April 9, 2014

"The Germ Theory of Democracy"

From Pacific Standard:
The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and All Your Most Cherished Beliefs 
BY ETHAN WATTERS • 
... What kind of government do you live under? Who are your sexual partners? How do you treat strangers? All of these questions may mask a more fundamental one: What germs are you warding off? ...
Anyone with a basic grasp of biology knows that all animals have immune systems that battle pathogens—be they viruses, bacteria, parasites, or fungi—on the cellular level. And it’s also fairly well understood that animals sometimes exhibit outward behaviors that serve to ward off disease. Our moment-to-moment psychological reactions to the threat of illness, they suggest, have a huge cumulative effect on culture. 
Not only that—and here’s where [evolutionary biologist Randy] Thornhill’s theory really starts to fire the imagination—these deep interactions between local pathogens and human social evolution may explain many of the basic differences we observe between cultures. How does your culture behave toward strangers? What kind of government do you live under? Who are your sexual partners? What values do you share? All of these questions may mask a more fundamental one: What germs are you warding off?
The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic to a place tends to steer a culture in distinct ways. 
Research has long shown that people in tropical climates with high pathogen loads, for example, are more likely to develop a taste for spicy food, because certain compounds in these foods have antimicrobial properties. They are also prone to value physical attractiveness—a signal of health and “immunocompetence,” according to evolutionary theorists—more highly in mates than people living in cooler latitudes do.

Eh ... sex differences are being overlooked. Looking like Denzel Washington or David Robinson in West Africa is a good symptom that you have an excellent immune system, which you will hopefully leave to your children if you leave them nothing else. But looking like you're strong enough for a lifetime of hoeing the yam patch with the other mothers, because you can't expect that good looking, entertaining baby-daddy to do much providing, seems to be selected for in West African women. A strong back is not exactly what most people around the world visualize as "physical attractiveness" in women.
But the implications don’t stop there. According to the “pathogen stress theory of values,” the evolutionary case that Thornhill and his colleagues have put forward, our behavioral immune systems—our group responses to local disease threats—play a decisive role in shaping our various political systems, religions, and shared moral views. 
If they are right, Thornhill and his colleagues may be on their way to unlocking some of the most stubborn mysteries of human behavior. Their theory may help explain why authoritarian governments tend to persist in certain latitudes while democracies rise in others; why some cultures are xenophobic and others are relatively open to strangers; why certain peoples value equality and individuality while others prize hierarchical structures and strict adherence to tradition.

This seems more like a modern America list of Bad Things and Good Things with little regard for how they relate to actual backward cultures. Being Americans in 2014, we've been told over and over how Xenophobia Is Bad, so cultures that obviously have dysfunctions much be Xenophobic, right? Except ...

But, how about Japan? Healthy, long-lived, prosperous, low-crime, and xenophobic as all get out (just in their polite Japanese way).

In contrast, Africans, who suffer from a very high disease burden, are not terribly xenophobic. So, in colonial times, Africa was relatively easy for Europeans to conquer, especially as they got better at handling the disease burden. Opposition from Africans wasn't that huge of a problem for Europeans. Similarly, disease-ridden India was easy for Europeans to conquer.

Today, African countries routinely accept a million refugees from a civil war in a neighboring country. African tribes generally live much more intermingled with other tribes than in other parts of the world. Why? Until recently, most of Africa wasn't anywhere near it's Malthusian population density limits, so there wasn't all that much incentive to keep outsiders out. In general, Africans tended to worry about having too few people to protect against wild animals (which might explain why, while other cultures try to restrain sexual behavior, African culture generally tries to encourage it -- we need all the babies we can get.)

The real impact of high disease burden on African cultures was that it made urbanization difficult -- if too many people got too close together, the settlement could be wiped out by disease, so Africans tended to live in small villages spread out across the vast countryside, and seldom developed the specialized arts and crafts that urbanization allows.
What’s more, their work may offer a clear insight into how societies change. According to Thornhill’s findings, striking at the root of infectious disease threats is by far the most effective form of social engineering available to any would-be reformer.

Getting infectious diseases under control (e.g., Singapore v. Lagos) has all sorts of socially positive knock-on effects. Bill Gates puts lots of money into looking for a malaria vaccine because he understands this.
If you were looking for a paradigm-shifting theory about human behavior, step right up. “Once we started looking for evidence that pathogens shape culture,” Thornhill told me, “we began to find it in damn near every place we looked.” 
THORNHILL WAS STEERED TOWARD the topic of the human psychological reaction to disease in the early 2000s by a young graduate student advisee named Corey Fincher. Fincher had arrived at the University of New Mexico intending to study the mating behavior of rattlesnakes. After a time, however, he instead became curious about the evolutionary effects of disease on human cultural behavior—and particularly about the question of why cultures tend to fall along a spectrum between individualist and collectivist dispositions. 

This isn't really all that good a spectrum for thinking about success and failure in the modern world. Sure, England is pretty individualist and it's a nice place to live, but then Japan is notably collectivist by temperament and it's not too awful a place, either. In contrast, perhaps the most individualist culture in the world is the Pashtuns of Afghanistan-Pakistan, who downgrade even loyalty within the nuclear family. A charming Pathan saying is:
When the floodwaters reach your chin, put your son beneath your feet.

And Afghanistan is an awful place.

Pacific Standard continues:
Psychologists and other social scientists have long been curious about this robust difference between human populations. In strongly collectivist societies, group membership forms the foundation of one’s identity. Sacrificing for the common good and maintaining harmonious ties with family and kin are expected. By contrast, in strongly individualist societies like those of the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands, individual rights are valued above duties to others. One’s identity does not derive from the group, but rather is built through personal actions and achievements. Although these differences have been confirmed by many cross-cultural studies in a variety of different ways, no one had come up with a convincing evolutionary theory to suggest why it would be advantageous for one group of people to become more collectivist and another group to become more individualist. 
Fincher suspected that many behaviors in collectivist cultures might be masks for behavioral immune responses. To take one key example, collectivist cultures tend to be both more xenophobic and more ethnocentric than individualist cultures.

Are Swedes more individualist or collectivist, more xenophobic or more ethnocentric? All of these concepts are extremely relativistic.
Keeping strangers away might be a valuable defense against foreign pathogens, Fincher thought.

Maybe. Andaman Islanders are very vulnerable to outside world diseases. The North Sentinel Andamans have stayed healthy, though, probably because they murder anybody who lands on their island.
And a strong preference for in-group mating might help maintain a community’s hereditary immunities to local disease strains. To test his hypothesis, Fincher set out to see whether places with heavier disease loads also tended toward these sorts of collectivist values. 
Working with Damian Murray and Mark Schaller, two psychologists from the University of British Columbia, and Thornhill, Fincher compared existing databases that rated cultural groups on the individualist-collectivist spectrum with data collected from the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network and other sources. The team paid special attention to nine pathogens (including malaria, leprosy, dengue, typhus, and tuberculosis) that are detrimental to human reproductive fitness. What the team found was a strong correlation between collectivist values and places with high pathogen stress. In 2008, Fincher, Thornhill, Schaller, and Murray published a major paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that laid out the connection. 

