NYT: Ash blond and pimply redhead boys hogging all the STEM education

EDITORIAL 

Missing From Science Class 

Too Few Girls and Minorities Study Tech Subjects 

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD 

Published: December 10, 2013 

A big reason America is falling behind other countries in science and math is that we have effectively written off a huge chunk of our population as uninterested in those fields or incapable of succeeding in them. 

Women make up nearly half the work force but have just 26 percent of science, technology, engineering or math jobs, according to the Census Bureau. Blacks make up 11 percent of the workforce but just 6 percent of such jobs and Hispanics make up nearly 15 percent of the work force but hold 7 percent of those positions. There is no question that women and minorities have made progress in science and math in the last several decades, but their gains have been slow and halting. And in the fast-growing field of computer science, women’s representation has actually declined in the last 20 years, while minorities have made relatively small gains. 

These jobs come with above-average pay and offer workers a wide choice of professions. Opening them to women and minorities would help reduce corrosive income inequality between whites and other groups, and would narrow the gender gap in wages. 

I for one welcome our new post-national globalist overlords

Matthew Yglesias passes on a rumor in Slate:

Stanley Fischer Likely to Be Tapped as Fed Vice Chair 

According to John Hilsenrath, "according to a person familiar with the matter," Barack Obama is poised to nominate Stanley Fischer to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. 

This is a bit of a surprising development if only because Fischer didn't seem to be seriously considered as a contender for the top Fed job. I figured that was either because Fischer wasn't interested in a government job or because the White House deemed him insufficiently American. If either of those were the case, it would seem to disqualify him for the vice chairmanship too. But he's extraordinarily well-qualified, a distinguished academic economist (Ben Bernanke's mentor) who also served as chief economist at the IMF and as president of the Bank of Israel. As Janet Yellen is already poised to be the best-qualified Fed chair in history, the duo would represent a significant upping of the ante in terms of the idea that the institution should be stewarded by real central banking professionals. 

Fischer himself is an interesting guy (read Dylan Matthews' profile from February), born in a town in what was Northern Rhodesia at the time but is now known as Zambia. When he was 13, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia, which at the time was run as a kind of apartheid rogue state. Then he went to the London School of Economics, then MIT for graduate school. He stayed in American academia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, then worked at the World Bank and the IMF through most of the 1990s. He's essentially a native of countries that don't exist anymore, and as he's Jewish he obtained insta-citizenship in Israel when in 2005 he was asked to run its central bank. But he's also an American citizen. 

With all the talk about Nelson Mandela lately, I only just this week started to develop a nuanced understanding of the demographics of the White Male Power Structures during the first half of the 20th Century in South Africa and Rhodesia.

NYT: William Bratton is awesome

The upcoming NYC top cop, the effective William Bratton, is being welcomed with hosannas by the New York Times as a supposed civil rights superhero. In the article and op-ed there is no mention of that interview, but plenty of misleading allusions to how Bratton cleaned up the LAPD's white racist Rampart Scandal.

Bratton’s Time in California May Offer Clues to His Plans for New York Police
By JENNIFER MEDINA 

Published: December 6, 2013 

... When he was appointed here in 2002, Mr. Bratton took the reins of a department that was mired in scandal and was seen as openly hostile to black and Latino residents. Just a decade before, deadly riots broke out after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney G. King, a black driver who had been pulled over for speeding. A few years later, pervasive misconduct and corruption were uncovered in the Rampart Division, with dozens of officers implicated in allegations involving framing suspects and the use of false evidence, as well as stealing and dealing drugs.

And today:

Hail to the Police Chief 

William J. Bratton’s Record Bodes Well for New York 

By CONNIE RICE 

Published: December 10, 2013 Comment 

LOS ANGELES — WHEN I first met Bill Bratton, at a Christmas party in Los Angeles in 2002, I told him that it was nothing personal but I would soon be suing him, just as I had sued several Los Angeles police chiefs before him. That was my job as a civil rights lawyer, and at that time, we had a rogue police force that refused civilian control, rejected court orders, abused people of color and acted with terrifying impunity. 

It was three months since William J. Bratton had been hired to fix the disgraced Los Angeles Police Department after a disastrous decade that had started with the beating of Rodney G. King, setting off the deadliest race riot in recent American history, and ended with revelations about a gangster-cop ring that had planted evidence, stolen drugs and attempted murder. The L.A.P.D. looked to many more like the Mafia than the police, more stop-and-shoot than stop-and-frisk.

In reality, the central rogue cops in the late 1990s Ramparts scandal were all diversity hires like Rafael Perez (the basis for Oscar winner Denzel Washington's character in Training Day) and Kevin Gaines (the basis for the black cop with $300,000 in his trunk who is shot by the white cop in Oscar winner Crash). 

It's a little weird that Hollywood screenwriters have a more careful regard for the truth in this case than the newspapers. It's like a modern Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

So, what's going on? Well, the New York Times basically wants Bratton to kick ass on the streets. They don't want street crime and they don't want the new Democratic mayor to get in trouble over street crime. So, everybody pretends that Bratton is the man who cleaned out all those white racists in the Ramparts Scandal. 

New York is special.

