January 29, 2014

My Super Bowl prediction: Manning to regress toward mean

I don't know anything about football, but let me make a Super Bowl prediction. 

Las Vegas initially established the strong defense and run Seattle Seahawks as the favorite, but a flood of public money on Peyton Manning's high-scoring Denver Broncos reversed that. (Both teams are 15-3.) 

After all, Manning set records this years for touchdown passes and yards passing. In the regular season of 16 games, he tossed 55 touchdowns compared to only 10 interceptions and was sacked only 18 times. 

He had a great game in the AFC championship against archrival Tom Brady's New England Patriots, throwing for 400 yards. This is all despite the 37-year-old Manning being one of the weakest-armed and least mobile quarterbacks in the league. Much of the season, he looked more like a symphony conductor, waving his arms around to direct his players in what to do, than a football player.

I'm a big Peyton Manning fan, as I'm a big Tom Brady fan. In fact, the endless Manning vs. Brady debate helped inspire one of my bigger (and most boring) ideas: Back in 2009, when Malcolm Gladwell was denouncing Steven Pinker in the New York Times for citing known crimethinker Steve Sailer's research debunking Gladwell's contention that the performance of NFL quarterbacks "can't be predicted," Pinker and I got to discussing why humans are most fascinated by arguing over things that are least provable, such as who's best: Manning or Brady? Pinker told me, "mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal."

Still, that doesn't mean that Manning is bound to win.

The Seahawk's quarterback Russell Wilson is 25-years-old and in his second season in the NFL. He had strong statistics but not up in the stratosphere with Manning's. (Wilson, who is black, is remarkably short for an NFL QB: at 5'11" a half foot shorter than Manning.)

Since pro football is increasingly dominated by quarterbacks, you gotta bet on the guy with the big numbers, right? 

Maybe, but I have this hunch that Manning is due for some regression toward the mean. I mean, how likely is it that he's going to be better on Sunday than he was against New England or the average for his remarkable season? In contrast, what's the chance that playing outdoors in New Jersey in February is going to catch up with him?

And I suspect Seattle has devoted some careful thought over these two weeks to how they are going to make Manning feel less like a young philharmonic conductor and more like an old football player.

So, I'm picking Seattle.

By the way, I was wondering why the Seahawks' Russell didn't make the NFL until age 24. It turns out that, after redshirting his freshman year at North Carolina St., he started three full seasons, and completed his degree (in communications, of course) while playing minor league baseball in the summers. But after three good seasons as a starter, nobody invited him to the NFL draft combine -- he's under 6 feet tall.

So, he transferred to Wisconsin (without having to sit out a year because he enrolled in a graduate program at his new school) and had such a spectacular season, 33 touchdowns and 4 interceptions and winning the Rose Bowl, that he was drafted in the third round.

Russell comes from an upscale black family in Richmond. His father was a lawyer. I believe Russell's Wonderlic test score equates to an IQ of a 114, same as Manning's. Here are Wonderlic's for active Super Bowl winners:

Here are the Wonderlic scores of active Super Bowl winners, with the mean equaling 21 and two IQ points per additional right answer.

Eli Manning, Ole Miss 39 -- 136
Aaron Rodgers, Cal 35 -- 128
Tom Brady, Michigan 33 -- 124
Peyton Manning, Tennessee 28 -- 114
Drew Brees, Purdue 28 -- 114
Joe Flacco, Delaware 27 -- 112
Ben Roethlisberger, Miami (Ohio) 25 -- 108

These guys probably study up for the Wonderlic, which boosts their scores, but still, it seems plausible that a 3-digit-IQ is an advantage for 21st Century NFL quarterbacks.

The next Sacha Baron Cohen movie?

From the Associated Press:
HK Lesbian Appeals to Tycoon Dad Over Dowry Offer 
HONG KONG — The lesbian daughter of a flamboyant [but not that kind of flamboyant] Hong Kong tycoon who publicly offered millions of dollars to any man who could woo her into marriage appealed to her father in an open letter published Wednesday to accept her for who she is. 
Cecil Chao made world headlines in 2012 when he tried to find a man who could successfully win his daughter, Gigi Chao, away from her partner by offering 500 million Hong Kong dollars ($65 million), an offer that a Malaysian newspaper who interviewed him last week said he has doubled. 

I initially figured that the Professor Poindexter with the bowtie in this above photo is dad Cecil. But the caption implied these were two women. So, I figured Gigi is doing about as well as she can, what with looking like Yoko Ono's nerdy nephew, to land a cute gold-digger like the one in the dress. But, apparently, the heiress is the one in the dress.
Gigi and Cecil
Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor behind "Borat," is reportedly working on a movie inspired by the tycoon's proposal, according to Hollywood trade publications.

I would go see that movie.
Cecil Chao, who made his fortune as a Hong Kong property developer, has a reputation for being a playboy with a love for Rolls-Royces. He once claimed to have had 10,000 girlfriends but has never married. Gigi Chao is one of his three children by three different women.

Okay, so that explains it. Gigi really hates her dad and this is her revenge on him for being a massive jerk.
  

SOTU & Immigration

Kevin Drum points out that Obama barely mentioned amnesty in his lengthy State of the Union address. Here's the relatively terse heaping of tripe that the President delivered:
Finally, if we are serious about economic growth, it is time to heed the call of business leaders, labor leaders, faith leaders, and law enforcement – and fix our broken immigration system.  Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have acted.  I know that members of both parties in the House want to do the same. Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits by almost $1 trillion in the next two decades.  And for good reason: when people come here to fulfill their dreams – to study, invent, and contribute to our culture – they make our country a more attractive place for businesses to locate and create jobs for everyone.  So let’s get immigration reform done this year.

Apparently, America needs more immigrants so more businesses will "locate." Or something. I don't think Obama is even trying to make sense here. He just wants to check this off his box so he can report back to the special interests that he mentioned it in the SOTU.

But he mostly he doesn't want voters who don't like him to notice he's all for amnesty. With Republican politicians winding up to stab Republican voters in the back, the last thing Obama wants to do is get between them.
   

January 28, 2014

Blue eyes, brown skin in ancient European

Russell Crowe with a tan?
Greg Cochran has been talking for awhile about how ancient European hunter-gatherers didn't look much like modern Europeans. Karen Kaplan writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Surprise! Ancient European had dark skin and blue eyes, DNA reveals
Blue-eyed people have been living in Europe for at least 7,000 years, scientists have discovered. 
A man who lived on the Iberian peninsula before Europeans became farmers probably had blue eyes but dark hair and skin, according to scientists who have sequenced his DNA. This surprising combination of eye, hair and skin coloring may have not have been unusual during his lifetime, but it is no longer seen among modern Europeans, the team reported Sunday in the journal Nature. ... 
The man, a Neolithic hunter-gatherer known to scientists as La Braña 1, is of great interest to scientists because he offers a snapshot of what was in Europeans’ DNA before agriculture spread through the continent. Experts have theorized that certain genetic traits spread quickly among humans after they adopted the farming lifestyle. La Braña 1 shows that at least some of their predictions were correct.

