May 22, 2014

Nerd Lib and the popularity of Race-Does-Not-Exist

Perhaps the biggest social change after the famous ones of the 1960s and early 1970s has been what I call Nerd Lib. Our culture has become much more congenial toward and perhaps conducive to the Aspergerish style of mind than when I was young. 

This has happened with little in the way of political attention or leadership. Like lefthandedness, it's not the kind of identity that current identity politics work well with. On the other hand, it's cultural influence is unmistakable.

It finally dawned on me while reading hundreds of extremely confident Internet commenters explain that Nicholas Wade can't possibly know anything about science because science proves that race-does-not-exist, that this dogma of recent decades is tied into the rise of the nerds who deal well with rigid categories but don't deal well with human complexity. 
   

May 21, 2014

Annual drowning PSA

I've known a couple of young men who have drowned, so this time of year I like to cite a good article in Slate on how often people drown in plain sight of potential rescuers who don't realize what is happening: 
The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs. ... Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

From a new report mentioned in the NYT:
... blacks ages 5 to 19 were 5.5 times more likely to drown in pools than whites the same age. The study is limited by a lack of data on who swims where — for example, if blacks have less access to swimming pools or choose not to use them, their rates of drowning may be even higher than the report indicates. 

Motel swimming pools are extremely dangerous for blacks. Black males tend to have lower percentage body fat and denser bones and thus tend to float poorly or not at all. You can definitely learn to swim if you don't float but it's less fun than if you do float. Black girls often have have complicated hair treatments that make them averse to taking swimming lessons. But black parents need to overcome all their children's reasons not to learn to swim and make sure their kids learn.
    

Being Julian Castro pays okay, not great

Byron York in the Washington Examiner goes deeper into Julian Castro story.

The problem with Castro as a subject to write about is that he's kind of a dull Obama-like figure who has been polished to be a figurehead. In the hands of a master of malice like Zev Chafets, Castro is a pretty funny story, but you pretty much have to be an iSteve reader to get the joke.
If chosen for HUD, Julian Castro's work, big payday could face scrutiny 
BY BYRON YORK | MAY 18, 2014 | 12:00 AM  
San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro is widely referred to as a "rising star" in Democratic politics. There's even talk the Mexican-American Castro could earn the vice-presidential spot on the 2016 Democratic ticket in an effort to further strengthen the party's bonds with Hispanic voters. And now, it appears Castro's national profile is about to rise with word that President Obama plans to nominate him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 
If Castro is tapped for the job, his Senate confirmation hearings will likely shine a spotlight both on his role in San Antonio's government and his way of making a living. 
San Antonio, the second-largest city in Texas and seventh-largest in the nation, has a council-manager-weak mayor form of government. The manager runs the city.  
The office of mayor carries with it no executive authority. ... "The mayor's job pays $20 a meeting plus a one-time $2,000 fee, so I basically make $4,000 a year," Castro told San Antonio television station KENS last year. 
So how does Castro, 39 years old, with a wife and a child, make a living? First, his wife, Erica, an elementary school teacher, makes about $55,000 a year. But lately, it appears Castro's real livelihood comes from being Julian Castro -- making speeches, surfing on his fame after a well-received keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and writing a book about himself. 
San Antonio Express-News columnist Brian Chasnoff recently reported that Castro made more than $200,000 in 2013. The bulk of that, Chasnoff noted, was a $127,500 advance for the memoir that Castro is writing.

In contrast, after Obama gave the same speech at the Democratic convention eight years before, he received a $1.9 million advance for what became The Audacity of Hope. In general, blacks are just a lot more interesting to the white reading public than Mexicans are.
More came from the speaking fees that were a product of Castro's post-convention visibility: $12,750 for one speech, $16,250 for another, $8,500 for another, and so on.

These are not particularly large amounts of money -- Castromania appears to be a long ways from liftoff. (It also doesn't help that Castro doesn't speak much Spanish, so that market is out.)
That's how Castro supports himself and his family now. But the seed money for Castro's time in the mayor's office -- he was first elected in 2009 -- was a controversial seven-figure "referral fee" that Castro, a Harvard-educated lawyer, received from a well-connected trial lawyer and Democratic donor in a personal injury lawsuit in which Castro may or may not have played a major role. 
The case stemmed from a 2006 drunk driving accident in which three people were killed. ... One of the victims, a man who lost his mother, wife, and son in the crash, knew Castro and chose Castro's small firm to represent him in a suit against the oilfield services company. Castro then referred the case to a much larger firm, headed by Mikal Watts, a prominent personal injury lawyer and Democratic contributor. Watts won the case, and a big award, and Castro was paid a seven-figure "referral fee" for bringing the suit to Watts' firm. ... 

