April 1, 2014

Justice without law: standup comedy division

Awhile ago I noted that stand-up comedy is in pretty good shape right now, even though it lacks dominant superstars. In fact, that's probably related to its health: the current culture of comedy enforces norms that allow a surprisingly large number of funny guys to eke out a living without one top banana getting too big a piece of the pie.

An article in Slate by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner references a paper by legal scholars on how comedians enforce their ban on joke-stealing:
While the law doesn’t provide much in the way of protection for comedians, Oliar and Sprigman found that today’s comics do maintain an informal set of rules. If two comics come up with a similar joke, for example, it’s understood that whoever tells it first on television can claim ownership. Similarly, if two comedians are working on material together, batting ideas back and forth, it’s generally agreed upon that if one comedian comes up with a setup and the other the punch line, the former owns the joke. 
Those who don’t follow the rules can face escalating repercussions. First they’re subjected to badmouthing; then they get blacklisted from clubs. Finally, if the unacceptable behavior continues, it’s understood that things might get physical. While none of the comics Oliar and Sprigman interviewed admitted to participating in or witnessing fights over stolen jokes, many had heard stories, and they accepted such violence as a possible, if remote, outcome. As one comedian told the researchers, “ … the only copyright protection you have is a quick uppercut.” 
Far from being dismayed by this extralegal system, Oliar and Sprigman came away impressed by the comedians’ informal arrangement. “They have managed to put together a community project that requires a pretty high-level amount of group coordination,” says Sprigman. It’s a lot better than the joke-stealing free-for-all of [Milton] Berle’s era. And it’s hard to imagine a more formal joke protection system, involving copyright filings and other legal procedures, working well in a world where comics are constantly generating and tweaking new material. In fact, Sprigman thinks this joke-stealing code could work for other industries struggling with how to balance creativity and copyright issues, including the music and tech industries. They should borrow it.

Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms.
     

The funniest April Fool's Day hoax yet

From the NYT:
U.S. and Israel Said to Be Near Agreement on Release of Spy 
By JODI RUDOREN  APRIL 1, 2014 
JERUSALEM — Officials involved in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian peace talks said on Tuesday that an agreement was near on extending the negotiations through 2015 in exchange for the release of Jonathan J. Pollard, an American serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. 

The Grey Lady is a lot more limber than she used to be. Who would have thought the NYT would be splashing an April Fool's Day hoax right on the front page?  
   

Kirchick's conspiracy theory about Right Sector as Putin's agents provocateur

In Politico, veteran political trickster Jamie Kirchick expands upon my reader's theory that Right Sector in Kiev is a Russian false flag operation:
And it is this reciprocal relationship with Russia that has many Ukrainians suspecting a shadowy dirty tricks campaign by the Kremlin. Almost every Ukrainian I spoke with speculated that Moscow is secretly supporting Right Sector in an attempt to both destabilize the weak government in Kiev and provide a pretext for further meddling – the tried and true tactic of provokatsiya, or provocation, which Moscow has been using since the early Bolshevik period to deceive its adversaries and earn sympathy among credulous Westerners. 
There are many peculiar things about Right Sector that lend some credibility to this theory. Why, for instance, did Yarosh allegedly meet with Yanukoyvch for half an hour on the very day that special forces, the much-loathed “Berkut,” opened fire on protestors? How was it that not a single member of Right Sector was among the “Heavenly Hundred,” as the casualties of the Maidan protests are now consecrated (a particularly curious omission given the group’s much-vaunted role as the armed vanguard of the revolution)? How does the organization afford an entire floor of rooms at the four-star Dnipro Hotel, the Right Sector headquarters in downtown Kiev, where a red and black flag hangs prominently in the lobby? Talking with Right Sector members protesting outside the parliament, I never received a coherent answer as to why they were not lining up to join the country’s army. The greatest threat to Ukraine right now is a potential Russian invasion; yet here were these so-called patriots trying to bring down an already weak Ukrainian government. One Ukrainian who took part in the Maidan protests told me that she heard several Right Sector members speaking with Russian accents. That the group would be part of a Kremlin black PR campaign, she said, is “not a crazy idea.”

My brain can't really process whom to trust least. 

That part of the world tends toward Byzantine conspiracies, so perhaps a prudent response would be to suggest that us dumb Americans might not want to get ourselves in too deep in a place we clearly don't understand well.
   

