text:
Comments on a Divided World, from Don Hamerquist
In the text that follows, Don Hamerquist addresses the current salience of imperialism, territory, and revolutionary organizing in the First World. This essay is prompted by the review of Zak Cope's Divided World Divided Class by Matthijs Krul, which was reposted to Sketchy Thoughts a few weeks ago. Don explains that "For Krul citations I am using generated page numbers from a print out of the version of the review and its single page of introduction that was on Sketchy Thoughts. These provide a rough guide to the relative locations of the citations, but may not translate accurately to other posted versions of the review. I considered not providing page citations, but I cite the document a lot and expect this will raise questions about interpretation, so this seemed like a better approach."
Here are Don's comments:
It's not usually wise to comment on a review of a book that one hasn't read, and I haven't read the Cope book, Divided World Divided Class, although I hope to shortly. On the other hand, the time I've spent functioning politically with, and at times within, variations of radical Third Worldist anti-imperialism provides some insight into Cope's arguments and some measure of agreement with his political conclusions. However, just so I can be corrected on any possible misunderstandings, I'll begin by sketching out my understanding of that position as it relates to some points I'd like to make about Krul's review.
When Arghiri Emmanuel's book, Unequal Exchange, was distributed in English in the early 70s, it was received as both a supplement and a correction to Lenin's theory of imperialism - a theory that was showing some wear as its political context, the crisis of the more or less organized left at the outbreak of WWI, receded further into the past. Lenin's theory didn't adequately foresee subsequent decades of perpetuation and expansion of inequalities within and between diverging national forms of capitalist 'development'. It didn't explain how distinctively different social and class relations in the capitalist center and the capitalist periphery would be reproduced for decades after the onset of the "general (read final) crisis" of the "highest (also read final) stage" of capitalism.
Emmanuel provided an approach to national oppression resting on a conception of unequal international exchange that in turn was based on Marx's theory of prices of production in Volume 3 of Capital. He argued that, under certain assumptions, the economic relationship between low wage countries and high wage countries resulted in a transfer of value from the former to the latter. This process worked largely through exchange, through 'trade', and, while not excluding the element of extra-economic imperial coercion that is central to Lenin's conception, it was not dependent on it. From Krul's review and some other things that I have read, I understand the Cope book to be an attempt to expand the base of empirical support for the position that Emmanuel and others outlined in more general theoretical form. If I'm wrong about that, I can only hope, it doesn't make the rest of what I say completely without value.
Emmanuel's theory clearly pointed towards an accelerated weakening of the potential for internationalism and revolution among a growing, objectively privileged, stratum of the working classes in the capitalist center. While not necessarily replacing the processes that Lenin described as a basis for a labor aristocracy, this argument went well beyond the - essentially temporary - "crumbs" of superprofits that Lenin stressed, and pointed towards a massive long-term enlargement of the base of common interest between workers and capitalists in the imperial center. Then as now, this argument was politically unpalatable to large sections of the metropolitan left and it was widely challenged on both theoretical and practical grounds. Emmanuel's book ends with extensive appendices where he debates these issues with Charles Bettleheim, a preeminent Maoist theoretician at the time. (Parenthetically I would say that Bettleheim made virtually all of Charley Post's arguments in the early 70s –in substantially greater detail, with more coherence, and without the benefit of knowing certain things that we all should have picked up from the four decades of subsequent history.)
Just as Emmanuel's positions were anathema to the mainstream metropolitan left, they have a continuing popularity with various critiques of Eurocentric radicalism and with an array of approaches to revolution on the periphery, including versions of prolonged people's war. They also play a role in many Global South vs. Global North, "Bandung Conference", perspectives that promote a radical third world socialism; e.g. Amin, Gunder Frank, and Wallerstein. (I would argue that this last category is essentially either utopian or reformist – or both – although many disagree.)
As Kersplebedeb notes in the introduction to Krul's review, one of the advantage of the theory and politics of unequal exchange is that: "it strikes many of us as 'obvious' on a gut level." (Review, p. 1) It appears to explain what is undeniable: the growing inequalities between center and periphery; the secular trend towards social passivity in the global North and West; and the continuing turmoil and rebelliousness in the global South and East. And it does this by assuming that these phenomena are interconnected and interdependent – mutually reinforcing - a point which also seems to some of us to be "obvious". Whenever the other side of the debate doesn't simply ignore and evade this reality, it generally asserts that these processes are essentially independent of each other and the residue of unexplained issues is poorly explained through an unpersuasive combination of productivism and workerism.
Before getting to Krul's review of Cope, I want to consider some of Emmanuel's theoretical assumptions and raise some possible impacts of the changes in the global context since the late sixties when he actually wrote his book. I hope this will indicate the need for an expanded and modified framework of explanation to support the political conclusions of Third Worldist analysis that should be supported.
Emmanuel assumes a tendency towards profit equalization over a territorial area with an unlimited mobility of capital, but with no mobility of labor. Beyond this, he implicitly, and the like-thinking early Samir Amin explicitly, assume the existence or the real potential for a socialist territorial alternative to the capitalist world market. This 'socialist camp' is central to the state-centric oppositional politics that both of them suggest.
There are problems with both of these assumptions. International labor flows, specifically including labor mobility between periphery and center, are a major feature of contemporary capitalism. Any perspective that disregards them or diminishes their importance will encounter major problems. Just as clearly, the disintegration of actually existing socialism into the capitalist world market makes it improbable, if not impossible, that any hypothetical national liberation state, New Democracy, or similar territorially-based transitional stage to 'socialism' will exercise substantive self-determination over basic economic processes for a meaningful period of time. Both of these problems raise doubt about the continuing relevance of the territorial state-centric national liberation framework used by Emmanuel and most Third Worldist radicalism – probably including Cope, and certainly Krul, who speaks of the importance of; "…vast transfers of value from the developing countries (my emphasis) to the developed ones…". (Review, p. 6)
However, whether or not the Third Worldist framework provides an adequate explanation for it, the "gut level" feeling about global inequalities still is grounded in a significant reality. Inequality within and between segments of the working classes and poor are issues of overriding significance for any viable revolutionary strategy. These inequalities provide much of the content of the competitions among the oppressed and exploited on which the minority power of capital rests, and they constitute a more important element of the rule of capital than the always challenged, "monopoly of legitimate force" enjoyed by its state formations. Confronting the entire gamut of inequality must be the substance of internationalism and emancipatory politics.
Since my opinion of Negri's current politics and much of his theoretical position is quite low, I'm reluctant to raise his views as a positive alternative to the Third Worldist perspective, although he explicitly presents them that way (see Empire, p. 333, for an example). Nevertheless, I think Negri and Hardt's Empire provides a superior framework for dealing with the issues of equality and oppression that are based in the current relationship between capitalist center and capitalist periphery. This framework doesn't exclude unequal exchange, but it emphasizes other aspects of growing inequality and oppression, while pointing out significant areas of tension and stress where these can be better confronted on a class rather than a national basis. These brief excerpts from Empire will give some sense of this point and will hopefully provide a context in which some of the issues with Krul's review can be clarified.
"… the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all." (Empire, p. xiii)
"Workers who flee the Third World to go to the First for work or wealth contribute to undermining the boundaries between the two worlds. The Third World does not really disappear in the process of unification of the world market but enters into the First, establishes itself at the heart as ghetto, shantytown, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers of money and command. Economic geography and political geography both are destabilized in such a way that the boundaries among the various zones are themselves fluid and mobile." (Empire, p. 253-254)
"Empire is characterized by the close proximity of extremely unequal populations which creates a situation of permanent social danger." (Empire, p. 336-337).