Julian's identical twin Joaquin shared in the tip.

Watts is a Texas-sized contingency fee lawyer. A cornerback named Mikal Watts would be black, but a major Democratic donor named Mikal Watts is white.

So, basically, the Castro Twins are the creation of the Bob Odenkirk-like Mikal Watts.
Castro's lawsuit payday has attracted some scrutiny. In 2009, the Express-News ran a piece (not available on the Web) headlined, "Whispers about Castro's referral of case grow louder." But Castro has remained mostly silent about the financial details of the matter. Still, the bottom line is that it appears the referral fee and Castro's connection to Watts are major parts of the foundation of Castro's political career so far. If Castro is nominated to be HUD secretary, the senators charged with his confirmation will undoubtedly want to know more about them.

I'm sure York is better plugged in to what Republican Senators are planning than I am. Generally speaking, though, whatever questions I think would be interesting to ask never get asked. 

For example, I thought it was fascinating that Obama nominated Israeli government official Stanley Fischer to be the deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Fischer had been seen as loyal enough to Israel to run Israel's monetary policy in 2005 by prime minister Ariel Sharon and finance minister Bibi Netanyahu (Fischer became a citizen of Israel in 2005), so I thought maybe Fischer's switching teams would be of some interest to United States senators, but I can't find any online reference to whether that subject ever came up during Fischer's March 13 hearing in front of the Senate Banking Committee. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Harrah's Cherokee Casino) voted to confirm him, but did make a good point in Politico:
The Citigroup Clique 
Why is Obama appointing so many former employees of one Wall St. bank? 
By SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN April 29, 2014 
Today, I cast my vote on the Senate Banking Committee for Stanley Fischer to serve in the No. 2 position at the U.S. Federal Reserve. I asked Fischer tough questions – in person, at his nomination hearing, and in writing – and I have been impressed with the depth of his knowledge and experience. 
But I cast my vote reluctantly because of my growing frustration over the concentration of people with ties to the megabank Citigroup in senior government positions. 
In recent years, Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citi has risen above the others in exercising a tight grip over the Democratic Party’s economic policymaking apparatus. Fischer, after all, is just the latest Citi alumnus to be tapped for a high-level government position. Starting with Robert Rubin – a former Citi CEO – three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents have had Citigroup affiliations before or after their Treasury service. (The fourth [Timothy Geithner] was offered, but declined, Citigroup’s CEO position.) Directors of the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget, as well as our current U.S. trade representative, also have had strong ties to Citigroup.

So, while I would like to ask Castro some embarrassing questions, my guess is that he will sail through untouched because he's exactly the type of smooth nonentity whom the Important People are looking for to surf the Hispanic Tidal Wave for them.
    

The benefits of reciprocity

From Ira Glass's This American Life on NPR, an African-American expatriate living in Paris recalls an early lesson learned in France:
Janet Mcdonald says:
I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let's jump the line. These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I'm black. That usually works in New York. 
These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn't believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there. You can't just walk to the front of the line. They were, like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people, and they're not scared of us? 
That's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating, because you know, we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these French bitches in high heels were threatening us. And they were in our faces. And it made me realize that the whole black-white game just doesn't work outside of the United States. 
Because white people aren't afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don't hate you, because that sort of goes together. So I'll take it. I'll wait on line. Now I don't dare jump lines. So that opened my eyes.
     

Newark passes stronger rent control law

Novelist Philip Roth grew up in Newark and has set what seems like a few dozen of his novels there. Since it's only 11 miles from Manhattan, I'd hardly be surprised if it gentrifies and some of his great-grandchildren (assuming he has any) wind up in Newark. 

Of course, Newark's African-American majority aren't in much hurry for that to happen. From NJ.com:
Newark city council passes new rent control ordinance
by Naomi Nix /The Star-Ledger  
NEWARK — The Newark city council passed tonight a new ordinance that will make it harder for landlords to raise the rents of tenants in rent-controlled properties. 
Under the old rules, landlords of rent-controlled buildings could raise rents annually by 5 percent if the building had 49 units or less and by 4 percent if the building had more than 49 units. 
The new ordinance caps the annual rent increases to the the Consumer Price Index in New Jersey.

