NYT: "When ‘Long-Form’ Is Bad Form"

On January 25, 2002, J. Clifford Baxter, the former chief strategy officer of Enron, shot himself in the head. This was widely viewed not as condemning but as confirming the journalists, such as Bethany McLean of Fortune, who had broken the Enron story. 

Today, if the Enron executive had been wearing women's clothes when he killed himself, there would be a full-fledged agonizing reappraisal of the journalistic inquiry into Enron. How dare anyone report that Enron was run by "conmen" when the appropriate noun is "conwomen!" Why is the press worrying about details of accounting when proper pronoun usage is all that really matters?

From the New York Times:

LAST week, the sports and pop culture website Grantland published a story called “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” — a piece of “long-form,” as we now call multi-thousand-word, narrative-driven reported articles — about a woman named Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who claimed to have invented a golf putter of unsurpassed excellence. 

Over the course of 7,000-plus words, the writer, Caleb Hannan, devoted a lot of space to the contentious relationship he had developed with his subject. Ms. Vanderbilt, who was transgender but in the closet — and also probably a con artist — didn’t like Mr. Hannan’s digging into the details of her personal and professional life. In the final few paragraphs of the story, Mr. Hannan revealed some shocking news: Ms. Vanderbilt had killed herself. 

The piece was initially met with praise from across the Internet. (“Great read,” raved a typical Tweet. “Fascinating, bizarre,” read another.) Then the criticism started. Mr. Hannan was accused of everything from being grossly insensitive to Ms. Vanderbilt’s privacy to having played a role in her suicide. The controversy soon grew so intense that the editor of the site, Bill Simmons, felt compelled to address it in an apologetic, if defensive, 2,700-word post of his own. Mr. Simmons stressed that the decision to publish the piece had not been taken lightly and that somewhere between 13 and 15 people had read it before it was posted and had all been “blown away.” 

Well, institutions make mistakes. Even a group of smart people is capable of doing something dumb. The fact that Ms. Vanderbilt had killed herself — and that the writer may have been involved in her decision to do so — obviously could not be relegated to the status of a footnote. But to chalk up “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” simply to shoddy editing and bad judgment is to miss the bigger picture. Grantland’s decision to publish the piece, like the initial burst of enthusiasm that greeted it, is also a product of the journalistic environment we’re living in. Specifically, the power of the cult of long-form. 

It wasn’t so many years ago that people assumed the Internet would make long magazine-style stories obsolete. Paradoxically, it now seems to have revived this once threatened medium. Magazines may be disappearing, but that’s O.K.; we still have “long-form.” What started as a Twitter signifier (#longreads or #longform), a way to get the attention of people who might be looking for a substantive read, has morphed into its own genre. In the process, a long magazine story went from being one part of a steady diet of journalistic consumption to something artisanal, a treat for connoisseurs. 

Not only are there websites like Longreads and Longform devoted to curating the best “long-form” writing from around the Internet, but even high-metabolism sites like BuzzFeed and Politico are producing their own long-form content. The term confers respectability and connotes something special, something literary. ...

It’s a familiar phenomenon: When you fetishize — as opposed to value — something, you wind up celebrating the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. How many of those people who initially praised “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” I wonder, even made it down to those final few paragraphs before taking to Twitter to associate themselves with this great journalistic achievement? 

When we fetishize “long-form,” we are fetishizing the form and losing sight of its function. That’s how a story with a troubled woman who commits suicide at its center gets told as a writer’s quixotic quest to learn everything he can about the maker of a golf club that he stumbled across during a late-night Internet search for tips for his short game. There’s a place for writers in their magazine stories, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering readers a glimpse into the reporting process. The trouble starts when the subject becomes secondary, and the writer becomes not just observer but participant, the hero of his story.

But the criticism of the reporter has been for his digging too deep into his subject. Sure, Dr. V. was lying about an MIT doctorate, the conventional wisdom says, but Hannan should never have reported that "she" had fathered two children when "she" was Stephen Krol.

What, then, is the function — the purpose — of “long-form”? To allow a writer to delve into the true complexities of a story, and also to bring readers closer to the experience of other people. Whether a long-form story is published in a magazine or on the web, its goal should be to understand and illuminate its subject, and maybe even use that subject to (subtly) explore some larger, more universal truths. Above all, that requires empathy, the real hallmark of great immersive journalism. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter if one is writing about a huckster or a fraud. The best work still enables readers to experience their subjects as human beings, not as mere objects of curiosity. 

Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Bloomberg View.

In other words, wearing a miniskirt proves you deserve privileged treatment from the press. Long-form journalism is inherently dubious because it asks too many questions. All that matters in 2014 is: Who? Whom? 

  

U.S. border unenforceable, but Detroit's 8 Mile Road is airtight

To encourage other Americans to move to Detroit would be racist, so the white Republican governor of Michigan is attempting to elect a new people in Detroit by demanding from the Obama Administration special visas for immigrants to Detroit, whom it would be racist to question. 