Sailer: "Corruption of Blood"

From my column in Taki's Magazine:

One of the more striking evolutions of recent decades has been the stealth revival of the ancient concept of hereditary guilt. It’s seldom called that—terms such as “white privilege” and “structural racism” are more popular—but if you’ve been paying attention you’ll note an increasing reversion to this old assumption that the sins of the fathers demand that punishment be visited upon their distant descendants. ... 

Going back at least to the time of the poor Neanderthals, we all tend to be descended more from history’s winners than losers, so none of us should assume the purity of our ancestors’ and relatives’ morals. At minimum, fear of reciprocation should restrain our urge to denounce our contemporary rivals for corruption of blood.

Read the whole thing there.

Schaeffer's Number: Health care costs $12 per hour worked

To put the question of minimum wages into a larger perspective, recall Peter Schaefer's jaw-dropping calculation that if you take the total cost of medical care in the United States and divide it by the total number of hours worked in the United States, it comes out to $12 per hour. Logical implications include:

- Wow. That's a really big number.

- We need to restrain the cost of health care.

- Yes but not everybody is that expensive.

- But, still ...

More broadly, Schaeffer's Number demonstrates the High Cost of Cheap Labor. 

An obvious distinction should be drawn between:

- low wage employers providing work for not very productive American citizens, which is largely a good; versus

- low wage employers drawing in large numbers of not very productive foreigners, which is largely a bad.

Unfortunately, the latter (e.g., large growers) tend to have their voices better represented in Congress and the media ("Crops Rotting in the Fields!") than the former.

$12 per hour minimum wage?

Ron Unz writes in the NYT:

Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour

Ron Unz, a software developer and publisher of The Unz Review, is the chairman of the Higher Wages Alliance, which is sponsoring a California ballot initiative next year to raise the state minimum wage to $12 per hour. 

DECEMBER 4, 2013 

Tens of millions of low-wage workers in the United States are trapped in lives of poverty. Many suggestions have been put forth to improve their difficult situation, ranging from new social welfare programs to enhanced adult education to greater unionization. But I think the easiest solution is also the simplest: just raise their wages.  

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and hiking it to $12 would solve many of our economic problems at a single stroke. 

A $12 minimum wage is hardly extreme or ridiculous. At the 1968 height of our post-war economic prosperity, the American minimum wage was over$10.50 in current dollars, and setting the rate at $12 today would represent a real rise of merely 11 percent over a 45-year period, which seems reasonable since worker productivity has grown by over 115 percent during the same period. 

The minimum wage in France is almost $13 while Australian workers benefit from an hourly minimum wage of around $15, together withunemployment of just 5.7 percent.  

Walmart is America’s largest private employer and 300,000 of its workers haveaverage wages of just $8.75 per hour, forcing many of them to receive food stamps and other government welfare benefits to survive. But if a minimum wage hike boosted their pay to at least $12 per hour, Walmart could cover the costs by a one-time price rise of just 1.1 percent, and the average Walmart shopper would only pay an extra $12.50 per year. Meanwhile, a $12 minimum wage would increase the incomes of America’s lower-wage work force by a total of over $150 billion each year, shifting those huge sums from the pockets of the sort of people who don’t shop at Walmart to those who do. A minimum wage of $12 per hour would be very good for Walmart’s business.  

And not just Walmart. America’s low-wage families tend to spend every dollar they earn, so a large minimum wage hike would constitute an enormous, permanent economic stimulus package, but one funded entirely by the private sector. Since wages would be rising nationwide, businesses could raise their prices to cover much or most of the added costs. Low-wage workers tend to be employed in the non-tradeable service sector, making their jobs relatively safe from foreign competition or automation. They’d keep their jobs, but their incomes would rise by 30 or 40 percent.  

The impact on U.S. households would be enormous and bipartisan. Some 42 percent of American wage-workers would benefit from a $12 minimum wage and their average annual gain would be $5,000 per worker, $10,000 per couple, which is very serious money for a working-poor family. White Southerners are the base of today’s Republican Party, and 40 percent of them would gain, seeing their annual incomes rise by an average $4,500 per worker. If Rush Limbaugh -- who earns over $70 million per year -- denounced the proposal, they’d stop listening to him. Hispanics would gain the most, with 55 percent of their wage-workers getting a big raise and the benefits probably touching the vast majority of Latino families.  

Ordinary taxpayers would be the other great beneficiaries, saving many tens of billions of dollars each year in payments for Food Stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing subsidies, and other social welfare programs. Businesses should pay their own employees rather than quietly shifting the burden to government programs and the American taxpayer. Conservatives and free-market supporters should endorse this simple idea.  

The best way to help low-wage workers is to raise their wages.

About a dozen years ago, I started writing an article about why a proposal to raise the minimum wage for workers in Santa Monica's beachfront hotels to something like $10.50 was, logically, a terrible idea. As an old Econ Major, if there was one thing I knew it's that the Minimum Wage is Bad. 

But I eventually gave up the project because it started to seem like a pretty good idea. Maids' wages make up a small fraction of the cost of staying on the beach in Santa Monica (much more of the cost of a room is the cost of the land it's on), so it seemed improbable that this law would turn Ocean Blvd. into Desolation Alley with tumbleweeds blowing past shuttered resorts and starving, weeping unemployable ex-workers.