The man’s skeleton, along with that of a male companion, was discovered in 2006 in a cave in what is now northeastern Spain. The site, known as La Braña-Arintero, sits about 5,000 feet above sea level, and the cave provided a cold, refrigerator-like environment that preserved his DNA. 
In the lab, scientists were able to extract enough DNA from a single tooth to reconstruct La Braña 1’s entire genome. They compared it to the DNA of other ancient Europeans (including Otzi, the 5,300-year-old mummy found in a Alpine glacier) and determined that he was a closer match with hunter-gatherers than with farmers. 
Two specific genes — one for digesting lactose (the sugar found in milk) and another for digesting starch — offered further evidence that La Braña 1 was not a farmer. New versions of both of these genes spread rapidly among Europeans after agriculture took hold and people began milking their livestock and growing crops. And in both cases, La Braña 1 had an older version of these genes. ...
When it came to genes that would influence La Braña 1’s appearance, the researchers found that their 7,000-year-old subject had versions of two skin pigment genes that are either very rare or nonexistent among Europeans today. Then they looked at other places in the genome that influence pigmentation and found a mix of ancient and modern gene variants. Taken together, La Braña 1’s DNA “is likely to have resulted in dark skin pigmentation and dark or brown hair,” they wrote. 
However, his DNA indicates that his eyes were most likely blue, the scientists found. This suggests that gene variants for light-colored eyes and skin did not spread together, they wrote, adding that La Braña 1’s combination “of dark skin and non-brown eyes is unique and no longer present in contemporary European populations.” Today, a blue-eyed person would typically have fair skin.

Here's the article in Nature.

One thing to keep in mind is that recovering ancient DNA is extremely delicate work and it's possible for the scientists' own DNA to accidentally get mixed in with the sample. They've gotten better at this during this century, but do not construct entire worldviews based on one paper.

At West Hunter, Cochran has been arguing that the modern skin lightening mutation of the gene SLC24a5 that's found in Western Eurasia must have had some other effect that provided a sizable fitness benefit beyond the usual theories about Vitamin D and the like.

Razib says that Caveman Moviestar above is missing the modern European variant of this skin-lightening gene.

Keep in mind that a gene variant can do multiple things that don't appear on the surface to be related. For example, the great Russian experiment in breeding silver foxes to have the temperaments to be pets resulted in a variety of changes in how they looked, such as floppy ears.

I'd guess from Greg's posts that he thinks he finally has an idea what that pleiotropic effect of fair skin is, but he isn't saying yet. From the hints he's dropping, it sounds like this gene version, which originated in the Middle East, might have something to do with digesting wheat-type grains. Or maybe not.
   

Amy Chua and Mormons

From my new Taki's Magazine column:
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld note that these three common traits of successful minority groups—which I would call ethnocentrism, paranoia, and self-repression—are not liberal virtues: 
"Paradoxically, in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into—or hasn’t yet bought into—mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles." 
And yet of the eight minorities, only Mormons are uncool enough to admit they reject liberalism. 
Mormons are interesting because they are the minority among minorities—an odd group out whose members publicly aspire to being ordinary Americans, as Americans used to define themselves before the 1960s. 
Being an insular sect that pretends to be regular Americans, the Mormons are the only minority that publicly dissents from the reigning worldview that minorities are inherently morally superior to the majority. 
But do Mormons actually benefit much financially from their strong moral culture? Or does their notorious niceness, their lack of a chip on the shoulder (which Chua and Rubenfeld cite as essential to minority success), their shortage of hostility toward the majority keep them from fully cashing in?

Read the whole thing there.
    

What is Sochi all about?

One nagging question is why Vladimir Putin is spending a supposed $50 billion dollars to fix up the Black Sea coastal town of Sochi and a nearby inland mountain ski village to host the upcoming Winter Olympics. That's a huge amount for a Winter games, which are smaller in scale than the summer games that contributed so much to Greece's current debt problems.

Putin's reasons no doubt include national pride and to allow his friends and supporters to skim tens of billions off the top of the construction budgets.

But another reason appears to be to develop one of that vast but northerly country's most southerly, mild, palm-lined, and scenically-varied regions into a world-class four-season resort and retirement destination for Russia's ruling class, where they can't be arrested by Russia's rivals. 

Many of Russia's biggest pre-Putin criminals have fled to safe havens in London, New York, the South of France, and the like, where they occupy themselves owning major league sports franchises and so forth. 

But Putin and his current oligarchs figure that the Washington-New York-London axis will look less approvingly on their crimes than on those of their predecessors. So, they'd better have a nice, warm place within Russia to retire to. 

Czarist and Soviet rulers used to have resort homes in the Crimea (e.g., Yalta), but that beautiful, mostly Russian peninsula got handed to the Ukraine on 1/1/1992. Stalin had a second home south of Sochi on the Black Sea, but that's now in Georgia.

So, Russia's latest rulers need a new, improved dream destination. Hence, the huge investment in Sochi.

That also helps explain some of the Western anger over the Sochi Olympics: the development of Sochi is intended to reduce the threat of Western countries taking Russian leaders prisoner some day, which reduces Western influence over Russia.
     

State of the Union Address: Whatever happened to Obama's screwing-in-lightbulb plan?

With President Obama back on TV reading, no doubt, a laundry list of things he's going to do for us, I'd like to look back in time to his first post-election Presidential agenda speech on December 7, 2008:
Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work. 
Barack Obama

At the time, I assumed that having a new President whose first Presidential-type speech outlining the first step in his carefully crafted plan involved screwing in lightbulbs was going to inspire a few jokes. 

Of course, I was sadly mistaken. The National Humor Depression of 2007-2016 rolls on relentlessly.

P.S.: My wife has on her smartphone Sound Hound, an app that recognizes songs on the radio and tells you what they are. She accidentally started it up while Obama's speech was playing in the background. Sound Hound quickly identified it as "State of the Union address."
   