From the New York Times:

Immigrants Seen as Way to Refill Detroit Ranks 

By MONICA DAVEY 

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan on Thursday announced plans to seek federal help in bringing 50,000 immigrants to the bankrupt city over five years as part of a visa program aimed at those with advanced degrees or exceptional abilities in science, business or the arts. 

Under the plan, which is expected to be formally submitted to federal authorities soon, immigrants would be required to live and work in Detroit ...

We are constantly told that the U.S. border, unlike say the Finnish or Israeli border, is impossible to enforce. Yet 8 Mile Road, the northern municipal boundary of Detroit, is apparently seeded with landmines or something because nobody seems to wonder how the new visa-holders will somehow be corralled permanently in Detroit instead of quickly moving to Birmingham, MI or Ann Arbor or San Diego or some other place in the U.S. nicer than Detroit.
 

Diversity and "ambient cultural disharmony"

From The Economist:

The downside of diversity
Jan 21st 2014, 16:00 by our Schumpeter columnist

THE closest thing the business world has to a universally acknowledged truth is that diversity is a good thing: the more companies hire people from different backgrounds the more competitive they will become. Diversity helps companies to overcome talent shortages by enlarging their talent pools. It helps them to cope with globalisation by expanding their cultural horizon. It stimulates innovation by bringing together different sorts of people. And so on. 

Diversity has multiple meanings which get conflated.

- The first type of "diversity" is in settings where sheer talent matters most and the talent comes from all over the world. For example, the richest baseball team, the New York Yankees, has players from all over the world. For example, they just signed the best Japanese pitcher to a $22 million per year contract. Hiring people who don't speak a common language doesn't do much for clubhouse morale, but that's probably overrated versus sheer individual skill in winning baseball games. The glamor of the diversity of the Yankees then sheds itself onto other, quite different uses of the term.

- The second use of the terms "diversity" means to hire the less talented and less productive. For example, the Yankees very rarely hire Asian Indians or even Mexicans. And they sure don't let any women on their team. But nobody notices and nobody cares. But if you mentioned the fact that women and, surprisingly, Mexicans aren't really good enough to play much for the Yankees, people would get mad at you.

- The third use is to refer to certain favored groups and to not refer to certain unfavored groups. For example, hiring a white NFL cornerback would, technically, increase diversity at that position, but nobody cares. Whites simply don't count as diversity, even when they should.

- The fourth use is to assume that diversity means that 1+1+1=4. If, say, the Yankees have some players who speak English, some who speak Spanish, and some who speak Japanese, they will play better as a team than if, all else being equal, they all spoke one language. Why? Due to the synergistical magic of diversity. This is the theme of many of the corporate image ads you see during the Olympics and golf tournaments.

But what about the downside of diversity? It does not pay to ask this question. Many countries have equal-opportunity laws on their books. American universities (and many others as well) are institutionally committed to the idea that diversity promotes learning and creativity. Most important perhaps, nobody wants to come across as unsympathetic to minorities or unappreciative of cultural variety. 

Yet a glance beyond the corporate-diversity statements suggests a more complicated picture. It is notable how many of the world’s best companies, such as McKinsey and Apple, have cult-like cultures—probably because they are also very diverse: they need a strong culture. It is also notable how many of the world’s best companies are rooted in small towns: think of Lego (Billund) or Walmart (Bentonville).

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it struck me in 1991-92 that Walmart was a vehicle for previously underachieving Scots-Irish hillbilly types to come out of nowhere and take over, like one of Ibn Khaldun's high asibya tribes coming out of the Sahara to conquer the diverse rich cities of the coast.

Distinctive religious groups such as the Mormons in America and the Parsis in India have also made an outsized contribution to corporate life. 

It is far too easy to present “diversity” in one-sided terms: as a triumph of enlightenment over bigotry and creativity over closed-mindedness. But the subject is too important to be left to the cliché-mongers. Diversity can bring risks as well as benefits and perils as well as perks. There are trade-offs to be made, for example between the trust that comes from sharing a common background and the cultural sensitivity that comes from employing people from different parts of the word. 

Roy Y.J .Chua, of Harvard Business School, is one of the few academics to produce serious studies of this subject. Mr Chua agrees that in a world of multinational corporations and global product markets success depends more than ever on your ability to foster multicultural thinking and cross-border collaboration. But in a paper in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal (“The Costs of Ambient Cultural Disharmony: Indirect Intercultural Conflict in Social Environment Undermine Creativity") he goes on to note that getting people from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds to co-operate is fraught with difficulties. At best differences in world-view and cultural styles can produce “intercultural anxiety”, at worst outright conflict. The very thing that can produce added creativity—the collision of different cultures—can also produce friction. The question is whether the creativity is worth the conflict. 

Mr Chua argues that creativity in multicultural settings is highly vulnerable to what he calls “ambient cultural disharmony”. Tension between people over matters of culture, he says, can pollute the wider environment and reduce “multicultural creativity”, meaning people’s ability to see non-obvious connections between ideas from different cultures. “Ambient cultural disharmony” persuades people to give up on making such connections because they conclude that it is not worth the trouble. 

