December 18, 2005

"Forget it, Jake, it's Iraqtown"

Mickey Kaus asks,


"Why does [Juan] Cole assume that Iraqi parliamentarians are irrational?"


Well, perhaps because other Arabs like to tell jokes about the self-destructive homicidal irrationality of Iraqis. Here's one from Richard Grenier's novel The Marrakesh One-Two (a wonderful picaresque about a Hollywood movie crew making a film similar to the late Moustapha Akkad's "Muhammad, Messenger of God" as they go from one terrible country in the Muslim world to another in the 1970s, looking for funding, but always trying to avoid ending up in Iraq):

A scorpion wants to cross the Euphrates but he can't swim. So, he asks a frog to carry him across.

The frog replies, "But you'll sting me with your paralyzing venom and then I'll drown."

The scorpion replies, "But then I'd drown too, so obviously I wouldn't do it."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. Okay, hop on."

They get to the deepest part of the Euphrates, where the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog freezes up, he croaks out, "But we'll both drown! Why did you do it?"

The scorpion replies just before he sinks, "Because it's Iraq."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Was Gaelic society like Africa?

In response to a study showing that 20% of the men in Northwestern Ireland are in the direct male line of descent from the Neill dynasty, a reader writes:

Interesting tip on the Y-chromosome study in NW Ireland. I look forward to reading it. I'll paraphrase from Kenneth Nicholls' Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages, published in 1972:

Gaelic Society was clan based down to the 17th century, when the Irish scholar and genealogist Dualtagh Mac Firbisigh wrote "as the sons and families of the rulers multiplied, so their subjects and followers were squeezed out and withered away." Such expansion of the ruling stock has been a normal feature of the modern Basotho in South Africa where "there is a constant displacement of commoners by royals [i.e., members of the royal clan] and of collateral royals by the direct descendants of the ruling prince." This same phenomena took place in every Gaelic lordship of the early modern era.

Turlough O Donnel, lord of Tirconnell, modern county Donegal in the far North West, (died 1423) had eighteen sons by ten different women, and fifty-nine grandsons in the male line. A little further south, in East Befny (Co. Cavan), Mulmora O Reilly (died 1566) had at least fifty-eight grandsons. Pilib Maguire (died 1395), lord of Fermanagh, had twenty sons by eight mothers, and fifty known grandsons. Irish law drew no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate in matters of inheritance and the rates of multiplication approached that permitted by the polygamy practiced in the Southern African clan societies already mentioned.

All of this is applicable to the contiguous and largely identical society of the Gaelic Highlands and Islands of Scotland, which formed a single cultural province with the Gaelic north and west of Ireland.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 17, 2005

The decline of the black quarterback?

"Four Vikings Charged in Boat Incident" -- No, it's not a headline from the Northumbrian Times of 860 A.D., but another incident in a big story from the NFL in 2005 that you won't hear elsewhere: the decline of the black quarterback. After years of sportswriters demanding more black quarterbacks, the mediocre performance of black quarterbacks this year, with only Byron Leftwich and Michael Vick having effective seasons, is not exactly Topic A to sportswriters.

Black quarterbacks, with their superior running ability, have added some valuable excitement to the league, but the current NFL game is dominated by passing. Here are the seven black quarterbacks' passer rating ranks so far this season (the passer rating synthesizes yards per attempt, completion percentage, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage):

12 Byron Leftwich JAC
14 Donovan McNabb PHI
16 Steve McNair TEN
22 Michael Vick ATL
25 Daunte Culpepper MIN
26 Anthony Wright BAL
28 Aaron Brooks NO

Leftwich of Jacksonville has the highest passer among the seven main black quarterbacks, ranking #12 in the league. Vick is only the #22 passer, but he remains a dangerous runner, although not as spectacular as last season when he gained 902 yards with a 7.5 yards per carry average. Other than Vick, none of the black quarterbacks are running well enough to make up for their mediocre passing. The tough veteran McNair has done another admirable job coming back from injuries big and small. Brooks of New Orleans had his city wash away. Wright is just a stopgap. Seven quarterbacks for one season is too small a sample size to draw conclusions, but this year's performance does raise questions that aren't being addressed elsewhere.

Minnesota Viking Daunte Culpepper, who finished in the top 3 in passer efficiency the last two seasons, was indicted yesterday, along with three teammates, on disorderly conduct, indecent conduct and lewd or lascivious conduct for a cruise by 30 Vikings on Lake Minnetonka on which they invited along dozens of prostitutes. It didn't help their popularity that the Vikings were off to a 1-3 start and Culpepper was throwing bushels of interceptions. Culpepper is now out for the season with an injury. He currently ranks 25th in the league in overall passer rating. Culpepper's replacement, Brad Johnson, the epitome of the boring white journeyman quarterback, now ranks 9th in the league and the once-reeling Vikings have won six in a row under him.

Meanwhile, Donovan McNabb of Philadelphia, who was the beneficiary of much praise from sportswriters two years ago when Rush Limbaugh quit his football commentary job after saying that McNabb was overrated because sportswriters had been calling for more black quarterbacks for so long, who is out for the season with an injury, after an adequate season as the #14 passer, has come under increasing criticism, in part for his poor play in last year's Super Bowl. Philadelphia's management suspended their superstar receiver Terrell Owens for criticizing McNabb. The much derided Owens, notorious for his showboating after touchdowns, performed heroically in Philadelphia's Super Bowl loss, garnering over 100 yards receiving despite playing on half-healed broken foot. McNabb, who apparently had been out partying the night before, ran one of the worst two minute drills in history, and was visibly woozy at one point when his teammates had to point him in the right direction.

Now, McNabb has been criticized by the owner of the local black newspaper, who also heads the local NAACP office, for not running the ball anymore. The black journalist attacked McNabb for saying To which McNabb replied, "Obviously if it's someone else who is not African-American, it's racism. But when someone of the same race talks about you because you're selling out because you're not running the ball, it goes back to: What are we really talking about here?... I always thought the NAACP supported African Americans and didn't talk bad about them,"

Indeed, what are we talking about? The black columnist's criticism of McNabb was fairly off-base: It's rational for McNabb to stop running now that he is older and slower and more beat up. By not running last season, he had his best passing season, ranking #4 in the league after many years of mediocrity as a passer. Similarly, Steve McNair led the league in passing in 2003 by not running anymore. He'd had only 138 yards rushing, whereas in 1997 he'd had 674. But, he was voted co-MVP in 2003 along with Peyton Manning.

But, it's not healthy for McNabb to play the race card.

Overall, what we may be seeing is a natural evolution of the black quarterback fad that began about a half dozen years ago. Nothing in the NFL lasts forever. The defenses eventually always figure out how to adjust to a new offensive style, including running quarterbacks. There's probably no effective defense against an unbelievable runner like Vick, but for mortals, defensive coordinators can take steps.

One advantage of black quarterbacks has been that they can be fairly effective early in their careers before they've learned how to be an NFL quality passer because of their running ability is at its peak early. In contrast, a classic immobile white quarterback like Cincinnati's Carson Palmer, who won the Heisman at USC in 2002. He didn't play at all as a rookie in 2003, then started but was a detriment in 2004, but now, in his third season, is second in passing only to the great Peyton Manning. And that's fast development. San Diego's Drew Brees wasn't an asset until his fourth year, Brad Johnson not until his fifth season, Trent Green his sixth season. Leftwich, an immobile black quarterback, has had a similar progression, becoming an above average quarterback in his 3rd season.

In contrast, McNabb started six games as a rookie, and in his second season, even though he was a mediocre passer, was an effective quarterback because he ran for 629 yards.