Haidt: Against Occam's Razor

From Edge confab on What Scientific Concepts Should Be Retired? the estimable Jonathan Haidt comes out against Occam's Razor:
Jonathan Haidt 
Social Psychologist; Professor, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind 
[Anti-] The Pursuit of Parsimony 
There are many things in life that are good to have yet bad to pursue too vigorously. Money, love, and sex, for example. I'd like to add parsimony to that list. 
William of Ockham was a 14th-century English logician who said that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." That principle—now known as "Occam's Razor"—has been used for centuries by scientists and philosophers as a tool to adjudicate among competing theories. Parsimony means frugality or stinginess, and scientists should be "stingy" when building theories; they should use as little material as possible. If two theories really do exactly as good a job of explaining the empirical evidence, then you should pick the simpler theory. If Copernicus and Ptolemy can both explain the movements of the heavens, including the occasional backwards motion of some planets, then go with Copernicus's far more parsimonious model. 
Occam's razor is a great tool when used as originally designed. Unfortunately, many scientists have turned this simple tool into a fetish object. They pursue simple explanations of complex phenomena as though parsimony were an end in itself, rather than a tool to be used in the pursuit of truth. 
The worship of parsimony is understandable in the natural sciences, where it sometimes does happen that a single law or principle, or a very simple theory, explains a vast and diverse set of observations.  
But in the social sciences, the overzealous pursuit of parsimony has been a disaster. Since the 18th century, some intellectuals have striven to do for the social world what Newton did for the physical world. Utilitarians, the French philosophes, and other utopian dreamers longed for a social order based on rational principles and a scientific understanding of human behavior. Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology, originally called his new discipline "social physics." 
And what do we have to show for 250 years of pursuit? We have a series of time-wasting failures and ideological battles. Human behavior cannot all be explained by positive and negative reinforcement (contra the behaviorists). Nor is it all about sex, money, class, power, self-esteem, or even self-interest, to name some of the major explanatory idols worshipped in the 20th century. 
In my own field—moral psychology—we've suffered from the same overzealous pursuit of parsimony. Lawrence Kohlberg said morality was all about justice. Others say it's compassion. Others say morality is all about forming coalitions, or preventing harm to victims. But in fact morality is complicated, pluralistic, and culturally variable. Human beings are products of evolution, so the psychological foundations of morality are innate (as I and many others have argued at Edge.org in recent years.) But there are many of these foundations, and they are just the beginning of the story. You must still explain how morality develops in such variable ways around the world, and even among siblings within a single family. 
The social sciences are hard because human beings differ fundamentally from inanimate objects. People insist upon making or finding meaning in things. They do it collectively, creating baroque cultural landscapes that can't be explained parsimoniously, and they do it individually, creating their own unique symbolic worlds nested within their broader cultures. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it: "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun." This is why it's so hard to predict what any individual will do. This is why there are almost no equations in psychology or sociology. This is why there will never be a Newton in the social sciences. 
Let's retire the pursuit of parsimony from the social sciences. Parsimony is beautiful when we find it, but the pursuit of parsimony is sometimes an obstacle to the pursuit of truth.

Let me suggest a distinction: Let's retire the pursuit of constructing one-size-fits-all Grand Unified Theories of All Human Behavior.

But let's very much retain the use of Occam's Razor for pointing out problems with social scientists' ideas.

For example, here's a graph of social mobility, of a child rising from a family in the bottom quintile of the national income distribution to the top quintile, made by award-winning Harvard economist Raj Chetty that has been widely publicized, along with Chetty's convoluted theories for why it has so many counter-intuitive findings, such as that the American Dream Is Alive in the dusty, dying small towns of the Great Plains but the American Dream Is Dead in bustling Charlotte, NC and the greater Atlanta metroplex.
Wielding Occam's Butterknife, Chetty comes up with a whole bunch of contradictory theories (e.g., Sprawl is the villain, except where is not, such as in Dreamrific San Jose) in his attempt to ignore the obvious.

My model of the map is a lot simpler:

1. Poor blacks (and poor Indians on big reservations) regress toward a lower mean income than poor whites regress toward. Regression toward the mean is a hugely useful tool in any analysis covering two or more generations. That's exactly the problem that Galton invented the concept to deal with in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. To ignore regression toward the mean in this kind of analysis should get the authors laughed at, but instead it gets them praised.

2. Chetty hasn't dealt well with the complications caused by diverging land prices, related changes in income, and migration (e.g., according to Chetty's map, the American Dream Is Alive in West Virginia, but that's most likely an artifact of so many Mountaineers moving to places like Charlotte).
 
In summary, while I have zero intention of building a giant overly-simplistic ideology to predict everything (conversely, my most ambitious philosophical hopes are to construct a simple explanation of why we can predict so few things of interest to us, like the Super Bowl; personally, I think the Seahawk defense is going to expose the fact that Peyton Manning is a middle aged guy and ... oh, where was I? Okay, back to boring stuff that nobody is really interested in), Occam's Razor remains the single most useful tool for slashing down faddish new conventional wisdom, like Chetty's bogus analyses.

Metaphorically, perhaps it's better to think of Occam's razor more as a weapon for chopping down than as a tool for building up. I suspect Dr. Haidt and I could agree on that

January 27, 2014

GOP Brain Trust's latest amnesty brainstorm

From the NYT:
Backing in G.O.P. for Legal Status for Immigrants 
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER 12:12 AM ET 
The House Republican leadership’s ideas for the nation’s immigration laws include a path to legal status — but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million adult immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Obviously, giving illegal aliens the vote is a stupid idea for Republican politicians. But so is giving illegals amnesty without "the path to citizenship." Hispanics are going to be told by the media, over and over, to feel racially insulted by Republicans over illegals getting only amnesty but not citizenship.

Is it too hard for GOP politicians to grasp that the whole ploy was a trap designed by Democrats that would have no good options for Republicans? How can choosing one poisoned apple or the other be better than walking away from both? Agreeing to amnesty is a massive defeat, substantively and symbolically, so why volunteer for it? 
   

China v. Europe: the big picture

Unified China and Divided Europe 
Chiu Yu Ko, Mark Koyama, Tuan-Hwee Sng∗ January 2013 
Abstract 
This paper studies the persistence and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of external threats and remained politically fragmented. Our model allows us to explore the economic consequences of political centralization and fragmentation. Political centralization in China led to lower taxation and hence faster population growth during peacetime than in Europe. But it also meant that China was relatively fragile in the event of an external invasion. We argue that the greater volatility in population growth during the Malthusian era in China can help explain the divergence in economic development that had opened up between China and Europe at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. 
∗Chiu Yu Ko and Tuan-Hwee Sng, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore. Mark Koyama, Department of Economics, George Mason University.  
Since Montesquieu, scholars have attributed Europe’s success to its political fragmentation (Montesquieu, 1748, 1989; Jones, 1981; Mokyr, 1990; Diamond, 1997). Nevertheless throughout most of history, the most economically developed parts of the world belonged to large empires, the most notable of which was imperial China. This contrast poses a puzzle that has important implications for our understanding of the origins of modern economic growth: Why was Europe perennially fragmented after the collapse of Rome, whereas political centralization was a stable equilibrium for most of Chinese history? Can this fundamental difference in political institutions account for why modern economic growth began in Europe and not in China? 
This paper proposes a unified explanation for this twin divergence. We emphasize the role of geography in shaping the external threats confronting continental landmasses such as China and Europe. Our model predicts when and where empires are more likely be stable based on the extent and nature of the external threats that they face. It also sheds light on the growth consequences of political centralization and fragmentation. 
Historically, China faced a large unidirectional threat from steppe nomads.