"From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation." (Empire, p.134, Negri's emphasis)
Let me raise two processes, one based in the periphery and one in the center, that illustrate how this framework has the potential to illuminate current social conditions that tend to elude the Third Worldist analysis:
Negri's conception of the "First World" becoming established in the "Third World" points towards new types of distorted and unequal social relations in the capitalist periphery. These emerge in contradictory relationships between new and growing ruling groupings, that are closely tied to the capitalist global system, and rapidly urbanizing working masses that are losing their ties to land, common areas, and collective resources. These processes can be partially explained in terms of national oppression, but in such a framework important elements of the extension to the periphery of what Marx terms "real subsumption" will not get adequate attention.
After the products and resources of the periphery are forcibly integrated into unequal capitalist relations of global distribution, the most valuable resource of these societies, their productive working populations, are also forcibly integrated into capitalist labor forces. A simple emphasis on the transfer of value from periphery to center tends to treat labor on the periphery as an undifferentiated oppressed unity confined within national social formations. In actuality the element of differentiation, particularly in terms of gender, is of primary importance and the effects of this differentiation cut across territorial boundaries and political jurisdictions in the capitalist periphery.
These are complex processes of expanded and continuing primitive accumulation with consequences that go beyond the separation of those who work from the tools and resources necessary for their minimal self-sufficiency. They cause involuntary and disruptive population movements in general, but more specifically they contribute to gender defined labor forces on a transnational level where a rapidly increasing proportion of women workers are employed at wages that challenge the reproduction of their labor power, while an expanding segment of working age men are permanently marginalized from the 'legal' economy. These processes are expedited, and at times resisted, by an array of quasi-state and civil society formations that indirectly and directly enforce labor discipline and control insurgent potentials - in large part through perpetuating male supremacy by overt force, not infrequently, military force. The fact that this occurs in areas that are increasingly characterized by hollow or failed governmental structures gives the results a de facto legitimacy despite all noise about rights and humanitarian interventions.
When it comes to the treatment of the capitalist center, the Third Worldist perspective is prone to make outside of time characterizations of the labor aristocracy. The general argument is that an expanded transfer of surplus value to the center equates to an expanded basis for a social democratic class collaboration that, in turn, equates to greater political stability for capitalism. The capitalist aristocracy of labor enjoys economic and social privileges that may entail some short run deductions from capitalist profit, but these costs are strategically justified by its centrality to the social order needed to maintain and expand capitalist profits over the longer run. This leads Krul to an endorsement of what is apparently one of Cope's political conclusions:
"…the Western working class currently is not revolutionary, and in fact cannot (Krul's emphasis)be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism." (Review, p.6. I'll return to this point often.)One feature of any aristocracy worth the name is that it is essentially hereditary. A capitalist labor aristocracy will only serve its function for capital, if it is a relatively stable network of privileges passed down through generations. So it is certainly a relevant issue for Third Worldist perspectives if, on the balance, processes in the capitalist center are undermining and fracturing this historic base of political support for the hegemony of capital – or if they are not. Negri's conception of the Third World invading the First World and establishing itself at its heart – an image with deep Third Worldist roots extending back to Martin Nicolaus's debate with Ernest Mandel in the sixties, points towards "…a situation of permanent social danger". This "danger" relates to possibilities for major disruptions of the equilibrium provided by the social democratic labor aristocracy. In my opinion, any political perspectives that assume a continuation of current levels of metropolitan stability conflicts with a lot of contradictory evidence – including some that is introduced in the concluding sections of Krul's review.
Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that relatively affluent, typically white male, metropolitan workers are on the cusp of becoming militant revolutionaries or that their narrow sectoral demands have a newly acquired radical significance. It does mean that they are increasingly disaffected from what many of them had previously thought was 'their' country, 'their' government, 'their' system – and that there is an increased likelihood that they will eventually begin to act out this disaffection. Unfortunately, without some major changes that don't appear to be on the horizon, the bulk of any militance and radicalism is likely to be right wing in character, but, nevertheless, this does not bode well for the stability of metropolitan capitalism.
Beyond this there are many other destabilizing elements in the capitalist center that don't depend exclusively on what this relatively privileged working class fraction does or does not do - including a number of situations marked by that "social danger" from the "close proximity of extremely unequal populations" that Negri mentions. However, at this time I am only arguing that unless the Third Worldists only intend to explain a past that is being superceded, they must either challenge the accuracy of this estimate of current trends toward destabilization and possibilities of social ruptures, or they must adjust their "cannot be revolutionary" estimate of the political impact of unequal exchange value transfers on the Western working classes.
This brings me more directly to the Krul review of the Cope book. I'd like to approach it somewhat in reverse, beginning from some of its conclusions before looking more carefully at the content of the argumentation. I think that these conclusions, and specifically some of them with which I have considerable agreement, don't fit the major themes of the argument, giving the complete product a certain schizoid character.
Krul presents his conclusions quite casually at the end of the review. Consider the following:
"In the current period, the capitalist classes of the First World seem inclined to go more and more against the historic compromise of social-democracy, and the social-democracy is therefore declining in historical vigour proportionally to the shift of capitalist production from the First to the Third World in search of lower wages and higher profits." (Review, p. 9)I agree that this is a partial description of the actual tendency of metropolitan capital, although I might quibble about whether it involves a ruling class 'inclination' rather than a circumstances imposed compulsion. However, Krul doesn't seem to appreciate the implications of this passage for the political positions that earlier sections of his review have substantially endorsed. He has advanced a conception of global capitalism in which value transfers from the periphery become, "an almost total compensation for the domestic exploitation of the First World working class" (Review, p. 6), providing the economic basis for a much broadened social democratic consensus that involves, "…a wider and wider section of the working class of the center." (Review, p. 6). If that is the case, what are the new calculations and/or new pressures that are inclining the "capitalist classes of the First World" towards a course that will certainly disrupt a relatively functional element of capitalist stability in the center, the arrangement that has provided important support for its capacity to exercise power in the rest of the world – specifically, what Krul terms the "historic compromise of social-democracy"?
Perhaps Krul is pointing to some new and greater threat that demands additional resources; e.g.; the political emergence of the toilers of the East that the later Lenin named as the ultimate guarantee of the working class revolution everywhere. But if there was once a period when it was possible to believe that the movement for national liberation in the oppressed 'countryside' was successfully encircling the urbanized center of world capitalism, that period is decades over – and has left behind its own list of unanswered, but still very pressing, questions.
The concluding sentences of Krul's review raise the issue more starkly, but still without providing any clear direction:
"This world monopoly is now that of the 'West' so-called, and every day it is more broken while every day the Western working class fights to maintain it. What will we do?" (Review p. 10)Who or what is breaking the, "world monopoly…of the West", if it actually is becoming… "more broken" every day? Since according to Krul, the, "…Western working class fights to maintain it", what has changed, if anything, with respect to who they will be fighting with, and who against? What social forces do these changes allies and opponents represent – and how will this "fight" be conducted?
There is an entire line of analysis that attempts to deal with a portion of these issues on a global level. I'm thinking about Wallerstein and, more specifically, Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century). Their positions emphasize contradictions in global capitalist processes and, at least recently, have moved away from the focus on revolutionary processes in specific national social formations on the periphery that is associated with modern Maoism and its nationally specific notions of prolonged people's war. I don't see any necessary conflict between this 'world system's' view and Negri's conception of empire – at least not on the issues that are of concern here.