I critiqued one of these Thornhill papers in 2010.
Thornhill and Fincher found further evidence for the pathogen stress theory by looking at geographical regions that had not only severe disease stress but also a highly diverse patchwork of local pathogen populations. The critters that make us ill—not only the viruses and bacteria, but also the ticks, flies, and mosquitoes that spread them—are tiny and lack the ability to regulate their own heat as larger organisms do. They often flourish only in very narrow climatic zones, where they are adapted to certain temperature and moisture levels. As a result, pathogen threats can be highly localized. One study, for instance, found at least 124 genetically distinct strains of the parasite Leishmania braziliensis across Peru and Bolivia.

Interesting; in general, however, the worst diseases are spread by mosquitos, rats, and other mobile carriers. That way they can kill you quick and still spread. Diseases that spread human tend to mutate toward mildness so you can still drag yourself into work and sneeze on your coworkers. Falciparum malaria, carried by one particular type of mosquito, is probably the most significant disease in the world in terms of Darwinian selection. The anopheles mosquito gets around on its own, so the notion of local germs that never move seems unpersuasive.

Super localized germs will tend to get milder because they are in a long term symbiotic relationship with their hosts. The big killers tend to sweep in from another continent, like the Black Death arriving from Asia in 1347 or smallpox in the New World after 1492.

However, germs that are transported from person to person not by the person but by a mosquito or similar mobile vector can remain virulent for a long time. Gregory Cochran's hypothesis from the 1990s is that falciparum malaria, which is worst in West Africa, is such a huge Darwinian selective force that it will tend to select for:

A. Immune systems resistant to malaria
B. Visible clues in males of resistance to malaria, such as being a Big Man

If a higher percentage of selection among West Africans is devoted to selecting for traits associated with malaria-resistance, then less selection in West Africans can be devoted to other kinds of useful traits. In contrast, if the Swedes or Japanese don't have to worry as much about infectious diseases, they can select more for other traits. That seems pretty persuasive, so you don't hear much about it. (David Epstein vaguely alluded to it in The Sports Gene.)
If you were to live in such a pathogenically diverse place, you and your family would likely develop a resistance or immunity to your local parasites. But that defense might be useless if you were to move in with a group just a short distance away—or if a stranger, carrying a foreign pathogen load, were to insinuate himself into your clan. In such places, then, it would be important for neighboring groups to be able to tell the difference between “us” and “them.” 
With that thought in mind, Thornhill and his colleagues made a prediction: that regions with a balkanized landscape of localized parasites would in turn display a balkanized landscape of localized customs and conspicuous cultural differences among human populations—dialects, unique religious displays, distinctive art and music, and the like. While there is much more research to be done, early findings suggest that—particularly when it comes to the development of local languages and religions—pathogen stress does appear to spawn cultural diversity.

Perhaps, but causation could run the opposite way. Places where people don't get around much don't see much interchange of human pathogens.
A set of more cautious researchers would likely have circled the wagons after unveiling their theory and concentrated on building a body of evidence to defend their early claims. Having a novel explanation for why some cultures are collectivist while others are individualist would probably guarantee one’s place in social science lore. Thornhill and Fincher, however, didn’t stop for a breath. By the time the two published a major paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2012, they had marshaled evidence that severe pathogen stress leads to high levels of civil and ethnic warfare

And vice-versa -- the Spanish Flu of 1918 was spread in troop hospitals, and a lot of plagues in China seemed to follow the breakdown of public health measures during the breakdown of dynastic order.
increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior. Moreover, these pathogen-avoidant collectivist tendencies, they wrote, coalesce over time into repressive and autocratic governmental systems.

Eh, you know, highly disease prone tropical countries might pretend to have a a Grand Generalissimo with lots of shiny ribbons who makes all the decisions, but they actually tend to be lackadaisical and chaotic places.
Want to understand the rise of fascism, dictatorship, and ethnocentric campaigns that dehumanize outsiders? Look to the prevalence of pathogen threats.

Uh, no, not really. West Africa isn't much of a source of fascism.

Or it could be backwards: if you want to explain Nazis, note that disease burden in Germany was low and falling fast.
 

NYT: "Note to Republicans: Channel Jack Kemp"

"Jack F. Kemp... at a 2008 House
hearing on the mortgage crisis."
More sincere political advice from the New York Times:
Note to Republicans: Channel Jack Kemp 
By SAM TANENHAUS   APRIL 5, 2014

WHEN Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, delivered a speech last month outlining proposals for economic growth, his sponsor was the Jack F. Kemp Foundation, a Beltway organization set up in memory of the Republican politician who died in 2009 and has recently been cited as a hero by some of the party’s most prominent figures. 
Senator Rubio is one outspoken admirer. Another is Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, who worked at Mr. Kemp’s think tank, Empower America, in the 1990s, and has said that Mr. Kemp was one of his principal mentors. 
Perhaps the most surprising Kemp acolyte, given his anti-establishment persona, is Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. Mr. Paul has updated Kemp’s most famous idea, “urban enterprise zones,” which were intended to entice businesses into struggling inner cities. ...
It might seem a curious moment for a Jack Kemp revival. Many remember him as an evangelist for supply-side economics and its drastic tax cutting — exactly the approach some Republicans say needs to be replaced with a fresh agenda that grapples with joblessness and stagnant wages. 
But there was another side to Kemp, a self-described “bleeding-heart conservative” who preached the gospel of upward mobility, economic opportunity, cultural diversity and racial justice. This Kemp personified the big-tent Republicanism that has gone into hibernation in the Obama years and that some Republicans think is crucial to the party’s success in the 2016 presidential election, when voters will want to hear a more positive message. 
It is one thing, of course, to emphasize reaching beyond the Republican base, and quite another to connect with other voters, which Kemp was successful in doing.

When Bob Dole put Jack Kemp on his ticket in 1996, Dole-Kemp won 12% of the black vote. Granted, they lost the election badly, but they still broke double-digits in the black vote. And that's what really counts, isn't it? (What? White people are still enfranchised? Why wasn't I informed?)
During the subprime mortgage crisis, for example, he called for a loosening of bankruptcy laws to protect “the estimated 2.2 million families in danger of losing their homes” and then teamed up with Henry G. Cisneros, the housing secretary under Bill Clinton, to urge congressional action against “predatory and discriminatory lending practices which have had a direct and significant impact on African-American and Latino homeowners and neighborhoods.”

Henry G. Cisneros? You mean, Angelo Mozilo's pal Henry G. Cisneros?
       