This is not to say that the traditional Econ 101 critique of minimum wage laws is completely wrong. Raising the minimum wage to $100 per hour would destroy the above-ground economy. 

What about the converse? It might even be true that cutting the minimum wage to $3 per hour would increase employment. But if so, would then cutting it from $3 to $2 be another slam dunk great idea? From $2 to $1? I don't think so. Diminishing marginal returns set in pretty rapidly.

So, there's a range of plausible minimum wages at which it's not an obviously a bad idea. The delicate part is finding where you can push the envelope without blowing a hole in it. 

One way to accomplish that is regionality. High "living wage" minimums in California coastal paradises have worked fine, but that doesn't mean the same number wouldn't cause high unemployment in rural Mississippi. Ron's initiative push for a $12 minimum for all of California sounds pretty sensible for such an expensive state, but could cause big trouble if Congress extended it to low cost of living Oklahoma.

A half century ago, debates over the minimum wage in Congress tended to break down along regional lines. Northern industrial states wanted high national minimum wages to discourage factories from relocating to low wage Southern states. 

So a minimum wage works as an internal protectionist measure. My views on protectionism are moderate. I am sympathetic to movement of jobs to cheaper locations in the United States, but I am also sympathetic to some degree of stability and restraint. Statesmanship consists of finding mechanisms that accommodate those contrary goals efficiently. (My views on outsourcing / insourcing across our national border are similarly moderate, which is why I'm considered such an extremist.)

Another issue is how a higher minimum wage would interact with Obamacare's employer mandates. The term "Double Whammy" springs to mind.

A few other thoughts:

Why not a $15 per hour minimum for non-citizens?

Why not a $6 per hour minimum for teenage citizens? And a $9 per hour minimum for 20 to 22 year old citizens?

A high minimum would only seem to work when tied into effective job-site enforcement of immigration laws. But, put them together and you might really have something.

Of course, the worst solution would be the inverse result where huge numbers of currently employed American citizens get squeezed out by a higher minimum wage and get replaced by new illegal aliens working off the books for less than the nominal minimum. 

Another triumph of multi-culti capitalism

In the bad old days of White Bread America, the dominant retirement savings model was the pension: your employer would take money that would otherwise be paid to you and invest it, then send you a check every month after you retire. Obviously, this lack of freedom is inferior to the modern diverse system in which you are given all sorts of options and incentives to invest your earnings in 401Ks and the like. 

Except, under the modern mode, the diverse tend to spend their earnings right now.

From the Washington Post:

Many blacks and Latinos have no retirement savings, study shows

By Michael A. Fletcher,  

Fewer than half of blacks and Latino workers have retirement plans on the job, leaving the vast majority of them with no savings designated for their golden years, according to a report to be released Tuesday. 

Americans of all races face the growing prospect of downward mobility in retirement, the report said, but the problem is particularly acute for blacks and Hispanics. 

More often than not, blacks and Latinos benefit little from the tax breaks and other policy initiatives aimed at bolstering retirement security because they typically have no money to save for retirement in IRAs and other vehicles outside the workplace, according to Diane Oakley, executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), which conducted the study. In addition, they are much less likely than whites to have defined-benefit pensions, particularly outside of public sector jobs. 

“Those are startling findings,” Oakley said. “The typical household of color has nothing saved in a retirement account.” 

Meanwhile, a host of state and local governments have been cutting back on pension benefits for public employees, saying they cannot afford their long-term cost. 

Such public employee pensions, which typically pay a fixed benefit for life, have been of particular help to African Americans, who make up a disproportionate share of government workers. ...

“One of the big issues here is a gap in access,” Oakley said. “We have what is essentially a voluntary retirement system and what we know is when we look at minority households, their access to retirement plans on the job is much less than that for whites.”

Liberty, equality, diversity: pick one.

Why Linda Tirado? Why not a genuine poor person?

As you've no doubt heard, Linda Tirado recently published a wildly popular essay about why her poverty forces her to make impoverishing decisions:

This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense 

There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of. 

Rest is a luxury for the rich. ...

(Which might comes as surprise to intern MD's, lawyers who haven't made partner, untenured professors, entrepreneurs, and so forth, but never mind.)

Kind-hearted people immediately sent her $60,000, which she took to Las Vegas.

Not surprisingly, it turns out Ms. Tirado comes from an upper middle class background (e.g., she could have been a boarding student at Cranbrook School, where Mitt Romney matriculated). And she isn't all that poor in income. Her husband is in the military (soldiers aren't well paid, but they are a lot better paid than they were pre-1981). And her parents help her out.

(Since the exposure of her actual story, she now seems to emphasize her personal mental health problems as the root of her problems, which is kind of the opposite of the original moral of the story.)

The question I want to ask is this: In America, there are millions and millions of genuinely born-poor-and-stayed-that-way people. And yet, none of them managed to exploit this evident opportunity as effectively as this child of privilege. Why not?

My impression is that Tirado smartly exploited a meme that has been hot in what we might call the Gladwellsphere ever since the publication on August 20, 2013 of a paper in Science:

Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.