Arrighi maintains that successive cycles of global capitalist expansion have been associated with the emergence of a distinctive world hegemonic state, and that there is always some tension between the capitalist hegemon, that functions in part according to a "territorialist logic of power", and capitalist production that functions according to a universal logic of accumulation. This leads to "…recurrent contradiction between an 'endless' accumulation of capital and a comparatively stable organization of political space". (see Arrighi, p. 27-34 for the general argument)
According to Arrighi, writing in the last years of the twentieth century, this "recurrent contradiction" is currently exacerbated by the decline of the U.S. as world hegemon, with - after he discounts first Japan and then China - no viable successor in view. He sees the contemporary content of the contradiction as follows:
"The uncontainability of violence in the contemporary world is closely associated with the withering away of the modern system of territorial states as the primary locus of world power…Combined with the internationalization of world scale processes of production and exchange within the organizational domains of transnational corporations and with the resurgence of suprastatal world financial markets, these unprecedented restrictions and expectations have translated into strong pressure to relocate the authority of nation-states both upward and downward." (Arrighi, p. 331)I have some agreement with these views, but I'm not sure if Krul or others sympathetic to more traditional Third Worldist national liberation politics do as well. However, even if Krul's conclusion does point to the disruptions and dislocations associated with the decline of the U.S. as the last in a series of Western world hegemonic states, it is still questionable to treat the U.S. as equivalent to the "West". But the "world monopoly" that Krul describes as broken, but still defended by its working classes, has been presented as the hegemony of the "West", and not that of the U.S.
In any case, I agree with Krul on two points. First; the working out of the contradictions between profit maximization and political stability in the core territories of the global capitalist system, does leave traditional social arrangements …"more broken every day". Second; to the extent that the working class in the center confines its resistance to rearguard actions that defend increasingly eroded structures of relative privilege, the best outcome is to bind itself more tightly within its strategic subordination to capital, while the worst is to expand the social base for fascism.
However, I think that Krul goes substantially beyond these points when he appears to argue that the metropolitan working class's acceptance of the role of junior partner in a failing enterprise is fixed in concrete and beyond effective political challenge from the left. This subordination is presented as a necessary political outcome from the overwhelming capacity of the, "…ruling classes of the center to buy off the exploited working class of the center with the proceeds of this imperialist rent" (an imperialist rent which through social democracy is then) "…shared with a wider and wider section of the working class of the center." (Review, p. 4). This then expands the sectors of the metropolitan working class that, as Krul has said and as I will regularly repeat, "cannot be revolutionary".
I do like this conception of the way that social democracy has functioned to broaden and generalize the base of class collaboration, however at this time I'm concentrating on problems with this overall approach. First, in my experience politics that are grounded in conceptions of objective material privilege, as is the case with the Third Worldist analysis, generally tend towards overly deterministic conclusions about the linkage between these relative material advantages and the ideas and actions of those that objectively benefit from them. Krul hints at a criticism of one possible form of this reductionist mistake when noting that Cope; "does not wholly avoid the common notion among Third Worldist Marxist writers that the economic analysis as such necessarily generates a set of strategic political concerns…(and – d.h.)…one simply cannot make the leap from historical and political economic analysis to strategy…" (Review, p. 8). However, it would seem appropriate to ask Krul whether it is not true that his statement, "…the Western working class… cannot be revolutionary", is exactly such a leap from "analysis to strategy"?
While there certainly are problems if a particular analysis is applied in such a doctrinaire way that it submerges other significant elements of politics, the criticism that Krul implies only deals with a secondary aspect of a larger issue. More important problems emerge when the economic and political reality that is the object of the analysis is presented as the necessary and sufficient cause of the ideas and behaviors of specific social groups. This is a big problem even when the material analysis of conditions is essentially valid. It is a larger problem when this analysis is flawed. It is not possible to adequately explain social action as a mere effect of social circumstances. The essential premise for the possibility of revolution always rests on the potential for enlightened social action to modify and even transform circumstances. Forgive me for an illegitimate argument, but without such a dialectical potential, what graduate student, privileged by definition, might become a revolutionary – and we do see many of them around.
At various points, Krul implies that he – and not only Cope or other Third Worldist theorists that he is reviewing – regards an expanded base for social democracy as equivalent to an expanded social democracy and from this point concludes that the metropolitan working classes (or at least major parts of them) are necessarily non revolutionary. I'd like to respond to this view with a deeper consideration of the implications of two passages from Krul, beginning with a restatement of the full version of the one that I've been citing ad nauseum:
"…the Western working class currently is not revolutionary and in fact cannot (Krul's emphasis) be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism." (Review, p. 6).
"This labor aristocracy, so formed, then no longer fulfills the one special role the working class has in Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism: namely, to be unable to emancipate itself without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its labour." (Review, p. 4).The first citation combines an accurate description of Western working classes in a first clause, with a second clause that is, at best, an eminently debatable assertion about Marxism. The low regard that Marx and Engel's had for the English working class in the last half of the nineteenth century, particularly with respect to its attitudes towards Ireland, was based on their estimates of its response to relative privileges. In this case, and in similar ones, substantial "revolutionary…expectations" for a working class segment that is heavily privileged, knows that it is privileged, knows that its privileges are the consequence of the oppression of other workers, and is set on retaining its privileges, certainly are a matter of self-delusion. However, even for a completely determinist view, logic requires that, if privileges are being eroded rather than expanded, any identification with 'their' capitalism will be shaken and revolutionary possibilities can be expected to emerge. This is even more likely, if, as is typically the case, the erstwhile privileged sectors have no real understanding that their relative affluence is related in any way to other worker's impoverishment, and instead have regarded their advantages, assuming that they even recognize them as advantages, as a deserved reward for past struggles and present productivity, rather than as 'privileges'.
More important, this implied conception of the revolutionary process, at least insofar as such a process is both anti-capitalist and liberatory, leaves out a crucial element. Revolution involves a break with capitalist patterns of competitive consumption; it projects needs that capitalism cannot satisfy and demands that capital cannot completely co-opt. These necessary ruptures with capitalist normalcy are possible, "be their wages high or low", as someone has said. The issues of material privilege certainly impact the essential struggle for real equality and are thus always relevant to revolution - but they are not all that is important to the process.
This leads to the second cited passage, and its treatment of the, "one special role the working class has in Marx and Engel's theory of historical materialism." Laying aside the ambiguity surrounding the theory of historical materialism and the massive debates about its 'correct' interpretation; and laying aside as well, the real possibility that Marx and Engel might not provide the final word on the issues that confront us a century and a quarter after the end of their productive collaboration, I'd question both the point being made here and the manner in which it is being made.
We can begin by agreeing that working class revolution must emancipate all social groups in the process of eliminating capitalist production relations and the classes that constitute these relations Then the first question being posed is: can the sections of the working class in the capitalist center that have gained 'more' under capitalism commit to anti-capitalism; while the second question, assuming that such relative advantages haven't completely ruled out this possibility, under what conditions and through what processes will more advantaged sections of the working class commit to anti-capitalism.
I answer the first question in the affirmative. Some of what Krul says implies that he might disagree, but I'm inclined to doubt it. A literal application of that position would treat struggles for improvements in material conditions and expansions of formal democracy in the capitalist center as entirely negative for revolutionary prospects – at least to the degree that they achieve some partial successes. It's one thing to argue against incremental reformist notions that see revolution as the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow path of sectoral improvements in working and living circumstances. It's quite another to see the reform struggle as only an inevitable process of corruption of some initially pure revolutionary impulse.
