December 17, 2010

The SCHEME Act up for a vote Saturday

The lame duck Senate is scheduled to vote on the DREAM Act, which is, in effect, a sneaky mid-sized amnesty, on Saturday.

The Ennui of the Left

As C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country pointed out in the comments, Google's new Ngrams website lets you graph the frequency of usage of any of the hundreds of billions of words in Google Books. 

For example, this graph shows how staple words of leftist thought, such as "socialism," "racism," "sexism," "feminism," "discrimination," and "civil rights" have been in decline in published books over the last decade. Socialism peaked in usage around 1976, but most of the others enjoyed their peaks in the 1990s. (To be precise, discrimination had a peak around 1975 and a second one of equal magnitude around 1996. The other four words peaked in the 1990s.) 

Is this just a decline in the proportion of public affairs books published? (These numbers, by the way, are weighted by publications, not by sales.) I don't think so. In contrast, "capitalism" and "conservatism" have been relatively flat since about 1980, and "evolutionary psychology" skyrocketed from 1992 to 2004, then drifted slightly lower. "Darwin" was flat from 1960 to 1990, the shot upwards until about 2005.

That fits my general recollection of hanging around bookstores on my lunch hour: that their was a surge in DiversityThink in books around 1989 to 1995 (perhaps related to the collapse of socialism channeling leftist thought into other directions, perhaps related to the surge during the Crack Era of bad behavior among blacks creating a perceived need for more denunciations of white racism). This era was followed, however, by collective boredom and embarrassment.

The word "diversity" itself zoomed upwards starting in 1989, peaked around 1999, but has only dropped slightly since then. As a non-accusatory happy word, it doesn't inspire as much heretical thought as an accusatory word like "racism," so  it's more likely to endure in exhoratory prose.

We're now well into the Brezhnev Era of DiversityThink, when everybody is bored and cynical about the ruling ideology, but it still has 53,000 tanks, so most people assume it can't be all that off-base.

To get off topic, how about Nabokov v. Borges? Borges, whom Nabokov spoofed as "Osberg" in Ada, has been in the lead in English language books since the early 1960s.

How about Golden Age Sci- Fi writers: Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury? They seem to be mentioned: Bradbury first, Asimov second, Heinlein third.

December 16, 2010

Does everybody secretly hate graphs?

I'm reading the book Fault Lines by former IMF chief economist Raghuram G. Rajan of the U of Chicago economics dept. It's a pretty good read, but what struck me while flipping through it is that it's solid text: no quantitative graphics, no tables of numbers, just paragraphs. The sole thing to interrupt the flow of paragraphs across a couple of hundred pages is a poem by 18th century economist Bernard de Mandeville.  

That lack of tables and graphs can't be natural for an economics professor, can it? The publisher must have told him what statistician Andrew Gelman's publisher told him when he wrote Red State, Blue State, that each graph in the book cuts sales in half.

So, does everybody really hate graphs? If so, why does everybody who gives a presentation think they have to do it in Powerpoint? (As in Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address graph comparing New Nations -87 Years to Now.) Do audience members actually look at the graphs? Or do they just appreciate the chance during the work day to veg out in a dark room with a glowing screen? "Powerpoint: It's Almost Like Watching TV While Getting Paid!" 

Or did people used to like graphs until Powerpoint came along? 

Do the books that the people who sit next to you on the airplane read have graphs in them? A large fraction of people in airplanes are traveling to meetings infested by Powerpoint graphs: if there is a graph in their book, do they consider it work? 

I like graphs. I had Minard's now-famous graph-map of Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia up on my office wall for years. It worked as a sort of secret club handshake for people walking by. One out every zillion people who walked down the hall past my office would recognize it and introduce himself.

I find that graphs always take me about five times longer to finish creating than I expected. For example, in VDARE, I've got a graph that answers the obvious question (obvious to you and me, at least) about those PISA international school achievement test scores that everybody was pontificating upon last week. My graph shows where the PISA test scores of the four main racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. would fall compared to the national average scores for the 65 countries that took the test. 

A simple idea, right? Yet it took me forever to get the graph right so the answer is clear. (First, I had to find the American race numbers, which don't appear in any of the hundreds of pages of data posted by the OECD last week.) Then, I had to fiddle for hours to get the graph to look less confusing. 

I think it finally came out okay. But, if everybody out there secretly hates graphs, then I'll stop wasting time making them.
 

December 15, 2010

The Pointlessness of the Central Flaw in Current Thought

In the latest brouhaha over new Nixon tapes, I saw something in passing by Slate writer Jack Shafer that is illustrative of the most fundamental weakness in modern thought. So, let me set the stage for a bit before getting to the key bit that wouldn't even be noticed by a non-crimethinker.

Jack Shafer writes in Slate:
From his throne in hell, Richard Nixon commands our attention once again with newly released White House tapes from February and March 1973 that drop another tanker load of piss and bile on Jews. ...

After recounting various private remarks of Nixon about Jews, Shafer turns to consider the arguments of Nixon's Jewish defenders:
Nixon has never lacked Jewish defenders. Just six months ago, writer Ben Stein, the son of Herbert Stein, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, pooh-poohed the Jew-counting story that Noah has so determinedly tracked. Wrote Stein:
Now, bear in mind, Nixon was by far the best friend the Jewish people have ever had since Abraham. He had the most Jewish appointees to high offices, the most pro-Israel foreign and defense policy in history, saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War, put Russia at bay about helping Egypt in that war—was just the best friend Jews have ever had, including Jews themselves.

Alas, being actively pro-Israel doesn't automatically exonerate Nixon from anti-Semitism. For one thing, he and Kissinger were playing a global board game with the Soviets in those years, and the Soviets were backing Egypt. An Israeli defeat would have been an American defeat, too. For another, Nixon didn't want to go down in history as the American president who "lost" Israel and put the Jewish people in peril.

True, but Nixon and his chief domestic policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan of 1969-70 were also simultaneously playing a domestic board game with New York intellectuals in those years. Nixon and Moynihan had long conversations in 1969 about how they could promote a self-conscious neoconservative tendency among Moynihan's fellow New York intellectuals. Portraying Israel as a crucial bastion of the Cold War (a position that Ike and, perhaps, JFK would have regarded as objectively silly) was intended by Nixon and Moynihan to encourage at least some intellectual Jews to take the Cold War more personally, just as the British government had found it expedient to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to appeal to Jewish opinion during Britain's struggle with Germany and Austria. Nixon's considered judgment was that he didn't need all the Jewish intellectuals on his side, just some of them, and he devoted a lot of effort to wooing them. As we can tell by reading Commentary and The Weekly Standard in 2010, Nixon and Moynihan had a fair degree of success with with wooing a vocal minority of Jewish intellectuals toward supporting an aggressive American foreign policy.
To be open-minded about Nixon, let's go ahead and put his support of Israel in the asset side of his anti-Semitism account.