Random notes from Gregory Clark's "Son Also Rises"

I have a lot of notes left over unused from my review in Taki's Magazine of Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. So, in no particular order:

The low social mobility seen under the Swedish welfare state over the last 75-80 years despite good public education and health care and all that might have something to do with the welfare state discouraging ambition and risk-taking. And/or it might have something to do with the Swedes sitting out WWII and much of the Cold War, which tended to open careers to talent in more active participants.

Here in the U.S., perhaps the most broadly accomplished surname on average is Huntington, almost all of whom trace back to a Puritan widow and her sons who arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s. It's not a coincidence that one of the few elite voices against mass immigration in this century was Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington, who pointed out that his ancestors and their relatives had done a pretty good job building a nation even without much Mexican help.

Clark goes to some pains to distinguish the surnames of French Canadian-Americans from French-Americans. For example, Gagnon is 42 times more common per capita in Canada than in France, so Americans named Gagnon are mostly of French Canadian descent.

On the other hand, French Huguenots (Protestants) tended to do better in America. For example, Winston Churchill's American mother's maiden name was Jerome, and traces back to a Huguenot immigrant.
  

Sailer on Gregory Clark's "Son Also Rises"

From my column in Taki's Magazine, a review of Gregory Clark's new book on surnames and social mobility:
Economic historian Gregory Clark, a Glaswegian now at UC Davis, has been extending a main channel of British science into the 21st Century. His new book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is another milestone in the revitalization of the human sciences after their long, self-inflicted dry spell in the later decades of the 20th Century. 
One of the central concerns of British thinkers from the 18th Century into the mid-20th Century was the scientific study of breeding. The British agricultural revolution that began about three centuries ago led to the scientific breeding of livestock, including thoroughbreds. (Indeed, various meanings of the word “race” in English—a contest of speed, a lineage, and a breed—are related to the British passion for breeding racehorses.)

Read the whole thing there.

April 8, 2014

How can we most fittingly commemorate Aunt Zeituni?

President Obama's Aunt Zeituni has tragically died before she could become an American citizen. In 2010, she was granted asylum in the United States so she wouldn't have to return to Kenya and be persecuted for being related to the most powerful man in the world. 

How can we best commemorate this supreme epitomization of what 21st Century immigration is all about? 

A commenter suggests the President and Congress should be petitioned to grant her posthumous honorary citizenship. Good idea. America has extended honorary citizenship seven times, five posthumously. The honorees have been:
Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British Prime Minister, enacted on April 9, 1963 
Raoul Wallenberg (1912–1947), Swedish diplomat who rescued Jews from the Holocaust, enacted on October 5, 1981, posthumously although he was thought to be possibly still alive at the time. 
William Penn (1644–1718), English real estate entrepreneur, and founder and "absolute proprietor" of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, enacted on October 19, 1984, posthumously 
Hannah Callowhill Penn (1671–1726), second wife of William Penn, administrator of the Province of Pennsylvania, enacted on October 19, 1984, posthumously 
Mother Teresa (1910–1997), Catholic nun of Albanian ethnicity and Indian citizenship, who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, enacted on October 1, 1996 
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834), the Marquis de La Fayette or General Lafayette ... a Frenchman who was an officer in the American Revolutionary War, enacted August 6, 2002, posthumously 
Casimir Pulaski (1745–1779), Polish military officer who fought on the side of the American colonists against the British in the American Revolutionary War; member of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth nobility, politician who has been called "The Father of the American Cavalry," enacted on November 6, 2009, posthumously 
Zeituni Onyango (1953–2014), undocumented nonworker, public housing recipient, refugee from popularity of her nephew in her own country, enacted on April 9, 2014 posthumously  

But what about a monument? Perhaps she should be buried at the foot of the Statue of Liberty right next to the Emma Lazarus poem. Liberty means Freedom and Aunt Zeituni loved her free public housing, so if that doesn't make her a Liberty Lover, I don't know what would.

But in the spirit of the healthy-sized portrait published along with her obituary in the New York Times, we should think big. Instead of burying her beneath the Statue of Liberty, we should build a full-sized replica of Aunt Zeituni as the Statue of Liberty. Why should the Statue of Liberty be restricted to a white? 

And why should the East Coast have the only Statue of Liberty? I know, let's put Aunt Zeituni's Statue of Liberty on the beach in Malibu:
Artist's conception
        

Aunt Zeituni: The worst asylum excuse of all time

From the NYT:
Zeituni Onyango, Obama’s Aunt From Kenya, Dies at 61 
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE APRIL 8, 2014

BOSTON — Zeituni Onyango, President Obama’s Kenyan-born aunt, who received asylum in the United States in 2010 after years of living illegally in Boston, died on Tuesday in a rehabilitation home here. She was 61. 
Her death was confirmed by Margaret Wong, a Cleveland lawyer who represented Ms. Onyango in her immigration case. She said that Ms. Onyango had cancer and respiratory problems. 
Ms. Onyango was the stepsister of Mr. Obama’s father. 
Ms. Onyango moved to South Boston on a valid visa in 2000 and sought political asylum in 2002. It was denied in 2004, and she was ordered to leave the country, but she refused. 
She was living in relative anonymity in Boston until just before the 2008 presidential election, when her illegal status was reported by The Associated Press. The Times of London found her in what it described as “run-down public housing.” ...
To escape media scrutiny, Ms. Onyango moved to Cleveland, where the Kenyan community took her in, said Ms. Wong, who helped her obtain a green card. 
In seeking asylum for Ms. Onyango, Ms. Wong argued that if she were forced to return to Kenya she would face undue attention and perhaps danger because of her nephew’s fame. To be granted asylum, people must show that they would face persecution in their home countries. 

Oh boy ...
In Boston, Judge Leonard Shapiro granted Ms. Onyango asylum in 2010. She died before being granted citizenship. 

Aunt Zeituni's reason for getting asylum may even top Ibragim Todashev's, which was more or less: My dad back home in Russia is only three levels down the org chart from Vladimir Putin, so if the 82nd Airborne ever installs Masha Gessen in the Kremlin to bring Russia democracy, good and hard, well, our family could face repercussions.
 

NYT: Real anti-Semites in Russia, not Ukraine

From the NYT:
Ukraine’s Jews Dismiss Claims of Anti-Semitism 
By ANDREW HIGGINS   APRIL 8, 2014

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — From his office atop the world’s biggest Jewish community center, Shmuel Kaminezki, the chief rabbi of this eastern Ukrainian city, has followed with dismay Russian claims that Ukraine is now in the hands of neo-Nazi extremists — and struggled to calm his panicked 85-year-old mother in New York. 
Raised in Russia and a regular viewer of Russian television, she “calls every day to ask, ‘Have the pogroms happened yet?' ” Rabbi Kaminezki said. He tells his mother that they have not, and that she should stop watching Russian TV. “It is a total lie,” he said. “Jews are not in danger in Ukraine.” 
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, added his own voice to the scaremongering in a speech at the Kremlin on March 18, when he described the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine as an armed coup executed by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who “continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.”