This is an impossible position to translate into any effective practical revolutionary politics in the capitalist center. And for those Third Worldists that might be inclined to discount any revolutionary possibilities in the capitalist center, it's important to recognize that the same type of critique would also apply to partial struggles in the capitalist periphery – although in a distinctive manner. In the center, the reformist distortion is more likely to take the form of limiting struggles because there is 'too much to lose' by challenging capitalism. In the periphery, the reformist distortion can take the form of limiting struggles because there is 'too much left to win' within capitalism.
Leaving any implications with respect to peripheral capitalism for examination in a different context, let's assume that the possibility for some relatively privileged sectors in the center becoming revolutionary is not completely ruled out. Krul might recognize a relatively limited revolutionary possibility in the working classes of the center, although one that is commonly approached in a reformist and opportunistic fashion. Recognizing that the magnitude of this potential and the political approaches required to materialize it will still be potential differences, I could agree with such an estimate. However, some clarifications are still needed to move this past a formal level.
What 'more' do the social democratic segments of the working classes of the West have that is 'too much more'? Can this 'too much more' be quantified - with a recognizable break point between where it is determinant and where it isn't? Is the crucial characteristic primarily a matter of higher wages – real or nominal, and, if so, how much higher? Does the counter revolutionary side of 'too much more' relate to the length of the working day, or to the breadth of the franchise, or to the stability of the social security net? Do segments of the metropolitan working class that are not white and male, but that also do have relatively more, also have 'too much more'?
When these matters are worked through, I very much doubt that Krul's conclusions about the metropolitan working class – "…unable to emancipate itself without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its labour" – will mark out any significant distinction between the working classes of the center and those of the periphery. Both areas require a rupture with existing patterns of struggle and accommodation. Although the specific form and content of the rupture will certainly vary, the one essential element that will be involved in both areas is the frontal challenge to all of the forms of inequality that are embedded within oppression and exploitation.
I'd like to conclude this comment by briefly noting some other interesting points that Krul makes in his review. These may or may not be integral to the questions about the existence and the impact of the labor aristocracy in the West. I think that they are, others may not, but at the very least they are important matters in their own right. I'd mention three such topics that Krul's review raises: the question of the 'socialism' of the 'actually existing socialism' variant; the conception of social democracy; and the conception of fascism.
In a larger statement on the continuing relative weakness of revolutionary movements in the West, Krul says; "…in being more serious about supporting the so-called 'really existing socialisms' elsewhere in the world, the Moscow line parties and 'Eurocommunists" were arguably still more useful than the current leading groups." (Review, p. 6). This seems to mean that "serious" support for the socialist camp so-called was, and presumably still is, good politics. This is a common theme among certain Maoist tendencies that are looking to separate what was positive from what was negative in our history. While it's hard to disagree with the disparagement of, "…the current leading groups", assuming I properly understand the reference, none of this 'really existing socialism' was socialism in the only meaningful sense of that term, as a transition to communism. This was a 'socialist camp' that made communism appear undesirable and confirmed prejudices that it was not possible. Its failures and crimes bear more responsibility for the mass rejection of revolutionary communism as an objective, than any of the actions or the ideologies of capitalism. There's nothing good here and – although there are important things to be learned, that has nothing to do with sifting through the wreckage for some trinkets that might still work.
This is the first time that I have seen the combination of an endorsement of the Comintern 3rd Period conception of "social fascism" with an endorsement of the post-Dimitrov WWII popular front. In my view they fit together and gain an essential similarity as successive massive errors. I think that Krul's position, insofar as I understand it from this review, involves a mistaken conception of both social democracy and fascism. I think that a radically different conception of each of these is a vital core for an adequate revolutionary strategy, and a more complete understanding of the relevant history wouldn't hurt either. This is already embarrassingly long-winded for what it set out to be, so I'll leave it there for the moment, but I am intrigued by the issues and prepared to follow them out in more depth. However, not to repeat some of the problems with this piece, I'd first want to read some of the additional material that Krul indicates he has written.
Don 2/17


text:
The answers to the Circuit Cellar 272 Engineering Quotient are now available. The problems and answers are listed below.
Problem 1—Why does the power dissipation of a Darlington transistor tend to be higher than that of a single bipolar transistor in switching applications?
Answer 1—In switching applications, a single transistor can saturate, resulting in a low VCE of 0.3 to 0.4 V. However, in a Darlington pair, the output transistor is prevented from saturating by the negative feedback provided by the driver transistor. If the collector voltage drops below the sum of the VBE of the output transistor (about 0.7 V) and the VCE(sat) of the driver transistor (about 0.3 V), the drive current to the output transistor is reduced, preventing it from going into saturation itself. Therefore, the effective VCE(sat) of the Darlington pair is 1 V or more, resulting in much higher dissipation at a given current level.
Problem 2—Suppose you have some 3-bit data, say, grayscale values for which 000 = black and 111 = white. You have a display device that takes 8-bit data, and you want to extend the bit width of your data to match.
If you just pad the data with zeros, you get the value 11100000 for white, which is not full white for the 8-bit display—that would be 11111111. What can you do?
Answer 2—One clever trick is to repeat the bits you have as many times as necessary to fill the output field width. For example, if the 3-bit input value is ABC, the output value would be ABCABCAB. This produces the following mapping, which interpolates nicely between full black and full white (see Table 1). Note that this mapping preserves the original bits; if you want to go back to the 3-bit representation, just take the MSBs and you have the original data.
3-bit INPUT | 8-bit OUTPUT |
000 | 00000000 |
001 | 00100100 |
010 | 01001001 |
011 | 01101101 |
100 | 10010010 |
101 | 10110110 |
110 | 11011011 |
111 | 11111111 |
Problem 3—Can an induction motor (e.g., squirrel-cage type) be used as a generator?
Answer 3—Believe it or not, yes it can.
An induction motor has no electrical connections to the rotor; instead, a magnetic field is induced into the rotor by the stator. The motor runs slightly slower than "synchronous" speed—typically 1725 or 3450 rpm when on 60 Hz power.
If the motor is provided with a capacitive load, is driven at slightly higher than synchronous speed (1875 or 3750 rpm), and has enough residual magnetism in the rotor to get itself going, it will generate power up to approximately its rating as a motor. The reactive current of the load capacitor keeps the rotor energized in much the same way as when it is operating as a motor.
See www.qsl.net/ns8o/Induction_Generator.html for additional details.
Problem 4—In Figure 1, why does this reconstruction of a 20-kHz sinewave sampled at 44.1 kHz show ripple in its amplitude?
Answer 4—The actual sampled data, represented by the square dots in the diagram, contains equal levels of Fsignal (the sine wave) and Fsample-Fsignal (one of the aliases of the sinewave). Any reconstruction filter is going to have difficulty passing the one and eliminating the other, so you inevitably get some of the alias signal, which, when added to the desired signal, produces the "modulation" you see.
In the case of a software display of a waveform on a computer screen (e.g., such as you might see in software used to edit audio recordings), they're probably using an FIR low-pass filter (sin(x)/x coefficients) windowed to some finite length. A shorter window gives faster drawing times, so they're making a tradeoff between visual fidelity and interactive performance. The windowing makes the filter somewhat less than brick-wall, so you get the leakage of the alias and the modulation.
In the case of a real audio D/A converter, even with oversampling you can't get perfect stopband attenuation (and you must always do at least some of the filtering in the analog domain), so once again you see the leakage and modulation.