What then to make of his long list of Jewish appointees? In a newspaper interview last year promoting his book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz beat Stein to the punch on Nixon's defense of Israel but added that Nixon "was the kind of anti-Semite who thought that Jews were smarter than everybody else. That's why he had Kissinger. That's why he had Arthur Burns, Herb Stein. … A lot of Nixon's anti-Semitism is talk. ... His anti-Semitism consisted of resentment of Jews for being liberals and hating him. It's not the traditional kind of anti-Semitism." [Emphasis added.]

Podhoretz is half, maybe three-quarters right. Nixon did seem to believe Jews were exceptionally smart, although these views were obviously colored by the fact that most of his encounters with Jews in his adult life were with successful Jews. Did he similarly extrapolate from his encounters with successful Catholics that they were brilliant, too? Mormons? Cubans? Armenians?

This last paragraph is worth re-reading. Shafer is attempting to first construct, then debunk a socially acceptable Occam's Butterknife defense of Nixon's opinion that American Jews tend to be smart. Let me flesh out the argument:
How could Nixon have ever come to the conclusion that Jews tend to be above average in intelligence? Well, perhaps he was an unwitting victim of selection bias [as outlined at length by novelist Michael Chabon in the NYT last June], which caused him to be unintentionally wrong. See, Nixon employed brilliant Jews like Kissinger, so he must have wrongly inferred from how smart Kissinger was that Jews on average were above average in intelligence. On the other hand, he also employed brilliant Catholics like Moynihan. And yet he does not appear to have inferred from long talks with Moynihan that Catholics were notably above average in intelligence. Therefore, Nixon can't be convicted of merely a lesser charge of Anti-Semitism by Error. Nixon was instead guilty of Anti-Semitism in the Highest [contemporary] Degree: noticing that American Jews tend to be smarter than average! Case closed!

Of course, Occam's Razor would suggest that just maybe Nixon, who was on a national ticket five times, winning four times, actually had a decent empirical grasp of social realities. And, if Nixon had had any questions about average Jewish intelligence, he could have asked Moynihan, who, with Moynihan's co-author Nathan Glazer, was academia's leading expert on white ethnics.

Now, you could say that Shafer's assumption that Nixon noticing the overwhelming evidence for Jews being smarter on average renders him odious is just an example of the contemporary aversion to realistic thought epitomized by how calling something a "stereotype" is now assumed to automatically refute its empirical truth.

But, over the last decade and a half, the evidence keeps piling up that the Jewish IQ advantage is not just an example of what's wrong with intellectual life today, but the single most important cause for contemporary thinking going off the tracks.

While I was reading all the frenzied reaction to The Bell Curve sixteen years ago, I noticed that not much of it was actually coming from blacks. Thomas Sowell had a response, we know now that Barack Obama broke his Vow of Silence to comment on NPR upon The Bell Curve, and so forth, but those were mostly the exceptions. There really aren't that many black intellectuals that other intellectuals pay attention to.

Those most vocally enraged by The Bell Curve were white intellectuals, especially Jews. To them, the assertion that the average black IQ was equal to the average American IQ serves as the outer bulwark defending the inner sanctum: the belief that the average Jewish American IQ is equal to the average American IQ. If you let the peasants realize that blacks are on average could be less smart, eventually they'll figure out that Jews on average could be more smart, and then they'll be coming for us with pitchforks!

Of course, this dominant belief about smarts held by contemporary intellectuals is about 99% stupid. Practically everybody in America already realizes that Jews tend to be smarter. And, guess what, they're okay with it. Most Americans appreciate Jewish intelligence.

Consider the example of, say, Richard Nixon, a powerful and congenitally angry man who was well aware of the facts about Jewish intelligence. What was his response to this knowledge?

He searched out ways to do more favors for Jews.

So, the central, underlying flaw in the edifice of current intellectualizing is pointless. 

On the other hand, an intellectual climate that says, in effect, you can't be a genuine intellectual unless you publicly humiliate yourself by saying things like Nixon must have assumed Jews tend to be smart because he only met smart Jews has a lot of usefulness as a loyalty test. It's like a fraternity initiation in which they'll only let you in if you run around campus dressed as a marshmallow. It shows how much you want to be one of us. You won't let self-respect get in your way.


Alternative History Questions

Imagine this scenario: Imagine that Hitler and Stalin both died in, say, 1935 and replaced by unaggressive Euroweenies of the Gorbachev sort. Without Hitler's bad example, the leaders of the Japanese Navy arrest the leaders of the Japanese Army and Japan gives up the crazy idea of fighting America. Or imagine whatever you want (Edwin Starr Sr. records "War! What Is It Good For?" in 1938, if you like), as long as it leads to WWII and the Cold War never happening. By 1939, Europe and East Asia have already settled into their long post 1989 peace that we know from our world.

In that situation, would anybody have gotten around to inventing the atomic bomb? Who? When? (Something to consider is the question of whether, in this world, nuclear weapons were ever truly reinvented?)

Now, imagine another scenario in which it's 2010, but nuclear technology has remained at rudimentary 1930s levels ever since the 1930s. Everything else is the same about the world of 2010 -- They've got computers, lasers, titanium, Powerpoint, Twitter, whatever -- just that nobody ever got around to working on nukes. 

Then, some country in this Alternative Present decides to build an atomic bomb. With all the 21st Century advantages, would they do it faster than the Manhattan Project? Would they even set one off by 2020?

December 14, 2010

Northeast Asians outpacing Muslims at complicated tech stuff

From the New York Times:
North Korean Nuclear Ability Seen to Far Outpace Iran’s
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s new plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble, according to senior administration and intelligence officials.

North Korea is smaller and much poorer than Iran, has no oil money, and is run by people who make the Iranian rulers look like George Washington for sanity.

Looking at 2009 PISA test scores (p. 155-157), North Korea didn't take the test, but 26% of South Korean 15-year-olds scored in the top two ranks of math tests, the fifth best performance out of 65 regions, behind only Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Iran didn't take the test, but trying to find remotely similar countries, we see Turkey with a respectable 6%, Qatar 2%, and Jordan with under 1%. In science, 12% of South Koreans scored in the top two ranks versus 2% of Turks and vanishingly small percentages of most other Muslim countries. 

Moreover, unlike North Korea, Iran lets people emigrate. A lot of smart Iranians have wound up in Southern California. My wife knows an upper crust Iranian lady who arrived from Iran a decade ago and her son then majored in physics at Caltech. Probably a better decision for the family, all in all, than staying in Iran, having the son get drafted into the nuclear program, and then having the Israelis someday drop a bomb on his head. (In contrast to Iran, there hasn't been a notably large outflow of smart Turks from Turkey. If you've got some money, Turkey is a pretty okay place to live.)

And then there's an interesting game theory paradox to how hard you would work on building a Bomb in Iran v. North Korea if you were an engineer. If you actually got to the verge of a working Bomb, the Israelis would likely drop a bomb on your head, so better to putter around and give each other Powerpoint presentations forever. It's a living! The North Korean engineers aren't too worried about a pre-emptive strike because North Korea already has a deterrent in artillery and small rockets trained on Greater Seoul. The North Koreans have freedom to build a deterrent because they already have a deterrent.