Mr Chua also says that “ambient cultural disharmony” has its strongest impact on people who regard themselves as open-minded. Closed-minded people expect cultural tensions. Open-minded people don’t expect them and so react to them more strongly. ...

In all three studies, subjects who had a greater experience of ambient cultural disharmony fell short on one or another of Mr Chua’s measures of creativity. Mr Chua says that he is not certain how much of a problem this is because his is the first study to identify it. But his results are important partly because many companies have such an optimistic view of cross-cultural pollination and partly because the second-order effects of cultural conflict (particularly among people who regard themselves as open-minded) are so hard to manage.

When I was in the marketing research business, the firm I worked at bought a Waltham, MA firm founded by MIT professors. A young Lebanese executive from the firm soon moved to headquarters in Chicago and rocketed up the ranks because he was unbelievably smart. (Papers were piled six inches deep all over his desk in a seemingly random fashion, but he would instantly retrieve any paper needed because he simply remembered in 3-d fashion where each one was.) The only problem with this Lebanese executive was that he was extremely brusque. Fortunately, I recalled that I had known five Lebanese people previously, and they were all brusque. By Levantine standards of politeness, this new fellow was David Niven reincarnated. So, I got along fine with him because I judged him on the Levantine curve. 

But if you are "open-minded" (which these days means "empty-headed") and rejected on principle my kind of ethnic stereotyping, you'd be as personally annoyed by his behavior as many of our less ethnorealist colleagues were. 

Patton Oswalt: "Political correctness is a war on noticing."

From the Twitter feed of stand-up comic and actor Patton Oswalt (who should have a received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Young Adult):

 

Patton OswaltVerified account‏@pattonoswalt

"Political correctness is a war on noticing." -- Steve Sailer

•  Reply 
•  Retweeted 
•  Favorite 

HeatherN ‏@hrn21245m
@pattonoswalt Um, have you read the article that quote comes from?  … Are you comfortable endorsing it?

HeatherN ‏@hrn21244m
@pattonoswalt I mean, Sailer is pretty objectively racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic.

Phil Butcher ‏@xeronius41m
@hrn212 @pattonoswalt PRETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTY sure he is mocking Sailer.

HeatherN ‏@hrn21239m
@xeronius @pattonoswalt Oh see. I should know better than to read a comedian's twitter feed seriously.

Patton Oswalt ‏@pattonoswalt28m
.@hrn212 @xeronius I'm in NO WAY mocking Sailer. I don't endorse or agree with his article, but THAT sentence? 100% accurate? ...

Patton Oswalt ‏@pattonoswalt27m
.@hrn212 @xeronius Aren't I allowed to read, test my assumptions, and even sometimes agree with people who don't share all my views?

Phil Butcher ‏@xeronius27m
@pattonoswalt @hrn212 Touche. I had looked at his body of work and just assumed it was mockery (bc he deserves mocking).

Patton Oswalt ‏@pattonoswalt23m
.@hrn212 @xeronius I've never been scared of ideas. I can hear all kinds & still keep my feet. Think I'll call this stance "diversity."

From the 2005 movie Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo:

Deuce Bigalow [Rob Schneider]: T.J., I'm so glad you are here. 

T.J. Hicks [Eddie Griffin]: How did you find me? 

Deuce Bigalow: Well, this seemed like the only chicken and waffles place in all of Holland. 

T.J. Hicks: Ohhh, so the black guy has to go to a chicken and waffles place, that's Racist! 

Deuce Bigalow: But you're here. 

T.J. Hicks: Yeah, but figuring it out was racist.

    

Ramzan Kadyrov's Instagrams: pre-Olympic doldrums

Ramzan Kadyrov is the hereditary warlord appointed puppet ruler of Chechnya by Vladimir Putin. 

He has a famous Instagram account where he posts pictures of himself punching out failing ministers, inspecting monster trucks with Gerard Depardieu, showing off his golden gun, sending his body double to work in his place, and the like. 

He's living the dream of eight-year-old Chechen boys everywhere. He's the Checheniest Chechen of them all.

Kadyrov was in the news recently asserting that his crack security forces had disposed of some top terrorist bandit threatening the Sochi Olympics.

But with the Olympics coming to the Caucasus, Kadyrov appears to have been put on his best behavior, Instagram-wise. 

Now it's mostly Ramzan as an ecumenical Father Christmas, or piously making another pilgrimage to Mecca. Apparently, they didn't let him sweep out the Kabaa like last time.

We get an occasional picture of the old Ramzan, but mostly he seems to be trying to maintain a low Instagram profile until this Olympic thing is over. It must be killing him to know that all the cameras in the world are going to be only 400 miles away and they won't be pointing at him.

Race Does Not Exist: Same old, same old

From the 2014 Edge.org question on What Scientific Concept Should Be Retired?

Nina Jablonski 

Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University 

[Anti-] Race 

Race has always been a vague and slippery concept. 

... By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found. 

Whereas a concept like "class" is utterly clear cut.