In this example, Fsignal = 0.9×Fnyquist, so Falias = 1.1×Fnyquist and Falias/Fsignal = 1.22. To eliminate the visible artifacts, the reconstruction filter would need to have a slope of about 60dB over this frequency span, or about 200 dB/octave.
Sponsor this ArticleCircuit Cellar's editorial team comprises professional engineers, technical editors, and digital media specialists. You can reach the Editorial Department at firstname.lastname@example.com, @circuitcellar, and facebook.com/circuitcellar

subset: commoncrawl


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Friday, 31 March 2023 07:48 PM EDT
Former President Donald Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday.
He will be formally arrested and arraigned Tuesday in his hush money case, setting the scene for the historic, shocking moment when a former president is forced to stand before a judge to hear the criminal charges against him.
The indictment remained sealed and the specific charges were not immediately known, but details were confirmed by people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that isn't yet public.
The streets outside the courthouse where the arraignment will unfold were calm Friday compared with earlier in the week. There were no large-scale demonstrations for or against Trump, though tourists stopped to take selfies and throngs of reporters and police officers remained assembled.
When Trump turns himself in, he'll be booked mostly like anyone else facing charges, mug shot, fingerprinting and all. But he isn't expected to be put in handcuffs; he'll have Secret Service protection and will almost certainly be released that same day.
In the meantime, Trump's legal team prepared his defense while the prosecutor defended the grand jury investigation that propelled the matter toward trial. Congressional Republicans, as well as Trump himself, contend the whole matter is politically motivated.
"We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wrote to three Republican House committee chairs Friday in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
The case is plunging the U.S. into uncharted legal waters, with Trump the first former president ever to face an indictment. And the political implications could be titanic ahead of next year's presidential election. Trump is in the midst of running for president a third time and has said the case against him could hurt that effort — though his campaign is already furiously raising money by citing it.
The Trump campaign said it raised $4-plus million in the first 24 hours after news of the indictment broke.
Top Republicans also have begun closing ranks around him. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised to use congressional oversight to probe Bragg. Reps. James Comer, Jim Jordan and Bryan Steil, the committee chairs whom Bragg addressed in his letter, have asked the district attorney's office for grand jury testimony, documents and copies of any communications with the Justice Department.
Trump's indictment came after a grand jury probe into hush money paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to squelch allegations of an extramarital sexual encounter. The indictment itself has remained sealed, as is standard in New York before an arraignment.
The investigation dug into six-figure payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both claim to have had sexual encounters with the married Trump years before he got into politics. He denies having sexual liaisons with either woman.
Trump also has denied any wrongdoing involving payments and has denounced the investigation as a "scam," a "persecution," an injustice. He shouts in all capital letters on his social media platform that the Democrats have "LIED, CHEATED" and more to damage his 2024 presidential run.
Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina said during TV interviews Friday he would "very aggressively" challenge the legal validity of the Manhattan grand jury indictment. Trump himself, on his social media platform, trained his ire on a new target, complaining that the judge expected to handle the case, Juan Manuel Merchan, "HATES ME."
The former president is expected to fly to New York on Monday and stay at Trump Tower overnight ahead of his planned arraignment Tuesday, according to two people familiar with his plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Trump's travel.
Trump will be arraigned in the same Manhattan courtroom where his company was tried and convicted of tax fraud in December and where disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's rape trial took place. On Friday, officials from the Secret Service and the NYPD toured the courthouse and met about security plans.
Court officers ultimately closed and secured access to the 15th floor, where Merchan was continuing to preside over unrelated matters, until Trump's arraignment.
Lawyers involved in the cases and some employees were permitted to stay, but media were chased away by officers, who were standing sentry in front of a bike-rack barricade set up in the hallway. Officers yelled at reporters who ventured up, "This floor is closed," and ordered them to get back in the elevator and leave.
"Officers have been cautioned to remain vigilant and maintain situational awareness, both inside courthouses and while on perimeter patrols, as evidenced by the incident on Tuesday afternoon outside of Manhattan Supreme Court," the court said in a statement.
Since Trump's March 18 post claiming his arrest was imminent, authorities have ratcheted up security, deploying additional police officers, lining the streets around the courthouse with barricades and dispatching bomb-sniffing dogs. They've had to respond to bomb and death threats, a suspicious powder scare and a pro-Trump protester who was arrested Tuesday after witnesses say she pulled a knife on passersby.
Since no former president had ever been charged with a crime, there's no rulebook for booking the defendant. He will be fingerprinted and have a mug shot taken, and investigators will complete arrest paperwork and check to see if he has any outstanding criminal charges or warrants, according to a person familiar who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive security operations.
All of that activity takes place away from the public. New York law discourages the release of mug shots in most cases. Less clear is whether Trump would seek to have the picture released himself, for political or other reasons.
Once the booking is complete, the former president would appear before a judge for an afternoon arraignment.
Even for defendants who turn themselves in, answering criminal charges in New York generally entails at least several hours of detention while being fingerprinted, photographed, and going through other procedures.
As for the allegations, as Trump ran for president in 2016, his allies paid two women to bury their accusations. The publisher of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for rights to her story and sat on it, in an arrangement brokered by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
After Cohen himself paid Daniels $130,000, Trump's company reimbursed him, added bonuses and logged the payments as legal expenses.
Federal prosecutors argued — in a 2018 criminal case against Cohen — that the payments equated to illegal aid to Trump's campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violation charges, but federal prosecutors didn't go after Trump, who was then in the White House. However, some of their court filings obliquely implicated him as someone who knew about the payment arrangements.
The New York indictment came as Trump contends with other investigations. In Atlanta, prosecutors are considering whether he committed any crimes when trying to get Georgia officials to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss there to Joe Biden.
And, at the federal level, a Justice Department-appointed special counsel also is investigating Trump's efforts to unravel the national election results. Additionally, the special counsel is examining how and why Trump held onto a cache of top secret government documents at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the ex-president or his representatives tried to obstruct the probe into those documents.
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Joey and I went for a lot of long walks - we saw something different each time. There was so much that captured my attention. The work of a woodpecker. . . Tiny shoots that grew on the side of trees that towered far above our heads. . . And lakeside picnic tables in the distance. Early one morning we woke to the sound of rain on the roof of the trailer. My sweetheart was happy – he said that's the kind of weather fishermen like! They say fish bite better when the sun isn't shining on the water. I heard quite a few of the fishermen say that but I still have to wonder if it's an old
I hope you'll come by again and come with us for a tour of the lake. There's room for you in the boat – I saved you a seat!


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Leaf Vacuum And Blower


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We can help athletes and employees improve his or her Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) to ensure career success. Dr. St. Laurent will address the root causes of any dysfunction, properly fuel the brain, then Pat Stafford will provide elite cognitive training to improve the score.
The research below is a small look into the benefits of proper brain function and success in the National football League (NFL).
Testing the Relationship Between a
Cognitive Ability Test and Player Success:
The National Football League Case
Arthur J. Adams & Frank E. Kuzmits
University of Louisville, USA
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) and subsequent National Football League (NFL) success. The WPT is a well known and established measure of cognitive ability that is used by the NFL in their annual combine, a pre-draft assessment of player mental and physical skills. The authors investigated the relationship between WPT scores and NFL success for all players drafted at 3 different offensive positions over a recent 6-year period. Using multiple measures of NFL player success, we found no evidence of any relationship. Accordingly we question the usefulness of the WPT as a combine measure. However given that other psychological constructs (for example; aggression, leadership, coachability, and self-confidence) have shown a relationship with athletic success, it seems wise for the NFL to consider expanding their mental assessments at the combine to include higher level cognitive measurements and also to examine the current research on peak performance that may provide for potential improvements in the NFL player selection process.