For an example of how welcome this study was to the conventional wisdom, here's Matthew Yglesias summarizing the meme in Slate on September 3:

Bad Decisions Don’t Make You Poor. Being Poor Makes for Bad Decisions.

In other words, this study was welcome fodder in the constant hunger for clickbait about how "Republicans Are Wrong Because Science." Lots of other publications in what you might call the semi-bright realm of the media, The Atlantic, NPR, etc., made a big, big deal over this. So the market was primed for somebody like Tirado who has the kind of rhetorical skills that appeal to SWPLs (despite all her complaints that lack of money has lowered her IQ, she's a deft writer who understands what her market wants to hear) to step forward with the seeming inside skinny that personalizes this popular meme.

Among people born poor who have stayed that way, however, few can write as well as Tirado; but I have to imagine that in a country as large as America, there must be some who can.

More subtle roadblocks to an actual poor person cashing in the way Ms. Tirado has include:

Genuine poor people, in contrast, don't really pay much attention to the Huffington Post and the like and aren't really that interested in the partisan battles that consume so many people of higher classes.

Moreover, genuine poor people tend to have attitudes and beliefs and ways of expressing them that are distinctly off-putting to SWPLs. But real poor people are seldom sensitive enough to the class marker aversions of the upper middle class to write a long essay that avoids stepping on any of those class land mines. For example, Tirado smokes cigarettes -- a prole habit these days -- but the way she verbally rationalizes her smoking as a manifestation of her victimhood is upscale. That's a tricky combination to pull off.

In other words, it really is better to be from an upper middle class background. People will treat you nicer, as they've treated Ms. Tirado.

And it's better to be intelligent enough -- even if you are signally lacking in Executive Function -- to pick up quickly on the ideas filtering down from the upper reaches of society the way that Ms. Tirado jumped all over the "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function" boomlet.

P.S., In contrast, Audacious Epigone writes an essay, based on General Social Survey data, about what a typical underclass woman would say if she could write as well as Tirado and were honest.

For more insights into the complex interplay of poverty and bad decisions, here is The Onion's opinion columnist Amber Richardson's trenchant essay Why Somebody Always Around Every Time I Drop My Baby? Other illuminating efforts by Ms. Richardson are here, here, and here.

Greatest record in sports finally broken after 43 years

Today Matt Prater kicked a 64-yard-field goal in the thin air of Denver to finally break the NFL record of 63 yards first set in 1970 by Tom Dempsey in the humidity of New Orleans.

Why was Dempsey's feat my favorite record? Because it was the exact opposite of the modern era's Ivan Drago-style scientific athletic accomplishments.

The only reason the Saints' coach sent in the field goal unit with 2 seconds left and down by one was because he thought the Saints were on the Lions' 44-yard-line, not their own 44.

Back then, the goal posts in the NFL were on the goal line, not the back of the end zone like today, so the coach thought he was calling for a 51-yarder. The NFL record at the time was 56 yards, so 63 yards was unthinkable.

Dempsey, who was born missing a hand and half of his right (kicking) foot, booted it in the obsolete straight-on style. And Dempsey is said to have had quite a hangover after enjoying Saturday night New Orleans-style. The players had intentionally gotten drunk because they were mad at the owner for firing their coach Tom Fears and replacing him with the kind of idiot who couldn't tell which 44-yard-line his team was on.

Dempsey was famously violent for a kicker. Since he couldn't break any fingers on his stump, he was notorious for using it as a club on kick returners.

The endurance of Dempsey's record was odd because placekickers improved so much in the 1970s alone. The longest NCAA kicks were largely accomplished in 1976-77 in the old Southwestern Conference when I was at Rice:

FBS: 67 – Russell Erxleben, Texas vs. Rice, Oct. 1, 1977; Steve Little, Arkansas vs. Texas, Oct. 15, 1977; Joe Williams, Wichita State vs. Southern Illinois, Oct. 21, 1978[69] 

FBS: 65 - Tony Franklin, Texas A&M vs. Baylor, Oct. 16. 1976; Martin Gramatica, Kansas State vs. Northern Illinois, Sept. 12, 1998. Longest without a kicking tee which was banned in 1989.

Most of these guys were soccer players, but Erxleben kicked his 67 yarder against Rice in the old straight-ahead style. (By the way, Texas beat Rice 72-15. Texas had Heisman winner Earl Campbell, so a 67-yard field goal on top of getting flattened all day by the greatest running back in the history of the state of Texas seemed a little like overkill. I see that Erxleben is currently in jail on his latest charge of running a Ponzi scheme, so maybe he inflated the ball with anti-gravity gas?)

But that wasn't the longest Texas college field goal of that brief golden era. In 1976 Ove Johannson of Abilene Christian in the NAIA kicked a 69-yarder.

It was widely assumed at the time in Texas 35 years ago that a 70-yarder was just around the corner, but that hasn't happened yet. I don't know exactly why. One reason is that NFL coaches rarely call for very long field goals.