Despite major shifts in scientific thinking, the sibling concepts of human races and a color-based hierarchy of races remained firmly established in mainstream culture through the mid-twentieth century. The resulting racial stereotypes were potent and persistent, especially in the United States and South Africa, where subjugation and exploitation of dark-skinned labor had been the cornerstone of economic growth. 

Which is why Mississippi was the cornerstone of economic growth in America from 1866-1963 and why Detroit, Gary, and East St. Louis are the chief engines of the economy today,

After its "scientific" demise, race remained as a name and concept, but gradually came to stand for something quite different. Today many people identify with the concept of being a member of one or another racial group, regardless of what science may say about the nature of race. The shared experiences of race create powerful social bonds.

Like brotherhood. Or sisterhood. Or fatherhood. Or motherhood. Or nephewhood/niecehood. Or cousinhood. Or so forth and so on.

For many people, including many scholars, races cease to be biological categories and have become social groupings. The concept of race became a more confusing mélange as social categories of class and ethnicity.

I think there are some words missing from that sentence.

So race isn't "just" a social construction, it is the real product of shared experience, and people choose to identify themselves by race.

It's funny how well-policed the boundaries are. If cornerback Richard Sherman announced tomorrow that he was henceforth to be called Rachel Sherman and immediately after the Super Bowl wanted to play power forward in the WNBA and engage in lesbian relationships with women, the Great and the Good would crucify anybody who refused to use feminine pronouns in discussing "her" past, such as "She flattened Cam Newton," or "She fathered three children."

Yet, if a college cornerback announced he was "a black man trapped in a white man's body" and therefore should be at least considered for playing cornerback in the NFL, he'd be laughed at.

Clinicians continue to map observed patterns of health and disease onto old racial concepts such as "White", "Black" or "African American", "Asian," etc. Even after it has been shown that many diseases (adult-onset diabetes, alcoholism, high blood pressure, to name a few) show apparent racial patterns because people share similar environmental conditions, grouping by race are maintained. The use of racial self-categorization in epidemiological studies is defended and even encouraged. In most cases, race in medical studies is confounded with health disparities due to class, ethnic differences in social practices, and attitudes, all of which become meaningless when sufficient variables are taken into account.

Because that's what Occam's Razor is all about: throw out the race variable in studies and replace it with a whole bunch of variables like:

Is grape your favorite soda flavor?
Does your first name have an apostrophe in it?
Do you smoke Kools?
Do you find Tyler Perry funny?
You don't have agree with everything Marion Berry did, but you do have to admit the bitch did set him up?

Ask enough and you won't need the race variable.

Race's latest makeover arises from genomics and mostly within biomedical contexts. The sanctified position of medical science in the popular consciousness gives the race concept renewed esteem. Racial realists marshal genomic evidence to support the hard biological reality of racial difference, while racial skeptics see no racial patterns. What is clear is that people are seeing what they want to see.

They are constructing studies to provide the outcomes they expect.

As opposed to the Race Does Not Exist crowd who don't construct studies, don't do experiments, don't do much of anything except reiterate things that seemed cool to say in 1994, but now seem dopey.

In 2012, Catherine Bliss argued cogently that race today is best considered a belief system that "produces consistencies in perception and practice at a particular social and historical moment". 

It causes white sprinters to run slower.

Race has a hold on history, but it no longer has a place in science. The sheer instability and potential for misinterpretation render race useless as a scientific concept. Inventing new vocabularies of human diversity and inequity won't be easy, but is necessary. 

Like ... ?

Hollywood's conservatives stay in the closet

From the NYT:

In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds. 

The name "Friends of Abe [Lincoln]" was chosen as a reference to the "Friends of Bill" in Hollywood who have done so much for the Clintons.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum. 

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the organization’s confidentiality strictures, and to avoid complicating discussions with the I.R.S.

Those people said that the application had been under review for roughly two years, and had at one point included a demand — which was not met — for enhanced access to the group’s security-protected website, which would have revealed member names. Tax experts said that an organization’s membership list is information that would not typically be required. The I.R.S. already had access to the site’s basic levels, a request it considers routine for applications for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. 

Friends of Abe — the name refers to Abraham Lincoln — has strongly discouraged the naming of its members. That policy even prohibits the use of cameras at group events, to avoid the unwilling identification of all but a few associates — the actors Gary Sinise, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer, or the writer-producer Lionel Chetwynd, for instance — who have spoken openly about their conservative political views.

To notice who in Hollywood is conservative, you have to be extremely good at reading between the lines. Andrew O'Hehir of Salon, for example, is always raising the alarm that various fashionable auteurs and stars are actually crypto-rightwingers, but few of his readers take him seriously. This is not because Salon readers are tolerant of diversity in the ideological sphere, but because they assume that anybody who is creative and cool has to agree with them politically. It's a law of nature or something.

By the way, I compared the politics of Sinise to those of another NDHS dad, Mark Harmon, a gun control activist, here to illustrate my complicated theory about the political effects of weightlifting versus jogging.

