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Intrigued by Tickle's IQ test results by state, I created a regression formula for estimating state IQs based on infant mortality and life expectancy, as these two variables correlate strongly with national IQ (.84 and .85, respectively). It was roughly plausible, with a few exceptions (most notably in that Hawaii came out on top), but not satisfactory.
This time around is better. Taking the regression equations produced by running the numbers in the data table put together by Richard Lynn in Race Differences in Intelligence where he correlates IQ scores with international math and science test scores (pp 173-175) and then adjusting the nominal test score values (by running an IQ of 98 through the regression equation produced by Lynn's numbers) on the international tests to the NAEP math and science tests in the US, I gave it another shot. From the process described above and by applying equal weight to the science and math test scores by state, here are the results (rounded to one decimal place and color-coded by 2004 Presidential election results in the spirit of the IQ hoax):
1. Massachusetts -- 101.5
2. North Dakota -- 101.4
3. Vermont -- 101.2
4. Montana -- 101.1
5. South Dakota -- 101.1
6. New Hampshire -- 101.0
7. Minnesota -- 100.8
8. Wisconsin -- 100.3
9. Wyoming -- 100.2
10. Iowa -- 100.0
11. Idaho -- 99.9
11. Maine -- 99.9
13. Nebraska -- 99.7
13. Virginia -- 99.7
15. Washington -- 99.6
16. Ohio -- 99.6
17. Colorado -- 99.4
18. New Jersey -- 99.3
19. Kansas -- 99.2
20. Oregon -- 99.1
21. Utah -- 99.0
22. Michigan -- 99.0
23. Conneticut -- 98.8
23. Delaware -- 98.8
25. Missouri -- 98.7
26. Pennsylvania -- 98.6
27. Alaska -- 98.6
28. Indiana -- 98.5
29. Kentucky -- 98.3
30. New York -- 97.8
31. Illinois -- 97.8
32. South Carolina -- 97.5
33. North Carolina -- 97.4
34. Maryland -- 97.2
35. Texas -- 97.2
36. Oklahoma -- 96.9
37. Rhode Island -- 96.8
38. West Virginia -- 96.7
39. Tennessee -- 96.6
40. Arkansas -- 96.5
40. Georgia -- 96.5
42. Florida -- 96.1
43. Arizona -- 95.9
44. Nevada -- 95.2
45. Louisiana -- 95.0
46. California -- 94.7
47. New Mexico -- 94.5
48. Hawaii -- 94.4
49. Alabama -- 94.4
50. Mississippi -- 93.3
Seems quite reasonable. I used the international tests for children aged fourteen and the NAEP results for eighth graders, so age discrepancies are not an issue. Lynn found that international math results correlate with IQ at .89, although that may be an error (or due to rounding), as running the exact numbers he has entered in the table yields a correlation of .87. He found that international science results correlate with IQ at .81 (replication yields the same). Accounting for attenuation, Lynn actually argues that the correlation is virtually 1.00. So these appear to be pretty accurate estimates.
Notice the states that come closest to realizing the open border crowd's quixotic utopia--Texas (#35), Florida (#42), Arizona (#43), Nevada (#44), California (#46), and New Mexico (#47). Compare them to states like North Dakota (#2), Montana (#4), and South Dakota (#5), where Americans still do the jobs that Americans won't do. Our future looks dumber.
Race matters (con't) (July 29, 2006)
Previously I posted on the telling fact that the percentage of a state's population that is black and Hispanic reveals more about that state's rate of violent crime than a host of other variables combined. Mping, who runs the Fat Knowledge blog, threw out some devil's advocate factors to consider. I haven't been able to find anything on police per capita (please let me know if you are aware of available data). Some factors suggested that I did take a look at and their respective correlations with a state's rate of violent crime:
% of population using illicit drugs in the last month: .130 (not significant)
% of pop between ages 18-24: .185 (not significant)
Median age: .173 (inverse) (not significant)
% of households containing one male, no spouse, and no children: .541
% of single-mother households: .699
The first three are all outside reliability at 90% confidence, but the loose correlations they have with violent crime trend in the direction that conventional wisdom asserts they should (more drug use and more 18-24 year-olds means more crime, the older the state's population the lower its criminality).
Both measures of household composition are statistically significant, again trending in the expected direction. When men assume more responsibility, they tend to get into less trouble. This is an argument for policies that make housing prices affordable enough for men to raise families and make a monthly mortgage payment. Our immigration policies appear to do the opposite, however.
The lack of a father figure removes a traditional disciplinary figure from the equation. Single mothers, around 60% of whom are impoverished, must pull double-duty. When a male child reaches early adolescence, he is physically unchallenged by mom. The staggering increase in out-of-wedlock births over the last forty years is yet another tragic legacy of the most socially disastrous decade of the US' existence, the sixties. Propensity to commit violent crime is only one of several sad circumstances for children in this situation. But with an r of .699, it is a very real relationship.
Still, it's not as strong a predictor as the percentage of the population that is either black or Hispanic (r = .800). Antero Kalva tells me that at the county level the percentage of single-mother households trumps the percentage of the population that is black or Hispanic in predicting violent crime, rendering the latter statistically insignificant when single-mothers are included.
Unfortunately I'm not a prospective PhD student working on a dissertation so the thought of entering data for 3,140 counties is daunting. At the state level, controlling for race eliminates the statistical significance of single-mother households. Moreover, the percentage of the population that is black or Hispanic is a more powerful predictor of violent crime (recall r = .800) than the following factors combined: % single-mother households, % single-male only households, % of the population using illicit drugs in the last month, % of the population between 18-24, median age, poverty rate, % of the population with a bachelor's degree, % of the population having completed high school, the gini coefficient, the rate of gun ownership, and the rate of unemployment (combined r = .784).
The correlation between single-mother households and the percent of the population that is black or Hispanic is .829, affirming that the two serve as proxies for one another, as an anonymous commenter suggested (especially for blacks, where the correlation is an even higher .875).
Why would the 'causal' factor be single-mother households at the county level and race at the state level? The sheer number of counties that have almost no black or Hispanic population strikes me as the most plausible explanation. Since Antero presumably did not adjust for county population size, the bulk of the data examined will have been from Bush Country. As there is almost no black or Hispanic population to speak of in most of these counties, other non-racial factors move in to fill the gap for the whites living in them. Well, excluding race, the percentage of single-mother homes is the only factor that retains statistical significance when the others previously listed are included. So in places like, say, all of Kansas west of Topeka, single-mother households are probably the critical factor.
I wonder what the relationship looks like if only counties where the population of blacks and Hispanics comprise at least 5% of the population are included. Antero, if you are running your numbers on SPSS, this should be easy to find out (as I once again tell myself I need to get the full version so I can enjoy more statistical alacrity than Excel allows for). This would address the issue of race without artificially crippling it as an explanation by including data from counties from which it cannot be a factor because it doesn't exist (since the pertinent policy question has to do with the US' shifting racial composition).
An interesting aside: perusing through The Color of Crime, the criminality of Native Americans stuck out (see p9). Including the percentage of Native Americans with blacks and Hispanics and then correlating with violent crime, the r creeps up to .810, a seemingly trivial but actually rather substantial increase when it is considered that only 1% of the US population is Native American.
++Addition++Antero sent me his county level data and, as he said, the percentage of single mothers is a better predictor of violent crime than racial data.
A couple of interesting things: the correlations between crime and a host of factors, including race and single mother households, are much weaker on the county level than on the state level (% single mothers, for example, for the 2,702 counties with complete racial and criminal data sets, correlates with violent crime at .538 compared to .699 statewide; % black and Hispanic correlates with violent crime at .428 at the county level and .800 statewide). Thus, even as the apparently strongest single predictor of violent crime, the percentage of single mother households still only 'explains' less than 30% of a county's violent crime rate. In contrast, knowing the full racial composition of a state explains 70% of that state's violent crime rate.
Perplexing. I would expect the relationships to become progressively weaker, not stronger, as the source of data broadened. Maybe there are dilution effects on a local level that become neutralized on a larger level (like the effect of immigration on wages in local economies compared to its effect on the national economy), although I can't readily conceive what the causation would be. Also, there are many missing data on the county level. For example, New York (the highest population density in the nation), Bronx, Richmond, Cook (Illinois), and Queen counties all do not have violent crime data, and they represent a considerable number of people (twelve million) in rough areas of the country that are not being factored into the county level analysis (but presumably are included in the FBI statistics).
In any case, more reason to lament the breakup of the nuclear family and re-stigmatize illegitimacy.
Race matters (July 23, 2006)
At least when it comes to crime. Indeed, it matters a great deal more than a host of other social statistics that putatively lead to criminality. In the abstract to the second edition of The Color of Crime, the American Renaissance wrote that "The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic." Then, using single variable regression, they compared correlations by state including DC (see pages 11 and 12).
Wanting to replicate for verification and introduce a few other factors that conventional wisdom often asserts as having a causal relationship to crime, I took the latest numbers available (the Kaiser Foundation has a fabulous, user-friendly site for state-by-state comparisons for several factors) and looked at the relationship of violent crime (murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults) by state and the following factors (with correlations; "inverse" indicates an increase in the factor reduces violent crime; statistically significant unless otherwise stated):
% of population in poverty: .399
% of population with a bahelor's degree: .289 (inverse)
State gini coefficient: .627
% of population owning at least one gun: .060 (inverse, not statistically significant)
% of population with a high school diploma: .388 (inverse)
% of population unemployed: .309
% of population black or Hispanic: .800
Very little variance with what Amren came up with for the measures they used. But most telling are the results of a multivariate regression to determine the combined effects of the first six factors listed (all but the racial categorization). Surely entering all of these factors together will be more predictive than simply knowing what racial box residents check on their Census forms! Actually, they're not. Including all of them yields an r of .689. Thus, knowing how many people in a state are black and Hispanic reveals more about the amount of violent crime than does knowing the number of people in poverty, holding a bachelor's degree, having graduated from high school, owning a firearm, who are unemployed, and the level of income inequality combined.
When the percentage of the population that is black or Hispanic is included and each factor is controlled for by the other variables listed, in addition to the percentage of the population that is black or Hispanic (p-value of .00000109), only the percentage of the population that has completed high school retains statistically significance (p-value of .025), but interestingly becomes positively related to the incidence of violent crime. Racial composition remains just as strong a predictor of crime as it does when the other factors aren't included. Not surprinsingly, the r value (correlation) only increases to .836 with the addition of the other six factors.
As people of European ancestry continue to hemorrhage away their numerical dominance, the US will become an increasingly violent place (or one that has an ever-growing prison population, the seemingly most effective way to cut down on crime being to throw people in jail). The detrimental effects of a browner population will be partially offset by an increase in Asians who, despite suffering higher poverty rates than whites and being a numerically less powerful ethnic special interest group than blacks or Hispanics, are far less likely to commit violent crimes than any other racial group (only a quarter as likely as whites). Every one percent increase in population represented by Asians reduces the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people by 25, a per capita effect stronger than that of blacks, whites, or Hispanics.
What should realists do with this information? Reject the sea of crap about the differences in geographical locations that fails to take into account each location's racial and ethnic composition. Vociferously argue for an end to unfettered, largely Hispanic, illegal immigration and the instituting of a merit immigration system that reduces the number of legal immigrants to a couple hundred thousand annually while insuring that those accepted will increase the quality of life for the current US citizenry.
Paraenthetically, genuine liberals concerned with the perpetually increasing wealth disparities in the US can argue against open borders by pointing to the deleterious effect it has on the wages of the least skilled natives and the strong relationship between housing unaffordability and the proportion of a location's foreign-born population. To insulate themselves from the charges of Hispanophobia and other ad hominen that scare whites into self-immolation, they should point out the moderately strong relationship between crime and wealth inequality referenced above.
Another state IQ estimate (July 8, 2006)
The IQ hoax revealed how state average IQs pique widespread interest. Some graduate student should be trying to find out what they actually are, for curiosity's sake if nothing else (Randall Parker suggests trying to ascertain them through schoolmatters.com) Though after some satisfaction at pointing out the lower scores in the NASCAR states, the propagators of the big lie would have to revert to feigning no interest in IQ when an astute internet user discovers a powerful inverse correlation between a state's demographic composition and its average IQ.
In the meantime, I'll throw an estimation out there based on the regressions I've run on national IQs, picking two strong variables that don't lose statistical significance when others are controlled for: infant mortality rates and average life expectancy. Like any multivariable regression, the formula produced is linear and is data entered into it are estimated at a 'perfect fit'. Consequently, the estimated IQs (adjusted to a mean national average of 98 and rounded to the nearest decimal place) are probably a bit too tight (while it's unlikely that any state enjoys an average IQ over 100 since the score approximates the non-Hispanic white average, DC's average is probably too high given that it is almost two-thirds black). More 'important', then, is the ranking.
1. Hawaii--99.7
2. Minnesota--99.5
3. Utah--99.3
4. New Hampshire--99.2
5. Massachusetts--99.1
6. Iowa--99.1
7. California--99.0
8. Colorado--99.0
9. Conneticut--99.0
10. Washington--99.0
11. North Dakota--99.0
12. Vermont--98.9
13. Nebraska--98.8
14. Rhode Island--98.8
15. Oregon--98.8
16. South Dakota--98.7
17. Idaho--98.7
18. New York--98.7
19. Wisconsin--98.7
20. Maine--98.6
21. New Jersey--98.5
22. Arizona--98.4
23. Kansas--98.3
24. New Mexico--98.3
25. Florida--98.3
26. Montana--98.2
27. Wyoming--98.2
28. Texas--98.0
29. Virginia--98.0
30. Pennsylvania--97.9
31. Alaska--97.9
32. Illinois--97.8
33. Ohio--97.6
34. Michigan--97.6
35. Maryland--97.6
36. Nevada--97.6
37. Delaware--97.5
38. Missouri--97.5
39. Indiana--97.5
40. North Carolina--97.2
41. Kentucky--97.1
42. Oklahoma--97.0
43. Georgia--96.9
44. Arkansas--96.8
45. West Virginia--96.8
46. Tennessee--96.6
47. South Carolina--96.6
48. Alabama--96.4
49. Louisiana--96.2
50. Mississippi--95.7
51. District of Columbia--95.0
Appears pretty reasonable, although there are a few curiosities, like Hawaii being on top (Asians live forever, and Hawaii's full of them). California seems high, likely in part due to the actual effects of illegal immigrants on the predictors used not being fully reported (first generation Hispanics probably don't live as long as native Californians and reliable birthing statistics are probably hard to come by for that segment of the population).