Perhaps coaches dread more than anything a 109-yard return of a short field goal, such as Auburn's last week that cost Nick Saban's Alabama Crimson Tide a berth in the national championship game. NFL coaches dislike not winning, but they hate being personally responsible for a loss the way Saban was last week. The coaches actually have good reason to fear 109-yard returns besides their egos: the guys who block for field goal attempts are chosen for their immobility, not their ability to cover returns. Thus, the very large and slow white guys Saban sent out on the field with 1 second left to keep Auburn from blocking the attempt at a game winning 59-yard field goal didn't come close to tackling Auburn's speedy returner.

Isn't it about time that the NFL did something to make field goals harder so that we can once again cheer when the guy makes it instead of roll our eyes when he misses?

In the comments, Reg Cæsar said:

Well, soccer-style wasn't an option in his case, was it? 

I always wondered if Dempsey's clubfoot was a feature rather than a bug. A similar deformity of the left hand sure was for the 1920s songwriter Harry M Woods. He could just barely bang out chords on the piano, but his club gave him a monster advantage in his favorite sport-- barfighting.  

The story is told that after a workday in Manhattan, he and a fellow songwriter stepped into a bar where a fight was already in progress. Woods joined right in and, Adam West Batman-style, immediately established himself as alpha dog. (These were total strangers, by the way.) 

An onlooker asked Woods's buddy "Who is that guy?"  

"Why, don't you recognize him? He's the man who wrote "Try a Little Tenderness!"

"OECD Warns West on Education Gaps"

From the NYT:

O.E.C.D. Warns West on Education Gaps 

By D. D. GUTTENPLAN

LONDON — Like a school principal handing out a clutch of C grades, Andreas Schleicher unveiled the results from the latest round of the Program for International Student Assessment tests last week. 

For Britain, the United States and most of Western Europe, the results ranged from “average” to “poor.” British students, for example, scored exactly average in mathematics and slightly above average in reading and science. ... The United States were below average in mathematics and science but slightly above in reading. 

For Asian countries, the news was much more encouraging, with students from Shanghai topping the chart by a considerable margin, but with students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea all closely bunched at the high end. 

Mr. Schleicher, the head of education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the tests every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries around the world, also noted significant improvement in Vietnam. He described it as a poor country whose students outperformed peers from many wealthier nations — and did even better once differences in income were taken into account.

Okay, but Vietnam only tested a sample representing 56% of its students, compared to 89% for the US and 93% for the UK. Let me strategically ignore 44% of my students and I could make California look pretty good.

This is not to say that Vietnam might not be doing pretty well -- it has some of the nationalist characteristics of other high-fliers like Finland, Poland, and South Korea. The Vietnamese attitude seems to be: Hey, we don't have to feel guilty and dabble in all that Cultural Marxist stuff: we're Communists.

Off-topic, but a couple of years ago I read a book by a JP Morgan executive on investing in developing markets. He explained that lots of capital had flowed into Vietnam a decade or so ago on the grounds that it was obviously China Junior. But this hadn't worked out all that well for foreign plungers. He pointed out that the topography of Vietnam is the opposite of the topography of China (which may help explain why long ago the Vietnamese were able to stop the Chinese imperial / cultural steamroller from taking over the way the Chinese empire originating in northern China had taken over what's now southern China). China possesses gigantic flat river valleys (Yellow, Yangtze, Pearl, etc.), like the American Midwest but with multiple outlets rather than just one Mississippi. Like the Midwest, the valleys have good soil. Crops and industrial output can easily be transported to the coast by river, or perpendicular to the rivers by canal, railroad, or road.

Vietnam, in contrast, has a narrow coastal shelf backed by mountains (until you get to the Mekong Delta in the far south). Rivers quickly become impassable. Ports are not very good. Most of Vietnam is physically like a worse version of the eastern seaboard of America: in a word, picturesque but geographically marginal. As Ben Franklin propagandized the British government during the diplomatic negotiations resolving the French and Indian Wars, the country that controlled the Mississippi River Valley would control the world in the 1900s, so don't let the French get back into the heart of the continent.

... Western countries, Mr. Schleicher warned, should not to comfort themselves with the myth that Asian high performance is the result of education systems that favor memorization over creativity. 

“The big success in East Asia is not a success in drilling,” he said, adding that the mathematics test required creativity and problem solving skills based on a deep understanding of mathematical concepts.

My experience is that drilling and creative solving of quantitative problems go together. What ability I have to, say, make more sense than most pundits out of PISA scores is based on my being good at simple arithmetic, which I drilled myself on hard as a child -- I'd make up numbers and add them together for fun -- because it was enjoyable to be good at arithmetic. I have almost zero mathematical skill, but I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide like nobody's business.

These days, everybody talks about "critical thinking skills," which seem to be conceived of as the opposite of rote memorization of your times tables. But as a rare critic who has actually helped undermine the reputation of a couple of high-flying nonfiction authors, I've done it mostly through being extremely well-drilled in arithmetic.

Though most of the press coverage in Britain focused on its performance, John Jerrim, a professor at the Institute for Education, said he thought that the big news in the results was neither the continuing rise of Asia nor the relatively flat results from the United States and Europe over all but a sharp drop in the scores for Swedish schools. 

“Sweden has the biggest decline of any country in the world,” Dr. Jerrim said in an interview. “They’re down 3.3 percent in mathematics, 3.1 percent in science and 2.8 percent in reading, and that continues a trend from 2009.” 