Identifying the psychological variables that help athletes achieve athletic success continues to be an important goal of researchers in the field of sports and athletics (Beilock & McConnell, 2004; Hays & Kenkel, 2006). The field of sports psychology has grown markedly in the past two decades, and the discovery of psychological constructs that help athletes achieve peak performance, defined as the "superior use of human potential" (Privette, 1981) and "outstanding accomplishments" (Jackson & Roberts, 1992) has led to advancements in the understanding of success in a wide variety of athletic endeavors. One research study involving peak performance and successful athletes showed that the psychological profile of peak performing athletes included high self-confidence, energy, feelings of control, concentration, positive attitudes, determination, and commitment (Krane & Williams, 2006).
Predicting Athletic Success
The development of psychological profiles of athletic success also enhances the development of selection models that assist in choosing successful athletes. In a research review of personnel selection practices in athletics, Humara (2002) found a number of psychological constructs related to various athletic endeavors, including aggression, leadership, coachability, and self-confidence. Further, affiliation and conformity may predict athletic performance; e.g.; an athlete low in conformity and affiliation may not perform well in team sports or under an autocratic coach. Based on his review, Humara (2002) concluded that in the selection of athletes, in addition to an assessment of an athlete's past performance and bio (physiological) data, administrators should make greater use of psychological assessments, including the Athletic Motivation Inventory (AMI), the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS), and the Profile of Mood States (POMS).
Cognitive Ability as a Psychological Construct
While the examination of psychological constructs and their relationships to athletic performance is not new, the role of cognitive ability and its part in athletic success, particularly in the realm of predicting athletic success, has received scant attention in the literature. Cognitive ability, also called general mental ability (GMA), remains one of the most widely used predictors of job performance (Brody, 1992; Jensen, 1986; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Several definitions have been put forth for cognitive ability. One approach views cognitive ability as the ability to reason, solve problems, understand complex ideas, and learn from experience (Gottfredson, 1997). Another conceptual framework views cognitive ability as a single general ability, labeled g, which includes multiple abilities such as memory, learning, cognitive speed, retrieval ability, and visual and auditory perception (Carroll, 1993). Finally, a simple definition of the concept puts cognitive ability as "the ability to learn" (Schmidt, 2002).
General Cognitive Ability, Job Performance, and Training Success
As a predictor of human behavior, cognitive ability has long been of interest to scientific investigators, with research dating back to WWI when the U.S. Army used a paper and pencil version of the Binet intelligence test to screen and classify conscripts. (Ree & Earles, 1992). In the workplace, cognitive ability has been demonstrated to be one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of job performance in traditional employment settings (Campbell, 1990; Hunter & Hunter, 1984; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998; Thorndike, 1986). Further, the predictive power of cognitive ability extends across multiple job families, including managers, salespersons, law enforcement, service workers, trades and crafts, industrial workers and vehicle operators (Hunter & Hunter, 1984). In addition cognitive ability predicts job performance for military as well as civilian occupational classes (Hunter, 1986; Ree, Earles & Teachout, 1994). However the predictive power of cognitive ability becomes stronger in more complex employment situations, such as managerial jobs and jobs facing continual and unexpected change (Hunter & Hunter, 1984; LePine, Colquitt, & Erez, 2000).
Cognitive Ability, Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) and the NFL
One widely used measure of cognitive ability is the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT). Material contained on the Wonderlic company website claims that "Since 1937, more than 120 million people at thousands of organizations worldwide have taken the WPT"…and that the test "Can be used to match job candidates or employees to jobs in which they will be effective and satisfied. WPT information helps shorten training time" (Wonderlic Inc., 2006).
The WPT measures the two principal dimensions of general intelligence: fluid intelligence (intellectual development resulting from biological factors, for example, heredity) and crystallized intelligence (intellectual development resulting from education, experience, and acculturation). Test items include word and number comparisons, disarranged sentences, and geometric figures and problems that require mathematical and logical problem solving (Furnham, Rawles, & Iqbal, 2006). Sample questions are available at www.wonderlic.com.
Wonderlic advises employers to gauge the utility of test scores by comparing test takers' scores to norms for the relevant occupational level. For example test score norms (The maximum score is 50) for attorneys, bookkeepers, and food service workers are 29.67, 23.36, and 16.31, respectively. Accordingly Wonderlic suggests that employers seek a minimum test score of 24 for bookkeepers. Wonderlic also recommends certain test scores for broad occupational groups, e.g., 28 and above for upper level management, 20 to 26 for general clerical workers and first line supervisors, and 10 to 17 for workers who operate simple process equipment and perform routine jobs. Wonderlic also cautions employers that employment tests be used in conjunction with other job related performance predictors (Wonderlic, 2002).
As part of the NFL draft each spring, the NFL and team personnel conduct a series of tests, termed the combine, for the most promising professional prospects among college football players. The weeklong series of tests are primarily physical tests (e.g. speed, agility, and strength) and a single mental exercise, the WPT. The NFL began giving combine invitees the WPT in the early 1970s, when coach Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys stated that smarter players were better players and that the test results would provide important information in the NFL draft selection process (Mirabile, 2004). Since then the WPT has become a required measure during the combine, with great media attention given to test scores, which range from 0 to 50. For example a Google search of '2006 NFL combine and the Wonderlic personnel test' resulted in 10,500 hits, with several of the top 20 hits focusing on star University of Texas quarterback Vince Young's (reportedly) very low score of six (Dougherty, 2006).
As a predictor of success in the NFL, the WPT is not without controversy. NFL teams themselves question the validity of the WPT and also worry about the possibility of cheating (Mulligan, 2004). Some teams minimize the significance of the test except for extreme outliers (Merron, 2002). Still others see the WPT as a sinister NFL tool to influence a player's marketability. As one sports writer puts it, "It's (the WPT) a manipulative tool in the NFL's strategy of misinformation in the run-up of head fakes and spin moves to a draft selection" (Roberts, 2006).
Predictably the Wonderlic organization supports the use of the test as part of the combine exercises. Quotes from a Wonderlic press release include:
The coaches understand that players have to be smart and think quickly to succeed on the field, and the closer they are to the ball the smarter they need to be… Whether you are hiring a mailroom clerk or a CEO, a defensive lineman or a quarterback, intelligence is an accurate determiner of success (Wonderlic Inc., 2005).
NFL and WPT Research
In spite of the NFL's continued use of the WPT as a measure of cognitive ability, no scientific support of the WPT as a predictor of NFL success has been provided by either the NFL or the Wonderlic organization (Lyons, Michel & Hoffman, 2005). Further, a review of the literature uncovered only two studies that have examined the ability of the WPT to predict professional football success. In the first study the WPT results of 261 NFL players selected in the 2002 draft were correlated with NFL performance for 2002 and 2003. Performance data were position specific; for example performance criteria for the quarterback position included the NFL quarterback rating (discussed in a later section); criteria for the running back position included yards gained, pass receptions and yards, and touchdowns. The results failed to show a statistical relationship between the WPT and NFL performance for either year or both years combined. The WPT also failed to predict overall draft order for 2002 and 2003 (Lyons, Michel & Hoffman, 2005). In the second study the relationship between WPT scores and NFL performance was examined for 82 quarterbacks drafted in the years 1989-2004. WPT scores predicted neither first-year NFL performance (passing efficiency) nor first-year salary (Mirabile, 2004).