The color-coding to the 2004 Presidential election results is to keep with the spirit of the hoax. If it taken as plausible, it doesn't tell us much about the IQ of Republican or Democratic voters. As income rises so does the propensity to vote Republican. And as income rises so does IQ (albeit moderately). Kerry picked up 800% more black votes than Bush, even though the blackest states went strongly for Bush (red states, in fact, average a 24% higher proportion of blacks to total population than do blue states). It quickly becomes muddled.
Bit more on Tickle IQ scores (July 7, 2006)
Infant mortality correlates more stongly with national average IQ as estimated in Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations than any other variable I'm aware of except for life expectancy (.84 and .85, respectively).
Does that relationship hold domestically? Unfortunately, the data on IQ by state are sparse. Tickle's results may approximate better than anything else out there--they correlate with GSP per capita at .53, white NAEP science scores at .63, Project Talent scores at .70, and my 'education index' (state's percentage of bachelor's degree and beyond minus state's percentage of less than high school diploma or equivalent) at a very high .86 (all statistically significant). They also correlate inversely with white infant mortality rates by state at .61 (unfortunately there are no recent data for white infant mortality in DC, the Tickle Test paragon).
The Tickle range for the fifty states plus DC is only five points, all presented as whole numbers. That the correlations remain so robust seems to evince the general accuracy of the results. I can only speculate on how they would be enhanced with numbers expanding out a couple of decimal places, but when I followed a friend's suggestion and contacted Tickle, a customer service rep told me it was proprietary information and then, sensing my frustration, advised me to see if I could find out more at Mensa. But he didn't expound and I found nothing there.
Average IQ by state (June 23, 2006)
Average IQ by state piques the curiosity. Unfortunately, there's little reliable state-by-state data comparable to what Vanhanen and Lynn came up with (Gene Expression's Jason Malloy links to a paper, but it's broken and doesn't pop up in engine searches).
Steve Sailer recently posted Tickle's state results, remarking that they appeared reasonable. Running a few correlations and incorporating anecdotal evidence, I'm inclined to agree. The Tickle scores correlate with GSP per capita at .53, white NAEP science scores at .63, Project Talent scores at .70, and my 'education index' (state's percentage of bachelor's degree and beyond minus state's percentage of less than high school diploma or equivalent) at a very high .86 (all statistically significant).
I took the Tickle test today and the result was two points higher than my last actual IQ test and three points higher than my ACT-to-SAT-to-IQ conversion predicts. From what I've heard from others, that's not an aberration. The Tickle test seems to be a decent measure of IQ, especially given that it's online and free.
If you're aware of other attempts at IQ estimates by state, please let me know. I'd like to run correlates on them as well. I found a couple and they didn't correlate as high with any of the aforementioned measures as the Tickle scores did. Tickle might be the best out there for now, after adjusting the scores around a mean of 98 or 100.
IQ and infant mortality (June 1, 2006)
Lynn and Vanhanen spotlighted the relationship between IQ and the purchasing power parity of nations. It was a groundbreaking new way of understanding prosperity in the world. But PPP's relationship with IQ (contemporary correlation of .60) is actually weak in comparison to IQ's relationship to a host of other quantifiables (Economic transparency/corruption index: .68, Distance from the equator: .67, Births per woman: -.81, Life expectancy: .85). When economic transparency/corruption is taken into account, the effect of IQ on PPP completely disappears, while controlling for a host of variables (IQ, distance from the equator, births per woman, net migration rate, life expectancy, and economic freedom) only mildly moderates the effect of economic transparency/corruption while rendering all the other variables statistically insignificant except for the migration rate (positive net migration being correlated with higher PPP).
Another surprisingly strong correlation exists between IQ and the infant mortality rate. The two are inversely correlated at a statistically significant .84. Thus 70% of a country's infant mortatlity rate can be 'explained' by its average IQ. By way of comparison, PPP and infant mortality are inversely correlated at a more modest .56. Even doctors per capita and infant mortality are only inversely correlated at .69. Controlling for IQ renders PPP meaningless. Doctors per capita retains statistically significant but loses two-thirds of its correlation magnitude. Controlling for PPP and doctors per capita, meanwhile, only cuts into 21% of IQ's 'effect' on infant mortality. Boosting African IQs through better nutrition will do more for the well-being of the continent than the noble Doctors without Borders organization will ever be able to accomplish (maybe they should focus on distributing vitamins).
Why does IQ matter more than access to physicians or material well-being? There's plenty of food for speculation: Smarter women have more self-control to refrain from activities during pregnancy that may damage the fetus like smoking, eating junkfood, and consuming alcohol, they have fewer kids and have them later in life so they can devote more attention to each child without the distractions of youth, sharper couples are less likely to get divorced and therefore children benefit from having two caretakers instead of one, brighter couples have brighter children that are less likely to accidentally kill themselves, and smarter people are less given to instant gratification that distracts from properly caring for infants.
The future looks precarious. The brainy nations are becoming grayer and reproducing below the replenishment rate of 2.1 children per woman (see the nearby charts--click to enlarge).
Globalization will continue to make migration easier. As newly-arrived, formerly destitute third-worlders enjoy the prosperity of the developed host, they become more fecund (Hispanics in the US average 2.8 babies per woman. That's higher than Mexico's 2.42 per woman, and indeed is more fertile than much of Latin America). By depressing wages and making housing less affordable, they also have the effect of decreasing the fecundity of the host country's natives. As the relative size of the smart fraction dwindles while the duller side grows proprotionally (and absolutely, of course), more human resources will have to spent by the brights to take care of the dulls. Crime and poverty will increase, living standards will be pressured, and human progression will be slowed.
Three ways to combat this: 1) Genetic engineering, the azoth that will potentially make all this worrying silly, 2) Technologies and techniques to slow down the aging process, keeping erudite old folks productive longer (SENS research is a worthy cause for charitable contributions), and 3) The creation of incentives for natives of the developed world to have more babies. France, Russia, and Portugal have recently implemented policies in attempt to achieve this. The US should give tax credits to high IQ professionals for donating sperm and eggs. The child tax credit should be regressive, or at least not progressive. Tubal ligations and other forms of sterilization should be used more by prosecutors as part of plea deals for criminals (Project Prevention is another worthy cause to consider).
IQ and PPP or procreation? (April 24, 2006)
Corruption and economic freedom each provide considerably more insight into the wealth of nations than national IQ does. The individual correlates of the three variables with PPP, all of which are statistically significant, are .82, .75, and .60, respectively (using the most recent figures). When all three are run against PPP in a multiple regression, the correlation only nudges up to .83. Not surprisingly, controlling for corruption virtually eliminates the effect of IQ on a nation's PPP (IQ's P-value becomes .48, meaning it's a cointoss as to whether or not the relationship between IQ and PPP is random, although the questionable relationship still trends in a slightly positive direction, with each additional IQ point leading to a $68 increase in PPP compared to $1,825 when corruption and economic freedom are not considered).
Economic freedom also becomes much less important (P-value of .18), although it is a pretty good proxy for the corruption index (which hones in more on IQ). After controlling for IQ and economic freedom, each point on the Transparency International Corruption Index (scaled with ten being squeaky clean and zero showing absolute corruption) ups PPP just over $3,300, down from $4,300 without controlling for IQ and economic freedom.
Corruption and IQ are inversely correlated of course (with an r of .68). Thus IQ "explains" about 46% of the variance in corruption levels and viceversa. But there's more to do with PPP in the 54% remaining on the corruption side than on the IQ side. It appears, then, that IQ likely helps goad citizens into collectively demanding rectitude in business and politics but that realizing such rectitude is significantly more important than IQ, at least at the national level.
I add the caveat because I suspect globalization is a steroids for corruption and a sedative for national IQ. As MNCs and entrepreneurs increasingly expand overseas, they play a correspondingly larger role in the economic development of the host country. They pour investment in, create local jobs, and help open up external markets. Foreigners with high IQs make dull nations wealthier. If a military junta threatens to take control or lots of grease is required to get the gears to turn, however, the MNCs and other business entities are hesitant to enter. So a lack of corruption lets in smart people who augment the nation's wealth without raising its IQ. IQ is still a powerful force, but the way it's been measured isn't optimal (for PPP anyway). The UAE epitomizes this (found here):
In the UAE as a whole, with a total population of 2.5m, nationals are outnumbered seven to one by mainly non-Arab aliens: 1.2m Indians, 600,000 Pakistanis, 100,000 Iranians and contributions from dozens of other nations, including 50,000 Britons. In Dubai, nationals fall to a mere 8% out of a million-plus.The IQ tests Lynn and Vanhanen used span a long period of time. Presumably, the test results were not found by testing foreigners. How much, then, does the IQ of the natives matter in the UAE? By letting in big corporations full of sharp people, the UAE is doing more for its PPP than taking a magic pill to boost its IQ from an estimated 83 to a Russian 96 would do if the pill's side effects included Russia's level of corruption and state control.
The UAE, as a quasi-corporate-owned state, is an extreme example, but globalization is trending us toward more of them. In a critique of Lynn and Vanhanen pointed out to me by John Bolton, we see that IQ correlated with PPP at .76 in 1998 while economic freedom correlated with IQ at only .68. Recall from above that those correlations have now basically swapped positions. I haven't found corruption data for 1998, but I suspect its correlation with PPP has increased over the same time period that the link between IQ and PPP has been attenuated.
The second paranthetical caveat is due to the variables for which a nation's IQ definitely can shed some enlightenment--making babies and dying. Births per woman correlates with IQ at .81. Life expectancy correlates with IQ at an astounding .85. Economic well-being and the number of doctors per capita don't hold a candle to IQ. The correlation between both of these together and life expectancy is only .72. When IQ is controlled for, PPP loses statistical significance and doctors per capita loses 80% of its correlation strength. This is, incidentally, the highest single variable correlation with national IQ I've yet seen--are there any others that are stronger?
Taking births and life expectancy together yields a correlation with IQ of .88. Controlling for one does not eliminate the statistical significance of the other. My theories on why:
-Smart people take better care of themselves. They are more likely to engage in healthy eating habits, exercise regularly, and get enough sleep, less likely to partake of behaviors they know to be damaging, etc. Seeking out this information and understanding it takes some level of intelligence. And because the benefits are long-term in nature, duller people are less likely to engage in them.
-As for births per woman, I've expounded a little on this before. Bearing and raising children takes an enormous amont of time. Smarter people are more likely to grasp the commitment required in producing offspring. These smart people have a perpetually growing number of other options that require a prodigious commitment as well. They can blog, day-trade, game, travel, program, learn an endless amount about an endless number of subjects via the internet, etc. Duller people, even with more money, are less likely to be self-starting in these activities and less likely to fully grasp how having children will hamper their ability to partake in the same activities. So the distractions of a high IQ society do not deter them as much from having urchins.
The meek (minded) shall inherit the earth (April 16, 2006)
The disovery of the connection between IQ and per capita income by country was ground-breaking. But there is another correlate of national IQ, and it's even stronger than per capita income: The correlation between IQ and number of births per woman. The correlation is, not surprisingly, inverse. Running the numbers yields an r of .81 (r-squared of .65--see chart below).
I haven't read Vanhanen's and Lynn's tome, but I understand that the r for IQ and PPP was found to be .73. Taking the same IQ scores and running them against the most recent PPP estimates yields an r of .60 (r-squared of .36)--moderated, perhaps due to the recession a few years back and the abrupt climb in oil prices that have bumped up the PPP in the moderately low IQ Middle East, but still significant. So IQ "explains" about one-third of national per capita income and two-thirds of fecundity. One notable difference in the correlations between IQ and PPP versus IQ and births is that East Asia doesn't conspicuously outly in the later like it does in the former.
We are taking a deleterious dive. Liberalized economies open up opportunities for careers, travelling, education, birth control, economic independence for women, etc. Making babies has always been an option, but now more than ever there's more desirable alternatives for sharper people. Wealth is tied to IQ, but the correlation between PPP and fecundity is considerably weaker (r of .55, r-squared .30) than it is between IQ and fecundity. The driver appears to be IQ. Women in countries with abundant natural resources but moderate IQs (Middle East most saliently) do not have as much cerebration to keep them from having babies. Religiosity, independent of IQ, is probably correlated with having kids as well.
What to do to counter this trend?
-Higher IQ countries attract migrants from places less cognitively endowed. The correlation coefficient for net migration rate and IQ is a positive .40 (r-squared .16) if countries with a rate listed as zero are excluded (this is only a rough approximation. I cannot find much data on migration rates. Searching online I've only been able to find data parroting what's on the CIA's site, which lists lots of places as having no net migration/emigration even though they clearly do (like Zimbabwe for example)). Stopping the flow will lower the cost of living, bump up wages, and make public schooling more attractive.
-Invest in research to extend productivity as people age. Median age and IQ correlates positively at a very high .85. That is, 72% of the median age in a country can be explained by looking at that country's average IQ. Put in another way, every 1.17 point increase in IQ ups the median age by a year. The planet's up-and-comers have lower IQs. The older folks have the brains. Okay, that's pretty crass but generally true. At least when nation to nation comparisons are made. The Flynn effect is (hopefully) counterbalancing this to some degree, but it may be abating.
-Create incentives for people of moderate affluence to have more children. France has taken a few baby steps in this direction. The US tax code, unfortunately, punishes the fertile wealthy by phasing out exemptions and dependent credits and by the existence of the AMT.