But instead of reeling in panic at any fascist resurgence, the Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk, one of the largest in Ukraine, is celebrating the recent appointment of one of its own, a billionaire tycoon named Ihor Kolomoysky, as the region’s most powerful official. 
“They made a Jew the governor. What kind of anti-Semitism is this?” asked Solomon Flaks ...   
Mr. Kolomoysky, the new governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, derided Rabbi Lazar’s support for Mr. Putin as Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda. ...
Mr. Kolomoysky, a Russian speaker who has both Israeli and Ukrainian passports, scoffed at the Kremlin’s pledges to protect Jews, Russian-speakers and other minorities. ... 
Anti-Semitism is experienced in daily life, he said, but gets no support or encouragement from the state, unlike in Russia, where the security services have tolerated and at times nurtured neo-Nazi nationalist groups with openly anti-Semitic agendas. Russia’s state-run news media regularly air the views of Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, the editor of the Zaftra newspaper, a notorious platform for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. 
Although not particularly observant, Mr. Kolomoysky, who is also the president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, has poured tens of millions of dollars into Jewish causes over the years. Together with a fellow billionaire, Gennadiy Bogolyubov, he financed the Menorah Center, the seven-towered, $70 million community center here where the veterans’ association, the Dnipropetrovsk Jewish Community and dozens of other organizations have their offices. Also housed in the building are the Israeli Consulate, a synagogue, kosher restaurants, a Shabbat-friendly hotel and a high-tech Holocaust museum. 
The museum skirts the delicate issue of how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazis when Hitler invaded Ukraine in 1941, explaining instead how Jews supported Ukraine’s efforts to become an independent nation. 
Before the Holocaust, Jews made up nearly a third of Dnipropetrovsk’s population, making it one of the most important centers of Jewish life and culture in Europe. The city now has 30,000 to 50,000 Jews, a small fraction of a total population of over a million but enough to sustain a vibrant community. The World Jewish Congress estimates that there are more than 250,000 Jews in Ukraine as a whole, the third-largest population of Jews among European nations. ...

When protests against Mr. Yanukovych started in November, he said, many Jews shared the pro-European aspirations of the demonstrators who gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square, though some worried about the role played by far-right nationalist groups. One such group, Svoboda, stirred particular unease because of anti-Semitic remarks by its leaders in the past and their lionization of Ukrainian nationalist heroes who, in some cases, helped the Nazis and shared their ethnicity-based concept of nationhood. 
But Rabbi Kaminezki said fears of a fascist revival had faded, “as there is a difference between what these people say to their own crowd and what they do when they become legitimate political leaders.” Anti-Semitism, he added, “exists in Ukraine, like everywhere,” but it has shown no sign of increasing since Mr. Yanukovych lost power. ...
Even Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist and in some cases neo-Nazi organizations, has made an effort to distance itself from anti-Semitism. In late February, its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, pledged during a meeting with Israel’s ambassador in Kiev to fight all forms of racism. ...
The protest movement that overthrew Mr. Yanukovych, the letter added, included some unsavory nationalist groups, “but even the most marginal do not show anti-Semitism” and are “well controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government — which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security forces.”
   
Allow me to mention again my Taki column on how traditional Fiddler on the Roof-style anti-Tsarism is one of the driving forces in this dangerous America v. Russia brouhaha. It's perfectly understandable why the revival of a stronger, more traditionalist government in Russia so upsets Victoria Nuland, Masha Gessen, or Anne Applebaum, but here in modern American there are a lot of thing we're not supposed to understand, even when they are perfectly understandable.
   

WaPo: Amy Chua totally wrong because Science

Actually, it sounds very much like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, just less funny. From the Washington Post:
Why Asian American kids excel. It’s not ‘Tiger Moms.’ 
BY FRED BARBASH 
Why do Asian American students outpace everyone else academically? 
The most publicized attempt to answer that question — a few years ago, by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua — set off a controversy that rages to this day. 
Chua’s answer, originally set out in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” was that “tiger mothers” were prepared to coerce kids into doing homework and practicing the piano, in part by calling them names. Chua (who’s latest book is “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America) held herself and her academically successful children out as examples. 
But a new study published in the journal “Race and Social Problems” by two California scholars takes on Chua, suggesting that with all the economic resources at her disposal — she and her husband are Yale professors with highly-educated parents — her children’s success is just as likely the result of socioeconomic and cultural advantages, generally cited by scholars as the main reason some children do better than others. 
The authors of “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans” are Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles, currently on leave at Nanyang Technological University, and Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the Univ. of California at Irvine. 
A better way to understand Asian American academic success, they write, is to look at families who don’t have resources and succeed nonetheless. 
That is exactly what they’ve done. And their findings are pretty straightforward: Young Asian Americans have all kinds of good role models to emulate.

So, it's not Tiger Moms per se, it's Tiger Co-Ethnics.
Their communities and families make sure they get extra help when they need it. Their families, even on limited resources, manage to seek out and move to neighborhoods with good schools. And they aspire to success with specific goals in mind: medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy. And they aim for the best schools. 
It’s not about coercion or some mysterious ethnic gift, they write. It’s about the way they view their horizons, with extraordinarily high expectations — so high that kids who don’t rise to the occasion feel like “black sheep” and “outliers.” 
Zhou and Lee studied Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities in Los Angeles without a lot of financial resources or parental higher education — factors that tend to skew other academic studies of success. 
They focused on two groups: the so-called “1.5 generation” — foreign-born immigrants who came to the United States prior to age 13 — and second-generation families. They conducted 82 face-to-face interviews to get a picture of why these communities are doing so well in advancing their children through high school and college. 
Here’s what they found: Although their means are limited, Asian families in the study choose neighborhoods carefully to make sure schools offer honors and advanced-placement courses. To do this, parents use the “Chinese Yellow Pages,” which the researchers describe as “a two-inch thick, 1,500-page long telephone directory that is published annually and lists ethnic businesses in Southern California, as well as the rankings of the region’s public high schools and the nation’s best universities.” They also make sure their kids get plenty of supplementary help such as tutoring. 
These families have incredibly high standards, according to the study. If kids come home with a 3.5 grade-point average, parents are disappointed that it’s not 4.0 — and they show it. ...
Both groups in the study, Zhou and Lee reported, adopt a similar “frame for what ‘doing well in school’ means: getting straight A’s, graduating as valedictorian or salutatorian, getting into one of the top UC (University of California) schools or an Ivy, and pursuing some type of graduate education in order [to] work in one of the ‘four professions’: doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, or engineer. So exacting is the frame for ‘doing well in school’ that our Asian respondents described the value of grades on an Asian scale as ‘A is for average, and B is an Asian fail.’’’ 
Such high standards have positive and negative impacts, the researchers found.
If expectations are that high, many young people will try to meet them. They will get into Stanford and they will get that PhD. 
The downside is that those who fall short — the ‘A-minus’ student’ — wind up feeling alienated from their ethnicity. In short, they feel less Asian and more, well, American. 
They describe a young man named Paul who chose to be an artist instead of following the path prescribed by his parents. He called himself “the whitest Chinese guy you’ll ever meet.” 
They tell of one young woman they interviewed, Sarah, who when asked whether she feels successful compared to her friends who are not Chinese, pauses “as if she had never considered that comparison before and finally replied, ‘If I were to look at my white friends of that same age range, yes I’m more successful. If I were to look at all of my friends, yes, I would say so.’” 
They write: 
Sarah is not unique in this regard; none of the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese respondents considered measuring their success against native-born whites (or native-born blacks for that matter). Rather, they turn to high-achieving coethnics as their reference group — a finding that highlights that native-born whites are not the standard by which today’s 1.5- and second-generation Asians measure their success and achievements. 
…So strong is the perception that the success frame is the norm among Asian Americans that the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese who cannot attain it or choose to buck it find themselves at odds with their immigrant parents and with their ethnic identities. 