I.e., not much.

I had a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica in 1981-82 while I was getting my MBA at UCLA. The landlady invested not one thin dime in maintenance during my 20 months there.

Rent control did not prove as disastrous to Santa Monica, however, as my libertarian econ professor predicted. (I offered some theories why here.) But the demographics of Santa Monica in 1981 were maybe 80% white and 10% Asian, where as Newark in 2010 was 26.3% white and 1.6% Asian.
    

Indian election: Nationalist tide is global

The victory in the Indian elections of Modi's Hindu nationalist right wing party is another reminder that, strange as it may seem to consumers of the American press, conservative nationalism is the leading political trend of the 2010s. The DC/NYC globalist view, which has been become even more dominant now that the Commander-in-Chief is Barack Obama, is that there aren't really any independent countries out there, just rebellious provinces. *

The important thing is for nationalists to not squabble with each other across borders, like the unfortunate events of 100 years ago.

----------------
* Lifted from the comments of a couple of months ago.
     

New Statesman: Thinking Jews good at capitalism is racism, thinking Finns violent when drunk is science

From the New Statesman:
“Jews are adapted to capitalism”, and other nonsenses of the new scientific racism 
Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance argues that the genetic differences between racial groups explain why the West is rich and Africa is poor - but beneath the new science lies an old, dangerous lie.

BY IAN STEADMAN PUBLISHED 20 MAY, 2014 - 11:34

Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance - a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic “adaptation to capitalism” - is racist,  it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. 
Viewers of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics on 10 August would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes ...

Spot the problem? Congratulations - you’re better at this than Nicholas Wade, former deputy editor of Nature, writer for the New York Times and Washington Post, pop-sci author and pusher of the hypothesis that: a) there is a biological basis for race, and b) racial differences explain cultural and societal differences. 
In this, he is partly correct - at least, in the way he defines “race” - but in oh-so-very-many other ways he is not. Frankly, it may well be that A Troublesome Inheritance is most useful as an illustration of the gap between the popular understanding of racism and the reality of how it operates. Wade very clearly does not consider himself, or his conclusions, to be racist, writing that "no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race". Yet this book is ultimately racist, because it does exactly that. 

Of course, at the 2012 Olympics, black men achieved all 8 spots in the 100m final for the 8th straight Olympics, but who is counting?
This is most obvious during the (numerous) sections of the book where Wade uses language that can best be described as “unfortunate”. We are told that, as a consequence of genetic analysis, “an individual can be assigned with high confidence to the appropriate continent of origin”. Furthermore, it is “perfectly reasonable” to classify all humans into one of five “continental based races”, while “classification into the three main races of African, East Asian and European is supported by the physical anthropology of human skull types and dentition”. ...

Then there’s the money shot: 
"Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.” 
And lest you be in any doubt that this isn’t a political tract disguised as science writing, Wade believes that the current scientific consensus is “shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma”. (Plus, he’s been given the cover feature in this week’s Spectator to argue his position, which is always a science writing red flag.) 
A Troublesome Inheritance begins with a history of Darwin and the theory of evolution, an overview of how natural selection works, and an explanation of how eugenics was the “perversion” of  Darwinism (including a shout out for New Statesman founders and eugenics fans Sidney and Beatrice Webb - always appreciated). As an opening, it comes across as an attempt to make clear that this new, scientific conception of race isn’t the same, but it’s a bit like saying Father Christmas and your dad aren’t the same person. They both get to screw your mother. 
Wade is keen to argue that humans, like all animals, are subject to evolutionary pressures, and that this evolution continues to happen. There are discussions of studies showing how different human populations carry certain genes more than others (for example, Finns disproportionately carry the HTR2B gene, linked with a tendency towards violent behaviour when drunk), but between the science there are bizarre asides where he attacks those he perceives as suppressing these findings - like Marxists, “who wish government to mold socialist man in its desired image and [who] see genetics as an impediment to the power of the state”. (These statements are not given citations.)
     

Race v. ethnicity among Hispanics

I've long argued that if you want to make coherent logical sense of the U.S. government's distinction between race and ethnicity, then: 

- A racial group is a partly inbred biological extended family

- While an ethnic group is united by some or all of the nonbiological traits usually found among extended families but that aren't necessarily biological, such as shared language, religion, cuisine, heroes, customs, and so forth.

