequence of cause and effect is that the Roma have been, predictably, doing things that attract attention. The main change is that the expansion of the EU allows gypsies to travel from their bases in Eastern Europe into richer, more naive Western Europe. When I say it was predictable, I mean I predicted this trend in a 2004 VDARE article "A Gypsy Is Haunting Europe ..." The NYT continues:
An estimated 11 million Roma are scattered across Europe. 
In Greece, officers’ suspicions were raised when they spotted the girl, who has light blond hair, pale skin and green eyes and bore no resemblance to the other camp residents. Subsequent DNA tests proved that she was not related to the Roma couple who were harboring her, the police said. ...
The Roma couple had given conflicting explanations to the police about how they acquired the girl – including that they had found her outside a supermarket when she was infant. Ultimately, they said they had adopted her after she was abandoned by her birth mother, a Bulgarian national. 
Panagiotis Tziovaras, the head of the Larissa police department, said Monday that it was possible the Roma couple was involved in human trafficking, state records showed them to have a total of 14 children registered in different parts of Greece. But he stressed that it was too early to draw any firm conclusions. 
“It could be an abduction, an illegal abduction, she could be a trafficking victim,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’re looking at all these options.”

We can't yet conclude that the child was kidnapped from her mother. In the chaos of gypsy culture, she might have been born to, say, a fair-skinned gypsy prostitute and traded along as a valuable commodity for use in begging and organized thievery. Gypsies use children all the time in their scams, and a child who doesn't look gypsy is less suspicion-arousing than their own children who do look like stereotypical gypsies. Also, if you are thinking about maiming a child to make her a better beggar, as in Slumdog Millionaire, you might wish to stockpile other people's children.

Child-stealing is an old stereotype about gypsies (e.g., the four-year-old Adam Smith was abducted by gypsies). Because it's a stereotype, it's fervently believed by the Great and the Good that it absolutely can't be true. That would mean that average people sometimes correctly notice patterns, and we can't have people noticing things for themselves. It's central to the dominant mindset that regular people can't notice patterns. Whether "can't" is used empirically or morally is left vague, with upholders of the conventional wisdom switching from one to the other.

My guess is that gypsy child-stealing really was a pattern, but it has largely disappeared because it elicited such ferocious reactions from the victims' communities. Europeans will put up with a lot of gypsy bad behavior, but not with child-stealing.
Documents found in the couple’s possession suggested that Ms. Dimopoulou had given birth to six of the 14 children within a 10-month period, the police official said, adding that Ms. Dimopoulou also had two police identity cards with different details and that Mr. Salis had been arrested for armed robbery in the past. 
... He said Maria’s case had “opened a Pandora’s box about what’s happening with the Roma and the exploitation of children in Greece but also in Europe.” He said there were no statistics to indicate how many children were victims of such rackets “because the authorities have not tackled the issue for fear of being accused of racism.” 
Representatives of the Roma community in Farsala appeared on several Greek television channels on Monday, asserting that Maria had been well-cared-for at the camp. The head of the Farsala Roma community, Babis Dimitriou, said that the real parents of the child were a Bulgarian Roma couple who had been at the camp last week during the police raid but had left. He expressed fears that the case would fuel discrimination against Roma in Greece and beyond.

After all, we can't have gypsies learning that there are boundaries of bad behavior that they can't cross, that child-stealing has consequences.

It will be interesting to see whether the global elite media gin up some other human interest case involving oppressed gypsies victimized by bigoted whites to distract from this one, or will drop the whole subject and imply that only lowbrows are at all interested in gypsies.

You might think that the keepers of the conventional wisdom would have decided to go easy on gypsy news the way they go easy on black crime news. It should have been utterly obvious that gypsy culture is extraordinarily sociopathic and parasitical, but instead, the NYT and co. chose to make a big deal out of the oppression of gypsies by whites. Maybe they just can't help themselves?

The inevitable embarrassment is now happening, but, as with the Trayvon Martin fiasco, if your hands are on the megaphone you can rewrite history a lot better than if your hands aren't.

For the NYT to drop its obsession with white oppression of gypsies and using gypsies as the main salient in the Immigration Wars seems easiest, but much of what you read in the prestige press is driven by a hyper-Leninist neurotic logic that "He who says A must say B ... and C and D and E and F." For example, if we let somebody get away with saying in public A -- "Gypsies have an unfortunate culture and they should try harder to be less of a burden on the rest of humanity" -- pretty soon they'll be shouting F from the church tops, and then the peasants with pitchforks will be coming after us.