This is all reminiscent of eight years ago when we were assured by The People Who Know that Saddam Hussein was this close to building his own Bomb using crack Iraqi scientists and engineers.

Sen. Webb: Germany, not China

If the United States wants to claw its way back to economic self-determination, it should look not at China for the route forward, but at Germany.

Such was the prescription issued Dec. 10 by U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), speaking at the Arlington Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting.

Webb noted that Germany, while having a population just 8 percent of China’s, had a higher trade surplus, and is the world’s biggest exporter.

“They produce quality products that people want, they take care of their workforce - they are doing something right,” Webb said of the Germans, during a speech before about 320 Arlington business, political and civic leaders at the Sheraton National Hotel.

Webb’s politics long have been all but impossible to pigeon-hole ...

Webb has written enough books explaining where he's coming from, such as Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. In short, he's a romantic but realistic Scots-Irish ethnocentric American patriot. In Webb's view, his Scots-Irish kin aren't, on the whole, the smartest or richest or most exclusive Americans; they're just the most American Americans. So, what's good for America is good for the Scots-Irish and what's good for the Scots-Irish is good for America.

From that flows a number of positions that sound contradictory to everybody else in Washington, such as being for the military and against war (because his kin will do more of the dying than anybody else) and being for industry and for labor (because his kin want high wage factory jobs).

December 13, 2010

"The Fighter"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
On Friday, I was shocked like the rest of America to learn that Richard Nixon had been taped in the Oval Office subscribing to a stereotype: “The Irish can’t drink.…Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

On Saturday, I went to see The Fighter, a first-rate biopic about the pugnacious family life of boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, “The Pride of Lowell.” The Fighter is only the latest in a long series of Oscar contenders, such as Good Will Hunting, Mystic River, and The Departed, about sozzled Greater Boston residents pounding the hell out of each other. In recent years, awards-season movies have featured working-class Irish giving each other fraternal concussions almost as often as upper-class English serving each other tea in a marked manner. Both The Town and The Fighter are good bets to join The King’s Speech as Best Picture nominees.

Read the whole thing there.


Does polygamy raise or lower IQ?

I don't have a definitive answer to that old evolutionary theory question, but I wanted to cite this one bit of data from that Iraqi terrorist who evidently tripped and blew himself up in Sweden:
In a recent profile he placed on an Islamic dating Web site, Muslima.com, the younger Mr. Abdaly appears as a tall, stern-looking, neatly dressed man standing in front of a white curtain, his dark hair cropped short, with a trimmed black beard.

“I am married since 2004,” he said on his dating profile, according to a translation of the original Arabic. He described himself as “very religious” and said that he had two daughters, aged three and one. “I want to get married again,” he said, “and would like to have a BIG family. My wife agreed to this."

December 12, 2010

Finns & Japanese

A Finnish-American reader writes:
Steve, have you ever investigated the connections between Finnish and Japanese culture? They are legion, and strange: Finns and Japanese are the two ethnic groups with the higest incidences of reversed-hemispheric brain activity, i.e. information from the right eye goes to the right side of the brain instead of the reverse (which is the usual way). There are some strange connections between Finnish and Japanese languages, although they come from quite different families. Doing a quick search for "finns and japanese" or "finnish japanese" yields interesting results, though few scholarly ones.

Also, the first foreign-born member of the Diet of Japan is a Finn, Marutei Tsurunen. And here's a webpage about him, which combines Finglish and Engrish in a very charming way.

You can't see it on a Mercator-projection map, but you can see it on a globe: Eurasia is narrower at high latitudes. From Vladivostok to Finland (or vice-versa) is about the same distance as from Vladivostok to the Caspian Sea. Probably more importantly, there were likely fewer people to have to fight your way past when wandering across the far north than at more habitable latitudes.

December 11, 2010

More Mandatory Finnish Content

Taksin Nuoret writes:
Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland's secrets.

The explanation widely accepted is that the Finnish educational system is better. For example, the following aspects have been pointed out:
  • Schools routinely provide tutoring for weak students.
  • Each school has a social worker ("koulukuraattori").
  • Substitute teachers are often provided when the teacher is ill.

Damn, why didn't anybody in the U.S. ever think of having substitute teachers? 

Anyway, Nuoret goes on to make the argument that perhaps Finnish is an easier language for kids to learn in than many other languages. He notes that Estonians, the other Finno-Ugric-speaking country, also do better than expected on PISA, and that Swedish-speakers in Finland do a little worse than Finnish-speakers on the PISA, even though Swedish-speakers have larger stock portfolios.

Arguments that one language is better than another for thinking about something have been around a long time. For example, maybe the poor reading performance in Latin American countries has something to do with the how it normally takes more letters and syllables to say something in Spanish than in English, as you can see by noting bilingual signs and the like. Puerto Ricans make up for the extra syllables in spoken Spanish by talking faster, but perhaps it's hard to read faster. I don't know.

We don't seem to have made much progress over the many years I've been listening to language theories like these at figuring out how to evaluate them. I like Nuoret's argument because he at least comes up with two pieces of evidence from the PISA results. That's only two pieces of data, however.  Yet that's still about twice the average amount of data presented in these types of discussions of whether one language is more efficient for thinking than another language.

December 9, 2010

"That's rape in Sweden!"

In Taki's Magazine, Jim Goad explains what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is in the hoosegow for. 

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a feminist scorned.

Arizona v. Nevada

Why has Arizona moved to the right while Nevada is, at least relative to the rest of the country, moving to the left? My new VDARE column offers some explanations.

The DREAM amnesty

Mickey Kaus has been covering in Newsweek the maneuvering to pass the DREAM amnesty by the lame duck Senate (after it was passed by a lame duck House this week).  First, DREAM is potentially a huge amnesty:
because there are no penalties to lying on a DREAM application, and because once you file the application you get a work permit good for 10 years (while you comply with the Act's requirements), DREAM is basically a 10 year free pass to any illegal in a broad under-35ish age range who either qualifies or is willing to say he qualifies even if he doesn't.

Second, that Harry Reid postponed a vote today shows he's not just going-through-the-motions to prove his good intentions to Hispanic activists. Instead, he's trying to keep it alive in case it can become part of the tax cut extension compromise:
Delay offers the hope that something will break in his favor, that the ongoing big negotiations on taxes and spending will offer a moment of leverage to pry a recalcitrant Republican (or, more likely, Democrat) or two over to the DREAM side. At the very least, it offers the prospect that, once the big tax-cut-extension deal is done, Republican senators will consider themselves released from their "Wall of No" pledge not to give any other legislation priority.

Anthropologists say sayonara to science

Nicholas Wade reports in the New York Times:
'Science' Is Cut from Anthropology Group's Guiding Plan, Deepening a Rift

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.
The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.
... Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

... Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science “just blows the top off” the tensions between the two factions. “Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,” he said.