Yet the American and British governments “have followed the Swedish model by opening more and more ‘free schools’ or charter schools,” he said.

Or it may have something to do with the Swedes being truer believers in immigration and refugees than other European countries, especially compared to the emerging northeastern European axis of excellence: Finland, Estonia, and Poland.

His skepticism was echoed by Mr. Schleicher, the O.E.C.D. official, who said, “The data shows no relation between competition between schools and the overall performance level.” 

Perhaps the current conventional wisdom of competition / multiculturalism doesn't work well at uplifting the masses?

Life expectancy in South Africa

Here's a chart of life expectancy in the USA, plus five countries that underwent political transitions roughly during the era of AIDS. It's interesting that Poland's transition from communism went better than Russia's.

You can click on Explore data in the lower right corner and add your own countries.

By the way, I don't know how much to trust this data that Google provides so conveniently. "Life Expectancy" is kind of an inherently made-up number. Moreover the smoothly elegant (if horrifying) South Africa and Zimbabwe curves are clearly stylized in contrast to the jittery line for Poland. (Mexico may or may not be stylized.)

Zizek on Mandela

In the New York Times, the nominally Leninist (but perhaps, deep down, more Mussolinist) Slovenian celebrity philosopher Slavoj Zizek laments:

Mandela’s Socialist Failure
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Mugabe, South Africa remained a multi-party democracy with free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty Socialist experiments.

Keep in mind that Mugabe wasn't Mugabe for the first two decades of his rule. He was handed a country with plenty of arable land for everybody (well, except for his archrival Joshua Nkomo's tribe, but that was quickly forgotten). By 2000, the population had nearly doubled, however.

... Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence, and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Secondly, people remember the old African National Congress which promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans. 

South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” — but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos, and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option? 

It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous “hymn to money” from her novel Atlas Shrugged: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.”

... We can safely surmise that, on account of [Mandela'] doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter, old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn’t disturb the global order of power.

Judging from the TV commercials shown during golf tournaments, we live in the Age of Gladwell, the triumph of MultiCulti Capitalism.

Eric Hanushek's $20 trillion idea

Click to enlarge

In the 2010 paper The High Cost of Low Educational Performance: THE LONG-RUN ECONOMIC IMPACT OF IMPROVING PISA OUTCOMES, Stanford economist Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann take a pretty scientific SWAG at what would be the economic benefits of your country enjoying the higher cognitive skills associated with higher PISA scores. They mull over the results of a series of mostly forgotten international math and science exams going back to the 1960 and find a surprisingly high, probably causal relationship between having a cognitively gifted student body in the past and an economically productive one today. 

This report uses recent economic modelling to relate cognitive skills – as measured by PISA and other international instruments – to economic growth. This relationship indicates that relatively small improvements in the skills of a nation’s labour force can have very large impacts on future well-being. Moreover, the gains, put in terms of current GDP, far outstrip today’s value of the short-run business-cycle management. This is not to say that efforts should not be directed at issues of economic recession, but it is to say that the long-run issues should not be neglected. 

A modest goal of having all OECD countries boost their average PISA scores by 25 points over the next 20 years – which is less than the most rapidly improving education system in the OECD, Poland, achieved between 2000 and 2006 alone – implies an aggregate gain of OECD GDP of USD 115 trillion over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010 (as evaluated at the start of reform in terms of real present value of future improvements in GDP) (Figure 1).

A number of years ago, I suggested that the American Establishment drop its obsession with Closing the Gap -- in effect, boosting black and Hispanic scores by close to a standard deviation while not allowing whites and Asians to improve -- in favor of a fairer and far more feasible goal of improving all groups by an average of a half standard deviation. Hanushek looks at just boosting everybody by a quarter of a standard deviation on test scores (25 points on a PISA test or on a SAT test) and finds the net present value for the U.S. would be $20 trillion.

Bringing all countries up to the average performance of Finland, OECD’s best performing education system in PISA, would result in gains in the order of USD 260 trillion (Figure 4). The report also shows that it is the quality of learning outcomes, not the length of schooling, which makes the difference.

Obama and his Uncle Omar

From the NYT, as another member of the President's Kenyan clan escapes deportation:

In Reversal, White House Says Obama Did Meet Uncle 

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR 

WASHINGTON — White House officials on Thursday abruptly changed their story about whether President Obama had ever met his father’s half brother, a Boston man who faced deportation to Kenya after a drunken-driving arrest in 2011. 

Drunk driving is an Obama clan theme. Both the President's father and his half-brother David died driving drunk, and his father killed a man in an earlier incident.

Two years ago, White House officials told The Boston Globe that the president had never met Onyango Obama, known as Omar, Mr. Obama’s uncle. But Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the 2011 statement was incorrect. In fact, the two men lived together briefly while the president was a student at Harvard Law, Mr. Carney said. 

The president “had met Omar Obama when he moved to Cambridge for law school,” Mr. Carney said, and “he stayed with him for a brief period of time until the president’s apartment was ready.” 