But, what's not clear yet is long they keep it up. NFL running backs take an extraordinary pounding, and their careers seldom make it to age 30. In contrast, QB Brad Johnson is 37.

For example, perhaps nobody in NFL history outright hurt the defense like Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers in his first three seasons, 1978-1980. Coach Bum Phillips's "offensive strategy," such as it was, consisted mostly of sending Earl slamming into the line, figuring that by crunch time in the fourth quarter, Earl would have bruised the defensive linemen more than they would have bruised Earl. For three glorious years, it worked, but after that, Campbell was never the same.

Turning quarterbacks into part time running backs may work out somewhat similar. Culpepper, for example, has had a lot of back problems.

On the bright side, little Doug Flutie is still getting a few snaps as Tom Brady's backup in New England at 43, and he ran for 476 yards at age 37, but most of his prime was spent in the Canadian Football League (where he was probably the greatest ever in CFL history), where tacklers aren't quite as fast and heavy. But Flutie is something special.

If you want running quarterbacks, and want them to have long careers, and, personally, I think they are more fun to watch, then you ought to think seriously about imposing on team's weight limits, because that's the only way to cut down on the pounding players take. Restrict each team to an average of, say, 215 pounds per player on the field at any time.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 15, 2005

Tall Noses Unclear on the Concept!

Yesterday, I cited Accordion Guy's discovery of a Japanese website's how-to diagrams for Santa Clauses on handing out gifts. This one, for example, suggests an overly-literal translation of the English phrase "stocking-stuffer" (along with that faintly fetishistic undertone that seems so common in Japanese culture). Today, a reader writes:

The page Accordion Guy links to is actually a parody. I've posted a rough translation here:

For example, the caption for this diagram reads:

Join the orthodox school of Santas with a traditional stocking stuffer. ... You can stuff presents into the stockings hanging by the bedside, but to avoid any confusion, just put the present inside her sock. Although it might hurt a bit if it's a big present, that is the way to true Santa-hood. Because then you're a Santa-kurousu. [Great pun, hard to translate. "Santa" + 苦労 kurou ("suffering") + すsu (infinitive verb ending) = "Claus."]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The American Conservative's December 19th issue

As a Christmas bonus, much of the issue is online, including articles by me, Gary "War Nerd" Brecher, Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, John Zmirak, Roger D. McGrath, Leon Hadar, Jim Antle, and Bill Kauffman.

End of the Rainbow
By Roger D. McGrath
Blacks lose the most ground in Los Angeles’ ongoing Hispanicization.

French Lessons
By Steve Sailer
The nation that neocons most love to hate has followed their immigration prescriptions—to devastating results.

Free Vermont
By Bill Kauffman
The Green Mountain State’s secession movement brings together hippie greens and libertarian gun owners.

Diminishing Returns
By W. James Antle III
Tax cuts and liberal-baiting may no longer be a surefire electoral strategy for the GOP.

Innocent Abroad
By Leon Hadar
Karen Hughes brings the gospel of Bush to the heathen masses.

Siberian Shamans at Wal-Mart
By John Zmirak
A blessed Santaclaustide to one and all!

Some of My Best Friends
By Steve Sailer
“Rent” doesn’t pay.

The Worst and the Dullest
By Scott McConnell
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer

Dueling Loyalties
By Howard Sutherland
The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in the Age of Terror
by Stanley A. Renshon

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

It’s All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson
By Gary Brecher
A War Like No Other
by Victor Davis Hanson


Who Killed General Motors?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Death of Economic Patriotism

The Cost of Sycophancy
By William Pfaff
Once-imperial Britain learns to kowtow.

Princely Advice
By Taki
The president should read The Prince.


Fourteen Days: Murtha-Hagel ’08; Republicans’ loose construction of the Magna Carta; Edwards feels heat, sees light

Deep Background: Businessmen cash out of Syria; Chechen mob supplies al-Qaeda; Argentina’s bungled counter-terrorism


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Holidays

Noah Millman on Hanukkah and Christmas:

Besides being a minor holiday, and far from central to the Jewish religious narrative as Christmas is in the Christian religious narrative, Hanukkah is a decidedly particularist holiday, where Christmas is universalist. Judaism is, ultimately, universalist, but it gets to universalism through particularism. And Hanukkah speaks specifically to that particularism; it's a holiday of national deliverance, about the rededication of our Temple, the liberation of our people. Yes, these events ultimately have universal significance, but you're starting several steps removed. Christianity, by contrast, trumpets its universalism, and nowhere more clearly than in the story of Christmas, about God's presence on Earth becoming material and concrete.

It is a bit ridiculous, then, to see how our culture has on the one hand tried to suppress official recognition of Christmas (not only by the government but by other nonpublic but impersonal bodies; how many corporations send out Christmas cards as opposed to seasonal "holiday" cards?) while on the other hand ostentatiously celebrating Hanukkah alongside what recognition Christmas gets as if the presence of a menorah somehow "kashered" a Christmas tree. A Hanukkah menorah most certainly does not "universalize" a Christmas tree; if anything, the opposite is true: it turns the tree, which symbolizes a holiday whose message is "joy to the world and peace on Earth" into a particularist symbol like the menorah itself.

And it is very strange indeed that, as my boss related to me yesterday, his kids are learning Hanukkah songs at school but no "religious" Christmas songs ("Frosty the Snowman" is OK, but not "Silent Night") or that a lawyer we deal with, a Lutheran, can report that her son came home the other day and announced that he wishes he could celebrate Hanukkah (which he'd been learning about at his public school). Inasmuch as it is a religious holiday, Hanukkah should be just as problematic to the anti-religious vigilantes as Christmas; and inasmuch as it's a holiday with communal overtones, it's a holiday celebrated by the Jewish people, not the American people.

Of course, as a Jew, I appreciate the gesture. Having a menorah in the lobby of my building is nice - it says, in effect, "hey, we know this is your holiday now; have a good one." But I'm not entirely happy with it. Public celebration of Hanukkah distorts the holiday...

If I had to compare Hanukkah to an American and Christian holiday, it would not be Christmas, but rather Thanksgiving. What, ultimately, are we giving thanks for on Thanksgiving? For the fact that the American experiment was going to go forward, apparently with God's blessing.

*

What's wrong with MLK Day: A reader writes:

It's not the weather that makes MLK Day not a fun holiday. Everybody manages to party for the Super Bowl and it's impossible to get dinner reservations on Valentine's Day. MLK Day is boring because it's not associated with any fun activity. Even the serious Memorial Day has flowers and picnics to enliven it. What fun activity could white people participate in regarding this day where we would not be called racist? Let's say that August is the new destination for the MLK Day celebration, as you suggested, and we all have cookouts where we eat fried chicken and watermelon and play basketball. What would Jesse Jackson have to say about that?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Producers"

I saw a screening of the movie version of Mel Brooks's musical tonight. I sat there with a big dumb grin on my face the whole way through. At least a half dozen production numbers received rounds of applause from the audience. Along with about two-thirds of the crowd, I sat all the way through the credits to hear all the additional songs, such as Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind, lunatic playwright of Springtime for Hitler, singing a mellow Jack Johnson-style ballad version of "Der Guten Tag Hop Clop." And a five second cameo at the very end of the credits by Mr. Brooks himself brought shouts of approval.

On the other hand, the guy in front of me didn't laugh once and left less than a second after the credits started rolling. (He probably liked "Rent.") This is a very old-fashioned musical, both a parody of and a tribute to old Broadway. To my mind, when it comes to musicals, "old-fashioned" is a synonym for "good," but if you don't agree, watch out.