The purpose of this research is to further investigate whether the WPT has the ability to predict NFL performance. Specifically we examine the relationship between the WPT and multiple measures of success at three NFL offensive positions (quarterback, running back, and wide receiver) over a multi-year period, 1999 through 2004. Results of this research should be of interest to NFL and team personnel in determining whether there is statistical justification for requiring combine participants to complete the WPT. In a broader sense this research may also encourage greater interest in the use of psychological construct testing, whether it be the WPT or other types of cognitive ability tests, in not only professional football but also other athletic endeavors (e.g.; baseball, basketball) and at other levels (e.g.; Division I and II college and university athletics).
Selecting the quarterback (QB) position for inclusion in this research was based upon three factors. First, performance data for the QB position were believed to be more objective and readily obtainable as compared to other positions such as guards, tackles, and centers. Second, one may surmise that the QB position requires greater cognitive ability than other positions, as the quarterback must handle the ball on the vast majority of offensive plays and must make play-calling strategic decisions within seconds; for example, by reading the defense and changing plays at the line of scrimmage. Third, the relationship between the WPT and quarterback performance had previously been investigated; however this research will define success in broader terms. We also examined running backs (RB) and wide receivers (WR) – the other primary so-called "skill" positions that involve handling the ball on offense. Further, RBs and WRs met the Wonderlic criterion that "…the closer they are to the ball the smarter they need to be (Wonderlic, Inc., 2005)."
A total of 68 NFL QBs were included in the study. This number represented all combine invitees who were drafted by the NFL from 1999 through 2004. The study also included data for 86 drafted RBs and 152 drafted WRs for the same 6-year period. (Typically the number of players drafted per year was slightly more than half of those participating in the combine). Table 1 shows the number of draftees by position for the years under study.
First published in 1937, the WPT is a 50-item, timed 12-minute test. The test yields a single score that reflects the total number of questions answered correctly. Originally adopted from the Otis Self-Administering Test of Mental Ability (Beck, 1986), the test includes multiple choice and short answer questions designed to measure verbal, numerical, general knowledge, and spatial relationship abilities. Few people complete the test because of time constraints.
The great majority of research concerning the validity and reliability of the WPT has been performed in traditional employment settings. In six employment categories (supervision, blue collar, general office, data processing, engineering, and professionals) the Wonderlic organization reports validities ranging from .22 to .67. Validity studies criteria included a variety of measures, primarily job performance rankings, productivity and production records, and supervisory ratings. The highest validities were in the professional group (e.g.; insurance agents, medical personnel, police officers), with validities ranging from .39 to .67. The lowest validities were in the general office group (e.g.; bank tellers and typists) with validities ranging from .27 to .35. The WPT also correlates highly with the other tests of cognitive ability widely used in employment settings, including the Weschler Adult Intelligence Test (WAIS) (Weschler, 1955), the WAIS-Revised (WAIS-R) (Bell, Matthews, Lassiter, & Leverett, 2002; Dodrill, 1981; Dodrill & Warner, 1988; Edinger, Shipley, Watkins, & Hammett, 1985; Hawkins, Faraone, Seidman, & Tsaung, 1990; Weschler, 1981), and the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) (Wonderlic, Inc., 2002). Various forms of reliability estimates for the WPT (test-retest, longitudinal, alternate form, and internal consistency) range from .82 to .95 (Dodrill & Warner, 1988; Furnham & Petrides, 2003; McKelvie, 1989; Wonderlic Inc., 2002).
WPT data for individual combine participants are not made public by either the NFL or Wonderlic, Inc. Wonderlic, Inc. does make available a single mean WPT score for all combine prospects and also mean scores for each position. Nonetheless WPT scores achieved by combine participants are widely available on the Internet. WPT scores for each combine participant included in this study were retrieved from nfldraftscout.com ("Rankings," n.d.), a website devoted to current and historical information on the NFL, NFL teams, and NFL players. Author discussions with nfldraftscout.com representatives indicated that Wonderlic scores were obtained from NFL team personnel, player scouts, and agents. For each position included in this study, a random sample of players' reported Wonderlic scores were checked and verified against at least two Internet sources; no disparities were found.
Player performance information was obtained from nfl.com ("Players," n.d.), and includes regular season games only (post-season play is excluded). This website contains career statistics for all players included in this sample. NFL salary data were collected from usatoday.com. According to the usatoday.com website ("Sports," n.d.), salary data are obtained from player agents and NFL Players Association research documents. Nfl.com and usatoday.com are owned, respectively, by the National Football League and the Gannett Co. As with the WPT scores, performance data collected for each position were checked and verified against other Internet sources.
Correlation Analysis
Correlation analysis was used to determine if the WPT is linearly related to any one of several possible measures of performance of drafted players. Treating the professional player prospect WPT score as the independent variable, the following possible dependent variables were examined:
Draft order. The players are picked in the NFL draft through several rounds. If the WPT is related to a player's talent and/or potential, there should be a negative correlation between WPT and draft order, as the "best" players should have a high WPT and a low (selected early) draft order number while the less promising prospects should have a low WPT and a high draft order number.
Salary. Hypothetically players are paid according to their promise and performance on the field, so we anticipate a positive relationship between WPT and salary if indeed the WPT is a performance predictor. We consider the WPT and salaries for each of the first three years in the NFL. (Note however that for players drafted in 2004, there is only one year of salary and other data described below. Similarly for players drafted in 2003, as we have data for their first and second but not their third year.)
On-field performance measures. Quarterback performance was defined by applying the NFL's quarterback rating system. According to nfl.com, this official NFL statistic (in use since 1973) is based on a formula that takes into account four aspects of passing performance: pass completion rate, average yards gained per attempt, percentage of interceptions, and percentage of passes that result in touchdowns. Again if the WPT predicts job performance, there should be a positive correlation for WPT with this on-field measure. As with salary we consider the first three years of data for QB rating. For RBs the success measure was average yards per carry; for WRs the success measure was average yards per reception.
Games played. Though a less complex measure than the others, it is possible to argue that WPT should be positively related to the number of games a player appears in per season, as a higher performing player should make more game appearances than a lower performing one and vice versa. As is the case for the other variables, we will analyze a player's first three years in the NFL. (One potential drawback of this measure is that it does not consider actual playing time per game. Conceivably a "game played" could involve simply one play, several plays, or the entire game. However the NFL does not make playing time per game data available, and neither do other websites or professional football statistics sources.)
We will consider the correlations for the 6-year sample period separately for each position (QB, RB, and WR). This first analysis involves only combine participants who were drafted by an NFL team. We will also conduct two-sample t-tests to see if WPT scores differ depending on whether a combine participant is drafted or not drafted. Each position will be treated separately for the comparisons of means (i.e., there will be three t-tests).
Sample Summary – Correlations by Position
Table 2 presents correlations for each WPT-success measure pair and for each player position over the 6-year time period. Sample sizes are 68 QBs, 86 RBs, and 152 WRs. For instance the first correlation shown is -.138, representing the WPT-draft order correlations for all 68 QBs drafted over the 6-year study period; the correlations for RBs are -.028 and for WRs the result is .086. None of these is significant at the .05 level; in fact only 2 of the 30 correlations in Table 2 generate a p-value < .05, an outcome that is consistent with a random chance model. Further one of these two correlations (-.259 for WR-Year 2 Salary) is in the "wrong" direction, assuming Year 2 Salary should have a positive association with WPT scores.