Mr. Carney added: “After that, they saw each other once every few months while the president was in Cambridge, and then, after law school, they gradually fell out of touch. The president has not seen Omar Obama in 20 years and has not spoken with him in roughly 10 years.” 

White House officials explained the abrupt change in the story by saying that no one asked the president in 2011 whether he knew his uncle.

If true, that fits a general pattern in the various remaining mysteries about the President's life: the people who would ask Obama questions don't have access to him, and the people who do have access almost never ask him. For example, apparently none of Obama's campaign aides asked him about the man Obama had invited to give the invocation at his Presidential campaign kickoff rally, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, until the day before. Obama had published thousands of words about Wright's influence upon him, and if you read them carefully you'd notice they represented Trouble, but Axelrod and Plouffe really didn't want to think about the subject, much less talk about it with their candidate.

Ironically, discoursing about his life story is one of Obama's favorite hobbies (e.g., his quasi-eulogy for war hero Senator Daniel Inouye, which included Obama's memories of his childhood fascination with motel ice machines).

Instead, Mr. Carney told reporters that White House officials then had simply relied upon the president’s own books and the public record to determine that they had never met.

“Back when this arose, folks looked at the record, including the president’s book, and there was no evidence that they had met,” Mr. Carney said.

Actually, Uncle Omar in Boston is mentioned three times in Dreams from My Father:

- "'Let’s say a son or husband moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar, in Boston.'" 

- "On the walls were various family artifacts: the Old Man’s Harvard diploma; photographs of him and of Omar, the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back. ... She asked if I had seen him, and I had to say no."

- "'When my first children, Omar and Zeituni, were born, he bought them cribs and gowns and separate mosquito nets, just as he had for Barack and Sarah.'" 

The President's book ends with his visit to Kenya the summer before he started Harvard Law School. In Kenya, he was asked by family members if he knew his Uncle Omar in America. He didn't -- during the time covered in the book -- but then Obama moved in with his uncle later that year, just like Uncle Omar said. That Obama later got to know Uncle Omar well explains why Obama kept mentioning his offstage presence in his autobiography.

“That was what was conveyed. Nobody spoke to the president.” ...  “Nobody had asked him in the past.”

Stanley Kurtz points out that this gives plausible deniability regarding Obama's inconveniently leftist past. But, you also might almost get the impression that the people who know Obama best find him and his twice-bestselling life story kind of boring, and thus avoid giving him excuses to talk about it.

On Tuesday, a judge in Boston ruled that Omar Obama could stay in the United States and apply for eventual citizenship after he testified that he had lived in the country for 50 years, paid income tax and been arrested only once.

Wow, I keep reading in the New York Times about how the Obama administration is rounding up and deporting all the illegal aliens in the country in a ferocious dragnet, even thought I haven't noticed this to be, technically, happening. Maybe the truth is more boring in regard to this, too?

J.M. Coetzee on Nelson Mandela

In the Sydney Morning Herald, the South African-born 2003 Nobel laureate in literature J.M. Coetzee writes:

Nelson Mandela has died after a long life – long yet lamentably truncated in that he spent 27 of the best years of his manhood incarcerated at the pleasure of the state. 

Incarcerated, he was hardly powerless. During the final years of that long sentence he in effect exercised a power of veto over the foreign policy of his country, exerting more and more of a strangehold over his jailers. 

With F.W. de Klerk, a man of much smaller moral stature, yet also, in his way, a contributor to the liberation of South Africa, Mandela held a turbulent country together during the dangerous years 1990-94, exercising his great personal charm to persuade whites that they had a place in the new democratic republic while step by step emasculating the separatist white right wing.  

By the time he became president in his own right, he was already an old man. His failure to throw himself more energetically into the urgent business of the day – the creation of a just economic order – was understandable if unfortunate. Like the rest of the leadership of the ANC, he was blindsided by the collapse of socialism world-wide; the party had no philosophical resistance to put up against a new, predatory economic rationalism. 

Mandela's personal and political authority had its basis in his principled defence of armed resistance to apartheid and in the harsh punishment he suffered for that resistance. It was given further backbone by his aristocratic mien, which was not without a gracious common touch, and his old-fashioned education, which held before him Victorian ideals of personal integrity and devotion to public service. 

He managed relations with a wife, whose behaviour became increasingly scandalous, with exemplary forbearance. 

He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows. 

J.M. Coetzee is an internationally renowned novelist praised for his unsparing recording of the impact of apartheid on South Africa. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003 and is now an Australian citizen.

Of course, there is an interesting story behind the concluding biographical phrase: "... is now an Australian citizen." 

Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace is about a white college professor in post-apartheid South Africa whose lesbian daughter is gang-raped by blacks. She ultimately agrees to become the polygamous wife of her rapists' clan leader to escape further violence at their hands. (I reviewed the 2009 movie starring John Malkovich as the Coetzee-like main character terrorized by the new ruling race.)

Unsurprisingly, Coetzee's book was not welcomed warmly by the ruling party, which held hearings to probe into the novel's "racism." After Coetzee's profile was raised even higher by winning the 2003 Nobel, he left for Australia where he has maintained a high level of discretion about why he is in exile.