Or if you are the kind of person who can't understand why they remade the 1968 movie version (hint: the new film has lots more singin' and dancin'), then it won't be for you.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 14, 2005

A Christmas present from Steven D. Levitt?

The Freakonomist used his latest column in the New York Times magazine to promote a new unpublished paper by U. of Chicago grad student Andy Francis as:

" ... an empirical argument that may fundamentally challenge how people think about sex."

It turns out that Andy Francis was a research assistant to Dr. Levitt in 2003-2004.

And Mr. Francis describes the paper praised by Dr. Levitt in the New York Times as his “Job Market Paper.”

While this apparent attempt by Dr. Levitt to use his soapbox in the New York Times to help out an old student’s job search certainly reflects well on his amiability, my vague impression is that the NYT prefers that its writers disclose this kind of conflict of interest to readers. Perhaps Dr. Levitt obtained a waiver of the disclosure policy in this case from his editors? Or perhaps he forgot to mention it to them at the same time he was forgetting to mention to his readers that Francis's study was statistically insignificant?

By the way, Francis's paper is really quite good, even though he doesn't come close to proving his theory.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Economy of Desire

The Economy of Desire: One of the most difficult questions in the social sciences is what causes male homosexual behavior. Is it innate? (And if it is, how did not disappear due to natural selection.) Is it conditioned by society? Freely chosen? (In contrast, the level of female homosexual behavior is clearly responsive to changes in social attitudes.)

In the New York Times Magazine, Steven D. Levitt writes in his Freakonomics column that a new study by a U. of Chicago grad student named Andy Francis found that:

Not a single man in the survey who had a relative with AIDS said he had had sex with a man in the previous five years; not a single man in that group declared himself to be attracted to men or to consider himself homosexual....

Because the sample size was so small - simple chance suggests that no more than a handful of men in a group that size would be attracted to men - it is hard to reach definitive conclusions from the survey data. (Obviously, not every single man changes his sexual behavior or identity when a relative contracts AIDS.) But taken as a whole, the numbers in Francis's study suggest that there may be a causal effect here - that having a relative with AIDS may change not just sexual behavior but also self-reported identity and desire.

In other words, sexual preference, while perhaps largely predetermined, may also be subject to the forces more typically associated with economics than biology. If this turns out to be true, it would change the way that everyone - scientists, politicians, theologians - thinks about sexuality. But it probably won't much change the way economists think. To them, it has always been clear: whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

Some rather grand claims.

Unfortunately, Levitt didn't bother to inform the NYT-reading public that the sample size of men who had a relative with AIDS was so tiny, only 60 individuals in total, that Francis's study did not attain statistical significance even at the loose 5 percent level.

The percentage of men in the no-relative-with-AIDS sample of 1451 who had engaged in homosexual acts in the last five years was 4.4%. That means that if there was no actual correlation between having a relative with AIDS and sexual orientation, you’d expect only to find 2.64 men having engaged in homosexual acts out of his sample of 60 who had a relative with AIDS. Instead of two or three such men, he found zero.

As reported here in Table 6, the p-value for this correlation was 0.086, meaning that if the relationship between the two variables was purely random, you'd still expect to find that result (0 men out of 60) 8.6% of the time by pure fluke.

Is that 0 out of 60 meaningful? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

Clearly, this study should be redone with an adequate sample size. Unfortunately, putting together a large enough and unbiased enough sample to do these kind of subtle analyses of male homosexuality has historically proven very difficult.

One major concern over how much credence to put in Francis's result is data-mining, or looking at a lot of relationships and then highlighting the ones that appear statistically unlikely to happen by chance. The 1992 database Mr. Francis used allows a large number of statistical tests to be run. If you looked at 100 different correlations, you’d expect to find an average of five that are statistically significant at the five percent level.

So, one relevant question is whether Mr. Francis started his research in order to test a pre-existing hypothesis that being exposed to people with AIDS would make a man less likely to engage in male homosexuality. I’d never heard the theory before, but perhaps it was going around in some circles. (Apparently, he did not -- he only formulated it after looking at data.)

I don’t have a strong opinion on Mr. Francis’s theory on male homosexuality. (Few doubt that female homosexual behavior is responsive to changing social pressures, but most experienced researchers treat male and female homosexuality as highly distinct.) It sounds modestly plausible in theory, but I can’t think of much historical evidence for it. The only bit of anecdotal evidence for it that I can recall is that singer Lou Reed converted to heterosexuality (and stopped shooting heroin) right after AIDS was discovered. In contrast, San Francisco, for example, didn’t see mass conversions to heterosexuality after 1982. Indeed, AIDS seemed to lead, if anything, to an increased public commitment to homosexuality.

In summary, Mr. Francis has made a worthy beginning, but his hypothesis desperately needs to be retested with an adequate sample size.

Dr. Levitt would have been better advised to publicize this study on this blog, which is the appropriate medium for this kind of Scientific Wild Ass Guess. (In general, a better brand name for Dr. Levitt's version of social science than Freakonomics would be Scientific Wild Ass Guessonomics. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Blogs are fine sites to try out hypotheses.) Unfortunately, Levitt put it in the New York Times and failed to inform the public that the result was statistically insignificant.

Perhaps the correlation will prove to be true. But it may well not pan out. If that's so, it may be too late to recall the Instant Conventional Wisdom that Levitt has generated. "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on."

Andy Francis replies here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Economy of Desire

One of the most difficult questions in the social sciences is what causes male homosexual behavior. Is it innate? (And if it is, how did not disappear due to natural selection.) Is it conditioned by society? Freely chosen? (In contrast, the level of female homosexual behavior is clearly responsive to changes in social attitudes.)

In the New York Times Magazine, Steven D. Levitt writes in his Freakonomics column that a new study by a U. of Chicago grad student named Andy Francis found that:

Not a single man in the survey who had a relative with AIDS said he had had sex with a man in the previous five years; not a single man in that group declared himself to be attracted to men or to consider himself homosexual....

Because the sample size was so small - simple chance suggests that no more than a handful of men in a group that size would be attracted to men - it is hard to reach definitive conclusions from the survey data. (Obviously, not every single man changes his sexual behavior or identity when a relative contracts AIDS.) But taken as a whole, the numbers in Francis's study suggest that there may be a causal effect here - that having a relative with AIDS may change not just sexual behavior but also self-reported identity and desire.

In other words, sexual preference, while perhaps largely predetermined, may also be subject to the forces more typically associated with economics than biology. If this turns out to be true, it would change the way that everyone - scientists, politicians, theologians - thinks about sexuality. But it probably won't much change the way economists think. To them, it has always been clear: whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

Some rather grand claims.

Unfortunately, Levitt didn't bother to inform the NYT-reading public that the sample size of men who had a relative with AIDS was so tiny, only 60 individuals in total, that Francis's study did not attain statistical significance even at the loose 5 percent level.

The percentage of men in the no-relative-with-AIDS sample of 1451 who had engaged in homosexual acts in the last five years was 4.4%. That means that if there was no actual correlation between having a relative with AIDS and sexual orientation, you’d expect only to find 2.64 men having engaged in homosexual acts out of his sample of 60 who had a relative with AIDS. Instead of two or three such men, he found zero.

As reported here in Table 6, the p-value for this correlation was 0.086, meaning that if the relationship between the two variables was purely random, you'd still expect to find that result (0 men out of 60) 8.6% of the time by pure fluke.

Is that 0 out of 60 meaningful? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

Clearly, this study should be redone with an adequate sample size. Unfortunately, putting together a large enough and unbiased enough sample to do these kind of subtle analyses of male homosexuality has historically proven very difficult.