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.
The flames have been fueled by blogs, like one in Psychology Today by Alice Dreger, a historian and medical ethicist. Reporting on an American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans, she wrote, “Non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing.”

This implied dichotomy between anti-science anthropologists who write about race, ethnicity, or gender and scientific anthropologists who don't study those topics is a bit misleading. The are also anthropologists who study race, ethnicity or gender scientifically (several of whom are on my blogroll). The work of Darwinian anthropologists of sex differences like John Tooby and of ancestral differences like Henry Harpending are the hidden key to this controversy. The anti-science anthropologists fear that if anthropology is allowed to be a science, then all sorts of politically incorrect scientific knowledge about humanity will emerge. The pro-science leaders try, publicily, to pooh-pooh those fears.

iSteve Finnish Content

Election expert Michael Barone writes about the midterms:
The Finnish vote. Around 100 years ago, Finnish immigrants flocked to the mines and woods of the country around Lake Superior, where the topography and weather must have seemed familiar. They've been a mostly Democratic, sometimes even radical, voting bloc ever since. No more, it seems. Going into the election, the three most Finnish districts, Michigan 1, Wisconsin 7 and Minnesota 8, all fronting on Lake Superior, were represented by two Democratic committee chairmen and the chairman of an Energy and Commerce subcommittee, with a total of 95 years of seniority.

Wisconsin's David Obey and Michigan's Bart Stupak both chose to retire, and were replaced by Republicans who had started running before their announcements. Minnesota's James Oberstar was upset by retired Northwest Airlines pilot and stay-at-home dad Chip Cravaack.

So here's a new rule for the political scientists: As go the Finns, so goes America.

Gus Hall (1910-2000), who was the perennial Communist Party USA candidate for President when I was a kid, was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in the iron-mining belt of Minnesota and grew up speaking Finnish in his family of twelve. A lot of the Finnish Communists who subsequently lost the Finnish civil war of 1918 to von Mannerheim fled to America, so the CPUSA always had a sizable Finnish contingent. 

So, Obama managed to lose the hereditarily Communist vote.


Again: Who is rich?

My impression is that most Americans believe that to be rich you have to have a butler, like on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Worldlier Americans believe that to be rich, you have to have a private jet. For example, I suspect that Bill Clinton and Al Gore don't consider themselves rich, precisely because they are always having to bum rides off billionaires and dictators with private jets. (Or have they cashed in enough by now to buy their own?)

Ergo, almost no Americans see themselves as rich.

December 7, 2010

Who is rich?

For 2010, federal income marginal tax rates begin at 10% and lurchingly rise to 35% on every dollar of taxable income above $373,650 for married filing jointly.

And then the marginal tax rates stop rising. Couples who make $374,000 per year, well, they're about as rich as it's worth thinking about, right.

A generation ago, it made sense not to worry much about squeezing a little extra tax revenue out of people making extremely gigantic amounts of income because there weren't very many of them and it didn't add up to all that much.

Today, though, the term "orders of magnitude" just comes up a lot more when thinking about income.

Consider baseball contracts as a well-known example. Free agency started around 1975, but by the 1980 season, only one player, Nolan Ryan, was averaging a million bucks per year over the life of his contract. During the 1989 season, Eddie Murray was averaging the most at $2.7 million. By 1996, Ken Griffey Jr. was getting $8.5 million, and then pay really exploded, all the way up to Alex Rodriguez getting $25 million in 2001. Today, Rodriguez remains the highest paid at $27.5 million. 

So, today, the marginal tax rate on Alex Rodriguez is the same as on a utility infielder making the minimum major league salary of $400,000.  How much would it really hurt the economy in the long run if Alex Rodriguez faced a marginal tax rate that was 5 or 10 points higher than that of the lowest paid major leaguer?

What are the hardest sports?

I finally dug up the old table I'd heard about from Letter from Gotham ranking dozens of sports on dozens of different "performance factors." It looks like it goes back to James Nicholas's 1975 study in the Journal of Sports Medicine.

I was going to accuse it of being subjective, but then I noticed that the least hard sport according to Nicholas, hiking, is the sport I least dodge doing.

PISA and Mexico

In Mexico, the PAN government's of the last decade has been trying to get parents to keep their kids in school longer. Here's PISA document congratulating Mexico for getting its act together over the last decade. 

The really striking thing about Mexico's performance on the 2009 PISA school achievement tests is the lack of very high scorers. For example, on reading, 9.9% of Americans score at the 5th level or 6th level on a 0 to 6 scale. In contrast, only 0.4% of Mexicans score that high. That's really bad. 

In comparison, 1.9% of Turks score in the top two levels: not great, but several times the fraction in Mexico, suggesting that in Turkey there are small cultures of elites here and there who impress it upon their kids to hit the books hard. When I was in Bodrum, Turkey for Hans-Herman Hoppe's conference, I was impressed by the books on sale at the supermarket across the street. Granted, Bodrum is kind of like Santa Barbara and this was an upscale supermarket in a chain headquartered in Switzerland in a nice neighborhood in a resort town, but, still, it was nice to see serious books on sale somewhere.

That suggests to me, not for the first time, that much of the blame for Mexico's cultural malaise stems from Mexico's rich not setting a good example for the masses, such as by not studying hard.

More PISA school achievement results

Lots of fun stuff here, such as a table on students by region in certain European countries. Some tendencies:

- For example, England,  Scotland, and Northern Ireland all do about the same, but Wales lags, kind of like West Virginia in the U.S.

- Finnish-speaking Finns outscore Swedish-speaking Finns, although they both do well versus the world. A century ago, high achieving Finns like Sibelius and Mannerheim tended to come from the coastal Swedish-speaking population of Finland, but the Finnish lumberjacks have really come on in the world since then.

- Flemish-speaking Belgians outscore French-speaking Belgians who outscore German-speaking Belgians.

- Northern Italians outscore Sicilians.

- Madrid slightly outscores Catalonia in Spain.

PISA scores for Shanghai

Here are the results from the 2009 PISA test of 15-year-old's school performance with the first ever scores from the city of Shanghai. Shanghai swept the three categories. (Shanghai is not the full country of China -- Shanghai is the current favored son city of the regime, with restrictions on who gets to internally migrate there). Also, this is the first time Shanghai participated, so they presumably waited until they were ready to rip on the test.

Mean is 500, standard deviation is 100. So, Shanghai students beat the advanced world's international mean by 0.75, 0.56, and 1.00 standard deviations. Pretty good. On an IQ-like scale, that's approaching 112.

Having seen the National Merit Semifinalist names for 2009 in California, where there was a single Cohen and 49 Wangs among the honorees, I can't say I was too surprised. Santa Clara County might challenge Shanghai in a heads-up match, though.