The most obvious example for thinking about this involves adoption: An adoptee might be racially Korean but also be ethnically white Minnesotan Lutheran or whatever. 

From the NYT's Upshot:
More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White
Nate Cohn

Hispanics are often described as driving up the nonwhite share of the population. But a new study of census forms finds that more Hispanics are identifying as white. 
An estimated net 1.2 million Americans of the 35 million Americans identified in 2000 as of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,” as the census form puts it, changed their race from “some other race” to “white” between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, according to research presented at an annual meeting of the Population Association of America and reported by Pew Research. 

All over the world, in both Latin America and India, people want to be seen as fairer, going so far as to painfully bleach their skin (e.g., Sammy Sosa). In America, however, the government, academia, and media offer incentives for these folks to identify strongly as nonwhite. However, that bangs up against their distaste for African-Americans.
The researchers, who have not yet published their findings, compared individual census forms from the 2000 and 2010 censuses. They found that millions of Americans answered the census questions about race and ethnicity differently in 2000 and 2010. The largest shifts were among Americans of Hispanic origin, who are the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group by total numbers. 
Race is an immutable characteristic for many white, black and Asian-Americans. 
It is less clear for Americans of Hispanic origin. The census form asks two questions about race and ethnicity: one about whether individuals are of Hispanic or Latino origin, and another about race. “Hispanics” do not constitute a race, according to the census, and so 37 percent of Hispanics, presumably dissatisfied with options like “white” or “black,” selected “some other race.” 
The researchers found that 2.5 million Americans of Hispanic origin, or approximately 7 percent of the 35 million Americans of Hispanic origin in 2000, changed their race from “some other race” in 2000 to “white” in 2010. An additional 1.3 million people switched in the other direction. A noteworthy but unspecified share of the change came from children who weren’t old enough to fill out a form in 2000, but chose for themselves in 2010. 
The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white.

Which is why Italians and Irish we're constantly being sold into slavery.

But, like I've said, while the media denounce the GOP for being the White Party and thus a party that Hispanics and Asians would naturally be allergic to, the Democrats ought to fear being identified in the minds of Hispanics and Asians as the Black Party. Where the rubber hits the road, most Hispanics and Asians would rather ally with self-confident whites than with blacks, which is why the confidence of whites is under constant assault for all manner of racial high crimes and misdemeanors.

(The Republicans can help along the process of the Dems being considered the Black Party. The Dems win with Hispanics and Asians when the election is framed as the Evil White Party v. the Cool Multi-Party. The Repubs win with Hispanics and Asians when the election is framed as the Responsible Adult Party v. the Dysfunctional Corrupt Black Party.)
It is particularly significant that the shift toward white identification withstood a decade of debate over immigration and the country’s exploding Hispanic population, which might have been expected to inculcate or reinforce a sense of Hispanic identity, or draw attention to divisions that remain between Hispanics and non-Hispanic white Americans. Research suggests that Hispanics who have experienced discrimination are less likely to identify as white. 
The data also call into question whether America is destined to become a so-called minority-majority nation, where whites represent a minority of the nation’s population. Those projections assume that Hispanics aren’t white, but if Hispanics ultimately identify as white Americans, then whites will remain the majority for the foreseeable future.

Of course, as the government offers money and prizes to Hispanics and Asians for identifying as non-white, it's hard to bet against their leaders insisting on being victims of the Evil White Man.
White identification is not necessarily a sign that Hispanics consider themselves white. Many or even most might identify their race as “Hispanic” if it were an explicit option.

The American government doesn't offer useful Latin American racial categories such as mestizo, mulatto, and pardo, so they tend to fill out the race and ethnicity forms in a hit or miss fashion.
... There is mounting evidence that Hispanics are succeeding in American society at a pace similar to that of prior waves of European immigrants.

As long as we ignore the economic collapse of the popping of the Mortgage Bubble.
   