I think this kind of neuroticism is bizarrely implausible, but you aren't supposed to criticize it, so it tends to fester and expand over time.

Is "Stereotype Threat" mostly publication bias?

Although the social sciences are considered a bastion of progressivism, it's remarkable how few data-driven ideas they generate in support of their ideology. We can get a feel for this by noting how rare are the "exceptions to the rule" studies that become immensely popular due to bolstering the dominant worldview, such as Hart & Risley's finding that black people don't talk enough and Claude Steele's little study of Stereotype Threat in which he induces black students at Stanford to score lower on a low stakes test of his devising than their high stakes SAT scores would predict. (I wrote about Stereotype Threat in VDARE.com in 2004, suggesting it's not hard to get across the message to black or female students that the professor wants them to not exert themselves fully on this meaningless test. That you can "prime" groups of people to work less hard on an unimportant test does not prove that you know how to make them score higher on an important test.)

Lately, the evidence has been mounting that the existence of Stereotype Threat is quite dependent upon the file drawer function: studies finding its existence are quickly published while studies not finding its existence are in much less demand.

Developmental Psychology
An Examination of Stereotype Threat Effects on Girls' Mathematics Performance 
Colleen M. Ganley, Leigh A. Mingle, Allison M. Ryan, Katherine Ryan, Marina Vasilyeva, and Michelle Perry 
Online First Publication, January 28, 2013. doi: 10.1037/a0031412
... Conclusion 
Taken together, the findings from published research, unpublished articles, and the present studies reveal inconsistency in the effects of stereotype threat on girls’ mathematics performance. The discrepancy in results from published and unpublished studies suggests publication bias, which may create an inaccurate picture of the phenomenon. A recent review suggests that this publication bias may also be an issue in the literature on stereotype threat in adult women (Stoet & Geary, 2012). Overall, these results raise the possibility that stereotype threat may not be the cause of gender differences in mathematics performance prior to college. Although we feel that more nuanced research needs to be done to truly understand whether stereotype threat impacts girls’ mathematics performance, we also believe that too much focus on this one explanation may deter researchers from investigating other key factors that may be involved in gender differences in mathematics performance. For example, there are a number of factors (e.g., mathematics anxiety, mathematics interest, spatial skills; see Ceci & Williams, 2010) that have been shown to be consistently related to mathematics performance and mathematics-and science-related career choices and may warrant more research attention than does stereotype threat.

And here's another study reaching a similar conclusion.

White baby boom in Washington D.C.

From Fox D.C.:
There's been a baby boom in Washington, D.C. 
Census figures show the number of children younger than 5 has grown by almost twenty percent to 39,000 over the past 3 years. 
The number of children ages 5 to 13 rose 7 percent.  
The biggest increases came from white infants and toddlers, which are up 34 percent.

That's a 34% increase in white babies in just three years in the nation's capital.

Now, all eyes back to what really matters: the insensitivity of the name of the Washington Redskins!

Did Netanyahu ask Bernanke to head Bank of Israel?

Here's an update to the story that Larry Summers turned down Bibi Netanyahu's offer to be the Israeli equivalent of the Chairman of the Fed. From YNetNews back on June 18th:
Netanyahu has also approached Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Shalom Bernanke, 60, who will be ending his term soon after eight years in office. Bernanke, a Jew, has an Israeli connection as well: Stanley Fischer [Israel's retiring American citizen central banker] was his thesis advisor at MIT.

This would be different from the Israeli government's approach to Summers, who is currently a private citizen (although always on short lists for important jobs). Bernanke was (and is) one of the three or four most powerful figures in the United States government. Bernanke has huge power both as a central banker and a financial regulator. Is it too much to ask foreign governments to have the good grace to wait until the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is out of power before approaching him with lucrative offers?

Of course, none of this is fully confirmed, but it's interesting that nobody in America was terribly interested in the propriety of all this back then. In Israel, however, the public has a more nationalistic view. The Wall Street Journal [link fixed] has now taken up the Summers-Bernanke story:
The approach has stoked domestic ire against Mr. Netanyahu for allegedly overlooking qualified Israeli candidates.