Interestingly, the NYT table left out some low-scoring countries, such as Mexico, but then what possible policy implications do the educational attainment and intelligence of Mexicans have for an American audience? None, none  I tell you! Here's an eyeball-frying graphic from The Guardian of the OECD countries (leaving out unrepresentative cities like Shanghai). Check out the bottom line:

Converting to an IQ scale, Mexico scores an 88, although that's probably held down by the low quality of Mexican schools. 

You can look up all the results on the official PISA site here. The crazy colored Guardian graph is somewhat unfair to Mexico by making it the lowest: there are a number of countries that did worse, including Argentina. My general impression is that Mexico has been coming up in these international comparisons over the last decade.

"The Black Swan"

From my review in Taki's Magazine:
The Black Swan’s central problem is that the heterosexual Aronofsky, who directed Mickey Rourke so well in The Wrestler two years ago, appears more inspired by professional wrestling than by ballet. Despite Aronofsky’s undoubted cleverness (Harvard Class of ’91), he seems to love the idea of ballet far more than he cares for ballet itself. A film stronger on analysis than artfulness, The Black Swan’s dancing, while competently filmed, is seldom electrifying.

Aronofsky’s intentions can’t be understood in isolation from his last movie about a quasi-athlete’s alarming dedication, The Wrestler. Rourke portrayed a charismatic old professional grappler crucifying himself in training for one last comeback that will surely kill him. In The Black Swan, Natalie Portman plays a bland young dancer, a Little Miss Goody Toe Shoes, who destroys her health and sanity to be the prima ballerina in Tchaikovsky’s high romantic masterpiece Swan Lake.

The Black Swan intellectually complements The Wrestler in a fashion ideal for explicating in a Film Studies 101 term paper on dualities such as masculine v. feminine, experience v. innocence, heavy v. light, steroids v. bulimia, vulgar v. aristocratic, and (regrettably) moving v. overwrought.

Read the whole thing there.

December 5, 2010

The Citadel of Haiti

The is the famous Citadel on a mountaintop in Haiti build by Henri Christophe in 1805-1820  to deter France from attempting to reconquer Haiti. The loss of life in building the mountaintop redoubt was staggering.  But no attempt was made to retake Haiti. The King shot himself with a silver bullet in 1820.

The biography of Henri Christophe was enfolded into the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The extraordinary history of Haiti was probably better known in the U.S. many decades ago than it is today.

December 4, 2010

Lack of fortifications

Regions with lack of fortifications are one of those dogs that didn't bark conundrums that are hard to research. It's obvious that Europeans built fortresses and other defensive structures like crazy, while there are also forts in South Asia, and of course the Great Wall of China. But Africa, outside of Ethiopia, seems to be relatively lacking in defensive structures. Great Zimbabwe is by far the the largest pieces of construction south of Ethiopia, according to John Reader's Africa: Biography of a Continent says (319-320):
The outer wall of the Great Enclosure is certainly the largest single structure of comparable age in sub-Saharan Africa, but in terms of age and architectural significance the most striking feature of Great Zimbabwe is simply the fact that it is Africa. ... In terms of what drystone construction can achieve, Great Zimbabwe is not well built: the stones were not selected and laid with consideration for their relative sizes ... Even the amount of labour required was not excessive. Presented with detailed plans of the site, a modern drystone building contractor estimated that work force of 84 men on a six-day week could build the entire complex in two years.

The walls look in danger of being pushed over by any attackers. So, what was the point? In general, I have a hard time seeing why you wouldn't build defensive structures, but, apparently, large swathes of the Earth didn't see the point.

December 2, 2010

Africa's traditional lack of a Malthusian Trap

The concept of a Malthusian Trap, in which the finite amount of land limits food supply and thus population, is a highly stylized but still useful concept for thinking about much of human history before the Industrial Revolution. The major exception to the idea of a land-based Malthusian Trap was sub-Saharan Africa. As John Reader wrote in Africa: Biography of a Continent,  (p. 249):
The human population of Africa has never approached the size that the continent seems capable of supporting. ... An FAO survey published in 1991 reported that only 22 percent of land in Africa suitable for agriculture was actually in production (the comparable figure for south-east Asia is 92 per cent).

Reader offers a long list of discouraging factors, such as disease burden, poor soil, and wild beasts, especially elephants. We think elephants are cute, but they're huge and thus quite capable of eating a farmer's crop. Africa tended to be populated in a patchwork fashion. In some regions, enough people could be concentrated to drive off elephants, while other areas were conceded to elephants until enough human numbers could be assembled. Somewhat similarly, stronger herding tribes would tend to drive farming tribes (who use less land per person) into refuges in the mountains or islands. 

So, intensive agricultural use of land was rare, which meant that men didn't have to work terribly hard at farm work as long as they had women hoeing weeds for them. 

Reader writes:
From the time that Europeans first set foot in Africa, travelers have commented upon what they saw as an excessive interest in sex among Africans.

Think of this from the perspective of the Malthusian Trap. Europeans already tended to voluntarily keep their populations below Malthusian limits by practicing the moral restraint that the Rev. Malthus famously advised in 1798. From 1200-1800, the average age of first marriage for an Englishwoman was 24-26. Rich women tended to marry at younger ages, poor women at older. Illegitimacy rates were in the lower single digits. 

Thus, due to this sexual restraint, Europeans tended to be in a less Malthusian situation than, say, the Chinese, who tended to marry younger. Consequently, Europeans tended to be richer while working less hard than the Chinese. If the European population didn't grow as fast during good times as the Chinese population did, they didn't experience quite as many vast die-offs from famine during times when good government broke down (e.g., as recently as the early 1960s during Mao's crazy Great Leap Forward). England, for example, hasn't had a major famine in over 600 years.

So, Europeans developed cultural forms that attempted to sublimate sexual urges in more restrained and refined directions. Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example.

In Africa, however, conditions of life were such that the Malthusian Trap was not an active worry. More people were needed, so African culture -- dance, song, and so forth -- tended to encourage mating now rather than to encourage delay. Listening to Top 40 radio today, this pattern seems to have carried over from Africa.

Of particular interest as an exception that supports the general rule is an island in Lake Victoria, Ukara Island, now in Tanzania, where the Malthusian Trap seemed to operate. The population has been around 16,000 for a century, with about one percent of the population annually moving to the mainland, a rate of increase unusual in Africa until recently.

Ukara has a few major advantages over the surrounding mainland of Africa: no tsetse flies to spread sleeping sickness. No lions and no elephants, either, to compete with humans. Life (and death) is presumably less random than on the African mainland, so hard work and investment pay off more reliably.

Life on Ukara sounds rather like life in a poor Southeast Asian peasant society rather than in most of Africa. A 1968 aerial survey showed that 98.6 percent of the land on the island was in use. In contrast to the typical pattern of land use rights in Africa, almost every resource on the island, including each tree, is privately owned, which has prevented deforestation. (Here's a description of Ukara from a libertarian perspective.) People on Ukara practice much more intensive and sophisticated agriculture than elsewhere in Tanzania, supposedly working ten hours per day, every day.