-Spend aid money on birth control in the third world. A family member of mine worked in the diplomatic core of the State Department for several years. In Bangladesh he was involved in a program that distributed birth control devices. The program targeted the most impoverished areas. Critics lambast this sort of strategy as for being eugenic (that's inherently an evil thing for those of you who do not see why this counts as criticism!). But it helps realize a putative goal of the left: Closing the wealth gap.
-Watch Idiocracy. At least you'll be able to approach the future with tongue-in-cheek!
++Addition++John Bolton makes an excellent observation. Fecundity might be a better explanation for disparities in PPP than IQ is. IQ and births are decent proxies for one another. So which one is effecting PPP?
IQ is the primary causal factor. Its correlation with PPP withstands controlling for births per woman, but births per woman loses statistical significance as correlated with PPP when IQ is controlled for.
Here's how it breaks down: When IQ and PPP are correlated (without births controlled for), there is statistical significance factor of less than 0.001% with a correlation coefficient of .60. Each IQ point corresponds with a $653 boost in PPP.
When births and PPP are correlated (without IQ controlled for), the relationship is over 99.99% assured with a correlation coefficient of .55. Every baby costs $5,052 in PPP.
The slightly attenuated correlation coefficient for births versus IQ suggests the latter is the more powerful "determinate" of PPP. But we need to control for each of the variables. When births are controlled for, IQ remains statistically significant at about a 99.5% confidence level. Each IQ point now means a $485 boost in PPP.
When IQ is controlled for, births fall outside even an 80% confidence level (P-value of .78--meaning there's a 22% chance that the relationship is random. (The P-value is basically the same as the statistical significance factor, except the former relates to a multiple regression). In this less reliable relationship, each baby costs $1,752 in PPP.
So births per woman is a close proxy for IQ, and IQ is correlated with PPP. The corollary is, then, that births are correlated with PPP as well, although the correlation coefficient is not as strong as it is with IQ (.60 vs .55). When we control for births in the equation, IQ weakens a little but retains explanatory power (95% CI is the gold standard). However, when we control for IQ, births become only a third as powerful, and unreliable at that.
A rough reverse-syllogism: A couple comprised of two 130 IQers can afford to have a few children and still be considerably wealthier than a childless couple comprised of two 70 IQers. Having children does lower the economic power per family member, but IQ more than compensates for this cost. The dependents are net liabilities until they're no longer striplings. Lynn and Vanhanen should have (did?) considered this.
The most interesting (and tragic) aspect of the analysis is how few children the sharp nations are having (recall the correlation coefficient of .81). While IQ and PPP got the headline, the relationship between IQ and births is less tenuous--it appears to be rock-solid (I'm going to test it with some controls in near future).
Also, I humbly offer the data I'm working with to anyone who is interested (Email me if you are). It is in excel. More alacritous minds may find something my pile of mush is missing.
Race quotas and the ABA (February 12 2006)
The legal profession is not viewed in a particularly favorable light. Less than one in five people rate lawyers as having "high or very high honesty and ethics standards" (compared to 82% for nurses, 64% for teachers, and 54% for clergy) yet it is the most lucrative of the 22 occupational categories included in the US Census. Judicial activism and frivolous lawsuits are war cries for the social right and free-market right, respectively. I can't help but want to affirm this negative feeling when the ABA does things like this:
Meeting in Chicago today, the ABA's Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will vote on new "equal opportunity and diversity" standards. If they are approved, any law school that seeks to maintain or acquire ABA accreditation will be required to engage in racial preferences in hiring and admissions, regardless of any federal, state or local laws that prohibit of such policies...
The new Standard 211, styled "Equal Opportunity and Diversity," would govern admissions and faculty hiring policies. It says nothing about treating people from different groups equally, and lots about "diversity" -- a code word for affirmative action preferences. "Consistent with sound legal education policy and the Standards," part (a) says that a law school must provide "full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by members of underrepresented groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities," and it must also commit "to having a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race and ethnicity."
Sorry to those who are members of a demographic group that tends to excel. Isonomy does not actually extend to you. Instead your legal status is based on the arbitrarily judged performance of your clan. The ABA, which holds a virtual monopoly on who is eligible to take the bar exam, wants college campuses to look 'more like America'. Ostensibly this is to promote diversity, but if every place looks like America, there is actually no meaningful diversity--Kansas becomes the same as California, the South no different than the Northwest. Diversity requires pockets of relative homogeneity, otherwise we're left with a bland grey goop that spans the entire country (or world!).
The basis of the ABA's proposal comes from Gutter v. Bollinger, where a white applicant was rejected even though she was more qualified (3.8 GPA and an LSAT of 161) than her protected peers who were accepted. Here's what the venerable 'swing' vote, Justice O'Connor, wrote in the US Supreme Court's decision:
Held: The Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause, Title VI, or §1981. Pp. 9—32.Overt racism is okay if it furthers a "compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body". What benefits? Obviously they are not academic, as the standards must be lowered to let in less capable applicants. Not surprisingly, a study out of UCLA shows that 42% of black matriculants to law school do not pass the bar (compared to 14% of whites). Oh wait, O'Connor alluded to the benefits already:
The policy does not define diversity solely in terms of racial and ethnic status and does not restrict the types of diversity contributions eligible for "substantial weight," but it does reaffirm the Law School's commitment to diversity with special reference to the inclusion of African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American students, who otherwise might not be represented in the student body in meaningful numbers. By enrolling a "critical mass" of underrepresented minority students, the policy seeks to ensure their ability to contribute to the Law School's character and to the legal profession.Oh, the "character" of the school. I should have known. The academic setting needs to be more multicultural. To ensure that happens, meritocratic testing must be neutered. The culture of the majority must be detrimentally altered on account of the cultures of various minorities. Sound familiar? The same phenomenon is at work with the Danish cartoons and Islamic protests.
There is no quantifiable benefit from forced multiculturalism of this nature--the only defense multicult enthusiasts give is that multiculturalism is good for the sake of being multicultural. That is, diversity is good de jure. If cultural or ethnic variance occurs naturally based on skill levels all the merrier. But forcing balkanization and anti-merit for some silly heterogeneous ideal is absurd. Unfortunately, objecting to this asininity runs one the risk of being labelled a racist and ostracized. Being called a racist for pointing out how awful an explicitly racist policy is--who woulda thunk it?
If certain groups need preferential treatment, is that not a strong reason for restricting their entry into the US in the first place? People are different. By extension, so are populations of people. Of course, there are people of all ethnicities and places that would benefit the US by becoming a part of it (the purpose of immigration policy is to better the American citizen, right? Or is it to better the immigrant at the expense of the citizen?). That's why we need a merit immigration system that skims the cream of the crop from all corners of the globe (except for the Middle East) rather than letting people in based on chance or family ties.
Homo sapiens are among the most diverse species on the planet, next only to other domesticates (like dogs). Their tempermants, athletic abilities, intelligence, susceptibility to disease, ad infinitum vary widely. Humans are still evolving, and as Darwin pointed out 150 years ago, these evolutionary pressures dinstinctly shape different groups. This is human biodiversity. I thought it was this diversity that we were supposed to celebrate! But alas, we are actually not to celebrate diversity at all but instead to do everything we can to assure that everyone is exactly the same (in outcome). Such is the inane orthodox of the egalitarian belief system.
What is probably most tragic about race preferences is how it highlights group differences rather than attenuating them. Say, hypothetically, that we have a group of 50 whites and 50 blacks applying for admission to law school. A total of 10 will be accepted. The top ten scores break down like this:
White--178, white--176, white--176, black--174, white--171, white--171, black--170, white--169, white--168, white--166. Thus 8 whites and 2 blacks should get in. In this environment, the blacks and whites would perform about the same (this is why race relations in the military, which uses psychometric testing extensively, are so envied). There would be fewer blacks in this case, but the performance disparity between blacks and whites would be almost nonexistent.
However, the school has a quota policy mandating that the black/white proportion be equal. So, the last three whites (scoring 169, 168, and 166) are dropped in favor of the next three blacks who scored 161, 158, and 153. See what happens now?
The blacks, on average, are now obviously less capable than their white peers. The five whites will find that a couple of the blacks are roughly equal to them intellectually, but that the other three are clearly less able in the field of law. Thus, whites will be more inclined to believe their lying eyes--that blacks are not as smart as whites. The last three blacks, who are by no means dullards based on their scores (assuming this is the LSAT), are likely to struggle immensely and eventually fail out. They would have been much better served in a less rigorous environment where they could have been near the top of the class. This is also brutally unfair to the three whites who were rejected. And it does nothing for the truly disadvantaged blacks who scored in the 120s and 130s. Affirmative action is not only inefficient and unfair--it is also ineffective.
Hopefully Justice Alito, who took heat in the confirmation hearings for not being a proponent of race preferences, will 'swing' the Court back towards merit-based, rather than race-based, admissions.
Scrappy boys beat pro women (January 12 2006)
The US women's Olympic hockey team better hope Canadian female hockey pros are inferior to high school boys or the trip to Turin is going to be disappointing:
The Warroad High School boys' team squeaked out a 2-1 victory over the U.S. Olympic women's hockey team Wednesday.There are enormous differences between men and women. This is most blatantly obvious in the sports world, where men's sports are faster, harder hitting, and draw exponentially more revenue than women's (The NBA's average salary is $4.5 million compared to the WNBA's $50,000--even stars like Mia Hamm of Olympic fame bring in $60,000 annually, although promotions surely dwarf league salary).
That a group of high school boys could topple the best females in the country show that hockey, in the company of virtually all other physical sports, is a man's game. Men have greater body and muscle mass, lower body fat levels, and higher testosterone and adrenaline levels. Consequently, a relatively skilled man is going to able to beat a female pro much of the time.
Anecdotally, I've been playing recreational coed soccer the last couple of weeks and although I've not played the sport since elementary school, after two weeks I can outplay all the women on the team. A host of special rules keep the game from being dominated by men (men can only touch the ball three times in succession, it must be touched by a female at least once before a goal can be scored, and so forth), which makes coed enjoyable and the women a crucial part of the team. But it is clear that men are, on average, much better equipped for competitive play.
This is intuitive. For 95% of homo sapien's existence, males have been hunters, an activity requiring dexterity, endurance, and strength. This does not come free, however. Males also have a higher cost. They have to eat more to support greater muscle mass and body frames. During lean times when food was scarce, women fared better. Men historically have been more expendable because of propagation concerns (a clan of one man and ten women multiplies a lot faster than does a clan of ten men and one woman) and still today men are more likely to die in accidents and do not live as long as women.
Our evolutionary history is quite relevant today, going along way to explain gender (as well as group) differences. In this case, why men's sports are so much greater a draw than women's and why men require a 50% higher caloric intake than women to function well. The high priests of the egalitarian myth try compensate for human nature's 'failings' with things like Title IX. Instead of paralleling the WNBA with the NBA, however, it has led colleges across the country to drop competitive men's sports like wrestling for various women's activities that do not raise near as much revenue for the school.
Termagents and dead white males (December 20 2005)
Professor Lionel Tiger of Rutgers had an interesting op/ed in the WSJ discussing what he calls "Male Original Sin":
Male resentment of the self-righteous and automatic public support for women's interests and issues has been increasingly on the boil for some time. Civic celebrations of antipathy to men such as the Violence Against Women Act are finally generating specific and pointed responses by men fatigued, if still baffled, by the knee-jerk assumption that they suffer irredeemably from what I call Male Original Sin.
At my university as at countless others, one of the very first official greeting to students is a rape seminar predicated on the intrinsic danger males carry with them. And in family courts, the presumption of male behavioral malefaction has yielded heartbreakingly numerous cases in which men are charged with domestic violence to which courts overwhelmingly--often in brief hearings in which the male is not even present--issue temporary "restraining orders." These frequently segue into permanence, and award women the dwelling they've shared, financial support and the all-important privilege of custody--mothers gain custody in 66% of uncontested cases and 75% of contested ones. Less than a quarter of parents are awarded joint custody.
Tiger points out that women are now a substantive majority on US college campuses. Although there are almost one million more men between the ages of 18-24 than women in the US (15 million and 14.2 million, respectively), women comprise 57% of the nation's collegiate student body (see the table at bottom for a demographic breakdown).
The imbalance is strongest among blacks, which may be partly explained by recent psychometric analysis suggesting black women have an average IQ around 2.5 points higher than black men. Also, in many places there are a fewer black men than black women owing to the roughness of urban life, especially for those who internalize the pathological hip-hop culture. A much larger percentage of black men are incarcerated (3.2%) than white (.46%) or Hispanic (1.2%) males.
The trend towards female 'overrepresentation' is most trenchant among lower income families and is the most salient in liberal arts colleges. Engineering and computer sciences are still dominated by men (ratios of 5-to-1.1 and 3.5-1, respectively), and likely always will be (without genetic engineering) given male's consistently higher visuospatial reasoning and math scores on IQ and other aptitude tests.
The softening of the educational system favors women more than men. Rooted in hundreds of thousands of years of biology, men are more adventuresome and less risk-averse than women. They are also more competitive. The post-modern obsession with inclusiveness and acceptance is repulsing men and attracting women. Stories about Davy Crockett fighting valiantly to the death against swarthy invaders from the south are going to elate men more than didactic lecturing on how we must be tolerant of others and work to reconcile our differences through peaceful dialogue and compromise.
Think about it primordially. When all humans were hunters and gatherers (95% of our history as a species), men were the hunters. Going on long excursions to find game gave those who could recognize and recall terrain (to find their way back home) and accurately judge distance and angle (throwing spears, leaping from trees, etc) a distinct survival advantage. In the small clans that people lived in, fewer men were needed for successful propagation (a group with ten males and one female is not going to grow nearly as fast as one with one male and ten females), so men could afford to be more competitive. Men were also more expendable, shedding some light on why men's intelligence distribution is wider than that of women.
Women, on the other hand, were gatherers. Foraging through brush to find various nuts and berries required a different kind of intellect to learn how to distinguish the nourishing from the poisonous (memory as opposed to visuospatial reasoning). Like virtually all of mammalia, women were the primary rearers of offspring. In early communal societies, the women of the clan were in constant contact with other women and children, helping to explain their stronger interpersonal skills and greater desire for emotional bonds.