March 31, 2014

College acceptances: "The Fence Around the Ivy League"

With high school students currently receiving thick and, mostly, thin letters from the colleges to which they applied last year, let me quote some numbers from an old Taki's column of mine:
Immigration boosters insinuate that patriotic Americans should want a nonstop deluge of immigrants to prove We’re Number One. In practice, though, the attitude of America’s most celebrated colleges has been identical to that of our snobbiest country clubs: Who needs the hassles of growth when our prestige is proportional to the multitudes turned away? Hence, over the last generation, elite colleges have concentrated upon becoming more elite, not more accessible.
Some colleges have swollen to keep up with the country’s vibrantly diverse population, such as U. of Central Florida and Arizona State. But they tend to be ones you mostly read about on the sports page, if anywhere. For example, in Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe spoofs Florida International—now the nation’s fourth-largest undergraduate college with 39,147 students, two-thirds of them Hispanic—by calling it Everglades Global University. Nonetheless, few people outside of South Florida will get Wolfe’s joke, because who ever heard of Florida International U.? 
In contrast, consider the growth rate of Harvard, the world’s richest university. The number of undergraduates in its class of 1986 was 1,722. After a quarter of a century, during which the US population grew by about 75,000,000, Harvard’s class of 2011 was 1,726: an increase of 4. 
This is not to say that Harvard isn’t expanding: Faculty and grad students are up, and non-teaching staff skyrocketed.

Similarly, Yale’s undergraduate student body has been the same size since 1978. Five years ago, the second-richest college announced a proposal for adding a couple of dormitories, but construction won’t proceed until another $300 million is raised.

After all, Yale couldn't possibly take out a loan to finance construction. Who would loan money to a college that's been around for only 313 years?
In 2010, MIT unveiled plans to expand undergrad enrollment by six percent, which would only get it back to where it was in the 1990s. ... 
Perhaps the defining activity of American life since the 1960s has been elites conspiring to become more elite. 
            

The Chinese Military-Disco Complex: Update

I recently mused about the Chinese army's tendency to see itself less as the pointy end of the spear and more in terms of: "It's not a job, it's a racket." It's cleaned itself up somewhat since the 1990s, but without any particular wars that need fighting, the urge to relapse is always there.

From the NYT today:
Chinese General Charged in Graft Inquiry 
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD MARCH 31, 2014

BEIJING — ... On Monday, prosecutors formally charged General Gu with bribery, embezzlement, misuse of state funds and abuse of power, the outcome of a far-reaching inquiry under President Xi Jinping that could foreshadow unprecedented criminal prosecutions of other high-ranking military figures. ...
An internal inquiry accused him of presiding over a vast land development racket that hoarded kickbacks, bought promotions and enabled him and his family to amass dozens of expensive residences, including places where investigators found stockpiles of high-end liquor, gold bullion and cash, according to people briefed on the investigation. 
Even as President Xi presses a sweeping campaign against graft within the Communist Party, he has seized on the case against General Gu to pursue a parallel drive to clean up the 2.3 million-member armed forces.... Mr. Xi’s goal, they said, is to transform a service larded with pet projects and patronage networks into a leaner fighting force more adept at projecting power abroad and buttressing party rule at home — and to strengthen his own authority. ...
Mr. Xi, unlike his immediate predecessors, took over the military and the party at the same time — in November 2012 — and brought strong P.L.A. ties. After university, he served as an aide to a top military official. His father was a revolutionary guerrilla commander. His wife is a singer in the P.L.A.'s song-and-dance troupe.

The President of China's wife used to entertain the troops? Ann-Margaret style? Or was she more hands-on?
Mr. Xi has ordered a stream of antigraft measures, audits and criticism sessions; enlarged drills to upgrade “battle readiness”; and advanced contentious plans to restructure a military bureaucracy criticized as bloated and outmoded. Those plans are expected to overhaul the command structure, streamline the army’s procurement practices and significantly downsize nonmilitary divisions such as the performance troupes.

Is "performance troupe" (such as the one the First Lady worked in) perhaps a euphemism? Does the President of China have some deep-seated personal issues involving the military?
Corruption has bedeviled the P.L.A. since the market reforms of the 1980s, when it was permitted to venture into industry and earn the funds to modernize its arsenal and sustain its troops. Widespread smuggling, graft and profiteering ensued. It took years of debate for the party in 1998 to order the military to divest from business. But as Beijing increased military spending, officers tapped their own resources for profit.
The P.L.A. retains extensive land holdings, which have ballooned in value in line with property prices across the country, and real estate transactions are considered its biggest source of corruption.