I spent some time looking for accounts by recent tourists visiting Ukara Island, but it became apparent that very few people go there, which is not surprising since people on holiday generally visit big cities or go to less crowded places to relax. We tend to think of islands as being less crowded (and thus more relaxing) than mainlands because they are less convenient to get to, but in Africa, apparently, things work the opposite. Being inconveniently far out in Lake Victoria makes life healthier and less risky than being on the mainland.

Has the Ukaran culture spread with the steady flow of Ukarans to the mainland of Africa? Evidently, no. Phil Raikes wrote in 1986:
This provides a very clear example of Esther Boserup's contention that necessity in the form of population pressure is the mother of agricultural innovation. Further evidence for this comes from the fact that Ukara Islanders who migrate to the mainland, where population density is far lower, promptly drop their labour-intensive methods (over ten hours per day throughout the year) for the much easier methods practised on the mainland.

I'm not sure what the ultimate lessons are from Ukara Island, but the place is worth thinking about.

December 1, 2010

GOP sellout in offing?

In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus blogs:
When I worried that the Obama White House might have a plan to enact the so-called DREAM Act in "some sort of insidiuous tax-cuts-for-amnesty grand bargain," I figured it was just paranoid speculation. That's what bloggers are for, right? Unfortunately, the possibility of a lame-duck grand bargain that would include a big immigration amnesty has become more realistic since then.

Two things have happened: (1) The White House, Hill Republicans, and Hill Democrats have appointed a special negotiating group to hash out lame-duck issues, especially what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts, and (2) 42 Senate Republicans have signed a letter pledging to vote against cloture "on any legislative item [including, presumably, the DREAM Act] until the Senate has agreed" on a plan to extend the tax cuts and also to fund the government.

That second development might seem to preclude consideration of the DREAM Act, but it doesn't. DREAM would just have to follow a broader tax deal—or maybe be part of it.

What, GOP politicians might sell out on immigration in return for tax cuts for the rich? I'm shocked, shocked to learn this.

Plow Cultures v. Hoe Cultures

From a new paper, The Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough (Preliminary) by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn, we find an ethnographic map of cultures as of, say, 1491, that farmed with plows (red dots) versus those that did not (green dots, which lumps together hunter gatherers, herders, and farmers who used hoes or other means to weed). From Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas (click graph to enlarge):


The subject of the paper is gender roles in the modern world: today, all else being equal, women from old plow cultures are less likely to be employed outside the house than women from hoe cultures, just as women do most of the agricultural work in hoe cultures like sub-Saharan Africa and New Guinea. The authors don't mention this but one example is that in the inner city neighborhoods depicted on The Wire, women hold most of the paying jobs, just as their foremothers did most of the farm work in West Africa.

But the obvious thing that jumps out at you from the map is the high correlation between plowing and level of civilizational accomplishment (at least as measured in impressive ruins and buildings). The Taj Mahal, for example, is found in a plow culture. The ancient and medieval churches of plowing Ethiopia are a lot more impressive than the big pile of loose rocks that is the chief monument of Zimbabwe.

Of course, one causal connection between gender roles and civilizational accomplishment is that you can get more done if men work harder, as they tend to do in plow cultures. We don't think about that today, because we're supposed to think that the big issue is: "Why don't those evil men let women work?" In Africa, however, feminist organizations complain about the opposite problem: How do we get men to do more of the work?

The authors write:
The hypothesis tested in this paper is whether at least part of the current differences in gender role attitudes arose from the historic mode of agricultural production - e.g., plough agriculture, hoe agriculture, shifting agriculture, etc. - which in turn affected the gender division of labor historically and the subsequent evolution of norms about the natural role of women in the family and society. Ester Boserup (1970) originally put forward this hypothesis in her seminal book Woman’s Role in Economic Development. She argued that to understand cross-cultural differences in attitudes about female labor force participation, one needs to reach back into history and examine differences in primitive agricultural technologies. She contrasts shifting cultivation to plough cultivation. With shifting cultivation, which is labor intensive and does not use the plough, women do most of the agricultural work. By contrast, plough cultivation is more capital intensive, but also requires more strength to manipulate the plough and the animals that pull the plough. Therefore, in plough societies men tend to dominate agricultural work, while women primarily engage in home production and other activities that occur within the household. Boserup (1970) writes that plough cultivation “shows a predominantly male labor force. The land is prepared for sowing by men using draught animals, and this. . . leaves little need for weeding the crop, which is usually the women’s task. . . Because village women work less in agriculture, a considerable fraction of them are completely freed from farm work. Sometimes such women perform purely domestic duties, living in seclusion within their own homes only appearing in the street wearing a veil, a phenomenon associated with plough culture and seemingly unknown in regions of shifting cultivation where women do most of the agricultural toil” (Boserup, 1970, pp. 13–14)3. In plough societies, a gender division of labor both in the field and in the family becomes predominant. Because women specialize in work in the domestic domain, the home comes to be seen as the “natural” place for women, rather than outside the home in the fields or in the workforce.
Interestingly enough, Boserup maintains that this division of roles persisted even after a country moved out of agriculture: factory work appears to be avoided by married women in many part of the developing world and there is considerable evidence that this social norm is widely accepted.

You can also get bigger things done if men don't spend most of their energies competing with each other to mate with the most women. Anthropologist Peter Frost blogs at Evo and Proud about traditional societies where women do most of the farm work:
The polygyny rate varies considerably among human populations, being highest (20 to 40% of all sexual unions) in the agricultural societies of sub-Saharan Africa and Papua-New Guinea.

Such high rates have consequences. ...


High-polygyny society = Failed society?

In my last post, I noted that high-polygyny societies remain simple in large part because intense sexual competition keeps them from evolving into more complex entities. The surplus males stir up endless conflict, if only because war provides them with access to women, i.e., through rape and abduction. ...


Urban Africa and the new mating environment

This is not to say that a high-polygyny society cannot evolve into a low-polygyny one. It can, if the material conditions of life change. We see this happening as Africans move off the land and into cities and towns, where women can less easily feed themselves and their children without assistance (1). Urban African men are less likely to be polygynous because it costs them more to provide for a second wife.

This in turn has shifted the pressure of sexual competition from men to women. It is increasingly the woman who must compete to find a mate. Whereas before she only had to work hard at tending her plot of land, she must now invest in her physical appearance, notably by lengthening her hair and bleaching her skin.