E.g., Mongols, Manchus, Jurchen, etc. coming down on horse from the northern grasslands. There weren't many steppe nomads, but they were extremely scary. And their culture was so radically different that when the Mongols conquered China, their first thought was to burn it all down and turn it into pasture for their horses. Eventually, the Chinese were able to convince the various nomadic conquerors that they would enjoy Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, but it was kind of nerve-racking.

In contrast, the Himalayas shielded China from the South Asian subcontinent, due east is a high desert, and Indochina is a rugged, smaller region that wasn't all that much of a threat to the vast population of China.
Europe confronted several less powerful external threats from Scandinavia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. We show that if multitasking is inefficient, empires will be unstable in Europe and political fragmentation the norm. On the other hand, empires were more likely to emerge and survive in China because the nomadic threat threatened the survival of small states more than larger ones. Political centralization allowed China to avoid wasteful interstate competition and thereby enjoy faster economic and population growth during peacetime.

Hero dramatizes that ideology of centralization. The Muscovites had a similar get big or die trying ideology, as I noted in 2001. I recall reading somewhere that the Czarist foreign ministry once sent a memo to the Czar saying that they had searched through the archives and were proud to report that of the 40 wars Russia had fought, Russia had started 38 of them.

The Russians took a terrible beating from the steppe during the Mongol rule of 1300-1500, which permanently affected their national character.

Whereas the English were off on their nice island. The English had the perfect set up to eventually dominate the world politically-culturally: they didn't need to be wholly militaristic and autocratic because they had natural defenses. But they needed some degree of centralization to defend themselves from invasion: a serious but not overwhelming challenge that was conducive to building a state that was strong but not too strong.
However, the presence of multiple states to protect different parts of the continent meant that Europe would be relatively robust to negative shocks. Consequently, economic growth should be more continuous and less cyclical in Europe than in China. 
The framework we introduce has important implications for growth theory. Models of unified growth contain a scale-effect that implies that larger economies should be the first to experience modern economic growth (Galor and Weil, 2000; Galor, 2005, 2011). Our theory suggests that because it was more centralized, China was more vulnerable to negative shocks and therefore more likely to experience periodic growth reversals. As a steady increase in the stock of population is important for cumulative innovation to occur, the start-stop nature of China’s growth diminished its chances of escaping the Malthusian trap, while the European economy was able to expand gradually to the point where the transition from stagnation to growth was triggered.

I'd add a point I picked up from David Landes' late 1990s history of everything: different ages of marriage. Chinese girls seemed to marry around 18, while English girls married around 25. So, the Chinese population shot up faster, and then came crashing down when the centralized government broke down and with it the conditions necessary for supporting such a dense population per square mile.

In contrast, Europeans followed the Rev. Malthus's advice before he gave it, and tended to limit their reproduction through celibacy, temporary or permanent. So, outside of the Black Death, populations were more stable than in China.
   

Diversity in New Media Journalism

The big journalism news is that Ezra Klein and some friends are leaving the Washington Post for an all Internet media company, Vox. Here are pictures of Vox's staff, which looks remarkably like that picture of the 2012 Obama campaign staff, all the way down to having one black guy in the back row. Just as the Obama campaign was headquartered in Chicago, where no blacks live, Vox is based in Washington D.C., so there weren't any additional black workers available within a 100-mile commuting distance.

By the way, nobody should ever suggest that Matthew Yglesias is a tad out of touch with the Common Man. After all, back in 1948 his grandfather was the film critic for the CPUSA's Daily Worker.
     

Diversity in the NBA Commissioner's job

From the New York Times:
In a Transition Game, David Stern Is Passing the N.B.A. Commissioner’s Hat to Adam Silver 
By HARVEY ARATON 
David Stern stepped into a conference room through a side door from his office. He carried a can of soda and a small plate of tortilla chips. 
“My lunch,” he said on a recent weekday afternoon as he settled in to be interviewed jointly with Adam Silver, who will succeed him Saturday as N.B.A. commissioner. 
... Stern, 71, was, in the 1970s, a rising star at the New York law firm Proskauer Rose, which provided legal counsel to the N.B.A. and created a way inside the sport he followed growing up across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Teaneck, N.J. 
Silver, 51, spent much of his youth in Rye, north of New York City, the son of a Proskauer partner. ...
After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Silver seemed to be following in the legal footsteps of his father. “I loved basketball, but I never dreamed about playing in the N.B.A. or certainly working for the N.B.A.,” he said. 
The credentials and connections couldn’t have hurt after he wrote a letter to Stern seeking career advice. Silver joined the league in 1992 as Stern’s special assistant and subsequently became chief of staff, the senior vice president of N.B.A. Entertainment, and the deputy commissioner when Russ Granik left that position in 2006. 
“We’ve been working intensely close for 22 years,” Stern said. “I’ve been giving him advice and he’s been giving me advice for over two decades. It depended upon the owners ultimately, but I thought he was the logical successor.” 
Such is the rebuttal to the social media chatter about the commissioner’s office being too New York-centric, or even too Jewish. Support for Silver, according to league insiders, was widespread. ... 

On average, as Bryant Gumbel has suggested, NBA team owners aren't exactly all that different demographically from Stern and his protege Silver.
But when Stern said, “We think alike about a lot of things — not just about basketball, but about life,” he was stressing a more essential point that N.B.A. owners seemed to grasp. 

Indeed.
 

Today in White Guilt: White guy wins hip-hop Grammy; another white guy worries about it at length

From the New York Times:
Finding a Place in the Hip-Hop Ecosystem 
JAN. 27, 2014

By JON CARAMANICA 
A couple of hours after the Grammys on Sunday night, Macklemore [a white guy] sent a text to Kendrick Lamar [presumably a black guy], whom he had just beaten out for  best rap album. 
“You got robbed,” the text read. “I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird.” He added, “I robbed you.” 
As a private act, this was a love letter, a way for an artist to honor a peer. As a public act — Macklemore posted an image of the text on his Instagram account, although it’s unclear whether it was with Mr. Lamar’s knowledge — it was a cleansing and an admission of guilt. Not only did Macklemore want to show respect to his fellow rapper, he wanted the world to know that he understands his place in the hip-hop ecosystem and that he is still careful where he steps.
 Macklemore & Ryan Lewis [white], the Seattle duo that has spent the last year upending the rules about how hip-hop interacts with mainstream pop, won four Grammys on Sunday night, for best new artist and in three rap categories (best performance and best song for “Thrift Shop” and best album for “The Heist”). 