I am not overly concerned with this shift towards a greater proportion of females than males in the academic world. This may help close the gap between wage rates for men and women (currently women only bring in 77 cents for every dollar men make). However, this trend is likely to perpetuate itself--as women continue to make up more and more of the student body, schools are going to tailor the environment more toward them. This will make education less attractive for men. So long as talented men are not foregoing professions like law, medicine, engineering, architecture, science and accounting, the damage will be minimal (I'm skeptical of the value of most liberal arts degrees, which are easy to obtain and have minimal pragmatic use).
Still, this strikes me as a further argument for the publicly subsidized privatization of education, starting all the way back in kindergarten. Allow market forces to provide different learning environments focused on subject areas that children show a penchant for. Make college lectures on video tape or over the internet available to bright children who will be under-stimulated and become disinterested in education if left with the majority of the class. Conversely, for children who are less endowed, put them in classrooms with others on a similar plane so they do not become frustrated by poor performance relative to their peers.
Tiger also touches on how boys are more likely to be trouble makers:
While there remain grating sources of unfairness to women, the community is in the process of steadily creating a new legal and educational structure that generates new gender unfairness: 90% of the victims of Ritalin and similar drugs prescribed for schoolkids are boys; but even drugged they perform less well than girls. A 2005 study at Yale found nationally that even in prekindergarten boys are nearly five times as likely to be expelled as girls.
But that should not come as any surprise to those realistic about human nature. Men have higher testosterone levels, greater muscle mass, and are more competitive than women. Crime is overwhelmingly the work of men and men have been responsible for virtually all of humanity's wars. The genome is present at conception. Rambunctious urchins grow up to be rambunctious adults. Schools, again, could host more competitions (my fondest memories of grade school are the chess tournaments) and less group work to engage boys.
Tiger points out that breast cancer gets seven times as much in federal expenditures as does prostate cancer even though the number of deaths attributed to each is not near that disparate (40,000 to 30,000 respectively). And men are as much as 1000% more likely to commit suicide than women. Speculating, I imagine that men's appetite for risk leads more often to the all-or-nothing type of gambles that can leave one on the losing end in a state of hopelessly deep depression.
Perhaps what is most telling about Tiger's piece is how novel the information seems to most people. Indeed, his purpose in penning it appears to be to draw attention to the various struggles males face relative to females. We've heard for decades about inequalities between males and females, whites and minorities, and most especially between white males and everyone else. Yet when trends that favor females over males emerge, one has to turn not to the leftwing promoters of putative equality and fairness but to the callous, free-market, multicult right-leaning WSJ editorial board to hear about it.
No doubt there are many who revel in the struggles of men. It is, they might say, about time that this patriarchal society was shaken to its foundations. Do not be beguiled by the fib that the committed left is open to ideas and viewpoints spanning the entire political and ideological spectrum. All opinions are equal, but some opinions are more equal than others. This is most blatantly obvious in the academic realm, where one would assume the whole gamut of human thought would be welcomed.
Degrees ending in '-studies' (eg ethnic studies, women's studies, chicano studies, etc) often thinly veil their hostility towards traditional occidental culture, which is overwhelmingly the brainwork of white males. By mid-century, whites will no longer be a majority in the US, following the trend already established in Texas, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii. Should whites be concerned about this? Whites are currently a market-dominant majority, a position that is much more stable than that of market-dominant minorities (if Jews were 60% of Germany's population instead of less than 1% in addition to enjoying over three times the income of the average German, the Holocaust would have had a lot more trouble getting off the ground--racial demagogues like Louis Farrakhan are largely considered to be marginal fringe dwellers by most white Americans, but as the relative white population shrinks, so will that view of marginality). But this is a digression.
Heterosexual male white Catholics and WASPs are the two remaining demographic sets that can be bashed with impunity. Hispanics, blacks, women, Asians, Jews, and gays all have countless special interest groups that fight for their respective interests. You've likely heard of La Raza, the Millions More movement, NOW (National organization of Women), the Asian American Association, the Anti-defamation League, and the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Alliance (all linked to above). Excepting the Asian American Association each of these groups get ample media attention and are well known, almost household names.
On the other hand, how many people have heard of the American Renaissance? It is a white nationalist group, headed by the perspicacious Jared Taylor, that has released ground-shaking reports on racial disparities in crime within the US. Taken from FBI and Census statistics, there is scarcely a way to repudiate the group's work, so the media predictably ignore Amren entirely. Instead, they push an impression that those concerned about demographic trends antithetical to whites are self-evidently neo-Nazis.
Similarly, how many organizations exist to fight specifically for the well-being of white males? None that I'm aware of (neo-Nazis are obviously not bettering the white situation are so minute a portion of the population that they have no effect). There is certainly not anything to the magnitude of the other special interests. And probably for the better. People of Western European descent are the most universalistic in the world (contemporary leftwing liberals are difficult to find outside the ranks of affluent whites outside of academia, the media, and coastal US cities). Christianity is uniquely ecumenical in its scope. Creating yet another special interest group fighting for preferential treatment is not appealing, although we're probably going to trend that way as the ranks of blacks and Hispanics grow and their demands for preferential treatment like reparations and affirmative action become more forceful relative to Asians and whites.
At least the future will be interesting.
Evolution and ID in the Kansan (December 7 2005)
A recent op/ed piece in the KU student newspaper lambasted the "intelligent design" theory as proof that the US is controlled by "Christian conservatives". What follows is a challenge to Abramovitz's assertions and the broader question of why we should stop neutering Darwin's Origin of Species.
Abramovitz begins by positing that the transgressions of high-profile conservatives have largely gone unchallenged, evidentially revealing how the US is in their collective clutches:
"Was there a violent cry for redress last June when Vice President Dick Cheney publicly accosted Congressman Leahy on the Senate floor with the 'F' word? Or when Pat Roberts, a prominent conservative television evangelist, demanded the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on his television show, 'The 700 Club?' Or when President Bush, at the Middle East Peace Summit in 2003, made an even more outrageous claim: Justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq as a direct divination from God?"
Cheney was roundly excoriated for his boorish word choice, as was Robertson, who made the comment in response to Chavez's insistence that the US is actively trying to take him out. Clearly these actions do not find widespread support and are dismissed--just as they are on the other end of the spectrum (see DNC chairman Howard Dean's comments about most Republicans not making an honest living or black Professor and activist Kamau Kambon's vitriolic rhetoric concluding that the extermination of white people is the only way for blacks to save themselves). This sort of dopey confabulation is red meat for partisan volleying, but largely boring and irrelevant outside the realm of committed party rah rahs.
Abramovitz's last assertion, that Bush said God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan is tendentious at best and journalistically unethical at worst. That unsubstantiated allegation was made by Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator highly critical of US support for Israel, and was fervently denied by the White House as blatantly untrue. The typically credulous and anti-Bush BBC ran it without verification anyway and from there it became "fact" on the left side of the blogosphere.
Abramovitz continues:
"No actions taken for these incidents match the ones in response to Dr. Paul Mirecki's divulged e-mails. To cut to the chase, the United States is controlledHe's referring to the religious studies professor who planned to teach a course highly critical of the intelligent design theory and its supporters but subsequently cancelled it after correspondence was leaked that the presumably objective academic study of ID and the issues surrounding it were actually going to be a biased attack aimed at debunking and discrediting the theory.
and dominated by the Christian conservative right and is why critics have lambasted Dr. Mirecki so fiercely."
The primary reason, of course, that Mirecki was lambasted stems from the clandestine nature of what he was trying to do. Imagine if I, now a credentialled professor, offered a course entitled "Survey of Feminism" and sold it as a broad overview of the lives and philosophies of women from Emily Dickinson to Maureen Dowd. But in the classroom I only talked about sky-rocketing divorce and out-of-wedlock marriage rates, the poverty of single mother households, the drastic decline in Western birth rates below the replenishment level, physiological and psychometric data revealing the broad differences between the sexes, and showed pictures of partially-birthed aborted fetuses. Would there be an outcry? I sure hope so.
ID is hardly owned by conservatives. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans favor by a margin of almost 2-1 that creationism be taught alongside evolution. Even those identified as liberals were split evenly on the issue.
Abramovitz goes on:
"It is disgusting to see the ways in which politicians have interfered with the operations of an institution such as the University."KU is a public university, receiving its funding from federal and state coffers (the politicians) and Kansas residents (who elect the politicians in part for their views and actions regarding public education). No institution will get away with disregarding (or biting) the hand that feeds it for long. This should especially be the case when that hand is the American taxpayer.
Continues Abramovitz:
"All of this amounts to conservative censorship of what is viewed as liberal propaganda."No doubt there is some of that sentiment out there--possibly radicalized to the point of the horrific and unjustifiable physical assault on Mirecki by two unidentified assailants (although the actual motive for the alleged attack is not yet confirmed). But the underlying theme in the op/ed that fundamentalist Christians somehow control the country seems risible in light of the virtual disappearance of references to Christmas in retail advertising and sales floor displays even though a full 84% of the country considers itself to be Christian (1.3% professed Judaism and less than 1% claimed to be Muslim) and 96% celebrate the federal holiday.
Speaking of censorship, I've long wondered why the liberal intelligentsia are in such a fuss over the perennial calls of parents in local school districts to have certain objectionable books removed from the curriculum on grounds that children need exposure to reading material pertinent to contemporary culture (like extremely graphic descriptions of children and animals being sexually abused, apparently) yet vociferously demand the Bible not be made required reading. If anyone can give me a piece of literature more crucial to the development and understanding of the Occident, if not the entire world, than the Bible (specifically the Gospels), my ears are burning.
Writes Abramovitz:
"Don't students at a secular university have the right to take a class that is skeptical of religion?"Yes, of course. This likely strikes anyone who has ever taken an REL class at a public university as ludicrous. The humanities are overwhelmingly liberal and secular, even by academic standards--if a student actually finds an instructor who is pious it's a rarity. In any case, if the course presents subject matter in an acutely skeptical light, that should be made known to prospective students before they enroll.
Perspicaciously Abramovitz states:
"One of the first subjects discussed in the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology class this semester is how the implications of intelligent design do not fit inside the paradigm of empirical, scientific inquiry. Under the scientific method, the supernatural cannot be used to explain the natural and vice versa."Indeed. That is why ID belongs in the philosophy department, alongside other cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments/theories that seek to explain the origins of the universe and the meaning of human experience. Empirical science is to be based on things that are replicable. However, there are exceptions. The most notable is the Big Bang theory, which, while indefatigably scrutinized, still holds up as the most sensible explanation to the universe's beginning, incidentally causing a lot of angst amongst atheists. Fancifully now dictator of all freshman biology classes, I would introduce ID as a ten minute vignette to the unit on evolution, quickly covering its probabilistic argument and noting that Darwin's theory is just that--a theory (although one incredibly grounded in historical evidence).
And since the theory of evolution has been in the limelite for awhile, it is time we start applying it to a host of human social concerns (remembering that the full title of Darwin's work that gave structure to the previously inchoate theory of evolution: The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life). Instead of limiting its discussion to the point we wiped out (and bred out) Neanderthals, students should be introduced to its implications to modernity. It is not only pertinent in the field of medicine, but also in the immigration and affirmative action debates, the sports world, the criminal justice system, the definition of the modern woman, ad infinitum. Certainly Darwin would agree, as this terse excerpt from Descent of Man shows:
"There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and
measured, differ much from each other,- as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference."
Legal and spiritual equality are hallmarks of Western society, and there is no reason that should change. But the idea of a blank slate and all the spurious free-market libertarian and "it's all culture" (read racism) liberal nostrums that come with it are unempirical, dogmatic, and fraught with peril.
By taking a hard look at how evolution has shaped and continues to shape humanity, we can better understand the inherent difficulties multicultural, multiracial societies face. The HapMap project is humming along and promises to provide needed edification on human genomics--this knowledge should not be relegated to the esoteric halls of the hard sciences. Instead of fallaciously believing that Jeffersonian democracy can be equally successful irrespective of where it is attempted, we can make sense of why people tend so frequently to show an affinity for those like themselves (culturally and otherwise). Like the maternal instinct naturally propels a mother to protect her son, so does the solidarity of racially similar groups (race is best described as an extended family subject to some level of inbreeding) have an anchor in biology.
Obviously its tough to come to grips with the fact that people, and by extension groups of people, are more endowed in certain areas than others. No one likes the idea of someone else being sharper or more athletic than they are. Yet we all acknowledge it, at least subconsciously, through daily interactions with others. Even within our own families we realize that we're smarter than our younger brother, but he's a better athlete. College and military admissions are based on these known differences, and for good reason--Harvard wouldn't have it's stellar academic reputation if its average student didn't score a 32 on the ACT and the military would be more mistake-prone if it had a glut of nimrods in the field. While facing the facts can be difficult, ultimately the truth will set us free (and shed some light on the never-ending cultural battles over who is screwing whom in the process).
(Human biodiversity)
Multiculturalism is a misnomer (November 18 2005)
It's a longstanding point of frustration for those not somewhere on the left or multicult right to suffer the "intolerant", "ethnocentric", and "xenophobic" pejoratives hurled at them by those "multiculturalism" advocates. Yet, "multiculturalism" is clearly a misnomer. If every institution in every location must "look like America" (and increasingly every institution in every location in every country must "look like the rest of the world"), where is the diversity?
If Kansas is no different than California, British culture no different than French, do we really have diversity? No, not at all. Instead we have the international communist's dream of forced equitableness--one that can only be achieved by the haphazard, sinister balkanizing process that begs a prodigious, global governmental structure to force order, economy, and the whole of life in general. It will not matter where you are or what you're doing--the social and demographic landscape will be identical.