This new mating environment is described by Fokuo (2009) with respect to Ghana. Traditionally, Ghanaian women were married off through family mediation and bride price. This situation has changed since World War II and especially since the 1980s. They now largely find mates on their own, and do so in an increasingly competitive market that pressures them to be as sexually attractive as possible. One result has been the spread of skin bleaching:
By the late 1980’s and 1990’s, skin bleaching was no longer practiced by prostitutes. The popular culture of the 1980s praised lighter skin tones. This praise encouraged the spread of skin bleaching across gender lines and throughout all socio-economic classes of women. (Fokuo 2009)

Interviews with Ghanaian women suggest that this practice is driven by a competitive marriage market:
Sometimes if you really want to marry a particular man, you have to bleach.(Interview 14, 2006)

Lighter-skinned women tend to attract more men by virtue of their lightness. So if they are at marrying age they get more men coming to court them earlier and quicker than darker-skinned women. (Interview 16, 2006)

Darker-skinned women look at themselves and realize that they need to bleach to be beautiful. Just so men can call them beautiful. (Interview 17, 2006)
(Fokuo 2009)

This shift to ‘bodily commodification,’ together with the decline of matriarchy, is deplored in the literature. Yet the consequences are not entirely negative. Matriarchy meant that African women bore a very disproportionate share of labor in raising their families, especially physical labor. Today, there is a move toward a more equal balance of parental investment between African men and women. And bodily commodification is perhaps a necessary precondition for much of what we call ‘high culture,’ i.e., the pursuit of the aesthetic.

In the 1960s in Northern cities, higher welfare for single mothers, allowing them to support their children without a husband (a policy that had worked in Sweden for a generation without disaster), appears to have caused a remarkably quick reversion among many poor African-Americans to sub-Saharan cultural tendencies, but without the traditional restraining structures of African village life.

What I really want WikiLeaks to leak

The WikiLeaks' State Dept. cables revealed so far have been mildly entertaining. For example, American diplomats reported on President Sarkozy of France (according to the NYT):
But the cables also convey a nuanced assessment of the French leader as a somewhat erratic figure with authoritarian tendencies and a penchant for deciding policy on the fly. ... By January 2010, American diplomats wrote of a high-maintenance ally sometimes too impatient to consult with crucial partners before carrying out initiatives, one who favors summit meetings and direct contacts over traditional diplomacy.
... Mr. Sarkozy was criticized by European diplomats referred to in a cable for an “increasingly erratic” last half of his 2008 European Union presidency.
“Combined, these stories have bolstered the impression that Sarkozy is operating in a zone of monarch-like impunity,” said an Oct. 21, 2009, cable. 

In December 2009, Mr. Rivkin told Mrs. Clinton: “Sarkozy’s own advisers likewise demonstrate little independence and appear to have little effect on curbing the hyperactive president, even when he is at his most mercurial.” He added: “After two years in office, many seasoned key Élysée staff are leaving for prestigious onward assignments as a reward for their hard work, raising questions as to whether new faces will be any more willing to point out when the emperor is less than fully dressed.”

Nothing terribly surprising here, but gossip is fun. I especially look forward to (hopefully) forthcoming cables about Berlusconi.

What I'd really like WikiLeaks to leak, however, is the exact counterpart of this: what French diplomats are telling Sarkozy about Obama. It would probably be a lot more interesting than what the American press has told the American public about Obama.

For example, if Sarkozy tends toward mania, the obvious question is: does Obama tend toward depression? 

Obama's own memoirs suggests that the President suffered through significant depressive episodes in roughly 1981-1983 (a period when his sister asked his mother during a visit, “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here”) and 2000-2001 (of the 18 months following his crushing defeat by Bobby Rush, Obama wrote, "Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality.")

But some Googling on "Obama" and "depressive" brings up mostly an Onion piece and me.

Is Obama entering a third depressive phase?

I don't know, but it would seem both interesting and important. Of course, the American press hardly noticed Obama's references to his first two depressive phases, so we can hardly count on them to be on top of this question. 

On the other hand, I would suspect the energetic Sarkozy has been pestering his diplomats in Washington to keep him apprised of the Most Important Man in the World's mood swings. Maybe some day we'll be able to read what they've found out.

November 30, 2010

Stutterer Awareness?

You're going to be hearing a lot about the Weinsteins' movie The King's Speech between now and the Oscars. It's a sort of fake social concern Oscar film -- Stutterer Awareness! -- that turns out to be charming and entertaining.

And that got me thinking about why stutterers, like King George VI, aren't, actually, an identity politics special interest group. What helps determine who gets to be an identity politics group and who isn't?

Like left-handers, another group that isn't much of a group, stutterers occur fairly randomly across the population. So, the vast majority of their social allegiances are to non-stutterers. And most stutterers have non-stuttering loved ones.

Queen Elizabeth II believes her father's stutter was somehow related to his being forced as a child to switch from left-handedness to right-handedness, although the scientific evidence on this theory remains vague, at best. But that raises the point that Left Handers Liberation -- the big social change in the first half of the 20th Century when parents stopped forcing their lefthanded children to write righthanded (Ronald Reagan was a natural lefthander switched over to righthandedness, while three of the four subsequent Presidents have been public lefthanders) -- is completely off the radar. PBS never runs documentaries celebrating this triumph over bigotry.  

Lefthanders tend to view themselves as slightly better than righthanders (certainly at baseball, perhaps at creativity) who have to put up with a lot of hassles dealing with the physical world. In general, however, society expects lefthanders to pay for their own accommodations. For example, a running joke on The Simpsons is that Ned Flanders owns a shop at the mall that sells expensive scissors and so forth for lefthanders. Left-handed golf clubs are rare, so most left-handers play golf right-handed. Nobody ever gets worked up over this bit of unfairness.

Stutterers don't particularly want "awareness," either. Most stutterers would like to stop being stutterers. They view stuttering as a defect, which lefthanders generally don't view left-handedness.

Stutterers aren't, on the whole, all that articulate in speech (although there's a subset of stammering as an affectation: e.g., Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited or William F. Buckley going "B-b-b-b-b-b-but" on Firing Line as Hubert Humphrey steams onward).

It's worth comparing two kinds of deaf people: those who start out deaf and thus learn sign language, and those who gradually go deaf. The first form a small but rather fierce identity politics group, since their primary language is signing. (American signers can converse easily with French signers, but not with English signers, because American Sign Language is an offshoot of French Sign Language.) So, they form an insular cultural/language community. Innovations like cochlear implants threaten to take people out of the community, so leaders of the sign language using community tend to be against them. There is a lot of radical deaf activism at the sign language college, Gallaudet University.

On the other hand, the profoundly deaf aren't at all articulate, neither in speaking (of course), nor particularly in writing -- they have to think in sign language, in pictures of fingers according to Oliver Sacks, then translate into English. So, the media mostly ignore them.

People who gradually go deaf, on the other hand, do not form much of any kind of identity politics group at all. They are very happy to get better hearing aids.

One Loyalty

Newsweek has a long profile of Rep. Luis Gutierrez, whom I recently cited as a prime example of how racial gerrymandering creates extremist politicians:
“I have only one loyalty,” he says, “and that’s to the immigrant community."

November 29, 2010

"The King's Speech"

From my review in Taki's Magazine:
In outline, The King’s Speech sounds like a Wayans Brothers spoof (Oscar Movie) of a Weinstein Brothers prestige film: the King of England, a victim of society’s prejudice against stutterers, is empowered by an impudent immigrant therapist to overcome his stiff upper lip just in time to rouse his countrymen to defeat Hitler.