One major concern over how much credence to put in Francis's result is data-mining, or looking at a lot of relationships and then highlighting the ones that appear statistically unlikely to happen by chance. The 1992 database Mr. Francis used allows a large number of statistical tests to be run. If you looked at 100 different correlations, you’d expect to find an average of five that are statistically significant at the five percent level.

So, one relevant question is whether Mr. Francis started his research in order to test a pre-existing hypothesis that being exposed to people with AIDS would make a man less likely to engage in male homosexuality. I’d never heard the theory before, but perhaps it was going around in some circles. (Apparently, he did not -- he only formulated it after looking at data.)

I don’t have a strong opinion on Mr. Francis’s theory (Few doubt that female homosexual behavior is responsive to changing social pressures, but most researchers into homosexuality treat male and female homosexuality has highly distinct.) It sounds modestly plausible in theory, but I can’t think of much historical evidence for it. The only bit of anecdotal evidence for it that I can recall is that singer Lou Reed converted to heterosexuality (and stopped shooting heroin) right after AIDS was discovered. In contrast, San Francisco, for example, didn’t see mass conversions to heterosexuality after 1982. Indeed, AIDS seemed to lead, if anything, to an increased public commitment to homosexuality.

In summary, Mr. Francis has made a worthy beginning, but his hypothesis desperately needs to be retested with an adequate sample size.

Dr. Levitt would have been better advised to publicize this study on this blog, which is the appropriate medium for this kind of Scientific Wild Ass Guess. (In general, a better brand name for Dr. Levitt's version of social science than Freakonomics would be Scientific Wild Ass Guessonomics. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Blogs are fine sites to try out hypotheses.) Unfortunately, Levitt put it in the New York Times and failed to inform the public that the result was statistically insignificant.

Perhaps the correlation will prove to be true. But it may well not pan out. If that's so, it may be too late to recall the Instant Conventional Wisdom that Levitt has generated. "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on."

Andy Francis replies here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Every man a king!

The Irish Genghis Khan has been discovered. In northwestern Ireland, one out of every five Y-chromosomes appears to be descended in the direct male line from from the early medieval Uí Néill dynasty. I wouldn't be surprised if actor Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park"), who was born in Northern Ireland, is a direct descendent. (He's not as kingly as Sean Connery, but he'd do.)

Here's the abstract from American Journal of Human Genetics:

A Y-Chromosome Signature of Hegemony in Gaelic Ireland
Laoise T. Moore et al.

Seventeen-marker simple tandem repeat genetic analysis of Irish Y chromosomes reveals a previously unnoted modal haplotype that peaks in frequency in the northwestern part of the island. It shows a significant association with surnames purported to have descended from the most important and enduring dynasty of early medieval Ireland, the Uí Néill. This suggests that such phylogenetic predominance is a biological record of past hegemony and supports the veracity of semimythological early genealogies. The fact that about one in five males sampled in northwestern Ireland is likely a patrilineal descendent of a single early medieval ancestor is a powerful illustration of the potential link between prolificacy and power and of how Y-chromosome phylogeography can be influenced by social selection.

And here's a 2003 article, "The Norse Code," by Neil Macphail:

Are you a MacDonald herding sheep on your lonely croft? A MacDougall commuting home from your office job? Or even a MacAlister living a quiet but humdrum life?

If so, there is every possibility that lurking in your body is the genetic fingerprint of one of Scotland's greatest warriors - a fearsome man capable of tearing the heart out of a Viking foe.

An Oxford University scientist has traced the Y-chromosome, which determines maleness, of the founder of Clan Donald - the great Somerled of Argyll, who was born around 1100 and drove out the Viking invaders.

Geneticist Bryan Sykes says this microscopic fragment of the fearsome fighter still lives on in the DNA of half a million clansmen throughout the world. Indeed Professor Sykes says the Y-chromosome of the Gaelic warrior, who it seems had Norse blood himself, is so prevalent it could be among the most successful in the world.

Prof. Sykes and his team made the discovery almost by accident while they were researching genetic links between the Scots and the Vikings and looking for Norse Y-chromosomes. He and researcher Jayne Nicholson had taken thousands of DNA samples from men in the Highlands and Western Isles, and spotted a group that stood out.

They were at first puzzled, then Miss Nicholson looked at the donors' names. These revealed that among the men with the identical Y-chromosomes were MacDonalds, MacAlisters and MacDougalls. Prof. Sykes said: "There didn't seem all that much in it until Jayne said quietly that these clans were related. "The possibility that this Y-chromosome was inherited from the common ancestor of the MacDonalds, MacDougalls and MacAlisters was incredibly exciting.

They wrote to dozens of those clansmen throughout Scotland, enclosing a sampling brush for them to collect DNA from inside their cheeks. In the samples of those who replied, they found a single common Y-chromosome. To be double sure this was Somerled's, Prof Sykes embarked on a sensitive piece of research involving the living chiefs of the Clan Donald and their septs.

He said: "I wanted to see if the clan chiefs still alive, whose recorded genealogies descend from Somerled, also shared the same chromosome. This was a delicate task. We might find one or more of the chiefs did not have it - meaning one of their paternal ancestors might have been adopted, or had not been the biological father of his heir.

He approached Lord Godfrey Macdonald, Sir Ian Macdonald of Sleat, Ranald MacDonald of Clan Ranald, William McAlester of Loup and Ranald MacDonnell of Glengary, enclosing a DNA brush. The result was conclusive: 'They all shared the same chromosome. There was now no dought we had identified the legacy of Somerled.'

Now the only one whose lineage is in doubt is Somerled himself. Tradition says he descended from the ancient Irish kings - but Prof. Sykes says the chromosome proves his Norse ancestry.

Gregory Cochran emails:

The MacLeods have a similar story, and there are a zillion other such Y-chromosome studies in progress.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Even the Japanese love Christmas!

Although, judging by these faintly disturbing diagrams of the proper methods for how a Japanese Santa is supposed to leave presents, they aren't quite clear on the concept. Accordion Guy adds appropriate captions here.

A reader writes:

Those Japanese Christmas how-to's reminded me of the old story of the Japanese department store that reportedly made a life-size display of Santa crucified for Christmas.

I always thought it was true but apparently there is no documented evidence of this. It's evidently an urban legend.

Well, Christmas is the season for believing, and doggone it, I want to believe in this tale of the Japanese department store with the crucified Santa.

A reader writes:

Nearly every supermarket, restaurant, and big box store in Japan has Merry Christmas signs this time of year ... despite the fact that very few people in Japan are Christian. Most conspicuous is the blaring Christmas carols coming from every direction. Silent Night, The First Noel, and Jingle Bells seem to top the list, but, unfortunately, so does Wham's "Last Christmas." The Japanese are utterly shocked when I explain to them that this song was popular for only a brief time in the 1980s in America. I don't really know if that is true, as I have never even heard the song before coming to Japan, and, since I am only 23, I am not exactly old enough to recall the tune. I think that the true spirit of multiculturalism is about celebrating other people's traditions too; in Japan, the attitude seems to be, "If it is a reason to party, let's party!" rather than the American attitude of "Keep your parties indoors lest you offend my hypersensitivities." As a person who loves Christmas, it is very nice living in Japan, sans "Last Christmas."

In America, St. Patrick's Day is an ethnic holiday to which everybody is invited, as is Cinco de Mayo, although that is mostly a synthetic holiday invented by American liquor companies. (Real Mexicans are more excited by Mexican Independence Day in September.) Columbus Day is both an ethnic (Italian) and patriotic holiday.

I'm not sure exactly what Martin Luther King's Birthday is -- exclusive or inclusive -- because the public suffers from holiday boredom by the middle of January so it passes without much notice. My suggestion has always been to move MLK Day to August, where it would be much more popular.

But Kwanzaa and Hanukkah appear to be anti-inclusive holidays, the opposite of St. Patrick's Day.

Christmas, of course, is extremely inclusive, with something for all men of good will, which, I suspect, is why it is now so resented. The impressive, globe-spanning richness of "Christmas culture," the countless songs, the movies, the old legends, the literature, the recipes, the customs, the art, the decor, the costumes, and, worst of all, the genial benevolence of Christmas when compared to the cultural paucity of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah drive some people up the wall. The fundamental psychological issue is that Christmas is an all-around better holiday than its rivals, and in our status-hungry world, Christmas' superiority makes some people very angry.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tookie v. Ah-nold:

A reader writes:

There is an irony here, in that both Tookie and the Governator are arguably in the position they are today [well, yesterday for Tookie], due to their superior physiques. Williams used his to dominate the thugs around him and become their leader. Given that he has at least two kids, he also parlayed his muscles into reproductive success. Schwarzenegger used his to dominate other bodybuilders in relatively effete contests of manliness; then to achieve stardom in movies, marry a Kennedy, then to become the governor. But: why would a guy who is governor based fundamentally on his hardman appearance want to tarnish his image by being perceived as merciful? Of all people, Tookie should have understand that - his murders appear to have been in part done for the purpose of demonstrating to his buddies how badass he was.

Live by the Big T, die by the Big T.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 12, 2005

There's something strange about the soon-to-be late Tookie's anti-gang oeuvre:

Gangs and Self-Esteem (Williams, Stanley. Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence.)Gangs and Violence (Williams, Stanley. Tookie Speaks Out Against Gangs.)

I realize that the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Tookie Williams, the co-founder of the Crips and murderer of four innocent people, is now (was then? time is getting late) a sincere anti-gang crusader who has kept millions of impressionable children like these from joining criminal street gangs like his Crips, but there's just something about these cover pictures from his anti-gang books that seems a little, well, irrelevant. Let me ponder this more deeply and perhaps I'll deduce what seems a bit off...

Dennis Dale writes:

By now you’ve seen the two more heavily circulated photos of Williams, one apparently from the cover of his book showing him stripped to the waist and flexing body-builder style (Williams is said to weigh about three hundred pounds and has a body-builder’s physique), and another of him in a similar stance, wearing prison issues and bearing a massive afro, the very image of a hardcore gangsta. These are pinups for the adoring. While Tookie’s famous gang protocol and his children’s books are lauded as, it would seem, Herculean efforts to save the nation’s youth from gang culture (150,000 lives saved and counting, according to the “Tookie Fact Sheet,” based on “emails and letters”) what actually evokes all this adoration is his impressive physical stature and the same brutality (inferred by the thinly veiled braggadocio of his oft told history) that makes Tookie’s ilk so dangerous, necessitating their removal from society.

You see, there isn’t one of us who, at one time or another, hasn’t wanted just once to be Tookie. Tookie wants to be Tookie. Tookie has cultivated his image as the hulking brute more than anything else, and had he never been caught and convicted of his crimes he would no doubt have gone on being Tookie for as long as he could have pulled it off before death or incarceration put a merciful end to his tear. Physical prowess and emotional detachment combine to make a powerful intoxicant, in the bearer and in the beholder. Just witness the continuing fascination with all things gangster, from The Sopranos to Fifty Cent.

Just beneath the thin veneer of our socialization, deep in the base of our brains, on the wrong side of the tracks from our still developing prefrontal cortexes in the amygdala where our fear resides, we not only reflexively defer to physical superiority; we revere it. Brute force and the audacity to use it are, deep down, considered values unto themselves, even if we don’t like to admit it. So when the celebrants make the pilgrimage to the shrine of Tookie it is hardly a handful of children’s books or some ridiculous contractual form legitimizing street gangs that brings them there. They are there to pay homage to the undeniable value of brute force.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Springtime in Sydney

Summer is a coming in Down Under and spirits are high. Joe Strummer has finally gotten his wish.

First, a Lebanese Muslim gang beat up people on the beach in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla. In response, a mob of 5,000 drunken Australian whites attacked Muslims.

So, how long until we read articles blaming discrimination, lack of affirmative action, unemployment, and/or Le Corbusier's soulless architecture for the white riot?

Oh, wait, that's odd, in this case the media seem to be blaming the riot on the rioters. What a novel concept! I wonder what's different between the French and Australian riots? Hmmhmmhm, it's puzzling ... I just can't put my finger on the difference...

Unfortunately, the Riot Porn blog doesn't have any Australian pictures up yet, but they do have a "Burning Tire of the Day" and, of course, lots more South Korean riot pictures. This time it's the South Korean dump truck drivers versus the Orc-like riot police in a well-organized donnybrook that is nominally supposed to have something or other to do with "labor rights for non-regular workers."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Uh-oh

From 1992 onward, only 1% of the new enlistees allowed into the U.S. military came from Category IV -- the 10th to 30th percentiles on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the military's main IQ test. People who score from 80 to 92 in IQ were just more trouble than they were worth in today's high tech military.. Recently, however, the Army announced that due to recruiting difficulties, it would boost the Category IVs to 4%, which didn't sound too worrisome.

But what's happening in reality? The US Today reports:

The Army met its recruiting goals in October, the first month of the 2006 fiscal year, but 12 percent of its recruits scored in the lowest category on military entrance tests on science, math and word knowledge, “The Sun” of Baltimore reported this month. That was triple the number - 4 percent - that the Army expects in 2006.

Rep. John Murtha, the 37-year Marine veteran, who apparently drinks beers with the top brass regularly, claims it's worse:

They have lowered the standards. They're accepting 20 percent last year in category four. Now, this is a highly technical service we're dealing with, And yet they lowered the standards to category four, which they said when we had the volunteer army, that would eliminate all the category four.

So, what's really going on? I don't know. And I don't expect the media to cover this important national security issue in any depth, because if they did, they might have to admit that military puts tremendous weight on IQ, which the press has been denouncing as racist pseudoscience for decades.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 11, 2005

Sign of hope in Compton

Having outlined last week the lurid history of Compton, the home of the Bloods and of West Coast gangsta rap, I want to point out a sign of social reconstruction in that blighted municipality between Los Angeles and Long Beach.

I recently went to a high school championship football game between a Compton school and a higher ranked private school. One little remarked development in recent decades is that the best high school football programs are now typically predominantly white schools, either exurban, or private. The leading football schools will now generally feature a few black stars at running back, receiver, or cornerback, but will be otherwise white, with a sprinkling of Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and (most hoped for) huge Pacific Islanders. For example, the private school in last night's game featured a miniature version of Reggie Bush, an elusive black back who had run for over 2000 yards at 11 yards per carry, but was otherwise mostly white. Add in a terrific white quarterback averaging over 10 yards per both pass attempt and carry, a highly trained and motivated defense, and sensational special teams, such as a kicker who has made 26 of 33 field goals and 100% of his extra points over the last two years, and that combination had been good for three straight championships.

Physically, the mostly black Compton team looked much more impressive with a gigantic offensive line, including a 6'-5" 319 pound tight end, made up largely of Samoans and other Islanders, and a lot of strong, fast black running backs in the 200 pound range. But the fans of the private school were confident, since in recent decades in high school ball, black teams have tended to lack the militaristic discipline that football requires. Most of the student enthusiasm in places like Compton has gone into basketball, which reflects contemporary African-American culture's obsession with superstars. Football teams, with their scores of necessary but anonymous spear-carriers in helmets cloaking their individuality, have a hard time competing with the glamour of basketball, where the potential for showing off is so much greater.