The major danger is that the Chinese government will try to clean up the Army by giving it a war to fight. On the very, very macro scale, war is the enemy of corruption and inequality. Of course, war is also war.

America's Founding Father's didn't think much of standing armies. You can see why.
 

Diversity Central: Oakland

Oakland, California, across the Bay from San Francisco, has long led America toward its racially diverse future, with at least four major ethnic groups. From the Oakland Tribune:
Report: African-Americans compose 28 percent of Oakland's population, 62 percent of police stops 
By Matthew Artz 
Oakland Tribune
... The report did not include data on the percentage of crime suspects described to police as African-Americans. Separate Oakland police records show that from 2007 through 2011, about 70 percent of those arrested were African-American. Last year, police said 90 percent of robbery suspects were described as African-American. 
Sam Walker, an emeritus professor in the criminal justice department at the University of Nebraska Omaha, who has reviewed stop-and-frisk police tactics in New York City, said Oakland police stops were far more likely to result in arrests or the confiscation of a weapon. 
In New York City, there was little evidence of criminal activity to justify the police stops, he said. "In Oakland, it's a very different picture." 
Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and professor at Berkeley Law School, pointed to the data showing that 14 percent of police stops involving African-Americans resulted in felony arrests, compared to 7 percent for Latinos, 6 percent of Asians and 5 percent of whites. 
"In terms of conventional mathematics, that is the opposite of racial profiling," he said. 
While traffic issues were the most common reason people were stopped by police, African-Americans were far more likely to be stopped on the basis of "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion" than members of other racial groups. 
African-Americans stopped by police were searched 42 percent of the time, compared to 27 percent for Latinos and 17 percent for whites and Asians. Yet, those searches resulted in the recovery of contraband 27 percent of the time for African-Americans and Latinos, 28 percent of the time for whites and 25 percent of the time for Asians.

The question I have is why does Oakland have a distinctive "flavor," combining black criminality with political radicalism? I see it all the time in the news: if there's going to be a black political riot over some bit of news somewhere in the country, it's most likely to be in Oakland (with L.A. the second most likely).

This combination goes back at least to the Black Panthers in the 1960s. By the way, The Planet of the Apes movies have always been Black Power allegories, and the fine 2011 reboot of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is pretty clearly inspired by the once famous history of Bay Area black radicalism.

But maybe this combination of a culture of political radicalism and masculinity goes back even further before blacks arrived in large numbers for WWII military factory work: after all, the entertainment district in Oakland is named Jack London Square. And then there's the phenomenon of Raider Nation, the Oakland Raiders' obtrusively non-genteel fan base.

One vague theory I have is that the weather is so nice in Oakland (much better than in foggy San Francisco) that bad behavior is a long term strategy to prevent complete gentrification.
       

NYT: Mexican-American "disinterest" in voting

I'm not a stickler about proper usage of the English language (mote, log, own eye, etc.), but still, the decline of the word "disinterested" represents a decline in moral as well as literary standards:
Hopes Frustrated, Many Latinos Reject the Ballot Box Altogether 
By JACKIE CALMES MARCH 30, 2014 
Lizeth Chacon of Aurora, Colo., who signs up Latinos to vote, reports growing disinterest in registration. 
AURORA, Colo. — As the weather warms, Lizeth Chacon is anticipating a new season of registering Latino voters — yet dreading experiences like one late last year, when she came upon a skate park full of older teenagers. 
“I thought, ‘The perfect age! They’re turning 18,’ ” said Ms. Chacon, just 26 herself, born in Mexico and now the lead organizer at Rights for All People, a local immigrant organizing group. But among the roughly 50 people she approached in this increasingly diverse city east of Denver, “not a single person” was interested in her pitch, including those already old enough to vote: “They were like, ‘Why? Why would I bother to vote?’ ”

Man for man, Mexicans are not the most formidable political opponents a party can have.
    

March 30, 2014

Puerto Rico and IQ: Same as it ever was

At Human Varieties, Jason Malloy delivers a massive meta-analysis of Puerto Rican IQ, summarizing more than 70 studies over the last 93 years.