Without solid pockets of homogeneity dotting the globe, we just have a big pile of expendable mush. If Sri Lanka disappears, that's unfortunate but not really meaningful, because Australia is no different. With Thanksgiving approaching, think of the Turkey Day's dinner as a metaphor: You sit down to a feast in front of you. Stuffing, cranberry sauce, salad, cornbread, mashed and sweet potatoes, the turkey, and so forth. So many different things tempting your pallet as you wait in blissful anticipation is what allows the meal to be so enjoyable. Not only eating, but discussing the meal as different items are passed around the table while people talk about their favorites.
But wait. The turkey is different than the cranberry sauce. With regards to protein, the turkey is better for you! And some nefarious folk think it tastes better than the cranberry sauce. This is unjust, awful, intolerant! Everyone must appreciate everything, without exclusion. We must be "inclusionary" (another crucial word in the multicult lexicon), so from this point forward, we will be throwing all the Thanksgiving items into a gigantic blender--from the Turkey to the salad--until it is mixed into a vibrant and indiscriminate goo for all to enjoy. If you're a vegetarian, strictly a carnivore, or just don't care for sweet potatoes, it's time for you to quit being so culinarocentric!
In all seriousness, the absurd desire to make "multicultural" for the sake of multiculturalism has serious consequences. Over 100,000 years of human history in which isolated populations evolved with unique forces acting upon them, with results that we are only beginning to understand. Do you see France burn? Do you hear Mecha shout? Do you notice Mugabe's agricultural theft? Beslan? London? Theo Van Gogh? A state of emergency on the southern border? The Dalai Lama's indigent status? Louis Farrakhan? South Asia and the Chinese? The disputed territories of Samaria and Judea (referred to as the "West Bank")? Iraq's inchoate civil war? The rebels in Sri Lanka? Shall we continue in our search for more "multicultural" successes? Cheap DNA sequencing is on the way--hopefully that will start to open our collective eyes. But don't hold your breathe.
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More multicultural success (November 7 2005)
Paris burns for the twelfth straight day. The rioters are African Muslims who have, surprise surprise, fallen to the bottom of French society. Neither Islam nor Africa exactly correlate with success. No one should gloat over this predictable tragedy, but hopefully it will help awaken the West to the fact importing swarms of the low IQ, third-world underclass is an act of self-immolation. Predictably, the elites blame France for not assimilating and discriminating in favor of the hoodlums:
"It's the French mentality. They still haven't understood that even children with foreign origins have their place in society," says Boubaker. "They still think we're cleaners, and that's not good."
Nicolas Sarkozy has talked of the need to provide young people with job opportunities. The interior minister is also an advocate of positive discrimination for ethnic minorities, and of voting rights for foreigners.
I guess when a population causes trouble, you respond by giving more stuff to that population and bringing in more of its kin. After two weeks, the military still has not been called in to put down the insurrection. Unbelievable.
The French love to condescendingly mock the US for its racial 'inequities' while refusing to keep demographic statistics of their own. But France is now 10% Muslim--if Turkey finds its way into the EU that proportion will accrete rapidly--and the country's racial problem is not going away anytime soon. Sure, a less socialistic economic framework would move Islamic African slums from unemployment levels as high as 60% in some places to something that would give them a little more stake in the country. But until genetic or germ engineering allows for an artificial boost in intelligence (Arab countries average in the mid-80s, and most of Africa orbits around 70--France enjoys a 98), the vast disparity--and the resentment that accompanies it--will remain.
This comes on the heels of other recent high-profile, glowing multicultural triumphs: Black gangs and rioters in New Orleans, Bush's warm welcome in Argentina, South Africa's embracing of Zimbabwe's forced confiscation of white-owned farms, Pakistani Muslims attacking Indian relief workers in Kashmir, quasi-civil warring in Iraq, escalating terrorist activity directed at Israel as a reward for surrendering the Strip, ad infinitum. Samuel Huntington is such a fool--damn that prescient devil.
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Religion and crime (September 30 2005)
There's quite a stir in the blogosphere over a paper released by Gregory S. Paul that purports to show that religion causes pathological problems in industrialized nations, and it is only a matter of time before it hits the mainstream waves. Skimming through the study, vitriolic anti-Americanism stands out. In a nutshell, the paper shows the US, which has next to Portugal the highest rates of belief in a Creator and lowest levels of acceptance of evolution of the industrialized nations also has the highest rate of homicide and abortion and the lowest life expectancy.
Here are the countries the study looked at: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland/Netherlands, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Spain, Italy, US, Sweden, and New Zealand. Think the baby Jesus is to blame for all this? The high-priests of secularized Cultural Marxism would have you think so. Even though I am not a religious person and am a strong believer in evolution, this sort of tendentious BS has to be challenged. Unfortunately, race is that challenger, although the groups that struggle are completely inculpable for the sake of what I am arguing here.
East Asians have the lowest crime rates of any group of people on the planet, and not surprisingly, Japan basically scores the best on every measure. In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan (an urban area)—a disaster which killed 5,000 people and left 310,000 homeless—there were literally no assaults or murders reported. We can leave Japan, an anomaly compared to the other countries, at this.
The black murder rate in the US is seven times higher than that of whites. That is the global trend as well, as are low crime rates for East Asians. Racial realism is necessary to address the bloated homicide rates in the paper.Now, the black percentage in each of the countries:
Australia—less than 1%
Great Britain—2.2%
France—estimated at 3% (no official Census)
Germany—less than 1%
Holland/Netherlands--not mentioned
Ireland (all the links are on wikipedia, it's getting too tedious!)—not mentioned Switzerland—grouped into 26 cantons, the Swiss do not keep demographic stats
Norway--everyone is white as snow in the Nordic countries (not mentioned)Portugal—less than 1%
Austria—not mentioned
Spain—not mentioned
Italy—not mentioned
Sweden--everyone is white as snow in the Nordic countries (not mentioned, although might be able to find something at the government's stat website)
New Zealand—Africans, Latin Americans, and Middle Easterners combined comprise .8%
The homicide rate per 100,000 people falls between half a person and two people for all the countries except for Portugal (4) and the US (6). If 10% of the US population that is black committed murder at the rate of US whites, the homicide rate drops to under four per 100,000. The violent crime rate for Hispanics is 3.7 times that of whites—reducing the violent crime rate of Hispanics to the white level in the US would further reduce the homicide rate per 100,000 to under three. The other factor is American gun ownership. Murder by firearm in the US is 100 times higher than the next country on the list (Portugal), and there are over 200 million guns in the US—no other country listed even comes close. The gun debate is not one I am familiar enough with to have an educated opinion on, although it seems the New Orleans melee may have settled the Second Amendment issue in the US once and for all (it will stand). What the paper does not mention is how crime in the US has been on a downward trend while in most of Europe it has been on the upswing. According to UN statistics, the US is at the bottom-middle of the pack on violent crime, car theft, and overall victimization rates (flip through to see the graphs). Homicide is the only category in which the US leads the pack. Steve Sailer has chronicled laddism in England, and the subsequent increase in criminality among worker class Brits that has coincided with that country's recent crime problems.
The paper inflates rates of abortion, infant mortality rates, and adolescent pregnancies in the same way (blacks are 3 times as likely to abort as whites and Hispanics are 2.5 times as likely). Applying the same rate for blacks and Hispanics as whites in the US yields 20 abortions per US woman aged 15-19 (the stats the paper used) down from 28 with the various ethnic groups. This would put the US right smack in the middle of the pack.The infant mortality rate for blacks is three times that of whites (with Hispanics included in the white calculation!). Putting Hispanics right in between the rates of whites and blacks (as tends to be the case for the stats) drops the infant mortality rate per 1,000 births in the US from eight to under six—again, right smack in the middle of the pack.
The black birth rate for 15-17 year olds (the stats the paper used) is over three times that of whites while the Hispanic rate is over twice that of whites. Using the white birth rate for this age cohort yields 28 births per 1,000—higher than most of the countries but lower than New Zealand and neck-and-neck with Great Britain and Canada.
The average life expectancy for whites in the US is 77.6 years, while the country's average for all Americans is a bit lower at 77 years even. While that sounds trivial, it moves the US from fourteenth of eighteen in longevity to tenth out of eighteen--yet again in the middle of the pack.
Of course, the paper makes no mention of racial disparities between the countries, out of either irrational belief in that making no difference (even though the statistics clearly show otherwise) or surreptitiously shoving it under the rug knowing that fundamentalist-loathing media will unscrupulously run with it anyway.
While there likely does exist a negative correlation between a population's intelligence and religiosity, religion is overwhelmingly a positive force for most people. This seemingly contradictory statement makes sense if one assumes inherent differences in people. Think of intelligence, for simplicity's sake, as an age continuum of children with the older ones representing the more cognitively gifted among humans. There is a sixteen, ten, and six year-old present. The sixteen year-old feels insulted if you try to tell her she had better be good because if she's not, Santa won't bring her any presents. She wants a pragmatic and humanistic explanation as to why she should be nice to other people. The ten year-old believes in Santa, but wants to know why the jolly guy wants people to be nice to one another—a sort of in between stage. The six year-old, enticed by presents, will likely behave if he thinks there are presents on the line. But tell him he should be good because self-restraint is fulfilling in itself and it makes the world a better place... you're a fool if you expect an angel. It is important to distinguish between religiosity and belief in God (either the omniscient, benevolent and omnipotent or merely the philosopher's)—I am referring to the rote, ritualistic aspects of religion and a rule-based lifestyle based on its teachings.
Affluent lefties, like those sympathetic to religion-bashing, quixotically believe that all people are the same and that religion restricts ones right to think for oneself, gives power to a deity rather than the state, etc. That black imprisonment rates are the lowest in the South (surprising but true) where Pentecostal Congregationalism is part of the cultural ethos and highest in liberal areas like Minnesota and Washington DC does not phase them in their assault on religion.
Superciliously, Paul mentions US economic dominance but only to say that this should lead to lower negatives for the US relative to the other countries. Perhaps he missed a little phenomenon known as the Protestant work ethic. Simply unbelievable that such charlatanism passes as academic expertise. Forget any inklings you may have of me blaming blacks or Hispanics for the situation they are in--for the purpose of right now, assume that it is all because of white oppression, hegemony, and the legacy of slavery. The point is, the demarcation between groups is loud and clear, yet Jesus himself is being crucified for the problems!
Save for Spain, Europe has been moving to the right. Tony Blair was beat up by the Conservative Party in Britain when he was narrowly reelected last Spring, Angela Merkel received more votes than Schroeder in Germany, the uber-liberal Netherlands has cracked down on Islamic immigration and freedoms, and in Poland two right-of-center parties united to take a majority away from the former left-wing government. Europeanesque elitists notoriously hate the US, and this paper epitomizes that. It is intellectually bankrupt in leaving out of analysis areas that the US excels in—economic prosperity, charitable giving, non-homicidal crime, etc—and fails to mention several much more plausible explanations for the divergence in some select areas like gun ownership and minority composition for homicide rates. Be weary of what you read. Be very weary.
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Education and eugenics in China (September 21 2005)
These thoughts come from an online discussion forum (I'm near the bottom) that I thought would be worth saving if for no other reason than to say "I told you so."
Special ed students cost, on average, over twice that of the average student--An astounding $17,000 per pupil. The utilitarian benefit is, of course, considerably less--certainly a net liability. Machiavellian as that sounds, it's fallacious to let a bleeding heart bludgeon the wallet to death. Today, special education consumes 20% of public education spending (used a very liberal source as an antidote to your incredulity :) in the US. The fluffy-feeling this may give you aside, does it make sense to invest the highest amount of resources into the least productive people?
Less intelligent people can actually be better at many menial tasks that bore more intelligent people into lethargic sloppiness--they should be trained for these sorts of tasks, not put into mainstream classes where they learn nothing and are patronized (benevolent as your intentions may be, taking care of a handicapped person like you'd take care of a pet qualifies as patronization in my mind).
Excerpted from a John Derbyshire column (the whole thing is a worthwhile five minute read). He's discussing the 91% of Chinese scientists who believe eugenics is a good thing the government should be involved in and how the discussion of eugenic practices has no sembelance of the Christian ethics we in the West (especially the lefties) pride ourselves on. In the PRC they pragmatically talk instead of how it should best be executed--whether or not it should be done is not even a question:
"A rough kind of eugenics has, in fact, been practiced in China for a long time. Several years ago, when I was living in that country, I mentioned Down's Syndrome in conversation with a Chinese colleague. She did not know the English term and I did not know the Chinese, so we had to look it up in a dictionary. 'Oh,' she said when she got it. 'That's not a problem in China. They don't get out of the delivery room.'
As I said: While we are agonizing over the rights and wrongs of it, elsewhere they will just be doing it."
Keep in mind that China has Asian expansionism in its plans (North Korea's tentative promise not to develop nukes means the PRC won't have to worry about Japan and Taiwan going nuclear--notice that China was the country that got North Korea to oblige after the other four countries could not) and in less than eleven years (using US GDP growth of 4% and PRC GDP growth of 9% to future value) China's total economy will be larger than that of the US. Their population also has a higher average IQ than the US, ties with ruthless regimes like Iran, Zimbabwe, and North Korea, and because of the one-child policy recently reneged, millions more young males than young females (as males are more "prized"). I point out the glut of young males because, well, what makes a better army than millions of young males with no one to marry? I'm coming at this with assumed prescience--that the PRC will be the next Soviet Union. Unfortunate, because I love far-Eastern culture and people, but inevitable given the Han's feeling of superiority and the insatiable energy appetite that is going to consume China in the coming years.
Can we afford to fall behind?
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Bill O'Reilly's numbers are off (September 14 2005)
Countering charges that the Katrina response was saturated in incompetence because of racism towards impoverished blacks, Bill O'Reilly has claimed multiple times that "75% of the poor in America are white." If he was feeling pithy enough, he could have said that the high percentage of underqualifed blacks in the New Orleans' government was a key factor in the ineffective rescue. But he's a genuinely good guy simply trying to reduce racial tension--clueless as he is about human biodiversity--and the thought police would try to run him into the ground for such acumen.