I've actually heard the song "Thrift Shop," in which a white guy explains that he buys all his clothes used because you can get some real bargains. (I imagine this is a dig at black rappers, who mostly rap about how much money they waste.)
The rap awards were the most tortured, for artists and observers alike.

Huh?

I'm glad I didn't watch, seeing as how it was torture.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have experienced a very peculiar sort of hip-hop fame, one that has little to do with approval from the center of hip-hop, and it has unfolded largely without black gatekeepers, a traditional hallmark of white rappers through the years. Instead Macklemore & Ryan Lewis jumped straight from the independent hip-hop underground to the pop charts, which has left them scrambling to shore up their bona fides retroactively. 
So when he bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z [black], Drake [black] and Kanye West [black] — for a rap award, he makes sure he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. This is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege in a nutshell: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate. 
To many, that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were nominated in the rap categories at all was an affront. Hip-hop purists love a good debate about boundaries and who gets to police them. (Almost certainly Macklemore was one of those purists, until he couldn’t be anymore because of his fame.) Last week The Associated Press reported that the two were almost eliminated from competition in those categories altogether by subcommittee members who felt they were, in essence, too pop — and, presumably too white. Like a border militia tasked with passing judgment on infiltrators, those voters attempted a sort-of Grammy version of jury nullification, to no avail. 
The idea was, of course, preposterous. Part of accepting hip-hop’s growth into a pop music juggernaut is to accept that its edges are fuzzier than they once were. “The Heist” is undeniably a hip-hop album, though Macklemore’s songs have more in common with those by rappers like Flo Rida or Pitbull, dance-music-friendly artists who are rarely heard on traditional hip-hop radio. But Flo Rida [black] and Pitbull [white] are not white. 

Pitbull: Not White
Actually, according to Pitbull's Wikipedia bio:
He encountered problems early in his career as a rapper because he looks white with blue eyes, hails from the South, and is Cuban. 

But, America needs Cubans to demand more Hispanic immigration because Mexican-Americans don't seem to be mediagenic enough, so Pitbull's Not White.

Back to the NYT's cogitations:
And part of consuming the Grammys is to accept that when it comes to niche categories, chaos will reign. (The Grammys are one of the few remaining contexts in which hip-hop could be called niche.) Voting in these cases remains a catastrophically broken process. Last week  Complex published an article by a Grammy voter detailing some parts of the system, which included this behind-the-scenes tidbit passed from one voter to the next: “be careful about greenlighting an album by someone who was really famous if you don’t want to see that album win a Grammy.” Macklemore isn’t more famous than Jay Z [not white] or Mr. West [not white], but the nature of his fame is different — it’s likely to have registered with a wider swath of Grammy voters who would be comfortable voting for him in a way they might not have been for Mr. Lamar. 
Presumably Macklemore didn’t text his feelings to the others he bested, either because they didn’t need to hear them or he doesn’t have their numbers, or both. Of the three, only Jay Z was in attendance, though mostly to perform with his wife, Beyoncé [officially not white], and later dance with her in the aisles as Daft Punk [two white Eurotrash guys who perform in helmets like the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers so you can't tell that their 1979 Chic-style hit "Get Lucky" isn't being sung by blacks -- they could be Milli Vanilli under those robot suits for all anybody can see] performed. He also won the Grammy for best rap/sung collaboration, with Justin Timberlake [white, plays golf in case you were wondering].
Mr. Lamar, the least well known of that category’s nominees, “deserved best rap album,” Macklemore added in the comment section of the photo he posted. But note that he didn’t say album of the year, another category in which both were nominated (and lost to Daft Punk). If Mr. Lamar made a better rap album than Macklemore did, then didn’t he make a better album over all? Or was Macklemore ceding the traditionally black category while keeping his claim on the broader one? (Eminem [a white guy] has won the best rap album Grammy five times.) 
 In his effort to be gracious, Macklemore was uncomfortably splitting hairs. As has so often happened in the year or so since he emerged as a pop force, an act that was presumably meant to be selfless and open-minded instead came off as one of self-congratulatory magnanimity. It’s the same problem that bedevils him with “Same Love,” his song about marriage equality [gay marriage], which he performed at Sunday’s awards ceremony (accompanied by Mary Lambert [white, but fat and lesbian] and, perversely, a wild-eyed Madonna [by this point, mostly sinew, gristle, and steroids]) as the soundtrack to 33 weddings, gay and straight, over which Queen Latifah [black lesbian] officiated.
It’s an almost messianic song, and a deeply self-serving way to discuss an issue like equality. 

(Ronan Farrow [a Celebrity-American, who may or may not have inherited some genes for evaluating pop music] tweeted: "For a pro gay song, this sure does feature a lot of Macklemore clarifying that he's straight.")
 In interviews, Macklemore speaks readily about his position of privilege and the role it has played in catapulting him to fame. But incidents like the text to Mr. Lamar reinforce the narrative of Macklemore as tortured intruder, keen to relish his success but stressed about all the shoulders he’s had to step on along the way. It’s a transparent ploy for absolution, and a warning of robberies to come.

To prevent white people from robbing blacks, the only kind of popular music white people should be allowed to create is square dance calling. By the way, as Malcolm McClaren unkindly pointed out 31 years ago in "Buffalo Gals," hip-hop was Stolen from the great white art form of square dance calling:

Commenters point out that rap was a popular country and Western genre in the 1960s and 1970s:
A 1972 version of a 1955 song:

After all, who cares about melody in a song? What's important is to hear what today's youth have to say.
    

Jewish Journal: "Who is the mysterious shiksa girlfriend of Israel’s boy king?"