My favorite part is that Malloy has discovered a Jason Richwine-style brouhaha in the New York Times over Puerto Rican IQ from 1936:
The first report on the intelligence of NYC Puerto Ricans became something of a target for local and subnational hostility. In 1935 the New York State Chamber of Commerce’s Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization commissioned a study on the intelligence of Puerto Rican schoolchildren in East Harlem. The average IQ of 240 9-14 year-olds on the Army Individual Performance Test was 86.8; a comparison group of 400 white children scored 103.3 (Armstrong et al, 1935). This relatively low IQ score—and, probably more so, the report’s consequent recommendations against Puerto Rican citizenship and statehood—incited a backlash among local community educators and activists. The popular Commie Congressman Vito Marcantonio even ranted against the study before the House of Representatives (Thomas, 2010, p. 86). 
Academics, journalists, and government leaders in Puerto Rico also condemned the report—many offering parentheticals on the inferior intelligence of Americans. The New York Times reported in 1936:
A recent suggestion by a committee of the New York State Chamber of Commerce that statehood for Puerto Rico be held “in abeyance” because of the low intelligence indicated by a group of children … has angered political leaders and newspapers here … 
[Commissioner of Agriculture] Mr. Menendez Ramos cites parts of a survey by… Columbia University… That … praised the intelligence of the island’s children, and said the level was higher than that of [American children] … 
It is unfair and unscientific, Mr. Menendez Ramos asserts, to assume that the New York colony, composed of a working class faced with the difficulties of a new language and a new environment, represents the average of Puerto Rican mentality. 
… The newspaper Mundo criticizes the report satirically … [suggesting] that the Chamber of Commerce study the excellent records of Puerto Rican students in American universities … the island’s college debaters have been uniformly victorious against American debaters (NYT Special Cable, 1936). 
Harlem educator Leonard Covello organized a “Racial Committee” to critically evaluate the study. The group “argued that the Puerto Rican children’s poor performance was attributable entirely to their lack of familiarity with English” (Thomas, 2010, p. 86). Meanwhile, criticisms of the study from Puerto Rico’s white elite took on a slightly more insulted and chauvinistic tone (as already seen in the New York Times report). PR Assistant Commissioner of Education, Pedro Cebollero—apparently not convinced that the problem was “attributable entirely” to language differences—fumed that the children in the report were described as 76% colored, while the U.S. census described Puerto Rico as only 26% colored: “This fact is an evidence of [the report’s] absolute disregard of the principle of “representativeness”… Pinter points out that ‘all results show the negro decidedly inferior to the white on standard intelligence tests.’” (Cebollero, 1936, p. 5)

Since then, of course, we've seen how wrong the 1936 psychometricians were, as Puerto Ricans have risen high in the ranks of accomplishment in America, such as composing, writing, and choreographing West Side Story.

Oh, wait, you're telling me West Side Story is by gay Jews? Why wasn't I informed?

Actually, it turns out that this video clip sums up how much has changed over the last 78 years.

This is not to say that Puerto Ricans in America haven't made any progress over the many generations. Malloy looks at 45 cognitive studies of Puerto Ricans in America, tosses 15 for methodological problems, and concludes:
The median of 30 studies gives us an IQ of 84.7 for Puerto Rican Americans. 
The current average appears to be somewhat higher. The median IQ of 19 samples from the 1930s-1970s is 83.7. The median IQ of 14 samples from the 1980s-2000s is 87.4.
   

National Journal: "Tech Pipeline Is Alarmingly White"

Evil-White-Men-in-Training plot against humanity
From The National Journal (a.k.a., The Voice of Respectability):
Tech Pipeline Is Alarmingly White 
By Emily DeRuy, Fusion 
January 14, 2014 
The pipeline of students who will be tomorrow's tech leaders is alarmingly vanilla.

The unobjectionability of food-based ethnic slurs (vanilla, white bread, mayonnaise, etc.) against white people dumbs down public discourse.
According to a new analysis of test-takers, not a single girl, African-American or Hispanic student took the computer science Advanced Placement test in Mississippi or Montana last year. More than a third of the population in Mississippi is black. 
In other words, a hugely disproportionate bunch of white guys took the test.

Obviously, an even more disproportionate number of Asians took the computer science AP test, but we don't have a conceptual category for whites and Asians combined.

Is there some well-known dessert that combines vanilla and lemon flavors? It would sure help the quality of discourse on education and demographics and discrimination if journalists had a food-based ethnic slur that lumps together whites + Asians.

Here are the pass rates (3 out of 5 or higher, equivalent to a C or better in a college 101-level intro course):

All test takers: 67%
Males: 68%
Females: 62%
Blacks: 36%
Black males: 38%
Black females: 27%
Hispanics: 45%
Hispanic Males: 49%
Hispanic Females: 31%
Whites: 66%
White Males: NA
White Females: NA
Asians: 70%
Asian Males: NA
Asian Females: NA
 

Non-New Yorkers! Do as we say, not as we do.