NYT: Income inequality not increasing

David Leonhardt writes in the NYT:

The odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years, according to a large new academic study that contradicts politicians in both parties who have claimed that income mobility is falling. 

Both President Obama and leading Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, have argued recently that the odds of climbing the income ladder are lower today than in previous decades. The new study, based on tens of millions of anonymous tax records, finds that the mobility rate has held largely steady in recent decades, although it remains lower than in Canada and in much of Western Europe, where the odds of escaping poverty are higher. 

Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard and one of the authors, said in an interview that he and his colleagues still believed that a lack of mobility was a significant problem in the United States. Despite less discrimination of various kinds and a larger safety net than in previous decades, the odds of escaping the station of one’s birth are no higher today than they were decades ago.

The results suggested that other forces — including sharply rising incomes at the top of the ladder, which allows well-off families to invest far more in their children — were holding back talented people, the authors said. 

“The level of opportunity is alarming, even though it’s stable over time,” said Emmanuel Saez, another author and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Saez and Mr. Chetty are both recent winners of an award for the top academic economist under the age of 40. 

The study has the potential to alter the way Mr. Obama and other public figures talk about mobility trends. 

“The facts themselves are pretty unassailable,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has read the paper, which the authors will soon submit to an academic journal. “How you want to interpret them is the question.” 

The study found, for instance, that about 8 percent of children born in the early 1980s who grew up in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution managed to reach the top fifth for their age group today. The rate was nearly identical for children born a decade earlier. 

Among children born into the middle fifth of the income distribution, about 20 percent climbed into the top fifth as adults, also largely unchanged over the last decade.

Unfortunately, Chetty's methodology is fundamentally flawed as Leonhardt and I discussed in the New York Times last July regarding Chetty's previous study of income mobility by where children were raised. (See the update to the bottom of Leonhardt's post in the NYT.)

Thus you see bizarre examples like Scranton and Newark ranking near the top of Chetty's social mobility charts as the best places to be raised, while Charlotte and Atlanta rank near the bottom. (Chetty's analysis doesn't look just at municipalities, but at "commuting zones," so, for instance, Atlanta's sprawling suburbs are included.)

Yet, over the decades, lots of people have decided that it's in their overall self-interest to move out of Scranton (which is on the edge bankruptcy) and Newark and lots of people have decided it's in their self-interest to move to Charlotte and Atlanta. 

Why? A major problem is that Chetty looks at income but doesn't adjust for cost of living. The cost of housing is much higher in, say, New York City, a common destination for some fleeing Newark (e.g., Philip Roth) and Scranton, than in Atlanta or Charlotte, so wages and salaries are also lower in Atlanta and Charlotte.

Thus, people who fled the house where they grew up in collapsing Scranton or Newark for a small apartment in Queens may not feel like they a higher standard of living in their new life in NYC, but they have a higher income compared to the national average because incomes are high in NYC to account for the high cost of living in NYC, so they are counted by Chetty as upwardly mobile in income terms. 

In contrast, somebody born in Charlotte or Atlanta might feel less tempted to move to a place with higher nominal incomes because the local standard of living is pretty decent in Charlotte or Atlanta even if nominal incomes aren't shooting up because the cost of land is pretty low and stable.

Another major problem with Chetty's regional analysis that found that heavily black areas like the South and the Rust Belt have the least social (income) mobility while West Virginia has quite a bit of income mobility is simply racial regression to the mean. Here's Chetty's map, with places of lower income mobility in darker colors:

My blog response was entitled: "Breakthrough study: Poor blacks tend to stay poor, black."

Notice that according to Chetty West Virginia is an oasis of income mobility in the East, while nearby North Carolina is an abyss of stasis. Yet, lots of people raised in West Virginia who have something on the ball have moved to North Carolina to get ahead in life.

Since West Virginia is only about 5% black and has attracted very few Hispanics and Asians, the bottom 20% of West Virginians in income are majority white, so their children tend to regress toward the white mean, which is higher than the black mean. The bottom 20% in income in the Charlotte or Atlanta area is highly black, so their children tend to regress toward the black mean. Thus, West Virginia comes out looking better for social mobility than Atlanta and Charlotte in Chetty's methodology. 

This doesn't mean that if you had a peek around the Rawlsian curtain of ignorance, you'd choose to be born in West Virginia because of its strong social mobility. If you knew you were going to be born white, West Virginia would probably be last on your list of states to be born into. Nor does it mean that Blue State policies increase social mobility relative to red state policies. It's just mostly Moynihan's Canadian Border effect in action.

Chetty's new paper goes through a lot of contortions to disprove the race arguments I pointed out in the NYT last summer, but I'm not yet convinced.

As for Chetty's new study showing that over about a decade there wasn't much decline in social mobility, I'd take it with a grain of salt. Since he doesn't deal with standard of living, just with income, and since there have been massive population flows away from higher income, higher cost of living places toward lower income, lower cost of living places, and since he doesn't have good tools for dealing with race at the individual household level, I wouldn't consider this finding of stability over time definitive in a meaningful sense. I haven't had time to read it carefully, so I wouldn't reject it either. I just think that high-powered economists need to move on beyond simplistic measures like income to work on standard of living questions.