The blonde in white
From the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles:
Sandra Leikanger and Yair Netanyahu: Who is the mysterious shiksa girlfriend of Israel’s boy king? 
By Simone Wilson 
Norwegian news outlet Dagen is reporting that 23-year-old Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's eldest son and baby-faced prince of Tel Aviv nightlife, is going steady with 25-year-old Sandra Leikanger, a Norwegian communications major he met while the two were studying at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. 
... The scandal? The First Girlfriend is (allegedly) a white-hot Norwegian shiksa. 
What's more, the L.A. Jewish Journal can exclusively report that the two have been hanging out since at least the first week of July 2013. ... 
That same night, the First Son's bodyguard, hanging back in the crowd, told me wearily that his young boss had been staying out until dawn multiple nights per week. Netanyahu's firstborn also goes to IDC, which everyone knows is host to the nation's highest concentration of hot chicks and rich kids who like to party. 
So congrats, Miss Norway, on taming Israel's devilish boy king. ...
The Israeli media is reporting that Leikanger's older sister, Ida, also lives in Israel and has converted to Judaism. The two girls reportedly grew up in an Evangelical family in the quaint Norwegian port town of Grimstad. 
Religious and right-wing members of the Knesset, Israel's version of parliament, are of course making a monstrous stink about the mere prospect of muggle babies diluting the Royal Family. Apparently, matters of lesser importance like peace in the Middle East must take a backseat to one pretty Aryan threat to the bloodline.   
... Netanyahu, however, whose second marriage was to a shiksa from England, seems unfazed.

I did not know that.

Dad Bibi's love life has been pretty energetic. From Wikipedia:
Netanyahu's first marriage was to Miriam Weizmann, who he met in Israel. ... The couple had one daughter, Noa (born 29 April 1978). In 1978, while Weizmann was pregnant, Netanyahu met a British woman named Fleur Cates at the university library, and began an affair. His marriage ended in divorce soon afterward, when his wife discovered the affair. In 1981, he married Cates, but the couple divorced in 1984. In 1991 Netanyahu married his third wife, Sara Ben-Artzi, a psychology major working as a flight attendant, whom he met while traveling on an El Al flight from New York to Israel.[39][172] ... 

This article in The Times of Israel claims that Sara entrapped Bibi by getting pregnant:
“She had a plan. He didn’t have a plan. He’s very clever in some ways and very unpredictable, maybe stupid, in others,” says a former Bibi staffer. “She got pregnant. He didn’t have any serious intention of marrying her. She basically trapped him, and for some reason she was very surprised when another woman trapped him later.”

Back to Wikipedia:
In 1993, Netanyahu confessed on live television to having had an affair with Ruth Bar, his public relations adviser, claiming that a political rival had planted a secret video camera that had recorded him in a sexually-compromising position with Bar, and that he had been threatened with the release of the tape to the press unless he quit the Likud leadership race. The crisis eventually subsided, with Benjamin and Sara repairing their marriage, and Netanyahu was elected. However, in 1996, reports emerged of his "close" 20-year friendship with Katherine Price-Mondadori, a married Italian-American woman.[172]
 
I don't know, but I'd bet Putin's personal life is comparably chaotic.

January 26, 2014

Selectionism

We're all supposed to believe that nurture matters more than nature, but it sure seems like people behave as if it's the other way around.

From an article about girl's soccer recruiting in the New York Times:
In today’s sports world, students are offered full scholarships before they have taken their first College Boards, or even the Preliminary SAT exams. Coaches at colleges large and small flock to watch 13- and 14-year-old girls who they hope will fill out their future rosters. This is happening despite N.C.A.A. rules that appear to explicitly prohibit it. 
The heated race to recruit ever younger players has drastically accelerated over the last five years, according to the coaches involved. It is generally traced back to the professionalization of college and youth sports, a shift that has transformed soccer and other recreational sports from after-school activities into regimens requiring strength coaches and managers. 
The practice has attracted little public notice, except when it has occasionally happened in football and in basketball. But a review of recruiting data and interviews with coaches indicate that it is actually occurring much more frequently in sports that never make a dime for their colleges. 
Early scouting has also become more prevalent in women’s sports than men’s, in part because girls mature sooner than boys. But coaches say it is also an unintended consequence of Title IX, the federal law that requires equal spending on men’s and women’s sports. Colleges have sharply increased the number of women’s sports scholarships they offer, leading to a growing number of coaches chasing talent pools that have not expanded as quickly. In soccer, for instance, there are 322 women’s soccer teams in the highest division, up from 82 in 1990. There are now 204 men’s soccer teams. 
“In women’s soccer, there are more scholarships than there are good players,” said Peter Albright, the coach at Richmond and a regular critic of early recruiting. “In men’s sports, it’s the opposite.” 
While women’s soccer is generally viewed as having led the way in early recruiting, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey have been following and occasionally surpassing it, and other women’s and men’s sports are becoming involved each year when coaches realize a possibility of getting an edge. 
Precise numbers are difficult to come by, but an analysis done for The New York Times by the National Collegiate Scouting Association, a company that consults with families on the recruiting process, shows that while only 5 percent of men’s basketball players and 4 percent of football players who use the company commit to colleges early — before the official recruiting process begins — the numbers are 36 percent in women’s lacrosse and 24 percent in women’s soccer. 
At universities with elite teams like North Carolina and Texas, the rosters are almost entirely filled by the time official recruiting begins. 
While the fierce competition for good female players encourages the pursuit of younger recruits, men’s soccer has retained a comparably relaxed rhythm — only 8 percent of N.C.S.A.’s male soccer athletes commit early. 
For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.
    

Atlantic: "Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?"

Poor blacks more likely to stay poor, black
In other words, this is basically a map of blacks and huge Indian reservations
From The Atlantic:
Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South? 
Upward mobility has stayed the same the past 50 years despite skyrocketing inequality. But it's lower in the South (and Ohio) than anywhere else in the U.S.—or the rest of the developed world. 
MATTHEW O'BRIEN 
JAN 26 2014, 9:00 AM ET

The top 1 percent aren't killing the American Dream. Something else is—if you live in the wrong place. 
Here's what we know. The rich are getting richer, but according to a blockbuster new study that hasn't made it harder for the poor to become rich. The good news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago. But the bad news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago. 
We like to tell ourselves that America is the land of opportunity, but the reality doesn't match the rhetoric—and hasn't for awhile. We actually have less social mobility than countries like Denmark. And that's more of a problem the more inequality there is. Think about it like this: Moving up matters more when there's a bigger gap between the rich and poor. So even though mobility hasn't gotten worse lately, it has worse consequences today because inequality is worse. 
But it's a little deceiving to talk about "our" mobility rate. There isn't one or two or even three Americas. There are hundreds. The research team of Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Herndon, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez looked at each "commuting zone" (CZ) within the U.S., and found that the American Dream is still alive in some parts of the country. Kids born into the bottom 20 percent of households, for example, have a 12.9 percent chance of reaching the top 20 percent if they live in San Jose. That's about as high as it is in the highest mobility countries. But kids born in Charlotte only have a 4.4 percent chance of moving from the bottom to the top 20 percent. That's worse than any developed country we have numbers for.