From a report by the liberal fundamentalist UCLA Civil Rights Project:
New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future 
Authors: John Kucsera, Foreword by Gary Orfield 
Date Published: March 26, 2014 
New York has the most segregated schools in the country: in 2009, black and Latino students in the state had the highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools (less than 10% white enrollment), the lowest exposure to white students, and the most uneven distribution with white students across schools. Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation.
   

Shamelessness

It's not even April yet, but the 2014 Crops Rotting in the Fields public relations offensive is in motion. From the New York Times:
California Farmers Short of Labor, and Patience 
By JENNIFER MEDINA    MARCH 29, 2014

HURON, Calif. — When Chuck Herrin, who runs a large farm labor contracting company,

I.e., he's in the illegal alien procurement business, a pimp.
looks out at the hundreds of workers he hires each year to tend to the countless rows of asparagus, grapes, tomatoes, peaches and plums, he often seethes in frustration. 
It is not that he has any trouble with the laborers.

Thank God for that. We can't have stoop laborers getting uppity.
It is that he, like many others in agriculture here, is increasingly fed up with immigration laws that he says prevent him from fielding a steady, reliable work force. 
... In dozens of interviews, farmers and owners of related businesses said that even the current system of tacitly using illegal labor was failing to sustain them. A work force that arrived in the 1990s is aging out of heavy labor,

Indeed.
Americans do not want the jobs, and tightened security at the border is discouraging new immigrants from arriving, they say, leaving them to struggle amid the paralysis on immigration policy. No other region may be as eager to keep immigration legislation alive.

Assuming that "region" = "employers of illegal aliens."
... Like other employers interviewed, he acknowledged that he almost certainly had illegal immigrants in his work force. Would-be workers provide a Social Security number or a document purporting they are eligible to work; employers accept the documentation even if they doubt its veracity because they want to bring in their crops. ...
Roughly a third of Mr. Herrin’s workers are older than 50, a much higher proportion than even five years ago. He said they had earned the right to stay here. “If we keep them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that’s really extortion,” he said.

By "we," I don't mean "me," Chuck Herrin. I mean you taxpayers.
The region has relied on new arrivals to pick crops since the time of the Dust Bowl. For more than two decades after World War II, growers here depended on braceros, Mexican workers sent temporarily to the United States to work in agriculture.

Then there was this guy named Cesar Chavez who hated immigration. But that's Off-Message, so let's not think about it.
Today, many fieldworkers are indigenous people from southern Mexico who speak Mixtec and know little English or Spanish.

Nothing will alleviate America's Income Inequality and Social Immobility crises faster than bringing in a lot of Mixtec-speaking stoop laborers whose ancestors didn't learn Spanish in the last 493 years.
In recent years, farm owners have grown increasingly fearful of labor shortages. 
Last year, the diminished supply of workers led average farm wages in the region to increase by roughly $1 an hour, according to researchers at U.C. Davis who have tracked wages for years.

$1 an hour?!?
A report released this month by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, two business-oriented groups that are lobbying Congress, said foreign-grown produce consumed in the United States had increased by nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s.

In other words, it's possible for Mexicans to grow food in Mexico and sell it to Americans in return for money.
The report argues that the labor shortages make it impossible for American farmers to increase production and compete effectively with foreign importers. While the amount of fresh produce consumed by Americans has increased, domestic production has not kept pace, and the report attributes a $1.4 billion annual loss in farm income to the lack of labor.

In other words, the whole country needs to take on the burden of importing ever more Mixtec speakers and their descendants ad infinitum so growers can make an extra $1.4 billion per year? The current farm bill is supposed to hand out something like $940.0 billion over ten years. That's an absurdly small sum to bet the country over.
So even amid a record drought threatening to wipe out crops here,

You know, I keep reading about how what with the drought and climate change and all that, California can't come up with the water for all the farms and people. Now, we're supposed to have more?
A generation ago, he said, growers often pretended to have no idea that people working for them were not authorized to be in the United States. Now, there is a nearly universal recognition that the industry relies on immigrants who cross the border illegally.

Shamelessness is the most striking characteristic of contemporary discourse on immigration: greed and ethnic animus are praised, while patriotism and prudence are excoriated.