The ACCRA organization compiles careful data on cost of living by metropolis (including mortgage costs) for corporations moving managers around and needing an objective way to adjust their pay. It's not free, but a high-powered team of economists like Chetty and Saez should incorporate ACCRA data into their analyses.

Update: Chetty's new paper does use ACCRA cost of living adjustments, like I recommended to them last summer. This may be why their new finding is puzzling to the conventional wisdom.
    

Perspectives differ depending upon who's on top

As a young reader of National Review, Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I had been a true believer in the judicial doctrines of strict interpretation and originalism. The Supreme Court shouldn't run hog-wild in interpreting the Constitution and other law, I believed, but should instead sharply restrict itself to what was originally intended.

Yet when I read a full statement of this case -- Robert Bork's The Tempting of America -- I turned against it.

Why? Because I had noticed a logical flaw in the argument?

Nah ... Because I read Bork's book in paperback in the spring of 1991. 

And, sure, his originalist doctrine would be a good idea when those rotten Democrats were in ascendance. But in May 1991, only a few months after George H.W. Bush's triumph in the Gulf War,  it was utterly obvious to me that the Republican President would be re-elected in 1992. 

And with the GOP having 5.5 more years in the White House, they would nominate staunch Republican replacements for Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and Whizzer White. (Marshall, a Democrat, came to the same conclusion as me at this time and retired, allowing Bush to nominate Clarence Thomas to the black seat.)

So, why endorse Bork's judicial doctrine since it would impede My Guys from running hog wild when they'd soon have a huge majority on the Supreme Court and could do whatever they felt like?

My logic struck me as impeccable.

Is this the only time I've changed my mind expediently based on who was winning? Almost surely not -- it's just clearer in my head because my 1991 electoral forecast went so badly awry in 1992.

And am I the only person whose intellectual perspective seems to change depending upon whether My Team happens to be on the top or on the bottom at present? Perhaps. But perhaps not.
  

Bullying and Projection

The media mania to punish Grantland for one of its rare good articles because it was about not just a conman (which would be okay), but about a conman who wore a miniskirt (which is Not OK) is tied into the Anti-Bullying Movement of recent years. 

The logic is that, by definition, anyone who is "transgendered" was bullied on the school playground, and is therefore above criticism.

The bullying part is no doubt often true. 

For example, I knew somebody who is now a drag queen. I first met him when he was two years old. And he was the gayest two-year-old imaginable. As I heard him explain to some little girls with whom he was dressing up Barbie dolls, "I only play with girl toys. That's just the way I am."

I never heard about him being bullied at school, but it's hard to imagine he wasn't bullied by some moron.

On the other hand, reading about Dr. V., it's hard to not to notice that the promoter was a lifelong bully:

For all her wild stories, though, what Dr. V was most, Kinney [an investor out $60k] said, was a difficult person to deal with. “She would just explode. If you’re disagreeing with her while she had one of her headaches, you were in trouble.”

From an email from the promoter to the reporter:

“To whom this may concern,” it read. “I spoke with Caleb Hannan last Saturday his deportment is reminiscent to schoolyard bullies, his sole intention is to injure or bring harm to me … Because of a computer glitch, some documents that are germane only to me, were visible to web-viewers, government officials have now rectified this egregious condition … Caleb Hannan came into possession of documents that were clearly marked: MADE NON-PUBLIC (Restricted) … Exposing NON-PUBLIC Documents is a Crime, and prosecution of such are under the auspices of many State and Federal Laws, including Hate Crimes Legislation signed into Law by President Obama.”

Hannan notes:

Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. 

This is not wholly idiosyncratic. For example, the article that more or less launched World War T was a lavishly sympathetic New York Times story about the injustice done to a former male truckdriver who is not being allowed to beat up women for pay in mixed martial arts bouts.

A certain fraction of the trans community seem to represent less "a woman's mind trapped in a man's body" than an exaggeratedly masculine mind (as economist Deirdre [nee Donald] McCloskey kind of sort of admits in this New Republic article "I Know What Chelsea Manning Is Going Through").

To my regret, I've had the experience of noting that a subsection of the male-to-female trans-identified can be atrocious bullies. I got dragged into a bout of bullying organized by McCloskey, computer scientist Lynn Conway, and a few other  trans academics because they were out to get Northwestern U. professor J. Michael Bailey, and I had written about him. (This is not to say that Bailey is wholly right, just that trying to have chilling effects on free speech is a worse solution than, as Justice Brandeis said, more speech.)

McCloskey and Conway set out to systematically demonize anybody who had ever said a good word about Bailey (and, boy, are they ever systematic -- Simon Baron-Cohen could have a field day with their output). Their work was picked up and spread by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has used its crusade against "hate groups" to become the most lucrative hate group in America. This might sound strange, but it really isn't: after all, McCloskey and Conway are much smarter than most SPLC staffers, and also much more masculine -- thus, the flavor of their witchburning fervor is notably different from that of the women and dweeby dudes out to get Larry Summers or James D. Watson. Meanwhile the SPLC leadership is cunning about sniffing out the coming wave of money-making opportunities.