In other words, slacker Asians are more likely to assimilate into white culture in high school, for which they are castigated as ethnic outcasts by their relatives: No True Chinaman Gets a B-Minus!
  

April 7, 2014

NCAA: Vox on the Rox: Kentucky's scholar-athletes

From Vox
Ezra Klein's much-touted new website Vox's top story tonight is 
UConn Basketball's Dirty Secret 
by Libby Nelson 
The University of Connecticut Huskies made a triumphant return to the NCAA tournament this year — winning the national championship Monday night — after the school was barred from competition in 2013 for poor academic performance.
But UConn's graduation rate for male basketball players is still the worst of any team in the 2014 tournament.
UConn graduates 8 percent of its players, according to the most recent NCAA statistics. To put it another way: of the 12 players who started as freshmen eight years ago, exactly one managed to finish a college degree or leave UConn in good academic standing. 
The University of Florida, whom the Huskies beat to advance to the championship, has a graduation success rate of 60 percent; the University of Kentucky, playing UConn tonight, has a graduation rate of 82 percent.

Okay, but are you really, really sure that Kentucky graduates 82% of its male basketball players? Isn't Kentucky coach John Calipari's whole strategy to recruit one-and-done NBA prospects, who have to spend exactly one year in college before they are eligible for the pros?
"If you recruit guys who you know are going to be there for four years, you'll probably be in the NIT, and that's not a good thing at Kentucky," [Calipari] said. "You recruit the best players you can, and if someone is going to take them in the first round, I tell them to go."

Didn't Kentucky win the NCAA in 2012 and immediately have two freshmen get drafted #1 and #2 by the NBA? Didn't Calipari start five freshmen this year? Doesn't Calipari have one white senior who is still at Kentucky while all his other recruits are in pro ball or long gone? Yes, Jon Hood:
... [Hood] has many friends who are former teammates that have gone on to the NBA while he remained for a five-year career. By Hood’s count, he has 17 numbers in his phone for former Wildcats now in the pros, with whom he at least semi-regularly connects. A good deal of them are the one-and-doners and the early departers, who took leave of Lexington not long after they took a college class for the first time. Hood stayed, the only player on the current Final Four roster remaining from the 2009-10 season, John Calipari’s first in Lexington.

Coach Calipari makes $5.2 million per year. He doesn't get paid that for having a benchwarmer graduate, he gets paid that for recruiting superstars who have no intention of finishing their second semester at UK.

Eventually, the Vox article gets around to admitting that its statistics are from 2003-2006, back in the Tubby Smith Era of recruiting. Kentucky's starting five tonight were mostly under ten years old in 2003-2006. The past is a different country ...

This kind of dumb miscue is normal in the news biz where the goal is to churn out crud fast. But, Ezra Klein has spent three months explaining how he's going to revolutionize journalism by providing Deep Context.

Oh, well, that appears to have lasted about 24 hours ...

Part of what Dead Tree Newspapers provide is institutional memory -- old codgers in the newsroom who have been around long enough to remember things like that Kentucky is different than it was ten years ago, that in fact it's now the most extreme example of one-and-done.

Also, when making a bar chart, there's no need to make each bar a separate color.
    

Jeb Bush's wife was an illegal alien

There's been much discussion of Jeb Bush's speech announcing that illegally entering America is an "act of love" (Mike Tyson should have used that "act of love" defense in his rape trial), but little awareness that Columba Bush, Mrs. Jeb, was likely an illegal alien herself for part of her childhood.

And, yet, illegal immigration seemed to dissipate love within her family, since Mrs. Bush is notably unloving toward her own illegal immigrant father. Here's an AP news story that appeared in the Jacksonville News on 2/14/2001:
Jeb Bush's father-in-law hopes to reconcile with daughter 
By TRACI CARL  
Associated Press Writer 
SILAO, Mexico - Jose Maria Garnica has newspaper photos of his daughter Columba and her husband, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, along with articles on his grandson [George P. Bush], who lobbied for the Latino vote during his uncle's presidential campaign. 
But that's about the only information he has on his daughter's family. Garnica says he hopes President Bush's visit to Mexico on Friday may help him make peace with his 47-year-old daughter. 
Garnica said he hopes to catch a glimpse of Bush. He has gained the support of several local leaders and has a framed poster of Jesus he wants to give the president. 
Local broadcasters and newspapers have portrayed Garnica as the victim of an ungrateful daughter, but Columba Bush has said her father left the family when she was 3. 
Reforma, one of Mexico's leading newspapers, accused Columba of "forgetting her roots." She hasn't publicly responded to the reports, and declined to speak directly with The Associated Press. 
Families divided by a border are common in Mexico. Garnica said he traveled to California in 1960 - when Columba was about 7 years old - got construction work and brought his family north four years later. By then, he and his wife had grown apart and they soon separated, the father said, adding that Columba continued to visit him in California. 
Garnica said their three children - Columba, Francisco and Lucila - spent time with both parents in Mexico and California. 
He said he last saw Columba in 1973, when she told him she was going to the post office in La Puente, Calif. They haven't talked since. 
"That was so many years ago," the 77-year-old Garnica said. "Twenty-seven years isn't just a little bit. It's almost a lifetime." 
Gov. Jeb Bush refused Tuesday to comment on Jose Garnica's account of his relationship with Bush's wife, Columba. A member of the Bush's staff, speaking only on background, said there was no truth to the story that Mrs. Bush went to the post office and never returned. 
Garnica said his daughter Lucila called him this week and told him to stop talking to the media, saying he was "hurting Columba." 
"I don't want to hurt her, but everything I say is true," he said. 
A spokeswoman for Jeb Bush, Katie Baur, said it was a "personal, family issue" and Columba Bush wouldn't comment. 
Columba Bush has kept a relatively low profile. One of the few times she has been in the news was when she failed to declare $19,000 worth of clothing at customs after a Paris shopping spree. She paid a $4,100 fine. 
Garnica receives pension and Social Security checks from the United States - money that lets him live comfortably in Silao. The town is 200 miles northwest of Mexico City and a few miles from the ranch where President Vicente Fox and Bush will meet Friday. 
Garnica said he met Jeb Bush once, in California, when Bush and Columba were dating. The couple met when she was 17 and Bush was on an exchange program in Mexico. 
 