 

March 29, 2014

Nation building in Ukraine and Italy

In the New York Times, Stephen Sestanovich of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues:
No one wants to revive the Cold War. But it offers lessons for today. In the 1940s, the authors of “containment” saw nation building as the key to success. They wanted to check Russian power without war, and believed that across Western Europe, once viable societies were so deeply divided that they might not survive. Those nations’ political and economic models, like Ukraine’s today, were broken. They would not hold together without what Dean Acheson called “the added power and energy of America.” 
What made “containment” successful was not the infliction of pain on the Soviet Union. The heart of American policy was to revive, stabilize and integrate countries on our side of the line. Yes, we worried that Stalin had been able to bring down the government in Prague. We worried even more that he might do so in Rome and Paris. Successful nation building eventually dispelled those fears.

The examples of Italy and France as examples of post-WWII nation-building are a refreshing contrast to the usual cliches of West Germany and Japan, which weren't exactly lacking in national fortitude in the early 1940s.

Both France and Italy had huge Communist Parties (the French CP slavishly following the Moscow line, the Italian CP occasionally showing a little self-respect). The U.S. devoted much effort to keeping an election in either country from turning out with a result in which the CP would get the Ministry of the Interior, because there might not be another meaningful election.

France, of course, had among the grandest nationalist traditions in the world, so reviving it after the collapse of 1940 was not quite as challenging as building Ukrainian nationalism. Still, French national restoration ended up requiring a conservative leader (De Gaulle) who was distinctly unfriendly toward America, withdrawing from NATO in 1967. (In turn, this French rightist anti-Americanism set the ideological stage for the leftist leader Mitterrand to turn toward America in the crucial Cold War year of 1983.

As for America's role in Italy, a much weaker nation-state historically, well, the U.S. did what it had to do in terms of subsidizing the Christian Democrats and winking at their vote-garnering alliance with the Mafia to keep the Communists out. But it's by no means clear that the long U.S. Cold War involvement in Italy otherwise did much to build up Italy as a well-functioning state. It's not completely a coincidence that much of the crackdown on the Mafia by heroic prosecutors took place after the Berlin Wall fell.

Ideally, the U.S. would no doubt have liked to help reform Italy so that a big chunk of Italians wouldn't have reason to feel the place was so corrupt that the only solution was voting for Russia's party. But, that's hard to do when you have a friendly pro-American set of politicians already running the place and promising that if you help them out, they can keep the Russians out (which they did). 

I haven't thought through all the implications for Ukraine, but the Italian Cold War analogy doesn't seem all that appealing. 
       

The Chinese military-disco complex

In recent years, the government of China has been announcing large increases in military spending (although they usually don't wind up spending all they announced).

Back in 2000, there was a horrific disco fire in China with 309 people dying in a nightclub with safety violations. I vaguely recall an NPR segment explaining that fire codes weren’t enforced on discos because all the discos in China at that time were owned by the People’s Liberation Army. So, fire inspectors, lacking main battle tanks, were outgunned in confrontations with disco-owning generals.

I haven’t been following the Chinese military-disco complex since then, but has there been a cultural revolution in the military in which China’s best young men join today because they want to defeat America in battle or are they still getting the kind of recruits who see the military as the best route to becoming a nightclub owner?
    

March 28, 2014

My opinion on Bitcoin

Recently I received an email from a reporter asking if I had a new email address for a certain person on my blogroll. I replied that I don't, and that (although he didn't mention why he was asking) I don't know if this blogger invented Bitcoin or not. And that if he did invent Bitcoin, it wouldn't make any sense for him to talk to me about it because my brain just gets very, very sleepy whenever anybody tries to explain Bitcoin to me.

In fact, I'm not really all that sure I could fully explain the logic behind why the corner liquor store lets me have a can of Diet Coke in return for a one dollar bill. So anything involving any kind of currency more abstract than bars of salt and rifle cartridges is over my head. Maria Teresa thalers are about my limit of comprehension.

Therefore, I don't have any opinion on Bitcoin.
         

Obama Administration and disparate impact, Part MCVIII

From the Orlando Sentinel:
Bright Futures scholarships are subject of federal investigation

Denise-Marie Ordway, Sentinel School Zone 
12:18 pm, March 24, 2014 
Florida's popular Bright Futures scholarship program is the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, an agency spokesman confirmed Monday. 
The federal government is looking into whether the program's eligibility requirements discriminate against some minority students. 
The program has helped hundreds of thousands of students pay for college since its creation in 1997. But some groups have criticized its reliance on scores from college-entrance exams to determine who gets an award. 
That criteria, according to groups such as the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, hurts many black and Hispanic kids, who don't tend to do as well on standardized achievement tests. 
The U.S. Department of Education issued the following statement: 
"The Office for Civil Rights is investigating allegations that the state of Florida utilizes criteria for determining eligibility for college scholarships that have the effect of discriminating against Latino and African-American students on the basis of national origin and race, in particular with regard to its Bright Futures Scholarship Program, which uses SAT- I and ACT cut-off scores to determine eligibility."
     