Well, the underdog Compton football team just went out and dominated, and in a manner that coach Vince Lombardi himself would have admired. Most notably, they refrained from what you see in the NFL where black players celebrate every tackle and first down like they had just won the Super Bowl. They focused on the job at hand and didn't waste time and energy showing off for the crowd until late in the 4th quarter when they had the game more than wrapped up.

This is a real tribute to the coaching staff, and a sign of hope for Compton that its youth might be waking up from its catastrophic two decade-long obsession with the values of gangsta rap.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 10, 2005

Die, Tookie, die!

The best argument for the death penalty is the one you almost never hear: we need an ultimate deterrent against criminals who already facing close to life in prison to dissuade them from rationally deciding that it's in their self-interest to kill witnesses to their crimes, such as the victims of their robberies. As Robert Stacy McCain points out in FrontPage, the latest liberal cause celebre, Tookie Williams, murdered four people in cold-blood in two separate robberies in 1979 to get rid of witnesses:

One accomplice told police: "I asked Tookie, I said, 'What you do?' He say, 'I killed him,' like that. And I say, 'Why you kill him?' He say, uh, 'So it wouldn't be no evidence.'" Williams later laughed as he bragged about the gurgling noise the dying clerk made: "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him."

Among his other contributions to society, Tookie is the co-founder of the Crips.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tis the season for giving

Perhaps the leading enemy of free speech in America is now the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Of course, the SPLC long ago eradicated the last, faintest vestiges of poverty, southern or otherwise, in the lifestyle of founder Morris Dees, who is a member of the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.

That the SPLC is a festering sore on the American body politic has long been known to anyone who cares to spend a half hour Googling. Here's just part of a revealing statement by Jim Tharpe, the Deputy Metro Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which he made during a Harvard panel discussion about his experience editing a massive Pulitzer-finalist investigative series on the Southern Poverty Law Center during his days at the Montgomery Advertiser:

I’d never done any reporting on nonprofits, I thought they were all good guys, they were mom-and-pop, bake-sale, raise-money-for-the-local-fire-department type operations. I had no idea how sophisticated they were, how much money they raised, and how little access you have to them as a reporter, some of which has already been covered here.

Our series was published in 1995 after three years of very brutal research under the threat of lawsuit the entire time.

Our findings were essentially these:

The [Southern Poverty Law] center was building up a huge surplus. It was 50-something million at that time; it’s now approaching 100 million [it's now over $150 million in net assets], but they’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs.

A sampling of their donors showed that they had no idea of the center’s wealth. The charity watchdog groups, the few that are in existence, had consistently criticized the center, even though nobody had reported that.

There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the 13 black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the center, which was a shocker to me. As of 1995, the center had hired only two black attorneys in its entire history...

They hired an attorney who began first by threatening me, then my editor, and then the publisher. "And you better be careful of the questions you ask and the stories you come up with," and they would cite the libel law to us. So we were under threat of lawsuit for two years, basically, during the research phase of the series...

We published the series over eight days in 1994, and it had very little effect, actually. I think the center now raises more money than it ever has. [Laughter]

The story really didn’t get out of Montgomery and that’s a real problem. The center’s donors are not in Montgomery; the center’s donors are in the Northeast and on the West Coast. So the story pretty much was contained in Montgomery where it got a shrug-of-the-shoulders reaction. [More, much more]

The SPLC continues to concoct bogeymen to demonize in pursuit of extracting donations from gullible elderly liberals. In recent years, Dees's operation has come to resemble Mel Brooks's title for a proposed sequel to his Star Wars' parody "Spaceballs:"

"Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money"

After a liberal scion to a large fortune promised $100 million to the Sierra Club if it ignored the impact of immigration on the American environment, Dees's sensitive nose for piles of of cash led him to trash true environmentalists like former three-time Democratic governor of Colorado Richard Lamm.

And, of course, the SPLC smears VDARE.com and me. Amusingly, its attacks on me show how bizarrely flexible Dees's definitions of "Southern" "Poverty" and "Law" have become. The SPLC has teamed up with a group of transsexuals who are out to wreck the careers of anybody who has ever had a kind word for Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey!

Now, D.A. King on VDARE.com's blog has pointed out that the charity vetting organization Charity Navigator gives the SPLC only one star out of four. By way of comparison, the notoriously corrupt and ineffectual NAACP gets two stars. The National Council of La Raza ("The Race") gets four stars.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A question from a reader

I read a great variety of sites but I have yet to find a general news site that I could recommend to people who can use the internet but still rely on the MainStream Media out of habit. I used to look at Google news but have lately been disappointed in it. Drudge sometimes has some punch but is not what I want to recommend as a liberation from MSM.

Any suggestions?

I probably spend more time reading the New York Times that any other news source. Sure, it's biased, but I enjoy playing the game of spotting-the-fallacy.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Be afraid, be very afraid

From Fast Company, via Marginal Revolution:

Levitt and Dubner have spun their tales of rigged sumo matches and inner-city crack dealers everywhere from CNN to The Charlie Rose Show to The 700 Club. ABC just signed the pair to a one-year deal for recurring spots on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline, including backing for their own documentaries.

Suzanne Gluck, Levitt and Dubner's agent, says Freakonomics hasn't just inspired other numbers books. "People are pitching everything from 'The Medical Freakonomics' to 'The Freakonomics of Parenting,' " she says. "They're using freakonomics as a code word for unconventional wisdom."

Conventional wisdom says there's more to come. Dubner says, "We're working on another book: 'Superfreakonomics.' "


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 9, 2005

Racial Gestalt: Believing Is Seeing

Here's a picture of Rob Schneider, the low rent comic actor, formerly of Saturday Night Live, who starred in "Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo" and has played in a lot of his friend Adam Sandler's hit movies. He's Jewish, right? Nobody ever had any doubts about it.

And, he is Jewish ..., but only on his father's side.

Schneider's mother, I just found out after 15 years of assuming he is the standard-issue 100% Jewish comedian, is one half Filipino. Take a look at his picture again. Doesn't it suddenly snap into focus that he's obviously one quarter Filipino?

This snapping into focus can happen when looking at people who turn out to have a more complex racial background than you assumed. I call this "racial gestalt," after the old trick picture that gestalt therapists use to show people that believing is seeing.

Schneider persuasively played a native Hawaiian in the the Adam Sandler - Drew Barrymore romantic comedy "Fifty First Dates," and I was so convinced that he was 100% Jewish that I thought to myself, boy, he's actually a better actor than I always thought.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The "Memoirs of a Geisha" casting controversy in historical perspective

The same sort of sophisticates who tell you "Race Does Not Exist!" are currently sniping at the new movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" for casting Chinese rather than Japanese actresses in the three lead roles. After all, any worldly person can tell Chinese from Japanese people on sight, right?

Well, sort of ... When I was at UCLA and spent a lot of time studying coeds, I could probably correctly guess East Asian girls' nationalities over 50% of the time but not quite 90% of the time. I doubt if I'd come close to that accuracy today.

This question of how to tell Japanese from Chinese once came to national prominence. The Dec. 22, 1941 issue of Life Magazine carried a pictorial article entitled "How to Tell [Japanese] from Chinese: Angry Citizens Victimize Allies with Emotional Outburst at Enemy:"

In the first discharge of emotion touched off by the the Japanese assault on their nation, U.S. citizens have been displaying a distressing ignorance in the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a [Japanese]. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese, whose homeland is our staunch ally... To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japanese.

Personally, I think LIFE would have better advised their readers not to engage in criminal assaults on anybody. But, hey, that's just me.