Golf in the Rio Olympics

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics in August 2016 will feature golf for the first time since the early 20th Century. Professional golfers traditionally have not been enthusiastic about Olympic golf since the Olympics just gives you a shiny medal instead of what tour pros really like: one those four foot wide novelty checks with your name written in the "Pay to the Order of" space in Magic Marker 9 inches high.

A quarter of a century ago, there was big talk about holding an Olympic golf tournament at Augusta National during the 1996 Atlanta games, but the tour pros weren't interested and Augusta is closed in August, anyway, because -- although this seemed to come as a surprise to the International Olympic Committee -- it's hot and humid in Georgia in August.

But the golf industry wants to be in the Olympics now. And Brazil might conceivably be a good market someday for golf, since, unlike China, the country has a reasonable amount of land per person. But Brazil has almost zero golf tradition, so a new course is supposed to be built in Rio to host the men's and women's Olympic tournaments.

The Rio Olympic course is the the highest profile golf course commission of the decade. The surprise winner over Jack Nicklaus's and Greg Norman's firms was Gil Hanse, head of a tiny but excellent design firm, who promised to move to Rio for two years and drive the bulldozer himself.

The problem so far has been that exactly who owns the land where the golf course is supposed to go wasn't exactly nailed down. (Economist Hernando de Soto, who has frequently noted Latin America's less than clear-cut property rights, wouldn't be surprised.)

So far, Hanse has roughly shaped the golf course in the dirt, but he's visibly nervous in interviews about having the grass ready in 28 months.
Pete Dye's 1979 island green at TPC

Assuming it gets finished in time, the Olympic course will be a test of the mass appeal of trends in elite golf course design thought away from spectacular and expensive do-or-die holes and toward cheap, complex, and baffling, back to much like St. Andrews in Scotland, which more or less evolved over hundreds of years of play.

A couple of decades ago, Tom Doak pointed out that pros don't fear water hazards anymore, they only fear wind and gravity. In other words, they don't worry about being able to hit the ball far enough to cross a water hazard, they worry about being unable to stop the ball on the fairway or green. Hanse, along with Doak and the Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore team are the leaders of this generation of architects who have thought hardest about reproducing the subtle challenges of St. Andrews in the 21st Century.

When asked which existing course his Rio course will most resemble, Hanse says, "I think Rustic Canyon (in Los Angeles) would be the closest. It’s set on a similarly sandy site, and, like Rustic, it feels very indigenous to the area."
Rustic Canyon: Now what?

I played Hanse's Rustic Canyon on Wednesday for $36. I don't play much golf these days, but when I do it's almost always at Rustic because the quality to price ratio is so much higher than anywhere else in the greater L.A. area. And now, after Rustic has been open for a dozen years, the grounds crew has the greens in close to US Open quality. (A British Open would be more than pleased with how Rustic's greens played yesterday.) I hit quite a few greens yesterday with my irons, but typically the ball would then slowly, slowly trickle off the green because I hadn't hit the perfect part of the green. And even if I could execute shots perfectly, are my 3-d cognitive skills strong enough to plan shots perfectly?

Yet, Rustic is not a punishing course. The fairways are immensely wide, there are no ponds, streams, or waterfalls. The chief penalty for hitting an indifferent shot is that your ball keeps rolling until it reaches a spot disadvantageous for your next shot. Your score keeps mounting without anything spectacularly bad happening to you.

In theory, Rustic Canyon style courses have a lot going for them: they can be built cheaply on unexciting terrain and they challenge good golfers while not beating up bad golfers. Thus, Rustic Canyon is held in the highest regard by golf course architecture aficionados. On the other hand, you can play Rustic Canyon for $36, so it's not as if it has overwhelmed the golfing public.

It will be interesting to see if Hanse's Olympic course televises well to an even less sophisticated audience.
   

Zara

The 3rd richest man in the world at $64 billion is Amancio Ortega, a low-key Spaniard who owns the lady's clothing brand and retail outlet Zara. I understand how you can get really rich owning Facebook or DOS or most of the the telephone business in Mexico. But how great of a businessman do you have to be to get insanely rich in moderately priced women's clothes? Is there a more competitive business on Earth? What are the defensible barriers to entry? I could see getting rich in clothes if you could trademark, say, blue, and be the only guy allowed to sell blue clothes. Even I could make money doing that. But what's his secret?
  

April 6, 2014

Ezra Klein's Vox

From the New York Times, a hint as to what the secret sauce of Ezra Klein's much touted Vox.com will be: content repurposification recyclement.
In this high-tech universe, Vox Media’s content management system — which even has its own name, Chorus, and is used to publish all the company’s websites — has earned recognition. ... 
Mr. Klein, hoping to avoid incrementalism — “the biggest source of waste is everything the journalist has written before today,” he said — instead wants his journalists responsible for constantly updating pages that are the ultimate resource on a topic. 
“It would be like a wiki page written by one person with a little attitude,” Ms. Bell explained. 
To help accomplish this, the developers have been building a tool they call the card stack. The cards, trimmed in brilliant canary yellow, contain definitions of essential terms that a reader can turn to if they require more context. For example, a story updating the battle over the Affordable Care Act might include cards explaining the term “insurance exchange.”

Isn't that Bill Atkinson's HyperCard that was released on the Apple Mac in 1987?

Here's an example of Vox: on Ukraine.

Vox is like a cross between 1987-style HyperCards and 1992-style Frequently Asked Question lists. That's not a criticism: those were pretty good formats and it's especially a shame that the FAQ went out of fashion. So, maybe they will come back into fashion?

As for Ezra's idea that journalists should just reuse their old stuff, well, I'm all for doing less work. Personally, I think you people should stop demanding new stuff from me -- I'm still working on my opinion on Paul Walker's death and now you want my Mickey Rooney, too?!? -- and just go mull over my old stuff until you have it memorized. For example, is Monday the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwanda genocide? Well, if you want to understand the fundamental Tutsi v. Hutu issues that will be trotted out misleadingly tomorrow, I wrote a movie review in 2005 offering a new anthropological theory that explains them perhaps better than anything anybody had come up with before (and definitely better than anything I've come up with on the topic since).

But readers seem to draw a fundamental distinction between “yesterday’s news” and “news" thus requiring constant Feeding of the Beast. Is great content management software really going to make that distinction go away for Vox and allow Klein to lavishly monetize yesterday’s news? He seems to think so, although Jeff Bezos apparently didn't agree with him.