Nate Silver's new website

How's the much hyped new quant website run by Nate Silver, the former NYT election data guru, doing at the close of its second week? 

I seem to be the only person in the world who has usually had mildly positive views of Silver. During the 2012 election, he did a good job of making up a spreadsheet with weighted averages of the 90 or so different Presidential polls out there. It wasn't exactly quantum mechanics, but it was quite sensible. Ironically, his final prediction turned out to be off by a couple of points, just like Republicans were hoping. Unfortunately for Romney, though, Silver underestimated just how much Obama would win by: 3.8 percentage points.

But Silver's forecasting error was ignored in a tidal wave of Democratic self-congratulation upon how the existence of Nate Silver proves Democrats are better because Science.

So now he's left the NYT to start a website under the ESPN aegis, casting aspersions upon most NYT columnists other than Ross Douthat, with the old guard denouncing him back.

How's his new website going?

Not bad, but not too exciting either. I haven't gotten interested in the NCAA basketball tournament this year, so their coverage of that hasn't been of interest to me. The other stuff seems okay, but so far it's not clear that having a website organized around a methodology (because numbers!) is some overlooked killer app.

The feature article today is by Emily Oster:
Reports of a Drop in Childhood Obesity Are Overblown

But Razib Khan of The Unz Review did that in Slate an entire month ago:
The Obesity Rate for Children Has Not Plummeted

Mostly, Silver seems to want to do short pieces. For example, here's a baseball one
Quantifying the ‘That Guy Is Still in the Major Leagues?’ Phenomenon

where Neil Paine made up a table of all the players in the league in 2009 based on their age and 2007-2009 performances who are the most improbable that they are starting 2014 on an MLB roster. That's interesting to only a small fraction of the audience who might be interested in, say, political forecasting, but it's pretty interesting to people who find it interesting. Having gone to all the work of ranking all the players in the league on this dimension, Paine could have easily milked his database for 1500 words of this and that, but instead he wrapped it up in a few paragraphs. Paine had so much good stuff that down in the comments he tossed in other factoids he'd uncovered like the players who are most surprising that they aren't in the league anymore. So why not put more good stuff in the original article, especially in this period when the website needs to be building its brand among influential people with long attention spans (e.g., me)? There will be plenty of time in the future to dumb it down for the short attention span masses.
  
Check it out and see if I'm overlooking something in my tepid response so far.
    

Cochran-Harpending paper on "Amish Quotient"

Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran have a rough draft of a new paper: "Assortative Mating, Class, and Caste:"
The Amish marry within their faith. Although they accept converts, there are very few, so there is almost no inward gene flow. They descend almost entirely from about 200 18th century founders. On the other hand, there is considerable outward gene flow, since a significant fraction of Amish youth do not choose to adopt the Amish way of life. In recent years, something like 10-15% of young Amish leave the community In the past, the defection rate seems to have been higher, more like 18-24%. Defection is up to the individual - there are no exterior barriers against Amish who want to participate in modern society.
Since the Amish have very high birth rates ( > 6 children per family), their numbers have increased very rapidly, even though there is a substantial defection rate. There were about 5,000 descendants of the original 200 by 1920, and today [2013] there are about 280,000 Amish. 
Every way of life selects for something, but the Amish way of life is so different that natural selection in that population should be noticeably different from that in the general US population. It seems likely that the Amish have undergone selection for two specific traits, due to their unusual social and reproductive pattern. 
First, they were almost certainly selected for higher fertility. A recent study (Milot et al., 2011) found evidence of this kind of selection in preindustrial French Canadians, who, like the Amish, went through a very rapid population expansion. 
Second, and more interesting, the Amish have probably experienced selection for increased Amishness - an increase in the degree to which Amish find their lifestyle congenial, since those who like it least, leave. We have called this kind of differential emigration 'boiling off'. Obviously, if some of the soup boils off, what is left is more concentrated. 
This boiling off is essentially truncation selection. If we assume a normal distribution, the loss of the least plain 10% corresponds to the loss of everyone more than 1.25 standard deviations below the Amish mean. If we assume a narrow-sense heritability of 0.3 and use a scale similar to that for IQ, the Amish gain about 1 point of plainness per generation. Not counting possible selection for this kind of personality in Europe, before they settled North America, the Amish have spent about ten generations under this kind of selection. Therefore their 'plainness', their Amish quotient (AQ), might have increased by about 0.6 standard deviation. During most of the period for which we have sufficient in- formation, the defection rate was significantly higher than 10%, so this may be a conservative estimate. Although there are certainly other factors that might influence the defection rate, such as increasing differences between the Amish way of life and that of their neighbors, increasing plainness would tend to reduce the defection rate over time. 
The Amish have some genetic problems because of genetic drift in a small population, and those have received a fair amount of attention from medical geneticists. However, in our opinion, their social pattern probably drives strong selection for a particular flavor of personality, which is downright fascinating and worthy of further investigation. One could, with difficulty and a lot of investment, identify dimensions of a hypothetical AQ. It would likely include affinity for work, perseverance, low status competition, respect for authority, conscientiousness, community orientation, and so on. We proposed (Cochran, Hardy, & Harpending, 2006) a similar mechanism to account for Ashkenazi Jewish evolution in Medieval times selecting for ability and success in white collar occupations.