In any case, what he said is patently false. In 2003 there were approximately 35.9 million Americans in poverty. Roughly 16 million of them were white (8.2% of the white population)--44% of the total population of impoverished residents. Total poverty numbers for other groups are as follows: Blacks 8.8 million, 24.4% of black population and 24.5% of impoverished population; Hispanics 9.1 million, 22.5% of Hispanic population and 25.2% of impoverished population; Asians 1.4 million, 11.8% of Asian population and 3.9% of impoverished population.
Bill may have been attempting a sleight of hand to swell the numbers of the white impoverished. The Census considers Hispanics in the amalgamated category of "white". There are subsequently categories that break this down to "white, non-Hispanic" (to which I referred to as simply "white" above and will continue to do) and "Hispanic". By using the definition that includes Hispanics, whites comprise 67.7% of those in poverty--close to his 75% claim. Of course, this segment makes up over 85% of the US population so that percentage is still relatively low.
To cut through the obfuscation, I've run the numbers as an index. An index score of 1 for a segment means that as a group, the segment has exactly the same proportion of its members in poverty as does the entire national population as a whole. An index score of .5 means a group has only half as many members impoverished (proportionally) as does the entire country, and an index of 2 would indicate twice the poverty rate for the group compared to the country as a whole. In parentheses is the groups average IQ according to Wikipedia--depending on what data is looked at, the scores may vary by couple of points but center around these scores.
Whites--.66 (101)
Blacks--1.95 (87)
Hispanics--1.80 (91)
Asians--.94 (106)
Thus, poverty certainly does come in all colors, which was Bill's point. But blacks are three times as likely to fall into poverty as are whites. Hispanics are nearly as likely as blacks, while Asians are much nearer to whites (as per usual). Poverty rates are inversely related to IQ, and the rates by race almost follow suit, except that Asians have higher average IQs than whites. A plausible cause for the higher poverty rates of Asians versus whites is that Asian Americans on average are losing their cognitive advantage over whites as increasing numbers of Asian immigrants are from South Asia (India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Phillipines) where IQs tend to fall one standard deviation (15 points) or more below IQs of East Asians (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea). The poverty data is more recent than the IQ data, and consequently the IQs have probably followed (inversely) the changing poverty rates. Grouping all Asian Americans into one category (as large classifications tend to) obturates the diversity within it. Still, this minority is not suffering that dastardly white hegemony and oppression that plagues other groups!
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Race and Katrina (Sept 5 2005)Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and even Michael Moore have all taken pot shots about the inherent white racism evident in the wake of hurricane Katrina: the various levels of government not responding fast enough, accusations of media reports portraying blacks as looters, and even uber-extreme suggestions by multimillion dollar thugs (ie rappers) that the National Guard was ordered to fire indiscriminately on blacks. No one in the mainstream media points to what is obvious to those who will trust their own lying eyes. Thankfully, there are astute commentators out there who are not quixotic lefties to point me to true irrational racism taking place in New Orleans:
(From Australia's Herald Sun) "People were just staring at them and making suggestions that they were going to kill them." John's sister Susie said he saw shocking acts of violence amid fierce racial tension in the Superdome. "It's turned into a black against white thing," she said. "My brother has witnessed murders, stabbings, rapes . . . it's like a Third World country."
(From the BBC) The graduate economics student was travelling in the US when he was caught up in the devastation of the hurricane. He had also been coaching football to disabled children as part of the Camp America scheme. Mr Trout's brother Jonathan said: "We got a text message from someone whose phone was working which said he was alive but in terrible conditions.
"Then last night our mother got a call saying the situation had deteriorated. "He witnessed a good deal of violence, with scuffles going on and people breaking things."
The group really feared for their safety because they were being targeted because they were the only white people there.
(Reuters, a British news service similar to the Associated Press) Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.
"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."
Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.
Parapundit's Randall Parker goes on to meticulously report other instances of crime directed against whites in the city. Meanwhile Steve Sailer points out that a little to the east in the town of Chalmette, which was hit much harder than New Orleans (as the previous map link illuminates), there was no looting or rape or otherwise--just cooperation and heroism:
CHALMETTE, La. — Chalmette has been cut off from the world for six days...
The losses were just coming into focus Saturday. A storm surge estimated at 25
feet had receded, leaving yellowish watermarks along the retail strip, but parts
of the city were under an expanse of water, with a sheen of oil and a sickly
sweet smell. On the front of houses, search-and rescue teams had spray-painted
the numbers of dead found inside. One house had a blue six.
The water rose 10 feet in 10 minutes on the morning of the storm, residents
said, so fast you could watch a wall of water advancing down residential
streets. Sheriff Jack Stephens would not estimate a death toll, but spoke of
several large groups of people who had died together.
Thirty-one elderly residents of a nursing home died "in their sleep" when
their facility was flooded, he said. And in a subdivision, rescue personnel had
found the bodies of 21 people who had tied themselves together, he said,
probably in an attempt to evacuate. The scenes were so disturbing that 30 of his
deputies could no longer work because of fatigue and emotional overload,
Stephens said.
The federal response, he said, has been "woefully inadequate." ...Over the
next two days, she and Lobre played endless games of Yahtzee as they waited for
the water to go down. It didn't. What happened instead was this: Boats began to
pass under their window, driven by local people offering to throw necessities up
to them. Batteries sailed up and so did cigarettes."It was like a Mardi Gras
parade, but instead of beads, it was food, and lighters, and dry towels," Lobre
said.On the third day, the two hitched a ride on a boat to Chalmette High
School, which had been made into a shelter. A woman bore a child there -- named
Katrina -- and dead bodies were stored behind a stage, where the children
couldn't see them.
Michael Couture, 31, is an avid fan of the reality show "Survivor," and
always thought he would be good at it. What happened over six days, he said, was
a real-life version: For the first few days, most of the stranded people focused
on themselves. But then a community of interests developed. People raided local
stores and distributed what they found.
Bruce Velez, a construction worker, made his way to houses all over the
city; among the people he rescued was an elderly woman who had climbed on top of
her refrigerator to escape the rising water.Larry Strahub spent much of the week
with 17 strangers in an apartment building. Personalities clashed at times, he
said. But before he left -- he paddled 15 miles to find help on Saturday -- they
planned a reunion.
The kicker? Steve wraps up his post as follows:
Well, here's Chalmette's population:
White Non-Hispanic: 89.2%
Hispanic: 4.8%
Black: 2.4%
And the demographic breakdown of New Orleans? From the US Census: 26.6% non-Hispanic white, 1.5% Hispanic, and 67.3% black. In spite of the ceaseless complaints of a lack of external relief given to the city of New Orleans, Chalmette was hit harder and has received a paucity of attention. Of course, things are relatively well there, as the local human capital far exceeds anything that the state or federal government can do to keep New Orleans' residents from descending into utter chaos.
Clearly, there are wide variances in the capacities of racial groups on average. New Orleans is also a poor city, with 28% of the population below the poverty line most of whom are black. As intelligence is linked to foresight, those able to evacuate the city prior to Katrina making landfall mostly did so. Drug addicts, gangsters, and dummies (likely a combination of all three in one person in many cases) stayed behind. Magnanimous rescuers who ventured forth into the morass to help people were shot at and threatened with rape and violence.
It is sad to say, but the atrocious situation in New Orleans is not that surprising. Cities with huge black populations tend to descend quickly to third-status (Camden, DC, Detroit, and East St. Louis are other examples) scarcely distinguishable from the deeply impoverished continent of Africa. I am not placing moral blame on the black community--prior to 1964 the fault was largely on the shoulders of whites. But the pathological hip-hop culture, an antipathy towards education, and a broken family structure within black culture today certainly do not aid the already disadvantaged group.
The idea that whites are maliciously targeting blacks in the US is absurd. Black-on-white violent crimes is up to 250 times more common than white-on-black violent crime. Blacks consistently earn less and struggle more in school than their white counterparts. To keep blaming whites for every problem in the world while vehemently denying any genetic contributions to differences in human populations is something the dogmatic blank-slaters have pounded relentlessly for years at the expense of any real solutions. How can you fix a problem when you won't even admit it exists?
Last Friday, August 12, four thugs lured a delivery man into an abandoned house and killed him. (Free subscription required)
Heinous. Not that it ameliorates anything, but at least the criminals will be put away. Or will they? Seems three of the four had prior criminal records.
The teens allegedly stabbed Zhihai Cui several times Friday night, then
took his cash to buy marijuana and alcohol before heading to the National Guard
Armory to party, according to prosecutors. Authorities said some of the bloodied
cash was found on one of the teens the next day.
Three of the four boys have criminal records.
The system is broken. Diversion is a joke, and this is yet another example of its complete impotence. They've had multiple chances--Zhihai Cui, the Chinese delivery man, pays the ultimate price for society's idiotic wager to let repeat offenders back onto the street. As he tried to flee, they gang tackled him and stabbed him to death.
Ennis was previously charged with a misdemeanor assault, but that case was dismissed after the victim failed to show for trial. He also was charged with battery but entered into a diversion plan. A charge of auto burglary was dropped
as part of the diversion plan, Myers told Boal.
The tragedy aside, there is another interesting piece to this story. The four perpetrators were black and Cui was Asian, presumably Chinese. Where is the media outcry? NPR stuffs lynchings that took place fifty years ago down our throats on an almost daily basis. Ditto NBC, the New York Times, and a host of others. Yes, racism against blacks is an ugly part of American history: Jim Crow, segregation, and the assassination of MLK. But it's 2005, not 1965. The tables have turned. Blacks are an astounding 250 times more likely to murder whites than viceversa. Violent crime rates for blacks are 9.1 times higher than for whites, and 20 times higher than that of Asians (incidentally the best behaved of the four major ethnic categories in the US). They have the highest poverty rate in the country (24.4% or three times that of whites), creating an enormous burden on the net taxpayer.
The reasons for the depressing pathologies found so disproportionately in the black community is another argument. Low average IQs, astronomical out-of-wedlock birth rates (70%), and gansta rap certainly do not help. What is so irksome is that the mainstream media will not touch this case but would do so if the murderers were white, and the local media will do everything it can to put such an incident in race-neutral terms (the Star article does not make a single reference). Instead, nebulous society is blamed for all black crimes directed at whites. Is it any wonder that white flight is such a seismic problem in much of the country's urban core?
The Two Ages excerpt referred to in this essay on cultural Marxism today as it relates to the issue of human biodiversity is here (password: PHIL350).
Soren Kierkegaard distinguished between three stages of existence.1 He referred to the base as the aesthetic stage, where man is committed solely to the fulfillment of his own personal desires, much in the mold of Machiavelli. The next step is the ethical stage, where man is drawn outside himself and sees obligations to others as superceding his own wants. Finally, the religious stage is the synergy of man with the Absolute. If we contemporize Absolute by defining it as empirically verifiable truth, we have a working system (albeit not one Kierkegaard would necessarily be fond of) with the third stage being the apex of an individual and by extension a society.
Why, then, does the information dissemination structure, comprised of the great triumvirate of news media, Hollywood, and academia, viciously fight to squelch the notion of human biodiversity by ignoring and marginalizing the deluge of research that suggests it is fundamental to the differences in human populations? Because there is a new secular religion borne out of the 1960s that has swept across the West that demands the equality of outcomes and the suspension of all judgment, moral or otherwise, by those non-member individuals or institutions in any position of authority. It started with Marx, but was reformed by men like Gramsci and Marcuse from being economically-based to being culturally-based. Realizing that capitalism would wipe communism every time the two came into conflict, they knew that the roots of capitalism had to first be eradicated. Christianity and the bourgeoisie class were the targets—the two stalwarts of a free market. Laying every evil of mankind on their shoulders was the way to destroy them.2
The egalitarianism myth is fundamental to this new religion—if it flounders the whole house comes down with it. A theory of massive blank-slates requires there be no fundamental differences in groups of people. This extends beyond equality under the law or spiritual equality in the eyes of God, both tremendous positives brought about by Christian Europe. They wish biological differences to be vanquished as well. Employing cultural Marxism, more benignly known as "political correctness," the new religion's adherents believe that the imbalance of power in societies and among people is artificial. All people and communities are said to equal at birth and differences only emerge due to societal (or "structural") forces. The apostles work to enforce this belief by harshly punishing those who deviate from or even question it.3
Kierkegaard called this tactic "leveling," and he would suffer dearly for coming up against the media establishment in his own time, where he was virulently scorned for his challenge to the conventional wisdom of the time.4 The faithfuls' riposte to any contrasting viewpoint is a combination of blackballing, character assassination, and supercilious ridicule. Unfortunately, the apostates possess a deadly weapon to strike back with: empirical evidence.
In Two Ages, Kierkegaard criticized leveling, describing how "it lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it… [it] has transformed the whole of existence into an equivocation."5 Frustrated by the age's desire to overthrow everything without discrimination for the sake of destroying it, he attacked the philosophical weakness and inherent lack of conviction in the equivocation that leveling desired. Today, we need not be so esoteric. Let us look now at facts that fatally stultify the egalitarianism myth.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler rabidly laments that "the Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with terrifying speed."6 He was not baseless in his assessment. Although Jews only represented 1% of Germany's population, they comprised an astounding 75% of Berlin's doctors, 80% of the country's theater directors, and a disproportionately large number of German lawyers.7 Hitler was so irked by Jewish cognitive superiority that he banned IQ tests in Germany after Jews consistently outscored the Gentile population.8 Perhaps his one-thousand year Reich have survived more than twelve years if Hitler had utilized his human capital instead of obliterating it or sending it scurrying to the enemy.
Successful Jews were not unique to Germany. In fact, to this day Ashkenazi (European ancestry) Jews are enormously successful virtually everywhere they go. Although they comprise less than 3% of the US population, 27% of Nobel Prize winners are Ashkenazi. Over half the world's chess champions are Jewish.9 A slew of intellectual titans also claim Ashkenazi ancestry, including Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Bobby Fisher, and Sigmund Freud. IQ tests consistently show them scoring an average of 112-115 compared to the white European mean of 100 and the world average of 90.10 Yet by appearance and lifestyle, Ashkenazis are today indistinguishable from others of European descent. They go to the same schools, live in the same culture, and have the same friends as the goys they live amongst. The crucial difference is innate, and it is in the history.