Beating the same old drum: Sick? Hire a doctor as your consultant

An economics professor writes:
Why We Make Bad Decisions 
By NOREENA HERTZ

LONDON — SIX years ago I was struck down with a mystery illness. My weight dropped by 30 pounds in three months. I experienced searing stomach pain, felt utterly exhausted and no matter how much I ate, I couldn’t gain an ounce.

... It was terrifying. ... Trying to find the answer, I saw doctors in London, New York, Minnesota and Chicago. ... I was offered a vast range of potential diagnoses. ... Treatments suggested ranged from a five-hour, high-risk surgery to remove a portion of my stomach, to lumbar spine injections to numb nerve paths, to a prescription of antidepressants. 
Faced with all these confusing and conflicting opinions, I had to work out which expert to trust, whom to believe and whose advice to follow. As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions — prime ministers, presidents and chief executives — and so I’m all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere. But up until then I hadn’t thought much about the process of decision making. So in between M.R.I.’s, CT scans and spinal taps, I dove into the academic literature on decision making. Not just in my field but also in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, information science, political science and history. 
What did I learn? 
Physicians do get things wrong, remarkably often. Studies have shown that up to one in five patients are misdiagnosed. In the United States and Canada it is estimated that 50,000 hospital deaths each year could have been prevented if the real cause of illness had been correctly identified. 
Yet people are loath to challenge experts. In a 2009 experiment carried out at Emory University, a group of adults was asked to make a decision while contemplating an expert’s claims, in this case, a financial expert. A functional M.R.I. scanner gauged their brain activity as they did so. The results were extraordinary: when confronted with the expert, it was as if the independent decision-making parts of many subjects’ brains pretty much switched off. They simply ceded their power to decide to the expert. 
If we are to control our own destinies, we have to switch our brains back on and come to our medical consultations with plenty of research done, able to use the relevant jargon.

That's a great suggestion, assuming you have a high IQ and your illness isn't cognitively debilitating and you aren't too emotionally discombobulated by being on death's door.
If we can’t do this ourselves we need to identify someone in our social or family network who can do so on our behalf.

That's a great suggestion, assuming your social or family network is full of medical researchers and/or doctors who can give you good free advice on which arcane specialist to choose.

But lots of people aren't that plugged in. What about them?

I've made this suggestion many times before, so I apologize for boring long-time readers, but it's important: You should be able to pay a doctor to help you choose which specialist to bet your life on. That's what I did when I had cancer in 1996-97. Just as I would hire a consultant to help me choose a new email system for my employer, I hired a young general oncologist as my consultant (in the business, not medical, sense of the word) to help me evaluate the three non-Hodgkins lymphoma specialists in the Chicago area.

And here I am, so I guess I got my money's worth. (Actually, I had excellent health insurance at the time, so I got my employer's money's worth.)

I don't really know why this idea is so alien. I've been given the impression that there was something shady and just-not-done about my deal with my consultant. I suspect it has something to do with "professional ethics" -- doctors don't seem to like having patients pit them against other doctors, with another doctor judging them -- but I've never been able to figure out a Google search that would bring up anything relevant to this topic.

Anybody know?

October 20, 2013

John Rawls: immigration restrictionist

The famous liberal political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) argued for restricting immigration in his 1990s work The Law of Peoples:
Concerning the second problem, immigration, in #4.3 I argue that an important role of government, however arbitrary a society’s boundaries may appear from a historical point of view, is to be the effective agent of a people as they take responsibility for their territory and the size of their population, as well as for maintaining the land’s environmental integrity. Unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the responsibility and loss for not doing so, that asset tends to deteriorate. On my account the role of the institution of property is to prevent this deterioration from occurring. In the present case, the asset is the people’s territory and its potential capacity to support them in perpetuity; and the agent is the people itself as politically organized. The perpetuity condition is crucial. People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing to regulate their numbers or to care for their land by conquest in war, or by migrating into another people’s territory without their consent.

More briefly, Rawls opposed invade the world / invite the world.

Rawls went on to say countries that extrude numerous immigrants are at fault of being poorly run. For example, population pressure is partly the fault of a lack of women's rights. If immigrant-extruding countries managed their affairs on Rawlsian lines, then not so many of their people would try to leave. It's basically the same argument Jorge G. Castaneda made about Mexico in the 1990s.