Driving cross country recently, we zoomed through the Amish country in Holmes County in Ohio, where 44% of the population speaks some sort of German/Dutch as their first language. I was under the mistaken impression that the Amish abjure all technology past some point in history, such as the New Testament, on fundamentalist theological grounds. This would imply that the comfort gap is continually increasing: e.g., children would be playing with un-awesome wooden toys.

But a couple of hours of driving around showed I was mistaken. Congregations apparently pick and choose which technologies they will allow themselves based on what they kind of culture they want. This means they can adopt new technology if they feel it is constructive. The kids, and there are a lot of kids, typically have brightly colored plastic outdoor toys like other children have. 

There's nothing that looks like modern poverty and there's a faint air of quiet prosperity. It's a much tougher life than I'd like, but my general impression was that these people know what they are doing. They might well be getting better at doing what they do. 
   

March 27, 2014

Cartel monopsony power and antitrust laxity

Here's an old WSJ article:
FTC Investigates Oil Firms Over Hiring, Wages

By THOMAS CATAN 
Updated April 26, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET 
WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the world's biggest oil companies colluded to suppress managerial, professional and technical employees' wages in ways that violated U.S. antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. 
The previously undisclosed probe has been open for several years and involves as many as a dozen oil companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM +1.63%  , Royal Dutch Shell RDSB +0.39%  PLC, BP BP +1.28%  PLC and Chevron CVX -0.03%  Corp, these people said. The probe remains active, they added, but the five FTC commissioners have yet to vote on the matter, and it is possible a suit will never be brought. 
The investigation is the latest evidence of concern among U.S. antitrust enforcers that the nation's largest employers may be interfering with the labor market to hold down costs. The U.S. Department of Justice is carrying out a similar probe into whether companies in the technology sector have improperly agreed not to poach each other's employees, according to people familiar with that matter. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment. 
The oil companies and the FTC have discussed possible settlements over the course of the investigation but have failed to reach agreement, people familiar with the matter said.

I can't find anything more recent about this, so it may have fizzled out.

One general point I want to make is how bizarre "ExxonMobil" looks to an old-timer like me who can remember press and public paranoia against Big Oil in the 1970s and early 1980s. After all, Exxon is the direct descendant of the firm at the heart of the 1911 Standard Oil trust decision by the Supreme Court. 

That a Democratic administration in the late 1990s would approve the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, BP and Amoco, and Chevron and Texaco was unthinkable 20 years before. 

If six colossal companies suddenly turn into three supercolossal companies, economic theory predicts that it's now easier for the merged firms to exercise some degree of cartel power against their employees over pay: there are three fewer companies that might defect from informal arrangements.

A meta-general point: there were a lot of things 35 years ago that I turned out to be more or less right about. For example, it wasn't all that popular in 1979 to argue that Big Oil companies are not the chief locus of evil in the world.

On a lot of 1970s-1980s arguments, I turned out to be on the historically winning side. And that's great!

But ... here's the thing: diminishing marginal returns.

If the arguments in 1979 for smashing up and nationalizing the oil companies were, on the whole, bad, that doesn't necessarily mean we should, in effect, gut the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1999.

If the CIA needed to help undermine Russia's influence in Lisbon in 1975, well, that doesn't automatically mean that, on the whole, its all that crucial the CIA should do the same thing in Donetsk in 2014. It's 4,800 km from Lisbon to Donetsk by air. Sure, the Game of Nations never ends and all that, but we've built up a huge lead.