(It is possible to argue that the three draft order correlations in Table 2 should be determined via a nonparametric procedure since draft order could be interpreted as an ordinal number. This was done; yielding values for Spearman's rho little changed from the parametric correlations reported in Table 2: -.123, -.020, and .084, respectively.)
Sample Summary – Drafted versus Non-drafted Players
A second way to approach the question of how the WPT relates to NFL success is to compare the WPT scores of drafted players against those who were not drafted on a position-by-position basis. See Table 3 for WPT results for QBs, RBs, and WRs over the 6-year period of the study.
For QBs the average WPT for drafted players was 2.15 points higher than that of non-drafted players; however a two-sample t-test shows this difference is not statistically significant (at α = .10). WPT scores for drafted versus non-drafted RBs and WRs were nearly identical. The difference between the two groups for RBs was .18 point (p = .85) and the difference for WRs was .05 point (p = .94). Therefore for these three "skill" positions we fail to find that drafted players have significantly higher WPT scores than players who were not drafted. If assertions made by Wonderlic, Inc. were in fact true and believed to be true by the NFL teams selecting players, then we would expect drafted players to have higher WPT scores than those not drafted, but who play the same position.
Viewing the results as a whole we conclude that for the years, positions, and performance criteria we examined in this study, the WPT is unrelated to a player's draft order, salary, games played in, and on-field position-specific success measures. Further overall tests of drafted players versus those not chosen in the draft failed to reveal any meaningful differences with respect to scores obtained on the WPT.
Although it may have utility in more general employment situations, the WPT appears to lack validity in this athletic oriented setting; this despite its advocates and some perhaps self-serving statements from Wonderlic Inc. Although (see limitations below) there may be multiple variables interacting and even masking the effects of other variables, we would still expect to find more correlations above and beyond random chance, or a significant difference in drafted versus non-drafted means if the WPT had any merit.
Given the research that has been published on the relationship between various psychological constructs and athletic performance discussed earlier and the obvious monetary risks of false positives and false negatives when selecting professional football players, it is surprising that the NFL has not adopted a more sophisticated approach to the measurement of cognitive ability and other psychological measures for combine participants. While the validity and reliability of the WPT in traditional employment settings has been established, the instrument does not appear to have utility in the professional football arena.
The results of this study raise serious questions about the degree of sophistication employed by the NFL in its player selection process. While the actual selection process used by NFL teams remains confidential and cloaked in a degree of secrecy, it could be assumed that NFL teams could benefit from using contemporary human resource selection models to the choosing of player personnel. While the selection process is obviously constrained by NFL draft rules and requirements, the drafting of a player essentially remains an employee hiring process, one in which an organization attempts to predict how an employee will perform in the future. Contemporary human resource management models for hiring employees stress the importance of job analysis, "fit" between the person and the organization, and the development and validation of selection instruments (Heneman & Judge, 2005). Efforts to predict success are not new to collegiate athletes and other sports contests; for example, Olympic events (Humara, 2000; Spieler, Czech, Joyner & Munksay, 2007), but there is no evidence, at least in the literature, that the NFL undertakes the level of personnel selection research found in non-professional sports. Assuming such research is absent among the professional football ranks, NFL teams could well profit from utilizing employee selection models that are commonplace in traditional business settings and by examining the potential utility of the human performance research that has taken place in non-professional athletic environments.
This study has several limitations. First both WPT predictor and performance data were collected from secondary sources: nfldraftscout.com, usatoday.com, and nfl.com. While the data were collected from such sources, they are nonetheless considered valid sources for professional football statistics. Second, although we examined six draft classes, the question remains as to whether the results are generalizable to other draft classes. A historical analysis of the WPT over a greater time period might add insight into the ability to generalize the predictability of the WPT. Third, we examined performance variables over a three-year period. Conceivably, a player might not 'blossom' until after several years of experience; on the other hand, the average NFL career lasts less than four years (Zaslow, 2002).
In addition the performance criterion 'games played' might be moderated by the quality of a player's competition for playing time. That is, an excellent recently drafted QB, RB, or WR may see limited playing time because an experienced, superior player is currently performing for the team; conversely, a lesser quality recently drafted player may see considerable playing time for another team because he is the best available from a weaker roster of current players.
The relationship between the WPT scores and several aspects of skilled player performance was examined for NFL combine participants who were drafted in the period 1999-2004. In general the findings suggest that WPT scores are not related to draft order, salary, games played, or QB/RB/WR rating. Further the WPT scores do not appear to be related to whether or not a player is drafted. Thus "smarter" as measured by the WPT does not seem to translate into "better."
Future research should continue to focus on the WPT as a predictor of player performance by examining additional draft classes. Further the predictive merits of the WPT should also be examined for other NFL positions, both offensive and defensive. Beyond the WPT, the NFL may improve the overall validity of the combine process by including a test battery comprised of additional psychological constructs, for example, those that have been shown to correlate with peak athletic performance. In addition the other combine predictors in current use (running, jumping, and strength tests) should be analyzed to determine their relationships with success measures.
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The Great Bear Rainforest is home to a significant concentration of coastal grizzly bears. During the late summer and early autumn bears are drawn to the many salmon spawning streams feeding into the coastal inlets. While the local bear population reaches its peak in the autumn, during the spring and summer bears feed on sedges, succulents and grasses that make up the dense bio-mass of the river estuary. These ongoing sources of high quality food are why coastal grizzlies or brown bears are larger than inland grizzlies. Click on our bear-viewing page for more information on the bear viewing program, or you can find out more about the Great Bear Lodge.
Explore TV scouted the lodge for themselves, so you can hear all about their experiences. Great Bear Lodge has been chosen by Destination Canada as a Canadian Signature Experience, providing a unique connection with the geography, wildlife, culture and people of Canada.


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Diplomatic row breaks out between South Sudan and Ethiopia
Photo: Ethiopian Prime Minister during his visit to the capital Juba in October, 2016 (Radio Tamazuj)
By RadioTamazuj
A diplomatic row has broken out between South Sudan and neighbouring Ethiopia following rumours on social media that President Salva Kiir accepted to allow Ethiopian rebels to open their office in the capital Juba.
"Rumours have been circulating on social media that when President Kiir visited Egypt, he discussed important issues with the Egyptian officials so that Ethiopian rebels can open an office in Juba, "a senior government official who preferred anonymity told Radio Tamazuj today.
"The rumours circulated that the President has accepted to allow the Ethiopian rebels to open their office in Juba and Egypt will support the Ethiopian rebels with guns, because Egypt is having differences with Ethiopia over the issue of Renaissance Dam, so this is what happened on social media," he added.
The official accused the SPLM-IO faction allied to former First Vice President Riek Machar of circulating the rumour in neighbouring Ethiopia."The rebels now took advantage of that, and this information has already reached the government of Ethiopia," he said.
He pointed out that the government of Ethiopia has decided to cut diplomatic ties with the government of South Sudan and expel South Sudan's Ambassador to Addis Ababa.
"Even if there are differences between us, Ethiopia cannot expel our ambassador, because the ambassador is the ambassador of South Sudan to Ethiopia and at the same time he is representing us in the African Union. So, Ethiopia cannot expel our ambassador," he said.
According to the official, South Sudan government will issue a statement to deny the rumour.
Diplomatic row breaks out between South Sudan and Ethiopia
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