Well, best of luck to him.
       

Does this ever work?

From the NYT:
Business Titans Seek to Ease Fears in Ukraine 
By ANDREW HIGGINS 8:53 PM ET 
Kiev is hoping that naming businessmen too rich to bribe to positions of power will help allay fears in the east.

"Too rich to bribe:" this seems to be a common bit of wishful thinking, but how often does it turn out that the guys best at clawing for money suddenly stop clawing? I have the impression that basically this worked with 19th Century Downton Abbey-style English landed aristocrats but nobody else. It certainly didn't work with the ancestors of 19th Century English aristocrats -- you don't get Downton Abbey in the first place by being scrupulous.

More from the NYT:
DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — Two months ago, Hennadiy Korban, a millionaire businessman, fled to Israel to escape retribution for siding with opponents of Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. After Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster, he flew home in triumph aboard a private plane to begin a new life — as a harried civil servant. 
Mr. Korban, 44, now works 14 hours a day in a drab Soviet-era office block here for a meager salary that he does not bother to take. Business, he said, was more enjoyable and far less stressful than trying to keep Ukraine together. 
But since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March, and with tens of thousands of Russian troops now massed on Ukraine’s border, to the east of this sprawling industrial city, men like Mr. Korban have become part of a frantic, all-hands-on-deck struggle against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. 
Unable to throw money at the many problems besieging Ukraine’s bitterly divided east, the fragile and nearly bankrupt government in Kiev, the capital, has instead thrown rich people into a drive to convince the country’s Russian-speaking regions that their future lies not with Russia, but with Ukraine.

Mr. Korban’s boss is Ihor Kolomoysky, who was recently appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region by officials in Kiev. Mr. Kolomoysky, a billionaire involved in banking, oil, metals and the media, ranks as the second- or third-wealthiest man in Ukraine, depending on who is counting. He said he has not counted his fortune himself, noting that “a real rich person is someone who does not know how much he has.”

Actually, I find that pretty unlikely, too.
Another of Mr. Kolomoysky’s deputies is Boris Filatov, Mr. Korban’s business partner in luxury shopping malls and other ventures. ...
The naming of wealthy businessmen to positions of power marks a curious twist in the Ukrainian revolution, which was driven in a large part by public fury at the extensive wealth of a tiny group of plutocrats who prospered under Mr. Yanukovych and, with a few exceptions, stayed on the sidelines throughout three months of protests against him. 
Mr. Kolomoysky, who was mostly outside the country during the protests, said he came up with the idea not as a way to entrench himself and other businessmen in power, but as an emergency response to the fears of Russian speakers in the east, terrified by a revolution they saw as dominated by Ukrainian nationalists from the west.

“This is a signal to society,” Mr. Kolomoysky said. “If oligarchs are in power, feel at ease and view their future as being in Ukraine, then ordinary people will feel even more that they are not under threat.” He conceded, however, that average people “might not respect oligarchs or like them.”

But after being bombarded with Russian claims that fascists had seized power, he said, people in the east were heartened to see a move into government by multimillionaires with no interest in extremist turmoil or a neo-Nazi revival, “particularly when they are of Jewish origin.” 
Mr. Kolomoysky, a Russian-speaking citizen of both Israel and Ukraine, lived until recently in Switzerland, where his wife and son still live. Mr. Kolomoysky and his deputy, Mr. Korban, are both Jewish. 
Mr. Filatov describes himself as “100 percent Russian without a drop of Ukrainian blood.” He, too, fled to Israel in late January.
 
The traditional feudal solution is to make these regional ruling jobs hereditary to encourage the oligarchs to be "stationary bandits" with a long term interest in not despoiling the place too badly because their heirs will inherit it. That doesn't seem like a terribly great solution, but it seems to be better than having "roving bandits" expecting to get their's while the getting's good and fleeing when things get a little too hot for them.
        

Forbes 400 analyzed

The Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America has been published annually since 1982. You might think that economists would find it an attractive resource for analyzing the world, but that rarely happens. Here are excerpts from one of the few papers to do so:
Family, Education, and Sources of Wealth Among the Richest Americans, 1982-2012 

Steven N. Kaplan
University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER

Joshua D. Rauh
Stanford University Graduate School of Business, NBER, and the Hoover Institution

Abstract
We examine characteristics of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the U.S. over the past three  decades as tabulated by Forbes Magazine, and analyze which theories of increasing inequality are most consistent with these data. The Forbes 400 in recent years did not grow up as advantaged as in decades past. They are more likely to have started their businesses and to have grown up upper-middle class, not wealthy. Today’s Forbes 400 were able to access education while young, and apply their skills to the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail. Most of the change occurred by 2001. ... We find that the Forbes 400 in recent years did not grow up as advantaged as in decades past. Those in the Forbes 400 today are less likely to have inherited their wealth or to have grown up wealthy. They are equally likely to have grown up with no wealth as in the 1980s The biggest change is that they are more likely to have started their businesses having grown up with some wealth, what we consider to be the equivalent of upper middle class. The Forbes 400 of today also are those who were able to access education while young and apply their skills to  the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail.

... We collected these lists approximately every ten years, in 1982, 1992, 2001, and 2011. ... 
The generation is usually an integer but if the individual inherited a relatively small business and built it into a much larger one we coded it as a 1.5, as for example David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries. ... 
We separately code the extent to which the individual grew up wealthy, defining three categories: little or no wealth in the family, some wealth in the family, or wealthy. For example, the Koch Brothers grew up wealthy. Bill Gates, whose father co-founded a successful law firm, grew up with some wealth, as did, for example, sons and daughters of U.S. Congressmen (Warren Buffet), factory owners (James Simons), newspaper publishers (Philip Knight), retail owners (Stephen Schwarzman), and psychiatrists (Dustin Moskovitz). We view the “some wealth” category as the equivalent of an upper middle class upbringing. ... 
The Forbes 400 represent $92 billion of wealth in 1982, $301 billion in 1992, $943  billion in 2001, and $1.525 trillion in 2011. In constant 2011 dollars, the wealth amounted to $214 billion in 1982, $483 billion in 1992, $1.197 trillion in 2001, and $1.525 trillion in 2011. ... 
Figure 1 shows that in the U.S., the share of Forbes 400 individuals who are the first generation in their family to run their businesses has risen dramatically from 40% in 1982 to 69% in 2011. Figure 2 illustrates that the percent that grew up wealthy fell from 60% to 32% while the percent that grew up with some money in the family rose by a similar amount. The share that grew up poor remained constant at roughly 20%. The Forbes 400 of recent years therefore did not grow up nearly as advantaged as those in decades past.

I'm going to raise the methodological quibble that their starting point of the first Forbes 400 in 1982 may have been overly biased toward famous Old Family Money names like Rockefeller and Ford. It would have been natural for the Forbes researchers to first check off all the scions whom readers would expect to find on the list, and then over the years find more obscure self-made men.