And yet all sorts of people are disagreeing with Professor Chetty and pouring into Charlotte. From Wikipedia on the municipality of Charlotte:

2000 population: 540,828
2012 population: 775,203

Chetty's study fails simple reality checks. For example, he finds the Charlotte area to have the worst prospects of any metropolitan zone in the country (and Atlanta third to worst). Yet, Charlotte has been growing rapidly because hundreds of thousands of people don't think Prof. Chetty is right.

And much of that population growth stems from African-Americans moving from the North down South. From the New York Times:
For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South

By DAN BILEFSKY 
Published: June 21, 2011 
... The economic downturn has propelled a striking demographic shift: black New Yorkers, including many who are young and college educated, are heading south. 
About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times. 
The movement is not limited to New York. The percentage of blacks leaving big cities in the East and in the Midwest and heading to the South is now at the highest levels in decades, demographers say. 
... New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South. 
The South now represents the potential for achievement for black New Yorkers in a way it had not before, Professor Crew said. At the same time, unionized civil service jobs that once drew thousands of blacks to the city are becoming more scarce. 
... But Ms. Brown says New York is now less inviting. She plans to join her 26-year-old son, Rashid, who moved to Atlanta from Queens last year after he graduated with a degree in criminology but could not find a job in New York.
In Atlanta, he became a deputy sheriff within weeks. She is hoping to open a restaurant. 
“In the South, I can buy a big house with a garden compared with the shoe box my retirement savings will buy me in New York,” she said. 

A massive problem with Chetty's map, as I pointed out in the NYT last summer is that the cost of living varies so much across the country. San Jose has very high land costs and very high wages. Charlotte has modest land costs and modest wages. They are both fairly successful places considering their highly different demographics, but Chetty's methodology puts them at opposite ends of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country because he failed to consider the question of standard of living. (His latest paper on social mobility over time takes a stab at adjusting for cost of living, presumably due to my criticism in the NYT last July of his first paper on social mobility by city, but he really should withdraw his earlier paper, from which this map is taken, because it's so misleading.)

The other element is that the Bad Parts of the map largely denotes two things: Where the blacks are, and big Indian reservations like Pine Ridge, SD.

In contrast, note how West Virginia jumps out as a Beacon of Hope. Why? Because it's economy and education are so top notch? Nope. They're not. But West Virginia is very white, and whites regress toward a higher mean over the generations.

Let's look at Wikipedia for demographics in the 2010 Census. These numbers will be only for within the municipal boundaries, but they will give us a clue about the differences between who is in the bottom 20% in San Jose, CA versus who is in the bottom 20% in Charlotte, NC.

Percent African-American in 2010:

San Jose:   3.2%
Charlotte:   35.0%

Back to The Atlantic:
You can see what my colleague Derek Thompson calls the geography of the American Dream in the map below. It shows where kids have the best and worst chances of moving up from the bottom to the top quintile—and that the South looks more like a banana republic. (Note: darker colors mean there is less mobility, and lighter colors mean that there's more).

So what makes northern California different from North Carolina? Well, we don't know for sure, but we do know what doesn't. The researchers found that local tax and spending decisions explain some, but not too much, of this regional mobility gap. Neither does local school quality, at least judged by class size. Local area colleges and tuition were also non-factors. And so were local labor markets, including their share of manufacturing jobs and those facing cheap, foreign competition. But here's what we know does matter. Just how much isn't clear. 
1. Race. The researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower the upward mobility. But this isn't actually a black-white issue.

Actually, the overall shape of the map is a black-white (or black-everybody else) issue. Black children in the bottom 20% regress toward the black mean (median income of $33k), while white children in the bottom 20% regress toward the white mean (median income of $57k). In other words, poor blacks tend to stay poor, black.
It's a rich-poor one. Low-income whites who live in areas with more black people also have a harder time moving up the income ladder. In other words, it's something about the places that black people live that hurts mobility. 

In other words, the children of whites who can't afford to insulate, insulate, insulate them from poor blacks have poorer prospects in life.
2. Segregation.
Segregation is largely a function of the number and class of blacks. There's minimal segregation in the city of San Jose because only 3% of the population is black. The newer, faster growing parts of the country have less segregation than the old cities, but see Sprawl below for rationalization.
Something like the poor being isolated—isolated from good jobs and good schools. See, the more black people a place has, the more divided it tends to be along racial and economic lines. The more divided it is, the more sprawl there is. And the more sprawl there is, the less higher-income people are willing to invest in things like public transit. 

Oh, boy, "sprawl" as the problem of the black poor ... That's why poor blacks are doing so well in Baltimore. In contrast, San Jose has zero sprawl. No, I'm kidding, San Jose is virtually All Sprawl.
That leaves the poor in the ghetto, with no way out for their American Dreams. They're stuck with bad schools, bad jobs, and bad commutes if they do manage to find better work. So it should be no surprise that the researchers found that racial segregation, income segregation, and sprawl are all strongly negatively correlated with upward mobility. But what might surprise is that it doesn't matter whether the rich cut themselves off from everybody else. What matters is whether the middle class cut themselves off from the poor. 

Huh? Anyway, Charlotte, which is the bete noire of this article had a famous, much praised countywide school busing program that lasted for decades.
3. Social Capital. Living around the middle class doesn't just bring better jobs and schools (which help, but probably aren't enough). It brings better institutions too. Things like religious groups, civic groups, and any other kind of group that keeps people from bowling alone. All of these are strongly correlated with more mobility—which is why Utah, with its vast Mormon safety net and services, is one of the best places to be born poor. 

Take a look at Milwaukee (city is 40% black) in the map above: it's terrible, it's between Charlotte and Atlanta as the next-to-worst social mobility metropolis in the country. And yet the Wisconsin middle class is very good on Bowling Together.

Milwaukee's problem is that it has both a lot of blacks and particularly low quality blacks, largely because Wisconsin has a German social democracy heritage that led to generous, trusting welfare programs, which attracted the laziest people from the deep south.

My vague hunch from looking at a lot of data is that blacks thrive best under the rule of cheap, strict, not hugely sympathetic white conservatives, such as in Texas. But, to be frank, there isn't that much variation in black outcomes anywhere in the country, other than in a few states so isolated that most of the black residents are there because they could pass the AFQT test to join the military (e.g., Hawaii).
4. Inequality. The 1 percent are different from you and me—they have so much more money that they live in a different world. It's a world of $40,000 a year preschool, "nanny consultants," and an endless supply of private tutors. It keeps the children of the super-rich from falling too far, but it doesn't keep the poor from rising (at least into the top quintile). There just wasn't any correlation between the rise and rise of the 1 percent and upward mobility. In other words, it doesn't hurt your chances of making it into the top 80 to 99 percent if the super-rich get even richer.