Here, though, practice does make perfect. The King’s Speech is delightful: fast-paced, funny, touching, and extraordinarily well-acted.

Veteran TV-movie screenwriter David Seidler (who finally has written a cinema hit at age 73) is aware that overcoming one’s fear of public speaking isn’t an exceptionally edifying Triumph of the Human Spirit story, but it’s something with which almost everybody can identify. The British Royal Family remains of broad interest because it plays out on a grand stage such human-scale dramas as speech impediments and engagements.

The King’s Speech illustrates G. K. Chesterton’s 1905 insight that hereditary kingship is “in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule.”

Read the whole thing there.

The #2 Whitopia is Idaho; The #1 Whitopia is ...

Audacious Epigone has a table derived from the Pew Research Center of net migration trends for white people in the housing bubble years of 2005 to 2007.  

By 2007, Idaho had 4.6 percent more white people than it had in 2005, making it the country's #2 Whitopia for that period. During those years 384,000 residents of America (i.e., not immigrants from foreign countries) moved into Idaho and 307,000 moved out. So, net, Idaho added 77,000 Americans from interstate migration over that period, of whom 53,000 were white.

The term "whitopia" comes from a black author, Rich Benjamin, whose recent book "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America," took him to places like Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which he found to be pretty darn nice. In the course of his research, he took up golf and discovered that he really enjoys it. (The fourth picture down here is of the Coeur d'Alene golf course.)

Interestingly, Hispanics only accounted for 2,000 and Asians 1,000 of the net increase in Idaho. Blacks, however, made up 22,000 of the net increase in Idaho. So, Idaho is also a new Blacktopia. Who knew?

In 2008, McCain carried 65 percent of the white vote in Idaho.

In contrast, the #1 Whitopia for 2005-2007 is a place where Obama carried 86 percent of the white:, of course, Washington D.C. The nation's capital lost from interstate migration (i.e., not from immigration/emigration), net, 37,000 blacks, 5,000 Hispanics, and 2,000 Asians. But it gained 10,000 whites, for a net increase in its white population of 5.1 percent just from 2005 to 2007.

According to the 2008 exit poll, whites accounted for 35% of all votes in D.C., despite a huge black turnout for Obama. African-Americans were down to 56%. This sense within D.C. of the inevitable triumph of white liberal technocrats, leading to a whitopia of good public schools and high property values, was given a rude shock by the technocratic Fenty administration being given the boot in 2010 by black voters.

Immigrants and Exurbs

Ever since African-American voters in Washington D.C. kicked out school reformer Michelle Rhee, lowering property values in gentrifying sections of D.C., blogger and D.C. condo-owner Matthew Yglesias has been on the warpath to admit 165,000,000 immigrants to the U.S.. You might think that the subsequent increase in global carbon emissions alone would make that an expensive way to drive African Americans out of D.C. in order to improve the public schools and raise Yglesias's property value, but, you see, Yglesias has a triple bankshot plan to remake America into his beloved native Manhattan. He thinks 165 million immigrants couldn't help but come in handy in the Manhattanization of America so that everybody will take the subway to work.

But, has Yglesias ever asked immigrants where they want to live? Much of the evidence suggests: in the exurbs, in big houses, with big air conditioners, driving big SUVs. For example, here's a 2009 article by Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing entitled Immigrants and the Suburban Influx. It describes exurban Gwinnett County, about 30 miles outside of Atlanta. Famous as a white flight region just a couple of decades ago, Gwinnett is now majority minority, with lots of prosperous Indians and Koreans. Maybe in a generation or two, affluent Indians and Koreans will want to lead the downtown hipster life, but right now they want the traditional American Dream of a home with a yard and a big car (i.e., they want to emit a lot of carbon.)

"There will always be a reasonably passionate opposition"

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:
Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense. ...

Is there anything good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an individual level, no. It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells of human sympathy. Honor belongs to the people who resist partisanship’s pull, instead of rowing with it.

But for the country as a whole, partisanship does have one modest virtue. It guarantees that even when there’s an elite consensus behind whatever the ruling party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or passing Obamacare), there will always be a reasonably passionate opposition as well. Given how much authority is concentrated in Washington, especially in the executive branch, even a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is better than no opposition at all.

At the very least, the power of partisanship means that there will always be someone around, when Americans are standing spread-eagled and exposed in the glare of Rapiscan, to speak up and say “enough!”

Okay, but what happens when elites of both parties are in favor of a bad idea? To return to air security, President Bush campaigned in 2000 against ethnic profiling of Arabs and Muslims by airport security and Al Gore immediately said "Me, too!" Bush's Transportation Department had been running a big program in 2001 to crack down on profiling of passengers who look like Arab terrorists at the time that 19 Arab terrorists got on their flights on 9/11. (See my 9/11/2001 article for UPI, "Bush had called for laxer airport security.") Did the Democrats rush to denounce Bush for making it easier for Mohammed Atta to board? Did Republicans turn on Bush?

No, what happens is largely that the issue disappears down the old memory hole.

Similarly, how about Bush's push for more zero down payment mortgages in the name of fighting racist redlining?

I've largely devoted my career to raising unwelcome questions about bipartisan elite consensuses. It's not a wise career choice.

The Set-Aside Boondoggle

Heather Mac Donald explains in NRO in The Set-Aside Boondoggle another detriment on the economy. 

Allow me to reiterate that the one comparative political advantage that Obama personally would possess in improving the economy is his ability as a black President to set in motion -- so should he choose -- the reform of the huge number of distortions in economic life due to the Civil Rights Era of the last half century.

"Why isn't Mexico rich?"

Asks Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics blog, citing a paper by an American economist about how the Mexican government has done much of what American economists have advised them to do, with only fair to middling results.

The comments are relatively interesting. I would add that it's worth looking at areas in the U.S. with a traditionally Hispanic dominant population, such as parts of the upper and lower Rio Grande Valley as a test of the institutionalist explanations. They tend to be much richer than Mexico, but much poorer than the rest of the U.S., thus showing the institutionalist theory's glass is part full and part empty.

I would also add that a lot of Mexico isn't terribly poor anymore. Overall, the current life expectancy in Mexico is 97.5% of the life expectancy in the U.S.

November 25, 2010

Well-Staffed

You can't complain that high tuition private colleges aren't well-staffed these days. From an article in the Washington Post about problems college freshmen have with their parents when they go home on vacation for the first time:
A growing number of colleges are helping freshmen and their families navigate the fine art of learning to live together once again. Last week, George Washington University hosted a seminar for about 40 students on "Going Home: It will be different."

The university's Office of Parent Services also sent a letter to parents explaining that their kids won't be the same people this semester - and probably will sleep a lot.

Tips included: "Try not to remove all of the freedoms that your student has become accustomed to over the past few months. They have developed a new way of living, and reverting back to the 'old way' may cause stress." The letter ends with a couple of phone numbers to the school's Office of Parent Services that parents can call "if things get rough."