May 20, 2014

NYT: "The Great White Hope"

Tom Edsall writes in the NYT:
The Great White Hope 
MAY 20, 2014 
Three unlikely sources are providing qualified encouragement to Republicans who are either openly or covertly committed to a campaign strategy that focuses on white turnout, as opposed to seeking votes from Hispanics and African Americans. 
The first source of this qualified encouragement is an academic study — “More Diverse Yet Less Tolerant?” — that explores what happens to racial and ethnic attitudes when you present white voters with census findings that show that whites will be in the minority in the United States by 2042.
The second source is a related study by the same authors — “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America” — that explores how the “salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans’ political-party leanings and expressed political ideology.” 
The third source is a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit think tank. The survey measured the percentage of whites who are “bothered” by the “idea of” an “America where most of the people are not white.” 
These studies present a challenge to those who have declared that the Republican Party must move away from the “white strategy” – formerly known as the “Southern Strategy.” That strategy has been the de facto Republican approach to elections since the mid-1960s. It was initially very successful, but over the past decade it has only been effective in low-turnout, midterm elections. 
Now, partly in response to the Obama victories of 2008 and 2012, Resurgent Republic, a Republican organization that includes a segment of the party establishment and some of the party’s Bush-era elder statesmen, denounced the “white strategy” as “the route to political irrelevance in national elections. Mitt Romney won a landslide among white voters, defeating Barack Obama by 59 to 39 percent. In the process he won every large segment of white voters, often by double-digit margins: white men, white women, white Catholics, white Protestants, white old people, white young people. Yet that was not enough to craft a national majority. Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters. For the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. Trying to win a national election by gaining a larger and larger share of a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate is a losing political proposition.” 
Maureen A. Craig, a doctoral candidate, and Jennifer A. Richeson, a professor of psychology, both at Northwestern, have written two papers that ask questions that are relevant to this internal party debate. The authors do not endorse such tactics but their work suggests that there are in fact ways to intensify white suspicion of and hostility toward minorities and immigrants. These tactics offer the potential to shift voters to the right, into the Republican column. 
For their first paper, Craig and Richeson conducted a series of experiments that tested how whites respond to census data projecting that minorities will become the majority in the United States by 2042. 
What did they uncover? That “exposure to the changing demographics evokes the expression of greater explicit and implicit racial bias.” One group of respondents was shown evidence of the demographic trends and another was not. Those who saw the evidence “expressed more negative attitudes toward Latinos, Blacks, and Asian-Americans” than participants who were not shown the evidence. The authors concluded that “rather than ushering in a more tolerant future, the increasing diversity of the nation may instead yield intergroup hostility.”

Really? It's almost as if the problem is diversity in general, not the unique evilosity of straight white men.
Craig and Richeson’s second study, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America,” published last month, is even more directly relevant to the strategic choices facing Republicans. The authors found that whites – whether they called themselves liberals, centrists or conservatives — all moved to the right when exposed to the information about the approaching minority status of whites. This “suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide,” Craig and Richeson write. 
These findings led the two authors to observe that the future of the contemporary Republican Party may not be as bleak as some say. “Whites may be increasingly likely and motivated to support conservative candidates and policies in response to the changing racial demographics,” they write. “These results suggest that presumptions of the decline of the Republican Party due to the very same changing racial demographics may be premature.” 
Responding to my emailed questions, Craig wrote, “Overall, making this racial shift salient could bring more moderate White Americans into the Republican Party, as well as increase turnout among White Americans who already consider themselves Republicans. “

Like I've been saying for going on a decade and a half, if you prefer the politics of New Hampshire to the politics of Mississippi or Chicago or Bell, CA, then you should prefer the demographics of New Hampshire.

They are a package deal.
 

Rihanna: "“I Was Bullied At School For Being White”

Speaking of the Barbadian-American attorney general Eric Holder ... from the Barbados Free Press, 12/19/07:
The Ugly Secret Of Barbados Revealed Worldwide: Rihanna “I Was Bullied At School For Being White” 
The hidden secret of Barbados has just been splashed all over the world as the most popular music star on the planet says in a new media interview that she was bullied in school for being “white”. (ShowBiz Spy: Rihanna says she was bullied at school – for being ‘white’)
This might be the best thing that ever happened to those of us on this island who have shades of skin that are “not dark enough” – because it will focus world attention on that dirty little Bajan secret that we all live with: a virulent new strain of racism is alive and well in Barbados and it is being nurtured by our own government to serve a partisan agenda. 
Racism raises its head in schools, when applying for a government job, when shopping for groceries. And especially in politics. 
Racial division is encouraged by a Barbados political elite that regularly dismisses valid criticism on the basis that the opponent’s skin is not dark enough. Bajans with lighter skin colours are often given as a reason for failure – be it personal failure or failure of government projects – much like the Russian Communists would attribute production shortfalls to “wreckers”. 
Oh yes, the “whites” and “asians” are the cause of all trouble on this island of mongrels. 
Bajans who have never traveled abroad are almost always surprised that persons considered “white” on Barbados are considered “black” in North America or Europe! 
Who among us is of “pure” racial stock? We are truly an island of mongrels.