As I pointed out in 2010, the rich don't take all that much land in America, they don't get all the hospital beds, and their kids don't wreck the public schools for your kids. What the rich do, however, is control the media, so policies that would economically benefit the average person are demonized as unthinkable.
But inequality does matter within the bottom 99 percent. The bigger the gap between the poor and the merely rich (as opposed to the super-rich), the less mobility there is. It makes intuitive sense: it's easier to jump from the bottom near the top if you don't have to jump as far. The top 1 percent are just so high now that it doesn't matter how much higher they go; almost nobody can reach them. 
5. Family Structure. Forget race, forget jobs, forget schools, forget churches, forget neighborhoods, and forget the top 1—or maybe 10—percent. Nothing matters more for moving up than who raises you. Or, in econospeak, nothing correlates with upward mobility more than the number of single parents, divorcees, and married couples. The cliché is true: Kids do best in stable, two-parent homes.  ...

I'll insert the relevant demographic figures in the next paragraph:
The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose [0.9% black in city] and Salt Lake City [2.7% black in city] and Pittsburgh [has a ghetto but the surrounding commuting zone is one of the whitest in the country]. But it's dead in Atlanta [city is 54% black] and Raleigh [29% black] and Charlotte [35% black]. And in Indianapolis [28% black] and Detroit [don't ask] and Jacksonville [31% black]. Fixing that isn't just about redistribution. It's about building denser cities, so the poor aren't so segregated.

Because black people have done so well in high density cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and the Bronx. (Blacks sometimes manage to make high density cities into ghost towns, but places like Gary and East St. Louis didn't start out that way.)

This is just SWPL bullying. SWPLs want to live in denser cities and they want to squeeze poor blacks out of their cities, so they just make up rationalizations about how they are pushing through density to benefit poor black people.

So, you have a map of social immobility that looks like a map of where the best Division I cornerback prospects are found, and everybody goes out of there way to explain that it's really much much much more complicated: Occam's Butterknife.

Bill Gates: No more poor countries within 21 years, so morally okay to close borders now

Granted, Gates actually failed to publicly point out the logical policy implication of his premise, but that's what I'm here for.

From the Los Angeles Times:
Bill Gates predicts almost no poor countries left by 2035 
Billionaire and former tech mogul Bill Gates predicts that there will be almost no poor countries left in the world by 2035. 
Almost all nations will be either lower-middle income or wealthier, and most will have surpassed the 35 countries that are currently defined by the World Bank as low-income, Gates says in his annual letter for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 
 

Here's the gist of Amy Chua's new book

From the NYT:
What Drives Success? 
By AMY CHUA and JED RUBENFELD   JAN. 25, 2014

A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall. 
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.

Crimenoticing, as featured NYT commenters noticed:
RECENT COMMENTS
Nancy 53 minutes ago
What wildly racist thoroughly immoral gibberish.
 
Charlie 1 hour ago
As a social scientist, it is always frustrating to read these sorts of articles. This is a zombie idea; it pops back up no matter how many...
 
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

The Forbes 400 is the acid test, and individuals of at least substantial Jewish ethnicity make up over one third of the billionaires on the Forbes 400 for America (and not insubstantial fractions for the rest of the world).
The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture. 
Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background. 
Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants. 
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes. 
There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

And if you have any doubts about their credentials, they'll send you emails that will completely reassure you.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

Like Carlos Gutierrez, a Republican leader in the war on nativism, who learned his first words of English from a bellhop at his Miami resort hotel.
Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

Interesting ...
The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work. 
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

The fourth is skimming from your homeland: Indian-Americans are not representative of Indians back home, nor are Nigerian-Americans representative of Nigerians in general. Cuban-Americans are much whiter than Cubans on average. (In contrast, Mexican-Americans, a group of about 35 million that produces few outstanding achievers despite many having been here for generations, seldom come from the top 10% or whatever of Mexico, unless they are, say, already successful Mexican film directors.)
Any individual, from any background, can have what we call this Triple Package of traits. But research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success. 
It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself.

And the chip on the shoulder, by generating animus, is useful in pushing down competing groups.
Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment. 
Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking. 
We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo” placed on earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia L. Bushman’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.” Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian “superiority complex.” At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they may be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors. 
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children. 

Or in the case of the wealthiest, most powerful group, they use their influence over the media to instill it in their children and to depress, demoralize, and divide other groups' children.
A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

By contrast, white American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem. There’s an ocean of difference between “You’re amazing. Mommy and Daddy never want you to worry about a thing” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the family and end up a bum on the streets.” In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.

Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself.

Even if they have to use their hands-on control over The Narrative to declare themselves to be outsiders rather than the leading insiders that objective analysis would suggest.
Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but never your education, so study harder. Newcomers and religious minorities may face derision or hostility. Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro’s takeover reported seeing signs reading “No dogs, no Cubans” on apartment buildings.

Oh, boy ... We all recall such vicious anti-Cuban racism in the 1950s, such as the lynching of Desi Arnaz for playing the husband of a white woman on the instantly canceled "I Love Lucy."
During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear Mitt Romney’s clean-cut sons described as “creepy” in the media. In combination with a superiority complex, the feeling of being underestimated or scorned can be a powerful motivator. 
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age — or at least they did so when they were on the rise.

I grew up in a neighborhood that might have been plurality Jewish in the 1960s and 1970. The general impression of the kids on the block was that our Jewish friends got more presents and nicer clothes and had fewer chores than our Catholic or Protestant friends. It wasn't a big difference, and it was probably just proportional to the parents' wealth: the Jewish parents in the neighborhood tended to be wealthier. Has this moderate degree of spoiling held back Baby Boomer Jews? (We've got 50 years of data by now so we ought to be able to hazard a guess.)

Not that I can tell.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to. A culture producing, say, four high achievers out of 10 would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was one out of 20. 
But this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.” Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide). 
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history. To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it’s used by an outsider minority as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility, but ethnic pride or religious zeal can turn all too easily into intolerance of its own.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth. 
It’s not easy for minority groups in America to maintain a superiority complex.

That's why Sarah Silverman's worst nightmare has come true and all those hard-charging Chinese have taken over the media.

Then Chua has some stuff about black people ...
The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

Our current myths about what the Founding Fathers thought are just bizarre. Franklin's "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind" emphasizes that America is exceptional in having a lot of land per person, from which the greater prosperity and happiness of Americans flows. Franklin was very aware that Europeans were intellectually more advanced than Americans, and often thought permanently settling in London of Paris. Americans put little effort into competing with Europe for high distinctions for generations, instead building up a prosperous civilization built upon a non-European abundance of land per capita. Of course, this American narrative has largely been jettisoned in recent decades in the frenzy to rewrite America history as one of huddled massesness.
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”