Here's a good New York Times article summarizing the campaign to silence Bailey.

For some reason, McCloskey liked to denounce "the Steve Sailers, Stephen Pinkers, and Seth Roberts of the world," an unusual case of somebody spelling my name right and Pinker's name wrong. 

Here's an email exchange between McCloskey and Roberts (minus Roberts' last email) that McCloskey hosts on his website because he thinks it makes him look good. McCloskey starts out politely, but ... buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. (Roberts' version is on p. 117 here.) 

Obviously, McCloskey has a lot of issues.

You be the judge of who is trying to bully whom.

Freud's concept of "projection" explains much about the postmodern world.

    

More on Dr. V

To give you some more evidence of the New Conventional Wisdom that has rapidly congealed that privileges for the amorphous class of "the transgendered" is suddenly the Crucial Moral Issue of Our Time (a.k.a., World War T), here are some more articles denouncing Grantland for publishing freelancer Caleb Hannan's fine piece of investigative journalism: (with one admirable exception at the end):

From The Atlantic (can't some billionaire with a sense of history feel offended enough by the Gawkerization of this property founded in 1857 to buy it and lose money on it running something other than clickbait for liberal arts majors?):

Dr. V, Sports Journalism, and Why Sensitivity Matters 

What Grantland could have learned from a past decision at Vanity Fair before publishing its controversial story about Essay Anne Vanderbilt

... The second troubling aspect of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” is that it survived the editorial layers of a major publication like Grantland, which ultimately bears responsibility for running the story. In a lengthy mea culpa published yesterday, Grantland editor-in-chief Bill Simmons took responsibility for publishing the story, relating how several members of his team failed to flag the troubling aspects of Hannan’s writing. (To its credit, Grantland yesterday also published a stinging criticism by Christina Kahrl, a transgender woman who writes about baseball for ESPN.) Grantland didn’t publish Hannan’s story because it wanted to run a sensationalistic piece, privacy and sensitivity be damned. It published the story because its editors didn’t realize that writing about the transgender community required special sensitivity—and didn’t bother to ask. 

From Poynter, the website of some sort of foundation devoted to journalism education:

Lessons learned from Grantland’s tragic story on Dr. V 

by Lauren Klinger and Kelly McBride 

Published Jan. 22, 2014 2:23 pm 

By editor-in-chief Bill Simmons’ own admission, ignorance was the biggest mistake Grantland made in reporting and publishing the story of Dr. V and her innovative golf putter. Ignorance about one of the most vulnerable minority groups — transgender people.

Jamie Kirchik, who was the last of Marty Peretz's Bright Young Men (a lineage that includes Andrew Sullivan and Al Gore), dissents from the conventional wisdom in the Daily Beast:

Pressuring Journalists Won’t Protect Transgender People 

When Grantland revealed the inventor of a golf putter to be a fraud, a mob attacked the site as bullying a transgendered woman to death. They demand a double standard that is the antithesis of equality for trans people.

Teen employment rates: minimum wage v. immigration

It’s instructive to compare the vast interest in the econosphere over the question of whether higher minimum wages raise teen unemployment versus the crickets-chirping lack of discussion over whether higher immigration raises teen unemployment ... even though the most plausible answer to both questions is likely "Yes."

Hard-hitting journalism at its finest

From the front page of NYTimes.com:

2 Friends Reach Across the Aisle on Immigration 

If there is a way to unlock the immigration stalemate in Washington, colleagues say that Esther Olavarria, a Democrat, and Rebecca Tallent, a Republican, might find it.

Is this a news article, or the blurb for a new Sweet Valley High novel for tweens?

The article isn't much different in tone:

The two women might at first seem more like political rivals than a reminder of the way things used to work in Washington. 

Esther Olavarria, a Democrat, left Cuba as a child, worked as Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s top immigration lawyer and now holds a post in the White House. Rebecca Tallent, a Republican, left suburban Arizona and became Senator John McCain’s chief of staff, briefly advised Sarah Palin in 2008 and is now a top policy aide to Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. 

But if there is any way to unlock the immigration stalemate in Washington, colleagues say these two might find it.

Has Carlos Slim gotten his money's worth out of the Times' immigration coverage, or what?
  

World War T breaks out on the putting green

Here's my new Taki's Magazine column on the current brouhaha condemning a fine piece of longform investigative reporting in Bill Simmons' Grantland by freelancer Caleb Hannan on a con artist who duped Dan Quayle and golf broadcaster Gary McCord. Hannan's crime: prioritizing "fact-finding" over the subject's Pokemon Power Points in the victimism sweepstakes. 

Read the whole thing there.

Thanks to my readers who called my attention to this bizarre confirmation of what I've been saying for awhile about what comes next after World War G.
  