By the way, I read all the time about African refugees being expensively brought to America (here's a new NYT Magazine article about a Sudanese refugee's misadventures trying to become a cop in America) rather than America paying to resettle them at much lower cost in neighboring countries where the climate is more congenial.

But certain African refugees elicit extraordinarily little concern or interest in this country. For example, I've never heard anyone ask why the U.S. failed to become the new home for Coetzee, a Nobel laureate wary of political persecution. You might think that Nobel prize winners looking for a safe country would be near the top of the list. Yet, not only did America fail to attract Coetzee, we didn't try, and we didn't even notice we didn't try.

World War T Hate Hoax at Vassar

From the Daily Mail:

Bias incidents at Vassar were a hoax as one of the culprits was 'the transgender student leading the investigations into the offensive graffiti' 

Six bias incidents of graffiti were reported on the school's campus 

Messages included offensive threats at transgender students and African Americans 

Claims were investigated by student-led group and school officials later realized that one of the group leaders was behind the graffiti 

Both of the students involved have left the school

This is based on reporting done by Robby Soave for the Daily Caller.

The purported hate crime included a graffito reading "Avoid being a hot mess."

Chait: How dare anyone criticize Obama's narcissism! Didn't you see "12 Years a Slave?"

Jonathan Chait treats an Obama critic to a free screening of 12 Years a Slave

With 12 Years a Slave petering out at the box office after a decent but unspectacular run (currently $34 million and losing screens), liberals are increasingly angry that the well-filmed, erratically-acted, and poorly-scripted biopic remake has failed to shut down criticism of the President. From New York:

12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era 

By Jonathan Chait

This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era. 

... The social system embedded within slavery as depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography. It’s a system in which the most unforgivable crime was for an African-American to presume himself an equal to — or, heaven forbid, better than — a white person. 

That context was fresh in my mind when I read this column in National Review by Quin Hillyer, a conservative pundit, think-tank fellow, and former candidate for the GOP nomination in Alabama’s first Congressional district. In the midst of an otherwise unremarkable rant against the perfidious big-government liberalism of President Obama, Hillyer unleashes this: 

Every time decent people think the scandals and embarrassments circling Barack Obama will sink this presidency, we look up and see Obama still there — chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives — utterly unembarrassed, utterly undeterred from any assertion of power he thinks he can get away with, tradition and propriety and the Constitution be damned. The man has no shame, no self-doubt, not a shred of humility, no sense that anybody else has legitimate reason to question him or hold any other point of view. 

It is bizarre to ascribe haughtiness and a lack of a capacity for embarrassment to a president whose most recent notable public appearance was a profusely and even flamboyantly contrite press conference spent repeatedly confessing to “fumbles” and “mistakes.” Why would Hillyer believe such a factually bizarre thing? 

One answer is that, by the evidence of this column, Hillyer believes all sorts of factually bizarre things. But most African-Americans, and many liberal whites, would read Hillyer’s rant as the cultural heir to Northup’s overseer: a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself. 

Before plunging further into a poisonously defensive racial debate, I should note that I feel certain Hillyer opposes slavery and legal segregation, and highly confident he abhors racial discrimination, and believes in his heart full economic and social equality for African-Americans would be a blessing. (More than two decades ago, Hillyer worked against the candidacy of David Duke.) His feeling of offense at Obama’s putative haughtiness (“chin jutting out”) might be a long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface, but more likely a flailing partisan rage that could just as easily have been directed at a white Democrat. 

You can accept the most benign account of his thought process – and I do – while still being struck by the simple fact that Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope. He is either unaware of the freighted connotation of calling a black man uppity, or he doesn’t care. In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain. 

Conservatives need to impose total crimestop upon their thoughts. Therefore, the operant conditioning will continue until morale improves.

A Mandela mystery

Back in 2004 I recounted a story about Nelson Mandela's 1994 election that I could have sworn I'd read in The Economist in the mid-to-late 1990s. But I've never been able to track down the article (perhaps I read it in the Financial Times instead of The Economist?), nor seen any confirmation of the events since then. So, this may be completely apocryphal. Or not.

You may vaguely recall that the first open election in South Africa in 1994 was accompanied by huge lines at the polling booths and scenes of chaos at vote-counting centers. The media predicted it might take weeks to tabulate all the ballots. Then, almost instantly, the final, official results were announced, with no one objecting that that was logistically impossible.

Several years later, The Economist explained what happened: The vote counting was indeed chaotic and looked to go on indefinitely, but early returns conclusively showed Mandela's African National Congress winning a crushing victory that would give it the 2/3rd's majority needed to write the new constitution all by itself. So, Mandela called together the leaders of opposition parties and told them he was rigging the results to restrict his own party to about 5/8ths of the seats so that the new constitution would require some support from other parties to pass. He also gave local control of the Cape province to the white-led party and the KwaZulu province to the Zulu party. Not surprisingly, the opposition was deeply grateful and while many within the ANC were angry, they could hardly overrule Mandela.

Did this act of statesmanship really happen? 

I don't know. The article I read back in the day seemed very confident, and the story fit my recollection from watching the TV news (Election Day: Vote counting will take weeks. Day after Election Day: With 99.99% of precincts reporting ...). But I've never been able to track down what I read (and/or hallucinated).