Netanyahu to award Bloomberg $1 million "Jewish Nobel"

I know that lately the news often sounds like I'm just making it up for my own personal amusement, but, honestly, this was published by the New York Times 46 minutes ago:
Bloomberg Is First to Receive a $1 Million Jewish Award 
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS 
Published: October 20, 2013
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will be honored on Monday as the first recipient of a $1 million award that organizers are calling the “Jewish Nobel Prize.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will present the award, named the Genesis Prize, to Mr. Bloomberg at a ceremony in Jerusalem in May. The award, established by a charity founded by Russian Jewish billionaires, aims to honor “exceptional people whose values and achievements will inspire the next generations of Jews.” 
The announcement of the inaugural award will be made at a news conference in New York on Monday. The charity, the Genesis Philanthropy Group, has financed an endowment of $100 million to pay for the prize for years to come. ...
The Genesis Philanthropy Group was created as a foundation that promotes Jewish identity among Russian-speaking Jews worldwide. Mr. Bloomberg is the grandson of immigrants from Russia and what is now Belarus. 
The foundation was set up by three of Russia’s so-called oligarchs: Mikhail M. Fridman, Pyotr Aven and German Khan.

German Khan?
The prize is administered in partnership with the Israeli government, and is open to those who have succeeded in various fields, including science, the arts, business and diplomacy, the organizers said. 
The charity’s leaders have high hopes for the prize: they want it to be as prestigious as other major international awards like the Nobel Prizes and the MacArthur awards.

World Nonwar A

The minority group most oppressed in the world today for the color of their skin, eyes, and hair is likely albinos. From National Geographic:
Since 2000, a string of murders has left 72 Tanzanian albinos dead. The killings are believed to have been motivated by a lucrative trade in albino body parts, which some Africans believe possess magical powers. 
Last month, a United Nations report on albino persecution put Tanzania at the top of a list of African nations—mostly in East Africa—where albinos are targeted for murder. ...
"When I was growing up there was a stigma," says Ziada Ally Nsembo, an albino who helps lead a group called the Tanzania Albino Society. "But people weren't getting their bones cut—that only starting happening a few years ago."

Yet, the plight of albinos doesn't elicit much media attention, at least not compared to more pressing issues such as World War T.

Moreover, albinos are barely recognized as a victimized minority group.

Why not?

In the 21st Century, one of the more important processes to study is who gets to be a recognized victim group, One way to examine it is to pay attention to who makes the cut and who gets ignored.

The kind of thing I find interesting and few others do

Yesterday, I found interesting the news out of Israel that Larry Summers had turned down Bibi Netanyahu's offer to head Israel's central bank. In my defense, Summers is a personality who has popped up repeatedly in the Serious News for the last 20 years (most recently, the President wanted to appoint his awesome bro Larry head of the U.S. Federal Reserve), while Netanyahu has been immensely famous in America since, perhaps, the Gulf War of 1991.

This report struck me as intriguing on all sorts of grounds.

The first question, of course, would be: Is it true? There seems to be few sources for the story. On the other hand, nobody seems to be denying it. Nor does it anybody seem to find it all that improbable either, which is useful evidence in and of itself.

If so, isn't it kind of, uh, inappropriate for U.S. citizens to assume massively important jobs in foreign governments?

I'm of two minds about this. I wouldn't have much of a problem with, say, black American economist Glenn Loury agreeing to run Haiti's central bank for awhile as an act of charity. On the other hand, if Mrs. Merkel put new Nobel laureate Robert Shiller in charge of the German central bank, I'd be leery. Whether Israel is closer in importance on the world stage to Haiti or Germany is of course a question for you to decide for yourself.

Another question would be: would taking a major post in a foreign government disqualify you for serving your own government in the future. For example, Israel's retiring central banker, economist Stanley Fischer, is a naturalized American citizen. I would presume that means he has given up hopes of an American government position, but I've never seen this issue discussed. I recall that when IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken down in NYC in 2011, more than a few American economists started calling for the U.S. government to put its weight behind Fischer to get the IMF job. This struck me at the time as nuts: the IMF job traditionally goes to Europeans, and whatever Fischer is, he's not a European. 

Other questions: What was Netanyahu's thinking? I, personally, would very much like to understand Netanyahu's view of How the World Works.

And what does that says about the globe's transnational elites? And, why did Larry turn it down? Because he's an American or because the job's just not big enough for him? And how do Summers and Netanyahu get along?

Lots of interesting questions ... but, so far, virtually zero interest in the story in the U.S. It's just one of those things that you learn to find boring: 
"The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity."