December 12, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell just can't leave it alone:

The New Yorker writer calms down, takes a few deep breaths, and tries to salvage what he can from his spat with me:


"More Thoughts On Selling Cars."

"I would like to take one more pass at the car dealer study, because I think it raises a few, additional, interesting questions."


As you'll recall, on Sunday he demonized me as a "racist" from "the lunatic fringe," citing my review of his bestseller "Blink." In it, I had quoted Judge Richard A. Posner who also scoffed at Gladwell's claim that even though car salesmen had been shown to offer higher prices to blacks and women during negotiations, that they weren't consciously discriminating. Car salesmen were instead, according to Gladwell, the victims of "unconscious" prejudices that, sadly, prevented them from making even more money.

Malcolm goes on today:


"My initial response to that study [by Ian Ayres] was simple: it’s wrong to try and charge someone more for something because of his or her gender and skin color. Reading the comments to my earlier posts, I was somewhat surprised to learn that for some people that is a controversial position. I’m guessing a lot of those who are indifferent to this kind of price discrimination are not black males. Oh well."


Malcolm is distorting the record here to make himself look morally superior to me. I always contended that car salesmen were mercenaries who would consciously exploit any edge, including race, to make more money. In reality, in a 1,000 word answer that Malcolm posted on his website about a year ago to the criticism made by Judge Posner and myself, Gladwell wrote:


"My interpretation is that the reason the car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don't realize what they are doing. But buried prejudices are changing their responses in the moment. Sailer and Posner, by contrast, think that the discrimination is conscious and, what's more, that it's rational. … Now, I suppose it's possible that salesman believe this ludicrous statement to be true. But not on a conscious level. I refuse to believe that all of the car salesmen of Chicago are so stupid as to believe that by virtue of having a slightly darker skin color a human being becomes somehow predisposed towards higher prices. Sailer and Poser have a very low opinion of car salesmen."


As I responded last February to Gladwell in VDARE.com:


"You must be one of the few people in the country who claims not to have a low opinion of car salesmen. A 2005 Gallup poll asked 1002 adults nationwide to rate the honesty and ethical standards of 21 occupations. Nurses came in first, with 82% rating them high or very high. Last were telemarketers at 7%. Next to last were car salesmen at 8%."


Gladwell's defense of salesmen reflects his own self-interest. I wrote :


"In summary, Malcolm, I have to scratch my head: You get paid $40,000 per speech to corporate sales forces?

"Obviously, you don't want to insult salesmen, who butter your bread. But I've spent a lot more years in the corporate trenches with sales guys than you have, and most of them have a good sense of humor about what they do. They can put up with some ribbing.

"What gets on their nerves is a pompous fool."


This is not an isolated example. As I explained in VDARE.com:


"Gladwell is important, however, because he's pioneering a new hybrid genre. There are three obvious ways to get rich as a nonfiction writer:

- Flatter conservatives that they are more moral, patriotic, and practical-minded than liberals.

- Flatter liberals that they are more ethical, cosmopolitan, and high-minded than conservatives.

- Give people advice, especially on how to make more money.

"Although once a conservative, briefly working for The American Spectator, in recent years the Canadian-born Gladwell has been perfecting a spiel that unites the latter two approaches: he appeals simultaneously to his audience’s liberal snobbery and capitalist greed.

"His reply to me, quoted above, is a perfect example of this. He asserts that car salesmen would make even more money if they overcame their primitive biases and started to offer blacks and women lower prices.

"In other words, become more politically correct and wealthier at the same time.

"Hey, it sure worked for Gladwell!"


Malcolm writes today:


"So let’s move on. A good deal of the commenters made the point that the behavior of the car salesmen was rational. This was the position of Judge Richard Posner, who gave “Blink” a spanking, when he reviewed it in the New Republic two years ago...

"I am not one, ordinarily, to take issue with Judge Posner, who knows a great deal more about economics—and most everything, I suspect (except maybe the Buffalo Bills)—than me. But let’s take a little closer look at this idea: is it really in the economic self-interest--is it really rational-- of car salesmen to draw inferences about individual car-buyers from the group to which those car buyers belong?

"When I was reporting Blink, I talked to a number of car salesmen about this very question. They were all top salesmen—99th percentile—since it struck me that it wouldn’t be terribly useful to quiz mediocre salesmen about their strategies. (One of the salesmen I interviewed, Bob Golomb is quoted extensively in the book)."


Of course, a 99th percentile salesman would be precisely the one most likely to figure out what Mr. Gladwell wants to hear about the car business and feed it back to him. As I've said before, Malcolm is too nice a guy. He's too gullible to be a reliable business reporter. He trusts his sources way too much. It never seems to occur to him that they have self-interested reasons for telling him what he wants to hear.

Malcolm goes on today:


"First, that one of the things you quickly learn, in selling cars, is that your ability to draw inferences about individuals’ buying preferences based on surface characteristics of race, gender, dress, age, hairstyle or manner isn’t nearly as good as you think it is. …

"Second, that price discrimination—quoting a higher price to one customer more than another—is a risky strategy, because if it backfires you lose the sale. …

"And three—building on point two—that the incentive structure of car salesmen, in recent years, has changed."


This post of his is an improvement in rationality over his recent ones, and the last is an especially good point (although it may not be relevant to Ayres' study from the early 1990s).

But Malcolm is leaving out that Judge Posner had already answered some of the arguments he makes in this post. From Judge Posner's review of "Blink" in The New Republic:


"Golomb, the successful auto salesman, is contrasted with the salesmen in a study in which black and white men and women, carefully selected to be similar in every aspect except race and sex, pretended to shop for cars. The blacks were quoted higher prices than the whites, and the women higher prices than the men. Gladwell interprets this to mean that the salesmen lost out on good deals by judging people on the basis of their appearance. But the study shows no such thing. The authors of the study did not say, and Gladwell does not show, and Golomb did not suggest, that auto salesmen are incorrect in believing that blacks and women are less experienced or assiduous or pertinacious car shoppers than white males and therefore can be induced to pay higher prices. The Golomb story contained no mention of race or sex. (Flemington, where Golomb works, is a small town in central New Jersey that is only 3 percent black.) And when he said he tries not to judge a person on the basis of the person's appearance, it seems that all he meant was that shabbily dressed and otherwise unprepossessing shoppers are often serious about buying a car. 'Now, if you saw this man [a farmer], with his coveralls and his cow dung, you'd figure he was not a worthy customer. But in fact, as we say in the trade, he's all cashed up.'"


Gladwell also writes today:


"The study is described in Ian Ayres’ Pervasive Prejudice?: Non-Traditional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination, which is a book that had a great deal of influence on my thinking when I was writing “Blink.” Ayres’ project in the book is in exploring non-traditional sources of discrimination—that is, the discrimination that persists because of some flaw or condition of the marketplace in which it is operating."


Ayres' study of price discrimination by car dealers had a big impact on me as well. It is an excellent piece of work. I found it quite disturbing when I first read it in the mid-1990s, and I spent a lot of effort trying to discover a flaw in the methodology to no avail.

At the time, I was a libertarian fellow traveler and had just published a cover story in National Review ("How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America: Competition v. Discrimination") trumpeting the Milton Friedman-Gary Becker theory that a competitive market would squeeze out racial discrimination because it was irrationally expensive. (I showed how the baseball teams that integrated first, such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, went on to great success. In contrast, the two teams that met in the World Series the year before Robinson's debut, the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, were the last to integrate, and thus ended up wasting the last decade and a half of the stupendous careers of Ted Williams and Stan Musial, never allowing those two all-timers to get back to the Series).

But then along came Ayres' study that shows how, in certain circumstances, racial discrimination can prove profitable decade after decade, even in a very free market. That was quite unsettling to me because it showed that the free market wasn't the cure for all forms of racial discrimination. I hadn't really thought about the economist's concept of "statistical discrimination" much before, so Ayres' study was a real eye-opener for me.

By the way, in the study black salespeople discriminated against blacks just as did white salespeople. Same for saleswomen -- they offered female customers higher prices. The most plausible explanation is that salespeople know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it because it makes them more money than not discriminating.

Economist Robert J. Stonebraker writes:


"While dealers and/or salespeople may know little or nothing about a particular customer, they know quite a bit about statistical differences among races and genders. They know that women and African-Americans typically enter the showroom with less information and less proclivity to bargain. Although white males often salivate at the chance to lock horns with car dealers in a bargaining struggle, females and African-Americans may be unaware that bargaining is even possible. Ayres and Siegelman cite a Consumer Federation of America survey that discovered that many female respondents, and more than one-half of African-American respondents, believed that sticker prices were non-negotiable. Armed with such knowledge, salespeople will rationally adopt a more stubborn stance while bargaining with female and African-American customers."


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

December 11, 2006

A car salesman's secrets:

A reader wrote last February:


I sold cars on assorted lots during my summers off from college. What you're saying [in debunking Malcolm Gladwell's theory that car salesmen are unconsciously offering higher prices to blacks and women] is true.

As a matter of fact, because of this phenomena of black men wanting to appear to be big spenders, I reflexively used what is called a "negative sell" approach. When a black man would tell me what car he was interested in, I'd "try" to dissuade him. "That's kind of an expensive model. Not everyone can swing that. Maybe you should take a look at a Ford Focus? Obviously, it isn't like the car you're interested in, but they're easier to finance."

Most often, he would say, "Oh no! I can afford what I want, no problem." I'd reply with plenty of enthusiasm, and show his car of choice. Back in the office, if he gave me any objections, I'd remind him that I told him it might be a little too expensive for him to handle, and he told me it would be no problem. That usually squelched any lowballing efforts.

Where did I learn this? Through experience, and the advice of mentors who had been selling cars for decades. Nothing unconscious about it. We all just wanted to make money. What race a fellow was being irrelevant except as it may pertain to getting them out with one of our cars under their butts. If I'd been told blacks enjoy English tea and crumpets, and I found it to be true, all my black customers would be sipping Earl Grey.

Race did not matter to me. Making the sale did. Matter of fact, professional sales is all about psychological self-discipline. Generally for a professional salesman, being a racist is not cost effective. Being observant of human behavior, and accurately identifying how to exploit it... is.


It's striking how often those who denounce me for noticing some racial difference so often assume that I must be saying it's 100% genetic in origin. For example, to my mind, where a group falls on the urge to drive a hard bargain vs. to be seen as a big spender appears to be far too variable over time, place, and situation to be purely genetic. Earlier this year, I quoted one of America's most insightful social observers on his own tribe's cheapness:


"We're talking about an ethnic cultural trait. And the simple fact is that the urge to drive a hard bargain famously varies between ethnic groups. As Dave Barry notes in his new book Dave Barry's Money Secrets (Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?):


"I'm the world's worst car buyer. I come from a long line of Presbyterians, who get their name from the Greek words pre, meaning 'people,' and sbyterian, meaning 'who always pay retail.' … My idea of an opening tactical salvo is to look at the car's sticker price and say to the salesperson, 'This looks like a good deal! Are you sure you're making enough profit on this?'"


Quite true today, but I suspect that a few centuries ago, Barry's Scottish Presbyterian ancestors were viewed by English Anglicans as tight-fisted cheapskates.

Groups can change. The point, however, is that change is frequently slow enough that clear patterns can be discerned and exploited by the knowing.

It doesn't do black car buyers any good for Malcolm Gladwell to tell them that car salesmen are not consciously trying to get them to pay higher prices. Blacks are better off knowing the truth -- that they are being intentionally discriminated against by dealers who use their own typical behavioral patterns to extract more money from them.

Blacks should get mad at this situation and take steps to end it. Buy Saturn's that come with a no-haggling single price. Practice not falling for dealers' playing tricks on delicate egos about their financial situations. Complain. Criticize other blacks who fall for gimmicks like the ones described above. Do something.


The truth shall set you free.



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

Sometimes racial similarities are just skin deep

From the NYT:


Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found. The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome.

It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.

Throughout most of human [pre]history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant. Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.

Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.

A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on. [More]


Similarly, the mutation for fair skin color is different in Europeans than in Northeast Asians.


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

Malcolm Gladwell strikes back!

Yesterday, Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker was calling me a "racist" from "the lunatic fringe" because, bizarrely enough, I believe that car salesmen intentionally discriminate against blacks and women. Today, his big complaint about me on his blog is, in effect, that I started iSteve.com way back in 1996 and haven't kept up with the times technologically. Because iSteve.com is an old-fashioned Front Page website, it can't display comments, for which he calls me a "chicken."

I do, however, use Blogger for archiving my blog entries, so I have now turned on Comments on my archive site, www.iSteve.blogspot.com. So, knock yourself out and comment away, Malcolm.

You know, Malcolm, instead of trying to come up with these brilliant chess moves like today's, maybe you should just go back to quoting me out of context and calling me the R word a lot.

The ostensible subject of Malcolm's ire lately has been the criticism Judge Richard Posner and I made of a section in Malcolm's bestseller "Blink" in which Gladwell, ever the loyal lackey of multi-culti capitalism, claims that the reason car salesmen offer higher prices to blacks and women is not because they are money-grubbing sons-of-guns out to extract every penny they can from every customer, but because the salesmen are innoncent victims of their own "unconscious prejudices." They just didn't realize "how egregiously they were cheating women and minorities."

Judge Posner and I were unimpressed with that line of reasoning, to which Malcolm fired back on his website about a year ago: "Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen."

You can read the whole spat here. You might find it amusing.



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

December 10, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell is holding a vote

on whether or not to excommunicate me as a "racist" of "the lunatic fringe" over on his blog. Drop by and check out the proceedings.

To smear me today, Malcolm is completely distorting the argument with Judge Richard A. Posner and myself on one side and Malcolm on the other over the morals of car salesmen.

Malcolm _defended_ the conscious moral innocence of car salesmen when they charge blacks and women more than they charge white men. Judge Posner and I laughed at that.

Gladwell is baffled and offended that both Judge Posner, the distinguished leader of the Law and Economics school of thought, and myself had scoffed at his theory that, as he puts it, the reason "car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don't realize what they are doing. But buried prejudices are changing their responses in the moment."

Posner and I had pointed out that auto dealers aren't tragic victims of their own hidden bigotry. Instead, they are relying on their years of experience at milking different kinds of customers for the highest possible price. Thus, they make higher offers to blacks and women because they've found they can often manipulate them into paying more.

In a scathing review of Blink in the The New Republic, the celebrated Judge Posner explains: "It would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman's discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the "rapid cognition" that he admires… [I]t may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. An individual's characteristics may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more so. Economists use the term 'statistical discrimination' to describe this behavior."

I concluded: "Statistical discrimination is a troubling phenomenon, because it chips away at the libertarian assumption that competitive markets eliminate racial discrimination, as they do away with most things that are irrationally costly."

In response, Gladwell sniffed: "Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen."

Now, that's a killer comeback!

Today, when I pointed out that he was misleading his readers, he immediately deleted my comment. You can read the whole debate of Gladwell vs. Posner & Sailer over car dealers' motivations here. It's pretty funny. And you can comment on Gladwell's ban of me here.

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

December 9, 2006

Charles C. Mann replies about 1491

I read your blog fairly often so was quite surprised to see you talking about my book. I'm sorry you thought I was being "slippery" in not specifying more often when I was talking about the area north or south of the Rio Grande. You probably saw an artefact of my struggle with terminology. Problem is, the way we divide things up now (splitting the area north of Colombia into North America and Central America) doesn't fit very well with how things were then, when you had a bunch of related, highly urbanized societies in a region extending from about the Honduras-Nicaragua border to the American SW, and then everything else. In earlier drafts I tried saying when referring to the not-as-urbanized places something like "the area north of the Rio Grande except for the Southwest," but this was shouted down by my editors. I tried not using that kind of label as much, and hoping the reader would catch on to what area I was talking about, but obviously that didn't work for you. My apologies .

No, I should apologize. I was rushing to feed the blog beast after a spell of computer troubles and I posted something quick and dirty about an impressive book that Mr. Mann had clearly worked on for years, a topic where experts hold conflicting views, which he rightly refused to oversimplify.

I would say, though, that you're not quite right about Cahokia. Cahokia was by far the biggest of the mound cities of the SE and Mississippi Valley, but there were many thousands of these places--ten thousand is the estimate I've heard most often. Most of them probably held 3-10,000 people, so they weren't huge places. It's as if the moundbuilders went straight past urbanization to suburbanization, skipping the cities and going right to the strip malls. A lot of these places are just a few miles apart, and presumably would have had maize fields between, exactly the sort of situation that most urban historians think would have led to cities.

The other thing is... ten thousand of these places. If you do the math, 3K x 10K = 30M = far more than the total number of people supposed to be north of the Rio G (<20m).>

Another interesting topic would be the population of California Indians -- how dense can a population in a pleasant climate but fairly dry get without agriculture? We know the Northwest Indians were pretty thick on the ground due to fish, even without farming, but California Indians didn't leave a lot of relics behind.

I would argue with you a little that urban life was MORE feasible in the New World than the old because of the lack of pathogens. A lot of archaeologists think that it was LESS feasible because of the lack of draft animals, which made communications and infrastructure-creation much harder. It seems to me that the situations were so different that it's hard to make useful comparisons. Mesoamerica was almost freakishly urbanized, with some geographers claiming it was the most urbanized place on Earth in 1000-1400. But the second most urbanized place was China, which was absolutely swimming in disease. You can look to Africa for insight, as you do, but the situation is muddy. In Sub-Saharan Africa you certainly had major cities--Great Zimbabwe, Ingombe, Mbanzakongo, Loango. But there weren't as many packed in as Mesoamerica, that's for sure. A good book on this is Chris Ehret's Civlizations of Africa.

The Yucatan Peninsula is a horrible place -- not just hot and humid, but the limestone soil means that water sinks into the ground almost immediately. It's completely flat, with no rivers or lakes, and covered with low scrubby trees about 15 feet tall. Looking out the back window of a hotel room on a beautiful beach in Cozumel, I had a hard time shaking the feeling that I was an astronaut in some Twilight Zone episode who had landed on a planet where the beach was wonderful, but the rest of the planet was just a cheap backdrop slapped together in some alien movie studio. And yet the Mayans built extraordinary urban centers like Chichen Itza and Tikal on this unpromising landscape, while North American Indians, blessed with a temperate climate and rich soils, rarely created cities.


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

"Casino Royale:"

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

James Bond is the most popular English fictional character since Sherlock Holmes, the hero of 23 movies raking in four billion dollars at the global box office. The essence of his screen appeal has been the paradox embodied in the medieval word "gentleman:" an individual of refined manners, educated in the arts of conversation, dress, and cuisine, whose profession is violence.

The English gentleman was the outcome of a project lasting a millennium and a half to mold the anarchic barbarian chieftains who conquered Dark Ages Europe into the upholders of civilization. Like the Japanese samurai, they were gentled by learning aristocratic culture, without, of course, demeaning themselves so low as to have to get a job that didn't involve killing people.

Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale introduced a rather grim Bond. The charming but deadly gentleman Bond who had such an impact on popular culture was largely invented in 1962 by the director of "Dr. No," Terence Young. A public school boy, Cambridge grad, twice-wounded WWII officer, wit, bon vivant, and ladies' man, Young had everything except directing talent. He ended his career helming the seldom-seen epics "Inchon" for the Rev. Moon and "Long Days" for Col. Gaddafi.

What he did excel at, however, was teaching a young Scottish proletarian, a former milkman and coffin polisher named Sean Connery, how to act like Terence Young.


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

"Apocalypto"

Mel Gibson's upcoming movie about the collapse of Mayan civilization in pre-Columbian times, with an all-Mayan cast speaking Mayan, looks from the previews like nothing in Hollywood history. (Here's a review of an unfinished version.) Perhaps it was inspired by the Eskimo movie "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner"? (Here's my review of that 2002 film made by Inuits.)

As usual, my concern with Mel's movies is that his great theme -- pain -- is one where a little goes a long way with me. I suspect he became interested in Pre-Columbian Indian civilizations because pain was such a central theme in their cultures too.


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

Polygamy

Polygamy: Gary Becker vs. Nicholas Wade: A common theme here at iSteve is how intellectually Aspergery so many economists are. The thinking of a lot of famous economists seems to be vaguely autistic in the sense that they seem disconnected from so many obvious facts about human nature. Here, for example, is Gary Becker, who, oddly enough, won his Nobel for is work on family life, making a case for polygamy:

"While the ferocious opposition to polygamy seemed strange even in the 1970's when I first wrote about this practice, it is much stranger now in light of developments during the past couple of decades. These developments include a successful movement to legalize contracts between gays that allow them to live as married couples, even though there is ongoing emotional debate about whether such couples can legally be considered "married". ... If modern women are at least as capable as men in deciding whom to marry, why does polygyny continue to be dubbed a "barbarous" practice?

In other words, Becker just doesn't get it about why people don't like polygamy, even though the real reason is easily expressed in economics terminology: Monogamy is a cartel formed by males to reduce male vs. male competition for wives to more of a matter of quality than of quantity. The ability of a culture's males to cooperate with each other is correlated with the overall quality of life in that culture. But Becker doesn't seem familiar with that common argument.

Here it's expressed by the NYT's genetic reporter Nicholas Wade in his book Before the Dawn:

"The novel arrangement of pairing off males and females creates a whole new set of social calculations. Most males in the society now have a chance to reproduce since they possess socially endorsed access to at least one female. So each male has a much greater incentive to invest in cooperative activities, such as hunting or defense, that may benefit the society as a whole.

The pair bond takes much of the edge out of male-to-male aggression. It also requires that men trust one another more, and can have some confidence that those who go hunting won't be cuckolded by those to stay to defend the women."


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

"Stranger than Fiction"

Will Ferrell plays a boring IRS auditor who does everything by clockwork, always taking the 8:17 bus every morning to work, never showing any emotion or thinking about anything besides his dull job.

One day, he notices a well-spoken lady's voice in his head narrating what he's doing. When she (Emma Thompson, playing a prestigious author of literary fiction who has been trying to write her novel "Death and Taxes" for a decade) announces that he's unaware of his impending death, he goes to see a professor of literature (Dustin Hoffman), who has no problem accepting that his visitor is a character in somebody else's story. Eventually, with Hoffman's help, Ferrell tracks down Thompson, who admits she's about to kill him off in her ending.

In the only funny scene, Ferrell gives Thompson's unfinished manuscript to Hoffman who reads it and enthusiastically tells him that it's a masterpiece, and that any other ending would ruin it, so he'll just have to die for the good of literature.

One obvious challenge in any story where a character is supposed to be a literary genius is, as Nabokov argued, that the author must present persuasive evidence that the genius really is a genius. This is hard to do when the actual author isn't a genius, which, unfortunately, hot young screenwriter Zach "The-New-Charlie-Kaufman" Helm most evidently is not. The prose style of the lengthy narration from the novel by Thompson is deeply mediocre, and the plotting is singularly lacking in invention.

For instance, Thompson struggles throughout the film to come up with an inspired way to kill off poor Ferrell. Eventually, she achieves a breakthrough, which turns out to be that Ferrell will be ... hit by a bus. Hit by a bus? That's the most hackneyed form of death in the English language at present. Google lists 365,000 examples of "hit by a bus." In one of them, a reader asks, "Why do managers always say something like 'In case you get hit by a bus, I want to make sure you and Fred are inter-changeable'?"

Second, the movie, directed by Marc Forster, the man behind such mediocrities as "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland," is intentionally lifeless. It was filmed in Chicago, a great-looking town with many idiosyncratic landmarks, but the settings were so generic and lacking in local color I thought it was another one of those productions where Toronto is supposed to stand in for Chicago to save on the exchange rate.

This was a "creative" decision on the part of the filmmakers to emphasize how boring and uncreative Ferrell's IRS agent is. But the film just ends up looking phony. For example, there is no "8:17 bus" in Chicago. You simply go down to the corner and wait. Some days, depending on the vagaries of the weather, traffic, and politics, three buses show up one right after another, and other days, no bus comes until 8:45, and then it's full. In the real Chicago, stuff happens.

Third, the movie is redolent of the smug contempt that people with creative jobs have for people with non-creative jobs, whom the creative types imagine must be automatons.

"Stranger than Fiction" isn't an awful movie, but Zach Helm sure isn't Charlie Kaufman.

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

"Teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day:"

The New York Times Magazine runs another article about how to achieve the mandate of the No Child Left Behind act by closing the race gaps in American schools. In "What It Takes to Make a Student," NYT staffer Paul Tough visits some of the handful of charter schools where black or Hispanic students score above average and makes a list of what they need to succeed. My favorite: "Teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day." That sounds like something Mao would have called for during the Great Leap Forward: "My plan for backyard steel furnaces is guaranteed to succeed if the peasants work 15 to 16 hours a day!"
I don't doubt that a handful of superstar principals and teachers can make a big difference, just as a great basketball coach can win with fairly short players. In 1964, after many years as an also-ran, UCLA's John Wooden won the NCAA championship with a team with nobody over 6'-5." So, did Wooden resolve to continue to shatter the stereotype that height matters in basketball? No, he then took his prestige as a coach who could win with a small team, went all the way to New York City, and landed the best big man of the decade, 7'-2" Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
In contrast, Adolph Rupp of Kentucky won four national titles while recruiting 80% of his players from his home state. "Rupp's Runts" in 1966 were so short that they had to use 6'-4" Pat Riley, the future NBA coaching legend, for the opening center-jump. Rupp believed a good coach could win with undistinguished talent. But in this year's movie "Glory Road," Rupp is the bad guy who loses in the title game to the wave of the future, coach Don Haskins, who scoured the country to bring talent to El Paso.
Similarly, schools also routinely transform their flash-in-the-pan reputations for working wonders in to the long term capital of better students.


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

Charter Schools:

A reader writes:

As you know, I'm on the board of a new charter school in XXX, so this is an issue close to my heart.

High-performing charter schools are frequently accused of achieving their success by taking only the cream of the public-school student crop. But in NYC at least, that's not an option: students are assigned by lottery. There is a degree of self-selection, since you don't get *into* the lottery unless you apply. But there's no qualification for entry other than city residence; from that pool of applicants, the actual enrolled students are chosen strictly at random. The school I'm involved with is 25% special ed, and most of the school is reading well below grade level. I don't think that's the cream of the crop.

There's a bunch of charter schools that have achieved remarkable results with underperforming student populations. So: how do they do it? My own view is that the lion's share of success is due to three factors:

- Disciplined environment. High-performing charter schools take discipline seriously. As a consequence, they don't have the cultures of disorder and even violence (property crime, stabbings, even rapes) that you read about in some regular urban public schools. It's kind of obvious that an atmosphere of chaos makes pedagogy difficult if not impossible. This is a relatively low bar to clear in that what it takes to impose discipline isn't that complicated - it just requires willpower and a relatively free hand.

- Longer school day and year. At our school, the day starts early, ends late, there are classes many Saturday mornings, there's a shorter summer, and there are fewer holidays. That adds up to roughly 50% more class time than at regular public schools. It also means less time for the kids to be getting into one kind of trouble or another. Again, it's kind of obvious that more time in class should get better academic results, particularly if you're dealing with students who start out behind.

- Committed, competent staff. High-performing charter schools have the flexibility to hire and fire pretty much at will, so they can get rid of time-servers and incompetents, and they have school cultures that get teachers to put out a lot of extra (largely uncompensated) efforts. Again, we're talking about clearing a low bar: getting rid of worthless teachers is easier than hiring superstars, and may result in a comparable benefit in terms of better instruction.

On top of all this, each charter layers its own "special sauce" - one school has an "east Asian" theme, and teaches all the kids Chinese and karate; another has a music theme, and has all the kids in an orchestra; another has a purportedly afro-centric curriculum; another teaches Latin; the head-of-school at the school I'm involved in is big on civics and debate - but the particularities of the special sauce don't seem to matter much in terms of outcomes; the sauce is really there to create a sense of identity and mission for the school, which makes it easier to get staff and students to put out more effort for the sake of the team with which they identify.

At bottom, what I think accounts for the success of these schools are all very simple things and are, generally, more a matter of ending really bad practices than of implementing really extraordinary ones.

I *hope* that this is most of what it takes, because if great teachers are essential to producing decent students from underperforming populations, then there's no way to scale the success of these schools, and they are much less interesting (see below). An open question in my own mind is to what degree the deterioration in the quality of education across the board in America is simply due to feminism: highly intelligent women now have many more economically- and socially-rewarding work alternatives to teaching, which in turn must have meant a dramatic decline in average teacher quality.

There are very good questions to ask about the results that these schools deliver, but I don't think the question of whether they are selecting for better students is a key one.

Here are the two that I have been focused on:

- How lasting are the effects? If you have a longer school day and year, you can spend a lot more time teaching to the test, and not have that devour *all* classroom instruction time (which over time is self-defeating), as is happening under the pressure of NCLB at some regular public schools. That will clearly deliver better test results.

Will it result in longer-term gains? More generally, students who may succeed in the highly structured and supportive environment of a high-performing charter school may not function so well once that structure and support are withdrawn, as is the case when students graduate to high school (unless they go to a similarly highly-structured and supportive charter school for high school) or to college and/or the workforce. Charter schools have probably gotten big enough as a phenomenon that we can study the high school, college and early workforce performance (GPA, dropout rate, employment rate, average income, income trajectory, etc) and compare it to similar populations educated in mainstream urban public schools. I would expect the comparison to be positive; the question is *how* positive, how big the return is once you look out 10-15 years.

- How scalable is the model? To the extent that charter schools depend for their success on excellent teachers, the model is not very scalable at all, because there is no plausible mechanism for massively increasing the supply of quality teachers. (The supply could be modestly increased by better pay and working conditions, which charters can provide - high-performing charters tend to pay a better annual salary than the regular public schools, albeit on a per-hour basis they are generally paying *less* because of the longer work day and year); even more important is the freedom from the ed-school cartel and restrictive union rules that productive people tend to chafe against.) To the extent that charters can succeed with average-but-competent teachers, scalability is more plausible, but you still have to ask the question whether charters can succeed without outstanding principals/heads-of-school. You don't need as many of those, but I'm more confident that you can't build a high-performing charter without one. Even if we have (or can obtain) an adequate supply of really outstanding people to run these schools, can the model be scaled financially? Charters frequently brag about doing more with less - achieving great results while getting less public money than the regular public schools. But anecdotally I can tell you that many of the high-performing charters I'm familiar with get significant resources from the private sector, from foundations and/or from sugar daddies with a charitable impulse.

Someone needs to do a study of how significant those resources are, to determine whether the charter model is financially scalable.


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

The Polonium Puzzle

After I mentioned the pulp fiction-sounding name of the man who lunched with the spy the day he was poisoned, Russian radiation expert Professor Mario Scaramella of Naples and Bogota, a reader points out:

The name of the villain in Ian Fleming's "The Man with the Golden Gun,” played by Christopher Lee in the 1975 James Bond movie, was “Francisco Scaramanga!”


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

The art of golf course architecture

From the Wall Street Journal:


'That Was From the Artist's Green Period'
Just because players don't wax about aesthetics doesn't mean great golf courses aren't high art
by John Paul Newport

... [Golf] architecture buffs, wisely, don't bother addressing the high-art question, even though they do occasionally throw around the A-word (as in "the art of golf course design"), and some course designers do self-consciously attempt to incorporate age-old artistic motifs into their work. I say wisely because defining art is slippery. Have you ever tried to read an article in a learned art journal? I have, several times, and can only conclude that people who write about the subject professionally are a lot smarter than I am, because I hardly understood a word.

One writer who has boldly ventured into the art-golf waters is Steve Sailer, a blogger and film reviewer for American Conservative magazine. In a most entertaining essay last year (available at www.isteve.com/golf_art.htm2), he made the case that golf courses are one of the world's "least recognized art forms" and might even be thought of as the great WASP art contribution of the 20th century. Unfortunately, he contends, golf architecture has never received its artistic due for various cultural and sociological reasons. (One example: Cutting-edge art is usually thought of as anti-bourgeoisie, and golf is anything but.)

The article also reprised what for me has always been one of the most intriguing notions about golf's appeal, and which I think bears on the art question: namely, that at a subconscious level the game connects us (men especially, I suppose) to our evolutionary past as hunters. We stalk golf courses that themselves often resemble our primordial hunting grounds in East Africa: grassy savannahs with scattered stands of protective trees and abundant watering holes (read: water hazards) that attract prey. In one study Mr. Sailer cited, people in 15 nations were quizzed about what scenes they would most like to see in paintings; the collated responses in 11 of the countries pointed to landscapes that looked very much like golf courses, viewed from elevated tees. [More]


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

Environmental Impact of Immigration

A reader writes:

If we allow the millions of illegal aliens to remain in this country, what will be the environmental impact of this? You can not build a shopping center nor a housing development nor a dam in this country without doing exhaustive environmental impact studies. Would one way of delaying or even stopping the granting of amnesty to these illegals aliens be to file a lawsuit in federal court demanding that environmental impact studies be done on the effect of the amnesty on the environment?

Certainly laws opening the borders further would be more destructive of the American environment than just about any other law with much chance of passing. Does anybody know whether the environmental laws could be applied in this situation to force a massive environmental impact statement analysis? Certainly, the pro-open borders forces intend to use environmental impact statements to slow construction of border fences.


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

The Derb is on fire

John Derbyshire writes in NRO:

[Borat] illustrates the tremendous power of folk memory. Sacha Baron Cohen (who is an observant Jew) has said, in an interview, that he wanted to make some points about antisemitism.

Nothing wrong with that. I have expressed the opinion somewhere that we have entered an age in which antisemitism will again drive large world events. It is a great and terrible force.

But where is it located? According to SBC, it is located among East European villagers, super-genteel middle-class Americans, and redneck southern Christians. This is precisely the folk memory of the Ashkenazim. The enemies are mean, stupid, persecuting peasants of the Old Country, exclusive country-club patrons, and Klansmen.

Could anything be more wrongheaded? Jews are indeed in peril in the world today, but not from any of those sources. SBC is the Jewish equivalent of those Irish Americans I used to (and still occasionally do) get into arguments with, for whom nothing at all has happened since 1846.

He has not noticed the modern world, preferring instead to stay in the warm cocoon of his grandparents’ stories about brutish muzhiky, great-uncle Irv being kept out of Yale, and tobacco-spitting good ol’ boys sneering at pointy-head Jewish perfessors. I don’t think I have ever seen this odd phenomenon so clearly illustrated. I am sure SBC had no idea he was doing this.


Shallow Sentimentality on Immigration. One thing that you can’t help noticing about the immigration discussions is that pretty much all the real analysis — the spreadsheets, the projections, the number crunching — is on the restrictionist side.

The other side has... what? Well, it has the kind of silly feel-good twaddle illustrated to perfection by James Poniewozik’s essay in last week’s Time magazine. The piece is supposed to make some contribution to the immigration debate, but what does it actually tell us? “Here is a Hispanic person. Her father was an illegal immigrant! Yet she is really nice!” Well, that's great; but how does it help us in sorting out a sensible immigration policy? I don't doubt for a moment that America Ferrera is a wonderful person. Here is a different story, about an illegal immigrant from Ecuador who is not so wonderful. Here is a story about the fiscal problems here in my home county, twelve hundred miles from the Mexican border, caused by illegal-alien criminals. These are my property-tax dollars being spent, and I don’t have a lot of dollars.

Where does any of this get us? With big social-political issues like immigration, what is needed is for us to think things through, not to swoon over happy-face stories like Ms. Ferrara’s, nor for that matter to bristle at grim-face ones like Mr. Pillco’s. Yet practically everything published by the supporters of illegal immigration is just shallow sentimental swooning of the Time variety. Perhaps sentimentality is all these people have to offer. They sure don't seem to be long on real analysis.

Most insulting of all is the subhead on the Time piece: “On TV, the immigration wars aren’t as simple as politicians make them sound.” Let’s see: Who, exactly, is reducing this vast and momentous issue to simplicities: the author of the Time piece, with his cheery little anecdote about one immigrant, or serious analysts like our own Mark Krikorian, who has spent years patiently crunching the numbers to try to find out what will be the consequences for our nation of importing 100 or 200 million third-world immigrants? The argument is not about one immigrant, this Ms. Ferrera. It’s about tens or hundreds of millions, including some Ms. Ferreras, some Mr. Pillcos, and everything in between. Can we have that argument, please?

The great English immigration-restrictionist Enoch Powell had a slogan he tried to include in everything he said or wrote on the topic: NUMBERS ARE OF THE ESSENCE. Precisely. The Time essay has given us a number of one. Its information content, as regards what are and what are not sound immigration policies, is an even smaller number: zero. Immigration policy is a branch of mathematics, not weekend work for employees of the Hallmark Card Company. [More]


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

Feminism killed the Neanderthals?


Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE Published: December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

John Hawks isn't convinced, however.


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

More from The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Deogolwulf writes:

Monday, June 06, 2005
New Report Finds Britain is "Hideously White"

All socially aware people have long suspected it, the line-up at the upcoming Live 8 concerts has highlighted it, but now a report to be released today by the Committee on Racial Affairs has confirmed it: Britain is “hideously white”. The report found that up to 91% of the population of Britain is white. “This can’t go on,” said Dr Donald Watkins, who co-authored the report. “I find it offensive that in this day and age so many people in Britain are white. It is a disgrace.”

Institutions, such as the BBC, have been reprimanded before on precisely this issue. The new report, however, makes it clear that the problem is not confined to institutions: the problem extends all the way down into wider society. Indeed, the hideous whiteness of institutions is an accurate reflection of society at large.

As Prof. Tetherton, a sociologist at the University of East Anglia, explains, “Because 91% of the population is hideously white, it means that the institutions naturally tend to take on the same horrific hue. If we are serious about tackling the problem, we must eradicate it at the root. Only this way can we create a freer, more equal society.”

Chris Martin, of the popular beat combo Coldplay, was unsurprised by the findings: “Most of my teachers at school were white, most of the people in my street were white, even my parents were white. I think it’s disgusting. [And my wife, I just noticed, is the whitest woman in the entire world.] People don’t seem to realise just how offensive it is. And when you consider that most shareholders are white, well, then we know we are dealing with the most unspeakable evil.”

The report comes after weeks of mounting pressure on the government to make known its understanding of the extent of the problem. “It seems there has been a lack of will on the part of politicians to tackle this issue,” said Emily Burton, spokeswomen for the independent think-tank Totalitas. “But now the government cannot ignore it.”

The report also places greater pressure on the organisers of the Live 8 concerts to change the racial constitution of its performers. “The thought of old white people playing guitars makes me physically sick,” said one activist. [More Joy]


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

Liberaltarian?

Everybody in the high-IQ sliver of the blogosphere is talking about Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute's call for libertarians to dump their relationship with the Republicans and team up with the Democrats as "liberaltarians."

Funny how the libertarians waited until after the election to debate whether they should jump on the Democrat's bandwagon...

Do you imagine Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixara and the other serious Democratic pollsters and electoral strategists are sitting around clinking champagne glasses together over the possibility that the tiny fraction of the electorate that is libertarian might come over to the Democrats' side? Me, neither. As Stalin might ask, "How many divisions do the libertarians have?"

Libertarians are much more prevalent in the far right edge of the Web's Bell Curve than they are in the voting booth.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Diversity without Community"

My cover story "Fragmented Future" in the January 15, 2007 American Conservative is a long one. Here's an excerpt:


As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions.

Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only one out of three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third carefully straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the stripes were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever the hell they felt like.

The next year I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s.

That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans's beach, instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hard-working and ambitious as we were. Mexico's economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn't seem to team up well beyond family-scale.

In America, you don't need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, "Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power."

Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. "Mexicans need few friends," Riding observed, "because they have many relatives."

Mexico is a notoriously low trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, "Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population."

Jorge G. Castañeda, Vicente Fox's first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexico's disparities in 1995: "The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years)… By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians …"

Castañeda pointed out, "These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. … The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is … simply a retargeting."

And these deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why in Harvard professor Robert D. "Bowling Alone" Putnam's "Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey," Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie "Crash."

Of course, the winner-take-all entertainment industry contributes to Angelenos feeling wary around each other. I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens ("Fargo"), Wachowskis ("The Matrix"), Farrellys ("There's Something About Mary"), and Wayans ("Scary Movie"). "Who else can you trust?" he shrugged.

Still, what primarily drove down LA's rating in Putnam's 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of LA's whites said they trusted other races "only a little or not at all," 37 percent of LA's Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.

Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from the Latinos' failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet, the LA survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of cooperativeness and social capital among Latinos. As op-ed columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the LA Times: "In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity."

Due to the rapid national growth of the Hispanic population, America as a whole will become, like Los Angeles, a less trusting, less cohesive society, sapping political, economic, and cultural life.


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

December 7, 2006

Swivel

For a long time, there has been a need for a Wikipedia of Data.

Back in 2004, the Laboratory of the States website showed the value of the concept by inputting several hundred sets of numbers for the 50 states and then allowing users to try any correlations they wanted. I found it very useful in devising my Affordable Family Formation theory of Red State-Blue State voting. For example, that's where I discovered that housing inflation by state from 1980-2004 was very closely correlated with voting in the Bush-Kerry race.

Laboratory of the States lacked the glossy interface necessary to catch on with the public, however. A snazzy-looking website called Gapminder ("Our Vision: Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!") came along recently loaded with data by country and with some excellent graphics for analysis.

My first thought was, "Man, we have got to load the Lynn-Vanhanen IQ by nation data into this." But, I've never found a way to add data to Gapminder.

Now, a new website called Swivel.com is positioning itself to be the Wikipedia of data, allowing the public to load in their own data sets, then produce correlations and graphs versus other data already in Swivel.

Meanwhile, Swivel will be automatically checking the correlations of all the data it has, thus producing a few new valuable insights and, no doubt, a boatload of false positives, some of which will turn into new examples of conventional wisdom of the abortion-cuts-crime ilk. For example, today Swivel is featuring a graph showing that the crime rate in America has been negatively correlated with the popularity of wine. So, Steve Levitt was wrong -- it wasn't abortion that drove down crime in the 1990s, it was the resurgence of wine-drinking!

A reader writes:

Swivel won't exactly be the new youtube, but it is very fun and could be useful. Right now though, it's a bit hard to operate. They're going to need to figure out how to find a good way to search through the various graphs. Also, I couldn't get the graph mashing function to work on the few I tried. So there are still kinks.

Note: From Swivel's Terms Of Service:

According to their TOS, if you submit anything, you grant to Swivel, its affiliates and their assignees a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, royalty-free right to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, make derivative works of and otherwise exploit such User Submissions in any form and for any purpose, including without limitation, any concepts, ideas or know-how embodied therein.

So, bye-bye to your intellectual property rights in anything you post there.


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

The bizarre reigning definition of "racism:"

A reader comments, in response to Malcolm Gladwell expressing the elite conventional wisdom, "To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites:"

I've wondered many times why social scientists always define racism as the belief in innate racial differences. Even when I was a liberal, I used to think things like, "Racism is supposed to be about hatred. Ordinary people constantly talk about how hating others is so terrible, but when it comes to scholarship, the topic is always framed in terms of nature versus nurture. What about the situation where a guy loves blacks, but thinks they are naturally faster sprinters than others. We want to get worked up about this guy? We want to call him a racist?"