Ever since the close of the fourth Century following the excoriations of Judaism by Church fathers like Saint John of Chrysostom and Saint Augustine of Hippo, European Jewish life has been largely segregated from that of Christians. The Church abhorred usury, and consequently Jews were heavily overrepresented in the areas of finance and banking. Only five percent of Jews worked in agriculture at a time when most Europeans were farmers.11 Thus, Jews relied heavily on intelligence for success. Financing and banking were among the most cognitively demanding occupations at the time. As Jews lived almost exclusively in urban areas, children were an economic liability rather than an asset as they were for farmers and other craftsmen. Therefore, the most successful Jews could afford to have the most children while the dullards could not, whereas struggling rustic non-Jews had huge families to help make ends. In addition, entering the religious order was a desired achievement that required great intellectual ability to be able to read and write in multiple languages and become well versed in theological and philosophical history and discussion. Monks were celibate, while rabbis were encouraged to have many children, thereby spreading their intelligence while many monks became a genetic dead-end. Finally, there was little intermarrying—Jews and Gentiles came from distinct stocks from before the fifth century until the mid-twentieth century, with a different set of natural selection forces at work on them. Less than one percent were thought to have married outside the Jewish community.12 Given that IQ is agreed to be 40-80% hereditable (with 75% being the most agreed upon), the differences we witness today are not surprising.13
Terrified by Jews who threaten to shatter the appeal of their special interests—that they are victims of relentless white oppression—other minority group leaders attack this tremendously successful one. Radical Colorado University Professor and Native American activist Ward Churchill rages about the "clear, and often quite overtly expressed, desire among many Jews to claim an absolute monopoly in terms of genocidal suffering."14 In the run up to the election of a new California Governor to replace ousted Gray Davis, an advocate of Aztlan's creation (making the Southwestern US become an independent nation and home for displaced Aztecs) named Ernesto Cienfuegos wrote that criticism of Cruz Bustamante (who was seeking the Governorship) was an "attack by the Jews to keep in check the emerging Mexican-American community of Alta California and to continue perpetuating their power in Sacramento."15 Black activist and former Presidential candidate Al Sharpton famously exclaimed after being heckled that "I am already in hell. I'm in Israel."16
But wait! We are attempting to use Darwinian evolution to explain biological differences in human populations. Yet was not Social Darwinism merely a perverse rendering of Charles Darwin's watershed discovery that was discredited after Hitler's atrocious disaster? Further, is not race just a social construction rather than a biological one? So goes the criticisms of "the lightly equipped encyclopedists" Kierkegaard writes of, who believe that because they have heard a bit about everything they are infinitely erudite, when in actuality they are "overwhelmed by delusions."17 That Richard Rorty proclaims it to be self-evident that classifications like "homosexual," "negro," and "female," are "inventions that have done more harm than good," does not make it a veritable truth.18
Curiously, Hitler's systematic destruction of six million people in the name of inequality has made the discussion of human biological differences anathema, while Stalin's 25 million dead and Mao's 20 million dead—both in the name of equality—has not ended the ebullient enthusiasm for unfettered egalitarianism. Yet the facile proposition that differences are due to how groups are treated by hegemons is at best only partially true. Ashkenazis are particularly potent in refuting this assumption, as they are historically the most persecuted group in the world and yet have become the most fruitful today. Ashkenazis, Koreans, Africans, and indigenous South Americans have all been brutally oppressed by industrialized nations. This cruelty is to be lamented and disdained for sure. But what is interesting is the vast variance in how these populations have made it in the world, with the former two being extraordinarily successful while the latter have not been able to adapt as well to a technologically advanced world that has been thrust upon them.
The first step we can suggest to those who believe evolution abruptly shuts off at the human level—after autioning them that they may shortly feel the urge to rip the Darwin fish-creature off the back of their cars—is for said epigones to read the full title of Darwin's work, rather than the politically-correct abridged version: The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It is difficult to imagine a phrase more inflammatory today than "favoured races," and yet proponents for intelligent design fail to utilize the cultural Marxist's own weapon against them. Darwin believed there to be differences between races, though it is crucial that he used "races" rather than the singular term "race."19 Different races have been naturally selected for the environments they live in by a process taking place over tens of thousands of years since we first began breaking away from the simians. As Darwin writes, "Natural selection in each well-stocked country, must act chiefly through the competition of the inhabitants one with another, and consequently will produce perfection, or strength in the battle for life, only according to the standard of that country."20 Clearly, Darwin understood that humans were not separated from the rest of life on earth, somehow immaculately free from the stains of diversity. In fact, humans are among the most physically diverse species on the planet, outdone only by domesticates that have been eugenically bred (like dogs).21 Different groups display different abilities and tendencies. Consequently, the desire to "level" the end result of groups or individuals is unnatural and a recipe for tension—or worse—between groups.
"If simultaneously we could spread the notion that it is all make-believe, we would approve and admire… but privately know that nothing decisive is supposed to be meant by it. And we will not be repentant, for after all we are not demolishing anything," wrote Kierkegaard, mocking the established order of his day.22 And so goes the same today in regards to that elusive term "race." There is no specific "white" or "black" gene. But that is due to the fact that race is a relative term to denote a basket of differences between human populations. It can be used to differentiate blacks from whites, Germans from British, or Irish Protestants from Irish Catholics. It is, in essence, an extended family from which there is some inbreeding present (if there were no such inbreeding we would each have billions of ancestors wandering the earth thousands of years ago, as our family pedigrees would expand indefinitely and exponentially as we moved up them.)23 A solid definition of "extended family" is equally elusive, yet no one would seriously deny the hereditary relationship between family members—if that is the case, we had all best call up our contingency lawyers to go after those swindling doctors who have been scamming us by proscribing routine check-ups based on our family history!
Geography provides a terse analogy that is initially less contentious: Are not geographical demarcations artificial? We do not see a black line in the sand separating Mexico from the US, Johnson County from Wyandotte County, or the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern Hemisphere. Yet these distinctions are of great utility as the environment in each generally varies from the other, with broader (or larger) groupings displaying more pronounced differences—as the contrasts of Canada and Mexico are more stark than those of Miami and Johnson counties. Similarly, both are going to share some traits, at least in some segments of their total area, but the tallest mountains are going to be found in Canada and the warmest weather will reside in Mexico. Likewise, race can be sliced up in countless ways, with individuals in the group differing from one another and sometimes being very similar to a member of another group, but on average there are valuable differences extant between the groups nonetheless.
Let us quickly take a few more of the most conspicuous examples of differences between populations (a term essentially interchangeable with race) before moving on. Running is a universal sport that nearly everyone can participate in and anyone can detect a natural talent for. Yet the 100 fastest sprinters in the world are all of West African descent, and not a single top runner is of Asian ancestry, even though the continent contains over half of the world's population.24 Clearly running ability is orders of magnitude away from being random—it is genetic. White males are at six times greater risk for contracting melanoma than are males of other races.25 East Asians score nearly a standard deviation higher on visuo-spatial IQ tests than white Europeans, going a long way to explain their relative dominance in fields like engineering, chemistry, and mathematics yet they fall around four or five points below white Europeans in verbal-analytical scores, which suggests an explanation for lower numbers of East Asians in fields like law or the humanities.26
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger adroitly observed, "Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy." That the relationship between males and females is portrayed as a competition, while seemingly jocular, is actually dangerously ignorant. Men are going to "win" in some arenas, and women will be victorious in others. It would be sagacious to, accepting that, look at the biological differences rooted in tens of thousands of years of human existence and base societal norms on each gender's relative advantages. But the second wave of feminism, emerging in the 1960s, militantly attacked the perceived differences of men and women in society as being one in which "men raped women physically, economically and spiritually."27 If everyone is truly the same, and it is exclusively the apocryphal nature of social constructions that make us think otherwise, then the only explanation is (non-genetic) male oppression! Of course, this begs the question of how men became dominant in the first place if no meaningful distinction can truly be made between the abilities of men and women, but we should not digress.
There is hardly any better demonstration of this fallacious thinking than the Harvard President Lawrence Summers fiasco in January 2005. In a meeting convened to discuss possible reasons that men so heavily dominate the top echelons of the hard-sciences (like mathematics, science, and engineering), Summers suggested among a host of other potential explanations that innate differences in intelligence distribution between men and women might account for the disparity. He was crucified for heresy by the cultural hegemons. The former Clinton official had to pony up $50 million in Harvard revenues and earmark them for "diversity efforts" including increased affirmative action hires and a "commitment to the advancement and support of women in academic life" at the school.28
Kierkegaard wrote that furtive envy "does not understand that it is itself a negative acknowledgment of excellence but wants to degrade it, minimize it, until it actually is no longer excellence, and envy takes as its object not only the excellence which is but that which is to come."29 His criticism was directed at those who leveled attacks at others out of a covetous desire for the knowledge or possessions they held. He could have been writing last week. The evidence for differences between sexes is overwhelming. Women have more white matter in the brain while the brain of men contains more gray matter. Different areas of the brain are activated for reasoning, emotive response, memory formation, and decision-making. Men outperform women on visuo-spatial and quantitative tests while women clean up on vocabulary and reading comprehension.30 The distribution of IQ is wider for men than for women by about one point per standard deviation, although the mean value is the same for both sexes.31 This means that 99.7% of white women (average 100) are contained between IQs of 55 and 145, while for white men it must be expanded slightly to IQs of 52 and 148 to achieve 99.7% of the population. Thus, there are more men at the highest (and lowest) intellectual echelons in society—exactly what Summers suggested.
Why then, with science on his side, was Summers persecuted successfully, especially when the discussion revolved around scientific questions? "No particular individual will be able to halt the abstraction of leveling, for it is a negatively superior force," wrote Kierkegaard about the culture in 1846.32 The stranglehold does not easily loosen. Charles Reich, a counterculture drone, enthusiastically wrote that cultural Marxism "is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence."33 What he proclaimed in 1971 was firmly implanted in the minds of Ivy Leaguers in 2005 when Harvard's faculty gave a vote of no-confidence to the institution's president for his suggestions.
Even if true, the question is sometimes asked, what good does pointing out innate differences in individuals and by extension populations do? Conditioned by years of relentless "discrimination is evil" coupled with the "inequitable results must entail discrimination" bromides, it is an understandable concern. The largely unchallenged thinking goes as follows: "If non-Hispanic whites in the US earn more per year on average than blacks, white racism must be the culprit." Kierkegaard abhors how "the drunken sailor has absolutely the same right to a public as the most distinguished of men."34 Interestingly, Asian-Americans, who have crime rates half that of whites and who outperform whites educationally and economically, are almost always ignored in media reports on racial inequality.35 They too inconveniently throw a wrench into the "white oppression" model. Irrational discrimination is wrong, as the civil rights struggle in the United States has shown. But a capitalistic republic relies on the ability of individuals and institutions to make rational choices. Neo-Marxist socialism mandates a loss of that right at grave expense, and we will pay dearly for it. Let us look at a couple issues where acknowledging human biodiversity could be of great benefit.
Unfettered immigration has taken its toll on the Southwestern Border States. California has been especially hard hit. Only a decade ago, California was the US cognitive treasure chest enjoying some of the nation's highest school test scores while being equipped with Silicon Valley and Hollywood. How the mighty have fallen. Saddled with almost $25 billion in debt with a infrastructure that is collapsing, the state was forced to close seven ERs in Los Angeles alone when they could not find their way out of the red as swarms of uninsured patients were continuously taken in.36 The state scored 44th in mathematics and 49th in reading in 2003 (out of fifty-one, including DC), among the very worst in the nation on the NAEP standardized test.37 Over one-quarter of its population is foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country, and one-third of its population is Hispanic.38 As far as even the fourth generation, Hispanics are only one-fifth as likely as the rest of the country to receive any education beyond high school.39 Leaving the discussion of why this is aside, such statistics clearly raise warning flags about the ability of the US to sustain a rapidly growing foreign-born population that tops 32 million, of which over half are from Latin America.40 Forty-one percent of foreign-born US residents from Latin America make less than $20,000 per year compared to only 16.5% of natives.41 The tax revenue derived from such an income ($5,000 as a liberal estimate) comes nowhere near covering the cost of education ($10,000 per child), road wear, police and medical services, jail facilities, and other infrastructure. With an $8 trillion national debt and unfunded liabilities of ten times that amount, the US can scarcely afford to be so profligate.42 Bring this into the debate, however, and at instant one becomes "racist" or "anti-Hispanic." The policy suggestion borne out of such a fact, however, is not one of racial motivation. Instead, it calls for some measure of merit-based immigration that is controlled so that those entering the US are both accounted for and judged to be a net benefit to the sovereign nation.
A non-violent liberal democracy sweeping over the Middle East would be a dream come true. The US has spent nearly 2,000 American lives and $150 billion to help make it happen. But given even the best efforts of a noble and effective military, is this plausible? The average IQ of Iraq is estimated to be eighty-seven.43 Income and IQ are inexorably linked, and it has been found that countries with per capita incomes of under $3,000 per year historically do not ever become (or remain if installed externally) democracies.44 Iraq totters dangerously at $3,500 and Islamic culture does not mesh well with democratic ideals.45 Hopefully it will succeed nonetheless, but such concerns should be brought up. At a recent online discussion when I did just that, the one I was debating gave this stellar response: "I cannot believe you just wrote this. You should be ashamed of yourself."46 It seems that Iraq's intellectual capital could be increased if the damaging frequency of consanguineous marriage was reduced, and Western-style leaders may be able to help ameliorate that in time. Currently, half of all Iraq men are married to someone who is a second cousin or closer, a fact that is definitely contributing to lower intelligence and a host of other problems that are borne out of inbreeding at such close proximity.47
Finally, there is the incendiary issue of eugenics. The mere mention of the word makes people uncomfortable, and with good measure. The unintended consequences could be devastating as the science fiction industry can attest to. Unless it is situated next to the word "Nazi," it is not to be found cultural Marxist media machine, as it is blasphemous. By equating eugenic practices with Nazism and "reminding people of the past it can discourage them from all else."48 But a dearth of discussion on the subject is risky as well, for in a country of 1.3 billion people it has long been taking place.