It was an emotional time, only days after the Japanese government had massacred 3,000 Americans. In contrast, after Arab Muslim terrorists massacred 3.000 Americans on 9/11, the U.S. government deliberated for 18 months, and then, with the at least tacit approval of most of the media, invaded an Arab Muslim country that didn't have anything to do with 9/11! So, perhaps in our age of political correctness, we aren't so much more sophisticated than in 1941, and we may well be stupider.

Anyway, the Life article includes some fascinating, if rather hopeless-sounding, tips on how to accurately distinguish Chinese (and Filipinos) from Japanese. (My impression is, by the way, that Filipino-Americans were, per capita, the most violent toward Japanese-Americans in the weeks following Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.)

The physical descriptions of Japanese and Chinese in Life magazine are in line with two habits of Time-Life founder Henry Luce. He insisted on having his journalists describe people he liked as physical paragons (according to William F. Buckley, President Eisenhower was always described in Time or Life as "tall, straight-backed, and graying" while Eisenhower's rivals were "short, squat, and nose-picking"). And Luce, who was born in China to a Presbyterian missionary family, admired the Chinese, especially Chiang Kai-shek's regime, and loathed the Japanese who invaded China. The Life article goes on:

To physical anthropologists, devoted debunkers of race myths, the difference between Chinese and [Japanese] is measurable in millimeters. Both are related to the Eskimo and North American Indian. The modern [Japanese] is the descendant of Mongoloids who invaded the Japanese archipelago back in the mists of prehistory, and of the native aborigines who possessed the islands before them [the Ainu]. Physical anthropology, in consequence, finds [Japanese] and Chinese as closely related as Germans and English. It can, however, set apart the special types of each national group.

The typical Northern Chinese, represented by Ong Wen-hao, Chunking's Minister of Economic Affairs [see picture, top], is relatively tall and slenderly built. His complexion is parchment yellow, his face long and delicately boned, his nose more finely bridged. [Translation: Henry Luce likes.] Representative of the Japanese people as a whole is Premier and General Hideki Tojo [see picture, below], who betrays aboriginal antecedents in a squat, long-torsoed build, a broader, more massively boned head and face, flat, often pug, nose, yellow-ocher skin and heavier beard. [Henry Luce no likes.] From this average type, aristocratic [Japanese], who claim kinship ot the Imperial Household, diverge sharply. They are proud to approximate the patrician lines of the Northern Chinese.

Captions to pictures included:


Chinese public servant, Ong Wen-hao, is representative of Northern Chinese anthropological group with long, fine-boned face and scant beard. Epicanthic fold of skin above eyelid is found in 85% of Chinese. Southern Chinese have round, broad faces, not as massively boned as the Japanese. Except that their skin is darker, this description fits Filipinos who are often mistaken for [Japanese]. Chinese sometimes pass for Europeans; but [Japanese] more often approach Western types.

I particularly enjoyed this caption, with its appeal to cultural rather than physical diversity:

Japanese warrior, General Hideki Tojo, current Premier, is a Samurai, closer to type of humble [ Japanese] than highbred relatives of Imperial Household. Typical are his heavy beard, massive cheek and jaw bones. Peasant [ Japanese] is squat Mongoloid, with flat, blob nose. An often sounder clue is facial expression, shaped by cultural, not anthropological, factors. Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists. [Japanese], like General Tojo, show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics. [Emphasis mine.]

We are repeatedly assured these days that an exclusive academic focus on cultural rather than biological differences among people is necessary to prevent group animosity, although the historical record (e.g., the extermination of "kulaks" in the Ukraine) should raise severe questions about this contemporary consensus.

In reality, human beings are awfully creative at coming up with reasons to resent other human beings. And there's little evidence to suggest that telling people that other people aren't born that way induces greater tolerance. "You mean, they aren't born that way, but they choose to be so annoying? Then, they're evil Let's get 'em!" is a common human response to modern "progressive" theories of cultural determinism.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 8, 2005

Why the French can't test ethnic quotas in only one university:

Purported tough guy French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has long advocated introducing American-style affirmative action to help out Muslims. He now plans to try it in one university. A reader writes:

If only one university in France decides to test affirmative action, the results will not be meaningful to those considering a nationwide program. This is because the one school testing affirmative action would only have to lower its standards slightly and gain access to its entire region's pool of minorities who are just a little below the cutoff. So the program will appear to be a success since the minorities admitted would only be slightly less intelligent than the white Frenchmen.

If every university in the country institutes affirmative action, then those minorities who are only slightly below normal admissions standards would be spread so thin among the different universities that standards would have to be lowered much more in order to increase minority representation appreciably everywhere.

Right. This is a near universal misconception about how affirmative action should work. Everybody assumes that they would be the only college in the universe to use affirmative action, so the impact wouldn't that bad. But the essential problem is a finite supply of smart individuals from the privileged group.

In the end all this may not matter. As I understand it, most French universities typically have low standards of admissions, but the exams are so difficult that dumber students are weeded out in very large numbers in the first two years.

That's how the University of California system worked before Proposition 209 made quotas illegal. Lots of fairly smart black and Hispanic students were accepted into Berkeley under quotas, and then a huge fraction were quickly flunked out (Berkeley is a tough school, especially during the first two years, with huge class sizes, and many lecturers with incomprehensible accents.)

They were then replaced by graduates of community colleges who hadn't been smart enough to get into a four year college out of high school. The black and Hispanic kids who would have been smart enough to graduate from UC Davis or UC Riverside, but instead got lured into flunking out of Berkeley and UCLA, well, who knows what happened to them.

This was a ridiculous system, but it was fiercely defended by liberal politicians, who didn't care what actually happened to fairly smart black and Hispanic students after they got admitted under a quota.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Welcome to the War Zone!

One of the odder websites I've found is ComptonPoliceGangs.com, "Dedicated to The Compton Police Department - in existence from 1888 until 2000." To you, Compton may be just a slum between Los Angeles and Long Beach, but to nostalgic former Compton cops, back in the day it was the Big Leagues of the Crack Wars:

The streets of Compton are considered the toughest anywhere in the United States, but the cops who worked these streets were tougher.

This site was created by the Compton Police Officers who were a part of the last 20 years of the department. A time of great turbulence - with riots, murder of police officers, the beginning of Gangster Rap and the rise and fall of Death Row Records.

Investigations of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls both lead back to the city of Compton.

The Compton Police Officers' Association lead a fight to back the citizens of Compton against a corrupt local government. This lead to the dismantling of the Compton Police Department before the city officials themselves were voted out of office, indicted, and later jailed.

Ah, good times, good times ...

Here's part of a brief history of Compton's major exports: gangs and gangsta rap:

Black gangs were forming and calling themselves Crips and identifying by wearing the color blue. The Crip gangs also established themselves in Compton. By the early 70's to combat the Crip gangs, a new gang was formed on Piru Street in Compton, calling themselves "Bloods". The Bloods associated themselves with the color red which was the school colors of Centennial High in Compton. Compton was virtually unknown to the outside world, but Gangster rap music in the upcoming years was about to change all that.

In the early eighties, Rappers like "EASY E", "DR. DRE", "ICE CUBE", and "DJ QUICK" were nothing more than young kids growing up in the harsh streets of Compton. Snoop Dog was in North Long Beach, which is on the border of Compton, involving himself with a Crip gang... The CEO of Death Row Records Suge Marion Knight, was growing up in the streets of Compton, in an area known as "Mob Piru."

Southern California is a generous place, and it shared its gangstas and gangsta rappers with the rest of America. The Compton cop site notes:

Compton rappers began to sing songs about the street life and growing up as a gang member in Compton. They began making underground tapes, which spread like wildfire with the youth of Compton, and they loved it. These rappers would call it "Gangster Rap".[The first huge-selling gangsta rap album was NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" in 1988.]