Now, I wonder if there is something else going on. One thing I do know about social scientists (since I am one) is that, as the disciplines have gotten more specialized, they know nothing about biology. Perhaps they have feared that if the connection between biology and behavior were allowed to be studied, the day would arrive when they would look like phrenologists. By delegitimizing the field, they could always be looked to as the experts. Their reputations and jobs would thus be preserved. I don't know if I'm right, but something smells fishy to me. Or maybe defining racism in terms of nature-nurture is simply designed to provide more direct arguments for affirmative action programs.


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

"Hideously white:"

When I quoted below the parody "New Report Finds Britain is 'Hideously White'" from the brilliant Joy of Curmudgeonry website, I didn't realize that Deogolwulf hadn't made up the phrase "hideously white." From the BBC News in 2001:

BBC director-general Greg Dyke has described the corporation as being "hideously white". Mr Dyke did not say the corporation was racist but acknowledged that, like the Metropolitan Police, it had a problem with race relations. He admitted the organisation's management structure was more than 98% white. And he said it was unable to retain staff from ethnic minorities and questioned if they were made to feel welcome. ... Mr Dyke said: "I think the BBC is hideously white."

The situation is similar in American media enterprises that aren't so big and rich that they have to have an affirmative action plan.

Steve Gilliard points us toward an article in the New York Observer by Lizzy Ratner called "Vanilla Ceiling" on the editorial and writing staffs of New York glossy magazines:

Still, the results of the survey revealed a world that looks little like the streets of New York, where nearly 65 percent of the population identified itself as nonwhite in the 2000 census.

Of the 203 staffers and contributors listed on the Vanity Fair masthead, six—or less than 3 percent—are people of color.

At Condé Nast Traveler, the swank travel monthly, 11 of the 85 staffers and contributors listed on the masthead are people of color. Of those 11 staffers, three hold editing positions and two are contributing editors, while six hold lower-masthead positions as researchers and assistant editors.

The New Yorker doesn’t publish a masthead, but based on conversations with sources and available published information, the magazine has a pool of some 130 editors, critics, copy editors, fact checkers, editorial assistants and outside contributors—of whom 11 are people of color.

At Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, four members of the magazine’s 73-person editorial staff are people of color.

Six members of New York magazine’s 90-person team of editors, writers, contributors and editorial assistants are not white. ...

At Forbes, an estimated seven people out of a pool of 116 editors, writers, reporters, editorial assistants, copy editors and bureau correspondents are people of color.

And the non-glossy Nation lists eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows.

Awhile back I tried to explain to Jared Taylor that his white ethnocentrism wouldn't fly in the U.S. for the paradoxical reason that whites remain so dominant in many of the top jobs in the more desirable industries that no sense of white solidarity could emerge because the top people see themselves as engaged in clawing their way to the top over other whites (for example, 99% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 94% of Hollywood screenwriters are white), and so they look upon minorities merely as tokens or as props they can use to engage in a little moral one-upmanship over their white rivals.

Of course, some media outlets, especially big city newspapers, have strict affirmative action plans. This means that their staffs instantly become hostage to the minority editors and reporters if they even dream about deviating from the line of political correctness.

In either case, honesty about race is the worst policy for the self-interested.


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

December 6, 2006

Hawk repellent?

This evening, shortly after dark, I was stepping into the enclosed backyard where Fred, my older son's large white rabbit, lives, when a gray shape suddenly swooped down out of the night sky and a white shape shot across the lawn inches ahead of it and took refuge in the dense star jasmine bush.

The hawk (or perhaps an owl, but it looked more like a hawk) landed on the roof of the house behind us. I threw lemons at the predator, but when it took flight again, it landed on the telephone pole in the backyard and peered down hungrily. Eventually, it tired of the lemons flying past and took off for parts unknown, but I fear it will be back for Fred.

I can't imagine anything smaller than an eagle could carry off Fred, who weighs several pounds. A few years ago, I saw a hawk struggling to lift a squirrel it had killed off a San Fernando Valley sidewalk, and certainly a big bunny weighs multiple times more than a squirrel. (That hawk finally gave up carrying off the squirrel after about 100 crows came from all around to squawk menacingly at the hawk's encroachment on their suburban turf.)

In a fair fight, face to face, the bunny would stand a good chance against the hawk, using the claws of its powerful hind legs to slash downward at the bird. Still, the hawk could do a lot of damage to Fred with its talons in one of its dive-bombing runs. The rabbit, who has pink eyes not suitable for bright conditions, spends sunny days deep in the bushes, but at night he likes to come out and frolic on the lawn. I had never heard of local hawks attacking at night, but this one clearly does.

So, tonight Fred is in the house, but he chews through all the lamp cords and aggressively poops in front of the door of his mortal enemy, Whopper, the little bunny who lives in my younger son's room. I want him back outside soon.

So, does anybody have any advice for preventing bloodshed in the backyard?


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

December 5, 2006

The Joy of Curmudgeonry

Dennis Mangan points us to a website where "Deogolwulf" delivers aphorisms in the style of G.C. Lichtenberg:


A Little More Lichtenberg
“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”


Here are some of Deogolwulf's own:


Fewtril #140 It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverising the already smashed idols of another.

Fewtril #126 It is hardly to be hoped that one can speak with knowledge and insight without being accused of ignorance and bigotry.

Fewtril #122 In the great scramble to be offended, it is essential that one might find any innocuous thing utterly vile and offensive, lest one be outdone by more inventive souls.

Fewtril #117 The principle that controversial or objectionable views ought not to be suppressed, but rather shown to be wrong through reasoned debate, is usually defended only when a man is under the impression that those views have little reason in their favour. So much for magnanimity!

Fewtril #107 The scepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realisation.

Fewtril #105 It is good to spend an hour or two wondering how many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.

Fewtril #79 I often get the feeling that many of those laymen who profess to be Darwinists have hardly the foggiest understanding of the theory of evolution through natural selection. It is as if the belief in it comes to them not through its scientific role in helping them to understand the natural world, but rather through its social role in helping them to appear no-nonsense and hard-headed at dinner parties.


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