Some 91% of Chinese scientists believe eugenic practices to be beneficial.49 The PRC has in place a law calling for the "sterilization of morons."50 Of course, the Chinese hardly have a history of success in managing people, as Mao's tragic Great Leap Forward demonstrates. The idea of forced sterilization is abhorrent to the West and to most of civilization in addition to being dangerous. Yet a more humane policy in the West could be of benefit if it was kept strictly voluntary. Sperm banks charge upwards of $5,000 for the sperm of high-IQ donors, and eggs from Ivy League graduates can fetch a price of $50,000 in some cases.51 Conversely, the non-profit CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) pays drug-addicted women to become sterilized.52 These stories are buried in the news if mentioned at all yet they deserve attention as both are potentially quite beneficial. As the technology advances, affluent people are going to use positive eugenic services increasingly—by not making it a public issue, we may be dooming lower classes to an even more disadvantaged status.
To attack individuals for bringing to light contentious but important issues because the result might be damaging to an ideology or purpose is fascism. Quixotically trying to mold the world to fit a preconceived notion of how things ought to be has an ugly history: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao just to name a few. Yet cultural Marxism seeks to do just that: "It now turns polemically against individuals—in order to save every single individual religiously."53 Most who react so viscerally against the suggestion of human biodiversity as a potent factor in the makeup of our world do not have a clandestine motivation—they have simply been conditioned to believe that such a suggestion, irrespective of the evidence, must be inherently evil. If that does not demonstrate a "leveling" via secular dogmatism, it is unclear what does. I realize Kierkegaard would likely come down on the side of the illogical existentialist rather than the stoic empiricist, as the latter is the object of his criticism in Two Ages. Yet in his time it was the pseudo-scientist that was perceived to hold the monopoly. Today, the tables have turned, and people are artificially discouraged from being individualistic (that is, seeking verifiable truth) in the name of individualism. Hopefully Kierkegaard would have detested that. By keeping us locked in the aesthetic stage where we live for ourselves by the approval of others, we are barred from perceiving the truth that bubbles just below the surface. Confronting reality can be difficult and even painful at times, but ultimately the truth shall set us free.
1. Clark, Kelly James et al. 101 Key Terms in Philosophy and Their Importance for Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. p 46-47.
2. Buchanan, Patrick J. The Death of the West. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. p. 80-87.
3. Lind, Bill. "The Origins of Political Correctness." Accuracy in Academia Address. Speech delivered in 2000 at American University, Washington DC.
4. Shepherd, Victor. "Soren Kierkegaard." June 1999. 22 July 2005. <>
5. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 253
6. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Mariner Books, 1997. Volume I, Chapter II.
7. "Arithmetic Questions in a German schoolbook." (translated) Rachenbuch fur Volksschulen. Melle, 1941. (Provided me by Professor Frances G. Sternberg of The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education)
8. Sailer, Steve. "Jewish Telegraph Agency on Ashkenazi Intelligence by Cochran and Harpending." Steve Sailer blog Archives. 8 June 2005. 23 July 2005. <>
9. Owen, James. "Did Discrimination Enhance Intelligence of Jews?" National Geographic News. 18 July 2005.
10. Dr. Cochran, Gregory et al. Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. Department of Anthropology, University of Utah. May 2005.
11. ibid.
12. ibid.
13. Herrnstein and Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York. Simon & Schuster, 1994. p. 23
14. Churchill, Ward. "Forbidding the 'G-word': Holocaust Denial as Judicial Doctrine in Canada." Other Voices. Feb 2000. 21 June 2005.
15. Cienfuegos, Ernesto. "Jews are behind attacks on Cruz Bustamante and MEChA." La Voz de Aztlan. 3 October 2003.
16. Newsmax News. "Sharpton Nixed Terror Victims for Arafat Lunch." 30 October 2001. 26 July 2005.
17. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 253
18. Rorty, Richard. "Phony Science Wars." Atlantic Monthly. November 1999.
19. Sailer, Steve. "The Genetic Revolution: From Marx to Darwin to Galton." Speech delivered at Hudson Institute's Thatcher Weekend. 11 December 1999.
20. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859. Chapter Six.
21. Sailer, Steve. "The Genetic Revolution: From Marx to Darwin to Galton." Speech delivered at Hudson Institute's Thatcher Weekend. 11 December 1999.
22. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 257
23. Sailer, Steve. "Making Sense of the Concept of Race: A Race is an Extremely Extended Family." Steve Sailer blog Archives. 1998. 24 July 2005. <>
24. Entine, John. Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk about it. Public Affairs, December 1999. BBC excerpt.
25. MMWR. "Deaths from Melanoma—United States, 1973-1992." Center for Disease Control. 5 May 1995.
26. Various authors. "Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag." La Griffe du Lion. May 2004. Volume 6, Number 2.
27. "History of Women in the United States." Wikipedia. 12 July 2005. 24 July 2005.
28. Mac Donald, Heather. "Harvard's Diversity Grovel." City Journal. Spring 2005. Volume 15, Number 2.
29. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 258
30. Kelly, Janis. "Men and Women Achieve Intelligence Differently." NeuroPsychiatry Reviews. March 2005. Volume 6, Number 2.
31. Langdon, Kevin and Seaborg, David. "Sex Differences in the Distribution of Mental Ability." Noesis. November 1999. Volume 144.
32. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 259
33. Reich, Charles A. The Greening of America. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. p. 2
34. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 263
35. Parker, Randall. "Wealth Gap Widening Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics." Parapundit. 18 October 2004. 26 July 2005.
36. Andersen, Hil. "Los Angeles Votes to Close Inner-city Trauma Unit." The Washington Post. 21 September 2004.
37. Parker, Randall. "Immigrants do not Improve Academically in Later Generations." Parapundit. 13 May 2004. 26 July 2005.
38. US Census. California: 2000.
39. Parker, Randall. "Immigrants do not Improve Academically in Later Generations." Parapundit. 13 May 2004. 26 July 2005.
40. *****. "Letter to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback (R)." The Audacious Epigone. 14 July 2005. 26 July 2005.
41. US Census. Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2003.
42. *****. "Letter to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback (R)." The Audacious Epigone. 14 July 2005. 26 July 2005.
43. Wikipedia. "IQ and the Wealth of Nations." From Lynn, Richard and Praeger, Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and the Wealth of Nations. 2002.
44. Goldberg, Jonah. "Democracy in Iraq." National Review. 31 March 2004.
45. Iraq, 2005. CIA World Factbook.
46. dmbmonkey. "Question for Conservatives." Nancies.org Discussion Forum. 26 June 2005. 26 July 2005.
47. Tierney, John. "Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change." New York Times. 28 September 2003.
48. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 261
49. BBC News. "Asia-Pacific Chinese Scientists Back Eugenics." 22 October 1998.
50. Sailer, Steve. "The Coming War over Genes: Darwin's Enemies on the Left." National Post. 1 December 1999.
51. Parker, Randall. "High Intelligence Sperm and Egg Donor Prices Rising." Futurepundit. 25 February 2003. 26 July 2005.
52. Ripston, Ramona and Watt, Kathleen. "Challenging Payment-for-Sterilization." ACLU of Southern California: News and Commentary. 12 November 1998.
53. Kierkegaard, Soren. "Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age." A Literary Review. 30 March 1846. p. 268
Just days after winning the EW Scripps Co. annual spelling bee, Anurag Kashyap is on the media circuit, rehashing how he knocked the word "appoggiatura" out of the park. And he should be honored for the feat. Thankfully intellectual development is still glorified in some small way between presentations of vogue American Idol and Survivor winners.
Interestingly, the media do not mention Kashyap's nationality. At least the American media do not. To verify that he was of Indian heritage, as his name and appearance suggests, I had to go to an Indian news service. That Kashyap is Indian is not an anomaly:
This throws a wrench into the putative popular belief that there is no significant differences across various cultures and races. Indians coming in from abroad to a foreign culture do well? What about the incredible success of Jews despite suffering quite possibly the worst perpetual persecution of any group in the history of the world? Eep. We can't have all that. What about European white male hegemony and exploitation? Consequently, our media sweep these minority successes under the rug and pretend they do not exist (Grrr, why is Israel still around?). But if a problem or failure happens to involve a minority, I don't need to tell you that you'll hear about it. The debacle involving Jai-isha Akins, the five year-old urchin who was handcuffed in Florida for attacking her teacher, climbing on furniture, and damaging school property is one of countless examples. Discussing the situation on the O'Reilly Factor was Akins' attorney, CK Hoffler, who said:
He beat 272 others, including three other Indian American students in the final
four... keeping with the recent trend, that Indian American students yet again
dominated the contest. The last surviving four were Kashyap, Patel, Rajiv
Terigopula and Deri.
In the blogosphere it becomes even more conspicuous, as this tendentious piece makes apparent:
I would be naive if I didn't mention that, certainly, I wonder, I question whether if this had not been an African-American child the same thing would have happened.
I am almost physically ill after watching U.S. television news video of a 5 year old child - a little girl who "just happens" to be Black - first, being set upon by two women - both white - who purportedly are her teachers; then later as the little girl sits quietly - being surrounded and handcuffed by 3 police officers - every one of them also "just happens" to be white.
The plight of select groups is well-documented and tirelessly harped on. When one member of this group succeeds, they may selectively be spotlighted for their achievement against the odds or they may not. Fantasia Barrino, the American Idol winner who is also a single black mother, has been glorified for attacking the stereotype about single mothers. Of course illegitimacy is overwhelmingly linked with poverty and pathological behavior, but that's beside the point. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, on the other hand, has not been held up as a minority who has made her way. Most people are not even aware that she is black. Instead she draws criticism (though some, like myself, consider this praise!) from people such as Senator Ted Kennedy:
She has criticized the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the minimum wage, and fair labor laws. She's questioned whether age discrimination laws benefit the public interest... No one with these views should be confirmed to a federal court and certainly not to the federal court most responsible for cases affecting government action.And we wonder why we have a solvency problem or that corporations want to outsource. Basically, if a member of the disadvantaged group succeeds by embracing the culture that tends to fail, they become heroic. If they abandon the said culture to better themselves, they at least lose that special "disadvantaged" tag, and often become called turn-coats and Uncle Toms.
These examples are microcosms of the larger social climate. When talking about the unfair difficulties that minorities face, the media are really only referring to select groups. Those that do astoundingly well (and in fact outperform native whites) are usually excluded from analysis. As the Census link shows, Hispanics and especially blacks do not do as well as their white counterparts. However, Asian Americans consistently do better than whites. As this graph shows, the differences in income have been remarkably static, showing that some minorities have been able to consistently outperform the majority.
It is virtually impossible to find data on income by country of origin in the US, but Japanese, Korean, and Chinese American immigrants (as a group) earned 110% as much as their native counterparts. That is exceptional given that immigrants as a whole earned 11% less than natives during the same year, irrespective of nationality. Asian Americans also have a greater affinity for obeying the law than other minorities and whites. From Steve Sailer:
They would almost certainly have to. Asian Americans made up 4.2% of the US population in 2000 (the Census defines Arabs as separate from Asians). So in that 2.3% "other" category is contained Arabs, native Americans, people of numerous different races, and groups with very small populations in the US in addition to Asians. Maybe Asians are 1% of that? If so, they are only about 25% as likely as the average American to end up in the slammer, and about half as likely as their fellow whites.
Nationwide in 1997, non-Hispanic whites comprised 34.8 percent of the prisoners, African-Americans 46.9 percent, Hispanics 16.0 percent, and others 2.3 percent. Overall, the study found that 2.6 percent of the African-American adult population was imprisoned in 1997, compared to 1.1 percent of Hispanics, and 0.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The report does not break out imprisonment rates for Asian-Americans, but most experts believe Asians tend to be imprisoned the least of all major groups.
Asians are the best example of minorities succeeding and subsequently being ignored by the media machine. As Randall Parker summed in one his recent posts:
But it is not just Asians. Within large categories there is huge variation in the amount of success that different subgroups attain. A recent report from the Pew Hispanic Center showed that Cuban Americans have a net worth about fifteen times greater than Hispanics from Central America and the Caribbean.
What is missing from the above report? Asians. South Asians. East Asians. They live in the United States. But to the leftist intellectuals who write about ethnic groups in America they are largely invisible. Why? They are inconvenient. They do at least as well as whites economically and yet they are not white.
Why the differences? Cultural and genetic differences come to mind. Indians, for example, place an extraordinary emphasis on education. From Confucian morality, the East emphatically stresses a respect for superiors. If a student in Harlem mouths off to a teacher, he's likely to become a class hero. If the teacher tries to discipline him, she may end up facing a lawsuit or getting a fist from the boy's father. In Singapore, however, the little whelp will be ostracized by his peers and receive a caning from the teacher. The hip-hop culture promotes misogyny, anti-social behavior, violence, irresponsibility, and drug-use. Couple that with a home environment where no father is present, and you have the recipe for an out-of-control kid who is not going to be able to compete with Anurag Kashyap.
Genetics is another factor that is often dismissed. Just for suggesting that something so obvious has an effect often leads to one being branded a racist. But we know genes are hereditary, and race is nothing more than an extended family. Here are the estimated average IQs for a few countries that may shed some light:
Hong Kong--107
South Korea--106
It is much overdue for the public discourse to move from the blank-slate, egalitarian belief that people (and groups) are all the same beyond the pressures of their external environment to face the realities of human nature. It is also past time that the politically correct belief in moral equivalency be discarded. Hip-hop and classical music are not different but equal. Nor is liberal democracy as a political philosophy equal to theocratic authoritarianism. Finally, laying the failure of some select groups on the shoulders of the majority is self-defeating and illogical, as many other minority groups surpass the majority in a host of ways.