A college roommate of one of my sons said, "Here in America, everybody calls me black, while back home in Jamaica, everybody calls me white."

I discussed the West Indian middle class marriage system that produced Rihanna and Holder in my review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
      

Reparations, amnesty, Brendan Eich


From The New Republic:
The Atlantic's Case for Slavery Reparations
By Isaac Chotiner
Ta-Nehisi Coates's long cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic is about reparations for slavery. Indeed, the piece is titled 'The Case For Reparations.' (It isn't online yet.) The story has been buzzed about for a while now, and while I recommend that everyone get their hands on the essay and read it at once, Coates's argument shouldn't be too controversial. But it will be—which is another sign of the sorry state of racial discourse in America.  
Coates was wise to focus the essay less on the evils of slavery and more on the systemic and institutional ways in which African-Americans have been beaten down, discriminated against, and terrorized over the past 150 years. Rather than being left to their own devices—something America prides itself on doing for its citizens—blacks were forcefully kept down by government and private institutions, federal laws and private banks. (The piece closes with Bank of America's recent behavior.) It is a powerful argument with some superb storytelling. 
But prescriptively? Here is Coates, with some big ideas that really shouldn't sound all that earth-shattering: 
What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payout, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. 
Coates adds that he believes "wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced," and says he supports a John Conyers bill that would merely call for a "Congressional study of slavery" and make recommendations for "appropriate remedies."
The fact that such measures will no doubt prove to be controversial is what makes this subject so depressing.

Obviously, paying out big cash reparations would, as Dave Chappelle observed, drive up in the short run the price of Cadillacs and cocaine with few long term benefits, which is why so many black intellectuals over the years who have argued for reparations eventually get around to saying that, well, of course reparations shouldn't be mailed out in checks to black individuals, they should instead be given to black foundations run by black intellectuals like me.

If we spent $4 trillion giving $100,000 to every black person in America, blacks would still do badly a generation later on fire department hiring exams and all the rest. So, nothing would change about the status of blacks, nor about their complaints about invisible racism.

But Coates' argument is an important one: the point of reparations is not just the money, but also "a revolution of American consciousness," i.e., a permanent delegitimization of dissent, present and past, from the racial ideological conventional wisdom as embodied by T-N Coates. Let the Brendan Eich-style firings begin!

As we saw, as long as gay marriage was losing over and over in referendums, some degree of ideological pluralism had to be pro forma allowed. But once the Supreme Court ruled, persecution of past pluralists seemed natural.

We need to understand that an amnesty for illegal immigrants would be used in exactly the same way: as signifying the end of any need for even the most pro forma tolerance of dissent on immigration policy. Let the firings begin!

There were a lot of things Orwell didn't understand, but he did grasp the essential appeal of being an ideologue on the winning side:
But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
            

May 19, 2014

Eric Holder isn't black: just ask his mom

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to talk about race some more.

It's quite interesting how Americans find Eric Holder's ancestry invisible to them. Most of Eric Holder ancestors weren't black. His recent ancestors were middle class mulattos in Barbados who carefully avoided marriage to blacks. (See the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" for a description of how people who look like Gladwell and Holder were bred.) Holder grew up in a middle class West Indian enclave in NYC that tried (and in Holder's case succeeded) keeping out black American influence.
   

Newark's new mayor

A key number for understanding the election as mayor of Newark of black nationalist Ras Baraka (son of Sixties poet Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka) over Cory Booker's well-funded designated successor is 10.9. That's the number of miles from downtown Newark to Wall Street. Another number is 18: that's the number of minutes from Newark's Penn Station to New York's Penn Station.

In an age of gentrification, electing a hostile mayor like Baraka is intended to scare off potential gentrifiers.
     

Do Hume and Smith prove Wade wrong?