Richard Sherman

Seattle Seahawks' cornerback Richard Sherman is getting a lot of attention for a postgame interview on Sunday that's more WWE than NFL.

I saw him play in high school in 2005. His team, Compton Dominguez, was so loaded with talent that they crushed my old high school, Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks, in the Southern California Division III finals without this future Super Bowl cornerback standing out in the game as a wide receiver (a position he played well for a couple of years at Stanford).

Compton's fast black backs just ran the ball over and over (19 times on the opening drive for a touchdown) behind an offensive line of giant Pacific Islanders, including a 319 pound tight end.

Compton Dominguez had gotten some major personal foul penalties in earlier playoff games, of the kind Sherman got at the end of the NFC championship game, but their conduct was exemplary in this one. Slum schools tend to blow up in high school playoffs, but Compton was very disciplined and didn't start celebrating after tackles until the last couple of minutes of the game.

Compton dominated so dominated on the ground, that NDHS only got one offensive play off in the first quarter, although it was a good one: Quarterback Garrett Green ran a draw 75 yards for a touchdown, pulling away from all four Compton defensive backs, including Sherman. Green was a remarkable athlete, a white guy faster than Richard Sherman, an excellent defensive back, and a quarterback with more or less a Division I passing arm, although not the NFL passing arm required by USC during those years at the top of the heap. So at USC Green just played quarterback on the practice squad, imitating the opponents' quarterback for the USC defense to tee off on, then went into the real estate business, which is a good business to go into if your years of service to the Trojans are appreciated by USC alums.
  

The Spirit of 2076

Vroom, vroom, vrooom! The NYT editorializes:

Pre-K on the Starting Blocks 

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD 

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambitious plan to provide preschool education to every 4-year-old brings high expectations.

As a way to Fight Inequality Now, universal pre-K sounds ... stately. The median age of the Forbes 400 is around 66, so if enrolling 4-year-olds in 2014 works as well as promised, it should really make a dent in about half of the Forbes 400 within 62 years, which is 2076.

I'll be attending my 100th high school reunion (yearbook theme: The Spirit of '76) via one of Robin Hanson's downloaded ems, so I have that to look forward to, which is nice.
     

"Oscar Gold"

From the comments:

We need to write a script for a movie where the Russians and Yankee WASPs join forces with Southern WASPs and plot to take over the world from the Maidstone Club. The diabolical plot is uncovered by a heroic transgendered migrant worker busing tables at the Knickerbocker Club to help pay tuition at Harvard Law School, pay to feed his four children, and cover the sex-change operation that will turn him into a single mom. Oscar gold, Steve! OSCAR GOLD! 

"Oscar Gold" would be the name of the movie since that will be the name of the migrant hero for obvious reasons. 

   

Slate: "A Gay Holocaust"

From Slate:

Note to Mary Matalin’s Gay Friends: She Won’t Hide You in a Gay Holocaust

By Nathaniel Frank

My Bubbie and Zada used to tell me my gentile friends wouldn’t hide me in another Holocaust. I like to think they were wrong (and that there won’t be another Holocaust). But that won’t stop me from invoking their wise spirit with a warning to conservative pundit Mary Matalin’s gay friends: She won’t hide you in a gay Holocaust. 

The famously crabby GOP strategist shrugged off a growing human-rights crisis in Russia on Sunday with a glib dismissal of even discussing the anti-gay policy and violence there, just as the upcoming Sochi Olympic Games have finally brought much-needed mainstream media coverage to the problem. “I’m so sick of sports and politics,” she complained in response to questions from George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s This Week. Her bottom line? “All of my gay friends think [Putin] looks so buff in his shirtless publicity photos.” Mustering the ghosts of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she asked about Putin, “Why is he even talking about this?” even though the obvious answer was that Putin was talking about it because Stephanopoulos had, quite properly, asked him about it, and later asked her too. 

It was difficult to make out if Matalin was quoting someone else, but the intent of her comments was clear, and despicable: All this talk of gay suffering is boring, unimportant, and makes lots of us feel icky (the gay part, not the fact that they’re being persecuted), and the only response is not to clearly condemn it but to vomit out a gay stereotype such as the one about how gays only care about how men look shirtless—indeed, they can only see flesh and muscle even when a major country is unleashing a concerted campaign to vilify and dehumanize their people for political gain, giving the green light to mob violence. 

This sort of response illustrates precisely why the head-in-the-sand, “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach can be dangerous and even deadly. The developments in Russia that Matalin was laughing off were a string of provisions passed last year—and their violent consequences—that punishes promotion or even discussion of homosexuality in a broadly defined set of scenarios. No, what’s happening there is not the Holocaust.

You should probably mention that to Slate's headline writer ...

But many observers have noted the eerie influence of the Nazi playbook, including the singling out of an unpopular minority for dehumanizing treatment, a campaign of terror unleashed by punitive laws and tough talk, and an autocratic leader’s use of blatant scapegoating to consolidate power and distract voters from his failed policies. 

1914: World War I
2014: World War G

1914: The Great War
2014: The Gay War