After all these years, the media is still stumbling upon zillionaires who haven't been in the public eye before because they keep a low profile and mind their own business (very, very well). For example, not until August 2013 did the press discover New Hampshire grocery wholesaler Richard B. Cohen, who may be about as rich as Mark Zuckerberg, but who hasn't had a hit movie made about his life, and probably doesn't feel an aching hole in his soul over that fact, either.

So, it's not all that unlikely that the very first Forbes 400 simply missed some self-made rich guys.

But, overall, there weren't all that many great fortunes made in the 1930-1982 era, so the descendants of the pre-1929 rich remained more significant among the richest than they are today. For example, the only sizable personal golf course I can recall being built in that time was Walter Annenberg's Sunnylands in Palm Springs that Obama now uses to meet foreign dignitaries.

By the way, this would predict that heirs will increasingly fill up the Forbes 400 in the future as the big money makers of the late 20th Century die off and leave their money to their descendants. Right now we're in a lull period when most of the guys who made it hugely rich in the last quarter of the 20th Century are still alive. But they'll be dying off in increasing numbers and being replaced by their heirs as time goes by. For example, the various Waltons take up a lot of space on the Forbes 400 ever since Sam Walton died in 1992, and there will be more such heirs on the list in the future.

In general, I think it's likely that more of the new fortunes today come out of the upper middle class than in the past, but it should be investigated carefully.
Those who grew up with some wealth in the family were far more likely to start their own businesses rather than inherit family businesses. Furthermore, these findings about generation and wealth in the family are very similar when the results are weighted by wealth. These results suggest that there has been an increase, not a decrease, in wealth mobility at the very top. ... 
As we show in Kaplan and Rauh (2013), some of these patterns are reflected globally but others are not. The share of global billionaires who are first-generation in the business rose by a similar amount abroad as in the US. The technology component has become more important globally, but nowhere has it become as important as in the US. Computer technology and money management are increasingly represented among billionaires globally, but the category that gained the most is mining/metals. Energy also saw substantial gains globally, whereas it fell in the US.

The 1982 Forbes 400 was full of J.R. Ewing-type oilmen, but many were gone by the mid-1980s, when the list was suddenly full of Donald Trump-types who had bought Manhattan office buildings in the 1970s. By picking only one year per decade, it's a little hard for the researchers to disentangle short term swings like that from the long-term trends (finance and tech uber alles).

This paper makes no mention of the ethnicity of the billionaires, but here's an estimate.
There is clearly a greater increase in wealth being derived from natural resources outside than within the U.S.  
Perhaps the most striking difference between the wealthiest individuals in the US and around the world is that the share of non-US billionaires who grew up without any wealth at all has risen from under 30% in 1987 to over 50% in 2012. The share that grew up with some but not large wealth has hovered around 20%, whereas the share that grew up wealthy plummeted.

A large fraction of these global billionaires grew up under communism (China, Russia, Ukraine) or socialism (India, etc.).
   

Pax Dickinson on World War G

From Twitter last summer:
at least if we end up getting into a nuclear standoff with Russia over gay rights we'll know this universe is just a satirical simulation 
— Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) July 31, 2013

"Technology's Man Problem" and H-1B

Yesterday I posted about the huge article, "Technology's Man Problem," in which the New York Times got itself pranked by a funny lady pornographer into taking seriously her complaints about how the white male nerd, Pax Dickinson, she had hired to build her sexting app was sexist.

The comments from NYT readers are depressingly obtuse, but here are a couple of interest:
JULIA Albuquerque 18 hours ago 
After 18 years in product engineering for a household name technology company, I took a buyout package during a recent force reduction. I am not planning to look for a pure engineering job, not because I do not love computer engineering, but because I am tired of not being valued for all of the things I bring to the table, both tech skills and soft skills. 
The elephant in the room that no one talks about is the difference in the way different ethnic cultures value (or don't value) women. While American mid-level managers occasionally needed to be reminded that women were part of the org too, most of the patronizing behavior and discounting of women's accomplishments came from Asian-born managers. (I did not observe this from American-born managers who were of Asian ethnicity.) They truly do not see that they are doing anything wrong. It is how they were raised. As companies go global, we have to have that piece of the conversation.
Flag79Recommended 
Margaret Atlanta 17 hours ago 
What I find is that increasingly the men in my office simply shut out the women - from socializing, work opportunities, recognition - the boys club effect is intensified when having to work with people from southern Asia. Sorry, but the men (and frequently the women) don't work well with American women - it is not in their upbringing and there are few ways to deal with this. I'm sure this will bring a host of complaints, but this is what I am experiencing and it is hard to see the sexism and racism on a daily basis.
Flag44Recommended 

Of course, nobody is connecting the dots to the H-1B visa program beloved by "immigration reform activists" like Mark Zuckerberg, which allows tech firms to hire foreign men instead of American women.
   

Books? "I already have one"

From the New York Times:
Books, and Compassion, From Birth

By GINIA BELLAFANTE 
Last year, when I was visiting a public school in Sunset Park in Brooklyn for teenagers with boundless difficulties, my host, a poet who teaches at various city schools, mentioned a student who had become pregnant. Hoping to start a library for the child soon to arrive, the poet told the young woman embarking on motherhood that she would like to give her some books — books of the kind her own grandchildren growing up in a very different Brooklyn had by the dozens. 
The offer was met skeptically. “I already have one,” the girl said.

That punchline sounds a little too good to be true, but I can't find evidence online that it's lifted from an old joke, so maybe it's for real.
The successful fight for universal prekindergarten in New York City, a feat the White House called remarkable last week, will allow the city to add 21,440 classroom seats for 4-year-olds this fall and 20,000 more in the fall of 2015, according to the Education Department. As ambitious and important as this initiative is, it cannot, by design, solve the problem of the high school student who thinks one book is enough, and does not yet understand the extent to which parents are obliged to serve as instructors and educators, expanding vocabularies through talking and reading — through exposition and illumination — long before the advent of formal schooling.
... we should concentrate our energies on helping the most vulnerable parents and children beginning at, or before, birth. 

How about 9 months and 1 day before birth, as in: Don't Get Pregnant!
Programs for 4-year-olds and even 3-year-olds, as Mr. Whitehurst put it, “come too late.” 

Indeed.
This is hardly a revelation, and yet there has been a squeamishness on the left to create sweeping policy out of the kind of intimate intervention implied, a fear of the judgment and condescension ferried in exporting the habits of West End Avenue to Central Brooklyn or the South Bronx. No one wants to live in a world in which social workers are marching through apartments mandating the use of colorful, laminated place mats emblazoned with pictures of tiny kangaroos and the periodic table. 

No, it's much better if the Central Brooklyn teenage mom drops her child off at Mayor De Blasio's pre-K and then heads home for a nap so she'll have the energy to hit the clubs again tonight to make another baby.