Hume and Smith
H. Allen Orr writes in the New York Review of Books in a characteristic review of about how the first half of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance is all very fine -- I mean, of course, race is biologically real, but who doesn't already believe that? -- while all this Gregory Clark stuff from the second half of the book is all wrong.
Conversely, it’s hard to see why profound instability in social institutions doesn’t trouble Wade more. He’s much taken, for instance, with the difference between tribal and modern societies, but one of the most tribal peoples on the planet, the Scots with their clans, are now identified with some of the most modern of ideas and attitudes. Were David Hume and Adam Smith precocious carriers of a mutation that swept Edinburgh? 

Like I said, figuring out the engines of history is the big leagues of erudition and nobody is all that good at it yet. It's easy for anybody to trip up. Wade does in places, as does Orr here in trying to score what he thinks is a slam dunk on Wade: Hume and Smith!

Of course, the Scottish Enlightenment was a product of the Lowland Scots, who had been settled English speakers for a long, long time. Orr is getting them confused with the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scot clans. As Thomas Babington Macaulay vividly pointed out in his 1855 History of England, his Highlander ancestors tended to be more or less barbarians into the 18th Century. Now Macaulay might be a better example of what Orr is groping for (but then that would be derided as Whig History.)
Similarly, consider the immense institutional differences that distinguish North and South Korea, ones that appeared only decades ago. The people who live north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel have very similar genes, so why do their social institutions differ so dramatically?

That's not really a tough question. From my careful study of history (mostly watching Team America: World Police), I've deduced that there appears to be this Kim family ruling North Korea.

C'mon, North and South Korea have been the go-to libertarian example for at least three decades. Can we come up with some newer ones? Also, as North Korea gears up for a fourth nuclear bomb test, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to insult their intelligence.
     

Wade in "The Spectator"

Nicholas Wade has an excerpt from A Troublesome Inheritance in The Spectator.

I'll reiterate my view that it's fruitful to think of this as a British v. American dust-up. The British competition-based paradigm (Adam Smith, Darwin, etc.) was fairly dominant in the natural and human sciences and in associated intellectual spheres from the 19th Century to the stock market crash of 1929. 

But after 1929, businessmen couldn't afford to fund intellectuals anymore, so the prestige of competition-based thinking plummeted. Only governments could pay for scholars in the mid 20th Century, so intellectuals in the 1930s quickly generated lots of rationales for why competition was bogus, as proven by all those busted businessmen who can't ante up for universities anymore, and central planning by the government was ideal both in practice and theory. One side effect was the collapse in prestige of the Galtonian tradition and the rise to dominance of the Boasian.

Here's something that's hard to keep in mind simultaneously: both Galton and Boas were pretty good guys. They both made contributions. When one's worldview like Galton's was riding a little too high, like Galton's was early in the 20th Century, the other served as a corrective. They still do.

 The Boasian worldview became too dominant later on in the 20th Century, in part because America became so rich and powerful compared to Britain. But both nature and nurture are important.

But the subtext to a lot of this struggle is a fairly adolescent struggle for turf dominance over the past. When you look at the combatants, it's pretty obvious that the breakdowns tend to be British v. American, WASP v. Jewish, and country boy v. city boy. There are many exceptions (e.g., Robert Trivers), but the natural biases are hardly invisible.
    

May 18, 2014

Nicholas Wade and Creativity v. Intelligence

Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance tries to sidestep the controversial subject of intelligence and focus more upon creativity. Clearly, most of the creativity in the world in recent centuries has come out of the west.

To some extent this is an optical illusion because we have the individual names of almost all Western artists and scientists since maybe 1500. Since we don't have the names of many of the artists involved in Gothic Cathedrals in the Middle Ages, it's easy for pundits to overlook them. Similarly, we only have a vague notion of who was chief architect of the Shah Jahan's Taj Mahal in the 17th Century.

But, most of the rest of the world was indeed stultifying after 1500, with Japan as an exception that was making steady progress.

The problem with creativity, is that we feel that we know it when we see it, but it's hard to quantify in the present, much less predict in the future. IQ has been studied intensively for a century, and we now know that it not only works pretty well in the present but as a predictor of future developments (e.g., Ian Deary's recent work tracking down surviving Scots who took a national IQ tests as 11-year-olds in 1932). And it seems to be fairly heritable, which probably is the chief reason we relatively few radical changes over time in national average IQs.

Creativity remains somewhat difficult to measure in the present and notably hard to predict in the future, with various national golden ages of this or that happening regularly.

Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment art and science creativity metrics work reasonably well in hindsight, leaving a half-century lag. Yes, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Wagner were creative. No question about it. 

But looking forward, it's hard to say. If you asked me on the way to the screening of The Matrix Reloaded if the Wachowski Brothers were the most creative filmmaker of our time, I probably would have said yes. On the way home, maybe not.

And what really matters isn't the judgment of critics like me, but of future creative artists. All the 19th Century composers were enthralled by or rebelled against Beethoven. It's the impact of Ludwig van upon  Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, and Debussy that matters. And it's hard to predict what creative and thus surprising artists of the future will be influenced by.

Likewise, the bigness of the tent of "creativity" -- Michelangelo and Shakespeare, but also Newton and Einstein, and Ford and Wozniak, well, that's a big tent.

So, because the most creative is the most unexpected, I've usually been less eager to opinionize about the future of creativity than of intelligence. Of course, it's because scientists know more about intelligence than creativity that we aren't supposed to talk about differences in IQ.
    

A question about tattoos

The logic behind men getting tattoos seems pretty clearcut: this is who I am for life! USMC, Thug-4-Life, whatever, and the harder the location is to cover up with clothes the better. But, women generally want to follow fashions, which, by definition, change rapidly. So, what is the feminine logic, if any, behind getting tattooed? 

My wife recently talked a lovely young waitress on Lankershim Blvd. out of getting a gigantic tattoo (the young newcomer to SoCal explained that "I feel like my body is a blank canvas") on the grounds that she doesn't need to be creative because she can create a baby. 

But that leads to the question what's the purpose of tattoos for women who wouldn't wear the same shoes for six months? Is it too signal to the kind of guys she likes (e.g., drummers) that you are the type of guy I like? But what if after another year here she decides that while she liked drummers back in South Dakota, now she likes producers and agents? Tattoos are class markers, and might work against attractive young women rising in class by marrying well.

Is getting tattoos something guys suggest to discourage hypergamy? Or is it something that other women suggest out of the usual feminine malice?
  

May 17, 2014

"Who Gets to Graduate?"

Paul Tough in the New York Times has a long article "Who Gets to Graduate" on the high college dropout rate of working class kids, focusing on some black girl from a mediocre Dallas area high school who gets into desirable U. of Texas at Austin, the state flagship school, despite being down around the 10th percentile among freshmen:
Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.

The 25th percentile at UT Austin on the ACT is 25 and the 75th percentile is 31. I believe 30 is at the 95th percentile among takers of the ACT, so maybe 97th among the overall population. There are a lot of smart kids at UT Austin.

She got in, barely, under George W. Bush's plan to admit the top X percent of Texas high schools' graduating classes, even though 3.5 isn't very good these days.

Not surprisingly, like many freshmen, she struggled. Traditionally, state flagship universities are harder to graduate from than more prestigious private colleges because they spend less per student and don't feel a commitment to parents to deliver a degree in return for a huge amount of tuition.

After Sputnik, America focused on finding and educating the highest potential students. And 12 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. But then came other priorities like civil rights. 

The solution touted in the article is for famous public universities to give low test score students much more handholding, such as improving the teacher to student ratio in a special chemistry class for low test score students by 10 to 1.

But, the article makes clear, it's absolutely essential that nobody on campuses notices that there are all these special courses for the not so bright because that would ruin their self-esteem and then the magic would vanish. Or something. 

It's the perfect anti-falsification trick. Didn't work? That's because white students noticed! Karl Popper is spinning in his grave.
  
Anyway, I'm gearing up for the first iSteve fundraiser to launch in this year, finally, so I've tried to upgrade my Panhandling technology at top right of the blog. I think the links all work now, with lots of new options for sending me money. I'd like to do a soft opening among those of you who have been itching to send me money but have been rightfully frustrated by the various payment systems recurrently getting shot out from underneath me. So, if you wouldn't mind playing guinea pig, please give it a try. Thanks. That would be a huge help for seeing if all these news systems really work.

Over the years, I've gotten Paypal, Amazon, and WePay shot out from under me. But I'm not ecstatic about asking you to entrust obscure firms with money. So, I've added Google, Wells Fargo, and Chase.

Update: Okay, a reader has successfully sent me a donation via Google Wallet. So, that works and you won't be stuck trying something that doesn't work.