Rock cocaine was at its height and the street gangs were out of control. Rock houses seemed to be on every street. Selling cocaine was their way of making big money, which meant better weapons. The money made by these major Compton cocaine dealers was in the millions... The mid-80s were still out of control and Compton was a battlefield with gang warfare, averaging over seventy homicides a year...

But the competition was too much, so the spread of rock cocaine made its way across the United States. The competition was not heavy there, so these cocaine dealers could raise the prices, and as a result, even more money was made with less danger to the dealers. As a result of the spread of rock cocaine across America, these Compton gang members were making their influences known. Soon these other cities and states were having drive-by shootings, drug rip-offs. The Crips and Bloods gang culture was being introduced and law enforcement agencies from these other states did not know how to deal [with] the related crime.

Similarly, USC Ph.D. student Alex Alonso wrote in a 1998 study of LA's black gangs:

During the 1980s, a number of cities reported street gang activity, with many reporting the presence of active Los Angeles-based Blood and Crip gangs. In 1988 police departments from all over the country, from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Kansas City, Missouri, to Seattle, Washington, were reporting that California gang members were extending their operations (Skolnick et al. 1993). Some of this was due to migration of gang members from Los Angeles, and some gang formation was the result of indigenous youths emulating Los Angeles gang culture, which was partly facilitated through the media and films.

The State of Florida Department of Corrections notes:

The Los Angeles (LA)-based Bloods and Crips are probably the most widely recognized gangs in America due to the media exposure received in the 1980's. These groups have migrated throughout the country and are seen in most states and their prison populations. There are literally hundreds of sets or individual gangs under the main Blood and Crip names.

Whether this spread cross country of the names Bloods and Crips is driven more by the physical migration of actual LA gangsters or by locals emulating the media-driven glamour of the LA gangs has been debated, with somewhat inconclusive results. Gang migration has sometimes been exaggerated in the media, but there's little question that the big city gangs, especially of LA, have shown the way for gangs in the rest of the country.

All this, I'm sure you'll be unsurprised to learn, reminds me of the abortion-cut-crime controversy. The econometrically-oriented have always wanted to look at crime data by state because it provides a larger data set to manipulate in a technically sophisticated fashion. That could prove useful, but I've always insisted that the rubber has to meet the road at the national level.

Dr. Levitt's correlations of abortions and subsequent crime by state would be an excellent way to examine the issue if this was a question in agronomy, such as: Does a farmer wind up with a better crop if he thins out and throws away a higher percentage of the less promising seedlings? (Which is pretty much Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory in farm science terms.)

Levitt's technique of looking at abortion rates by state in the 1970s and 1980s and crime rates by state from 1985 through 1997 would work well if people in each state were rooted in the ground like vegetables. Human beings, however, are not plants. For one thing, they can get up and move around. People don't always stay in the states they were born in. And they can pick up influences from other states that change their behavior.

Over these decades, for example, states changed radically in ethnic makeup due to immigration, migration, different birthrates, even murder and AIDS.

This wouldn't be a disastrous problem for the validity of state-level analyses if the movement and influences were random noise unrelated to abortion and crime: it would just reduce the effect size.

Unfortunately for Levitt's analysis, nothing was random. During the years when the first generation to survive legal abortion was entering their crime-committing years, crime, the very thing he's conceiving as an effect of changes in abortion laws, was itself massively roiling the demographic and cultural landscape, driving people and ideas from high abortion states to low abortion states. It's a statistical analyst's nightmare: the thing you assume is the effect you want to explain turns out to be the cause of the not-so-random "noise" in the data.

And that hoped-for effect, crime, turns out to be correlated historically with what you were hoping to prove was its cause. It turns out that the more liberal parts of the country both had more abortions earlier in the 1970s and more of the subsequent great wave of youth violence earlier. Cause and effect or coincidence? Who knows?

The two major socially liberal states that had legalized abortion by 1970, California and New York, saw crack wars begin about 17 or so years later. They were soon exporting to more conservative states with lower abortion rates:

1. Crack gangs looking for new markets with less competition.

2. Individual dealers trying to escape arrest or death at the hands of their gang rivals (like the New York-area dealer Strike at the end of Richard Price's 1992 novel Clockers, later filmed by Spike Lee, who is fleeing south on a Greyhound bus).

3. Gangsta rap, in its West Coast and East Coast flavors, which spread the code of the crack dealer to the hinterlands.

4. Families fleeing the crack wars in Southern California and the Tri-State Area, trying to save their sons from the mean streets, but some of the sons brought their criminality with them.

A 1992 USC study of gang migration found:

Survey interviewers asked participating officers to choose from a list of reasons why most gang members moved into their cities. The most frequently cited reason was that gang members moved with their families (39 percent). When this was combined with the reason of staying with relatives and friends, 57 percent of the survey respondents believed that migrants relocated primarily for social reasons. Drug market expansion was the second most frequently cited motivation (20 percent of cities) for migrating. When this was combined with other criminal opportunities, it created a larger category of illegal attractions, or "pull" motivators, in 32 percent of cities reporting an influx of migrant gangs. "Push" motivators that forced gang members to leave cities, such as law enforcement crackdowns (8 percent), court-ordered relocation, or a desire to escape gangs, were cited in 11 percent of migrant-recipient cities.

In LA, this couldn't go on forever, and it didn't. The anarchy culminated in the vast South Central LA riot in the spring of 1992, and then, mercifully, the killing leveled off. The crack wars burnt out:

- By the early to mid 1990s in SoCal, too many of the baddest gangstas were in prison, wheelchairs, and coffins for the madness to continue unabated.

- Black families started to move out of the LA region to get away from crack, with the South, especially Atlanta, being a popular destination.

- More stable drug dealing cartels reached agreements to divide up territory peacefully, while some of the hungry young dealers left out of the cartels headed for other states to seek their fortunes.

- LA elected a Republican mayor in 1993 to bring law and order.

- The upcoming generation, born long after the legalization of abortion, began to grasp that you could listen to gangsta rap without living it. Ice Cube started to transform himself into the cuddly star of popular family movies like "Are We There Yet?"

The crack wars burnt out in the New York area too. They just couldn't go on. In NYC today, there are 36% more black women than black men alive.

But in the early 1990s, the crack wars were just getting started in the more conservative parts of the country. In the hinterlands, where abortion hadn't taken off as early in the 1970s, gang leaders moved in from LA and NYC specifically to deal crack and they found youthful foot soldiers both among kids whose parents had moved them from LA and NYC to get away from crack, and among the local kids who had been listening with growing excitement to West Coast and East Coast gangsta rap.

So, in the more conservative parts of the country, it took until the mid-to-late 1990s for the crack wars to burn out.

You can see how this history makes Levitt's state by state analyses close to hopeless. People aren't mindless vegetables stuck in one place, and the populations of states were changing year by year, both demographically and culturally. Just a few Blood or Crips moving to your city could infect your ghetto, already primed by listening to gangsta rap, with a wave of violence.

One problem I've noticed with econometrics is that its difficult to think hard about both the technical side and the human side of the question. Economists are used to dealing with topics, like foreign currency exchange rates, where they understand the human behavior reasonably well -- it's not that hard for an economist to think like a foreign currency trader -- so they can concentrate on the math. Levitt, to his credit, is trying to push economics into new areas. Unfortunately, his understanding of the human side of these areas is, well, about what you'd expect from an economist.

He's learned a lot about crime and poor people since 1999, but, unfortunately, he's chosen to defend at all costs his naive 1999 theory about abortion, even though its lack of human sophistication is blatant.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer