I think Steve has argued that national media has more incentive to rile people up in nowheresvilles like Ferguson than in places they themselves live. The Eric Garner killing and protests were not covered with anywhere near the intensity that Michael Brown was, for example. Living in New York, there are always police killings of unarmed guys (Sean Bell was a particularly famous one from a few years back, since he was killed on his wedding day) but they almost never cause the nonstop coverage of some of the recent deaths that inspired BLM protests.

The media is in a coordination game with each other– once something becomes Big News, everyone has to cover it– but there are lots of events that are in the middle, where individual organizations have a fair amount of discretion and the media can coordinate about how much to push it.

Also, in terms of national consciousness (ie, how many chin-stroking think pieces and academic dissertations and paragraphs in school history books come out of an event) there’s even more discretion still. Kent State (or the Boston Massacre for that matter) are both huge events in national consciousness; each involved the death of four people. Are they *intrinsically* more important than many other events? Hard to say– they have been made to mean much more, and so at this point they matter quite a bit.

I have trouble drawing the line between “local tragedy that happened” and “part of broader pattern of lawlessness that needs to be discussed” but it seems like last weekend’s attempted assassination of two cops in roughly my old neighborhood of Philadelphia (he walked up to a police car and shot the nice black lady officer sitting inside six times; she happened to be wearing a vest, and two shots went off of her gun; then he shot four more people on the street, killing another woman, and then shot another cop, who also sustained minor injuries) has been more or less ignored outside of local media, but it seems to be part of an unfortunate pattern of people deliberately deciding to shoot cops; they found a letter on him explaining his plans. The knock-on effect, I assume, of this and the other two cop shootings in the neighborhood will be lower-intensity policing in the neighborhood and increased street crime.

To make the iStevey point– West Philadelphia has had a lot of gentrification in the last couple decades, and there’s a lot of money riding on it not turning into West Baltimore, not to mention the progress of the last two decades in reducing crime. So probably all the more reason for the media not to make a ruckus about these things as they go down.

There’s an interesting question about whether American unmanned space exploration and JPL in particular has continued to make progress even as NASA manned space flight has crashed and burned (American astronauts go to the ISS on Russian rockets now) in part because it was more resistant to PC BS.

There’s a question in economics about whether industries need to be really competitive in order to create incentives for the market leader to innovate or if it’s enough for there to be potential entrants and potential competition.

Google seems a good example of how potential competition might work for a good long while, but in the long run, the monopolist or near monopolist stops putting as much thought into making its little customers happy and starts worrying mainly about making its biggest customers (the government and regulators) happy so it can stay a monopolist.

The Google for Education video they showed at my kids’ school last year was really funny, and relates to this post. “Who will make the inventions and discoveries that will change the world? Not this guy, or this guy” and then a series of Stale Pale Males in grainy black and white shots- “Maybe it will be them or them?” And then lots of vibrantly diverse kids solving scientific problems by building Legos or making Oobleck or elephant toothpaste or whatever.

Here’s the problem with Kahneman’s work, or more precisely with how it is interpreted. If terms of evolution, our capacity for conscious, effortful thought (System 2) and our capacity for quick intuition of the “Linda must be a feminist” type (System 1) must have come from somewhere. But most of that “somewhere” wasn’t situations where the two systems were in direct conflict. To avoid getting eaten by a leopard, it is helpful both to notice leopard-shaped shadows (System 1) and remember that the pile of shit you saw fifty yards back was still fresh (System 2.) But since Kahneman only looks at places where the two systems are in direct conflict, he can only tell you about their -relative- strength under different circumstances, and not all that much that’s interesting about either one. RQ ends up being a test of Asperginess or conscientiousness instead of rationality in general. Here’s a review paper of dual process cognition, and it shows that outside of conflict-between-systems situations, the capacity for rational, effortful cognition is, surprise surprise, correlated rather more strongly with IQ- http://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Classes/Methods%20(3610)/Old%20Sections/Fall%202010/Fall%202010%20Project/Evans%20(2003).pdf
(And also that some forms of problem solving can be done reasonably well by most people with low IQ, but precisely where System 1 cognition is engaged and there is a low level of abstraction.)
As for why Kahneman’s work has been so endlessly ballyhooed, you can look at it two ways-
A) In our present modern environment, our instincts (System 1) really are constantly in conflict with our rational side (System 2). Figuring out the nature of this conflict is the only way we’re going to stop ourselves from eating and drinking ourself to an early grave, texting while driving, and so on.
B) Many different actors in the society have a strong incentive for ordinary well-educated people to view themselves as fundamentally irrational. First of all, it’s an essentially passive pose- “oh, we all make these mistakes, and all need correction in these matters.” Second, and more importantly in recent years, it helps convince well-educated people to accept a scope of government that treats everyone as equally incompetent.

It seems like there are two different contributing factors, right: how bad American architecture got after 1970 and particular issues where African Americans appear to be underachieving in many artistic fields even relative to their own pre-1970 accomplishments.

I don’t know how much I hate the new African-American Museum versus don’t like it very much. The Air and Space Museum is kinda ugly on the outside: http://images.greatergreaterwashington.org/images/201501/121938.jpg but it’s so much fun on the inside http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/washington-dc/images/s/national-air-and-space-museum.jpg that who really cares.

I’m told the newish (from early 2000s) Museum of the American Indian is just dreadfully dull. Some colleagues took our students from NYC down there soon after it opened, and it’s just full of bad contemporary art by Indian artists. Which is a shame, since lots of Indian artwork and culture is really fun. (I love the Northwestern Coast Indian room in the American Museum of Natural History, for example, where all the Totem poles and carvings look just huge in person, and are really well set up against each other: http://payload248.cargocollective.com/1/15/482153/7262757/hall-of-northwest-coast-indians_dynamic_lead_slide.jpg )

One of the problems with political correctness is it ends up leaving out the good parts of even the cultures it’s supposed to be celebrating.

Yes, this is right. David Brooks’s only good idea was pointing this out, in Bobos in Paradise, but the execution wasn’t great, and nobody had any incentive to believe him anyways. But just acknowledging that liberal politics are the Establishment would be a big step forward for the country.

I tried to make this same point quantitatively here: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/interaction-effects/

If you have a process that actually involves the interaction of multiple variables, if you only observe cases which clear some threshold of one of those variables, it’s likely to appear to be relatively unimportant in explaining your phenomenon.

CBGB on Bowery, where the Ramones played their first shows, closed a few years ago; that whole area, which was pretty scuzzy a few decades ago and was artsy-cool not too long ago, is now surrounded by Frank Gehry-lite towers of ultra-luxury apartments. So for example right now, you can buy a 6.7 million apartment across the street from where the Ramones did their first shows, or 7.9 million around the corner:

http://m.trulia.com/for_sale/40.72418947015556,40.72609614934246,-73.99321183346962,-73.99120017670845_xy/18_zm/2p_beds/map_v

A friend of mine who lives in West Philly calls the way you change your behavior and no longer feel at ease doing your old things after being the victim of crime, “the Tax.” The Tax is an underrated portion of the costs of crime.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-tax/

Toobin’s wife, a Verizon exec, gave a bunch of money to Teach for America and they hosted a couple hundred of us in their penthouse the week before I started teaching; I ended up talking with Toobin, not knowing who he was; someone brought up the Clinton impeachment and I said something anodyne about thinking impeachment wasn’t the right response but that Bill Clinton’s behavior was reprehensible, and Toobin became very animated in denying this. I didn’t realize he had just published a book defending the Clintons (“A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”)
He was a personable enough guy; I’m not surprised he got on TV eventually. He wanted us to know how much he hated being a lawyer and how much more he enjoyed being a writer. Marrying money has its benefits, and he probably had had the opportunity to observe Patty Hearst’s mother’s milieu-or the East Coast equivalent- up close.

I mostly agree with you on this but I think it’s about diminishing returns as much as the unique challenges of high school; this is a summary of the most recent large scale evaluation of KIPP, and you can see (p.2) the high schools had large impacts for new students, small/insignificant impacts for kids who had already been in KIPP middle schools. Basically, being in an intense academic settings once is enough to get most of what you are going to get from it.

https://www.mathematica-mpr.com/-/media/publications/pdfs/education/kipp_scale-up_ifbrief.pdf

I think it’s plausible but by no means assured that kids who enter kindergarten more well-prepared will adjust to school better and be generally more successful even if their long-run IQs are unmoved.

There’s a story I think of whenever Steve brings up the kidnapping line in this headline. In the mid 2000s, I was walking through Central Park on a beautiful weekday in summer, and I saw first one, then another, then another group of all-black campers in different matching t-shirts, being led by young blonde women in their 20s, presumably to or from the natural history museum or the Met or the Zoo. Then, immediately after, I saw an even more common sight: first one expensive baby carriage, then another, then another, with white infants being pushed by a different black nanny. Admittedly, the nannies were probably all West Indian and the kids were probably mostly American black, but it did seem as through we had complicated something that could be simpler.

The “Wisconsin welfare magnet” hypothesis/fact about Wisconsin that Steve discusses was a part of official reality up until the mid-90s, when (I guess) everyone decided that welfare reform meant that problem was over for better or worse. Official reality insofar as even liberal UW professors were writing things like this:

http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc133c.pdf

that don’t really dispute the basic pattern, and local think tanks put out things like

http://www.wpri.org/WPRI-Files/Special-Reports/Reports-Documents/Vol2no8.pdf

to gauge how much that pattern was costing the state.

Sorry, “time for wins.”

Yeah, my older daughter has definitely organized quasi-formal foot races with her friends. She races and beats my son enough that my son will sometimes say, “okay, time for wins,” when they get off the bus and it’s time to race home.

I think the big issue with these lists is that moviemaking is basically for kids or for adults who want to watch kids’ genres these days. Critics want to assert that film is still an adult medium, so they pick movies that not only seem sophisticated but would be specifically impenetrable or depressing to anyone younger than a certain age. No Country for Old Men isn’t even one of the Coen brothers’ five best films, but it’s their most nihilistic, so it gets the most praise.
I can think of several movies since 2000 I left thinking, “that was a great movie”
Memento/City of God/Kung Fu Shuffle/Gravity/How to Train Your Dragon/School of Rock /Ponyo,
and other movies I love because I liked them to begin with and I’ve watched them a bunch of times with my kids (Fellowship of the Ring, a few of the Harry Potters, Jurassic World, etc.)
But obviously I’m watching in a different frame of mind than a movie critic.

I’ve tried to talk about the small business set asides in federal contracting and why they’re so nuts (they get put into ginormous contracts no small businesses could possibly do, with the result the small businesses is just a potempkin front for a big corporation.) but when I tried to explain it to people, even reasonably well informed people, their eyes glaze over.

Of course, I’ve also thought about how many of the little boxes I could check off if my wife and I started a one-house federal consulting company and whether getting in on the scam, as a patriotic American, is better than complaining about it.

I meant more in terms of what the ultimate consequence of open borders would be in Europe/the US.

I don’t think any of it needs to be a conscious plan, I just think that “cheap workers” is not really the motivation anymore, and “Democratic voters” is only secondary.

I think it was on the menu since the 90s, as Bill Clinton’s quote suggests, but the real push comes because 2008 scared the shit out of the people who run the world.

Here’s how I see it. The way rich countries especially the US work is by using the productive capacity of the society as collateral for huge amounts of debt, that then the rest of the society can use to consume enough to keep the productive sectors of society working (and the productive sectors of other countries.) But in 2008, everyone had to stand up and face the fact (that goes a lot deeper than just housing debt) that a lot of the money moving the water wheel of capital flow forward is just never ever going to get paid back, because the people spending it just don’t have that much future earnings under even optimistic readings.

Maybe there are some more rational resolutions to this problem- the most durable it seems to me would be to convince richer people to have bigger families, which would increase consumption among people who could conceivably pay their debts. But there are various reasons why the Powers That Be don’t want this to happen, not least because rich people themselves don’t by and large want big families, but also because if the middle class had bigger families they would be much harder to push around ideologically and politically.

So what’s the solution? Instead of importing millions of Central Americans who will each be given $500,000 on debt that they’ll never pay back, we’ll import tens of millions of African/Middle Eastern/South Asians, who each will be eligible for benefits worth a fair chunk of change without needing quite as much highly leveraged debt. If they just up their consumption to vaguely Western levels without putting the whole Rube Goldberg machine in jeopardy, then the plan is a success. That they’ll also usher in a one party state doesn’t hurt, of course.

I see a lot of people online saying anabolic steroids prematurely age your face. Usain Bolt looked more like a guy on a lot of PEDs this time than previously, to me.

He’s pointed out reasonably enough that he was very very fast before he could have plausibly been juicing, as a teenager. But that was four years before he started breaking records.

There was an article in one of the economics journals several years back that argued that the more kids a Member of Congress had, the more conservative they were, but holding the number of kids constant, more daughters meant more liberal (particularly on feminist issues) and more sons meant more conservative.

I’ve wondered sometimes what would have changed if the Obamas had a son; I think it would’ve spelled the eventual doom of his political ambitions. For one thing, as Chetty’s research suggested, growing up in somewhere like Chicago is better for girls’ outcomes than boys’- the Obamas would hear about enough church friends’ sons getting into trouble that they’d eventually move to the burbs. For another, Barack is competitive enough that I think he’d want his son to be really athletic, especially with the competition from Michelle’s brother’s family. So some of his drive might have got pushed into traveling teams and Saturday games.
Last, the Obama family wouldn’t have seemed as “safe” to white voters in 2004 or 2008 with a boy as with two girls. So hypothetical Obama left the State Senate in 2002, is a vice-president of something or other in Chicago, is a fair amount heavier, became pretty critical of President Hillary in 2010 from the right instead of the left (though only in safe low key settings), thought about registering as a Republican in 2012 to run in his suburban congressional district, but decided against it, and drives in every other week to Trinity to feel “connected to the community.”

Yeah, I think it’s plausible that the kind of multiplicity of identities for white kids (combined with narrowed identities for black kids) was a product of a particular time and place- in my case, as Steve remarked, a liberal college town with a huge black-white income and test score gap in the early 90′s. I didn’t invent this observation- you can look up “Nice Education Professor Lady” books with titles like Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria (https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria/dp/0465083617 ) and Jocks and Burnouts (https://www.amazon.com/Jocks-Burnouts-Social-Categories-Identity/dp/0807729639 ) that talk about them in more, albeit politically correct, detail. But I will maintain it was something I noticed and discussed- nervously, jokingly- with friends, because it was pretty obvious.

One thing to note is that two books Obama mentions loving as a young aesthete- Ellison’s Invisible Man and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks- are about doing what he did (choosing a black identity) although he had, one might argue, more of a choice about it than Ellison or Fanon did. Steve’s book about Obama (as well as Obama’s book itself) goes into this general issue in a lot of detail.

Are you saying that high school kids don’t notice there are differences in social grouping by race or that they don’t think it’s funny?

You’re not anti-viral, Steve, you’re viral with a very long delay.

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether political connections with higher levels of government are really a double edged sword for cities. That is, you tell voters you’ll get them money from the state or the feds, but that keeps the kind of voters who want handouts, while upwardly mobile people are harmed not just by their less industrious neighbor’s sticking around but because subsidized housing development creates a housing glut that makes it impossible for homeowners to accrue equity.

Chicago’s big philanthropic resources might add to this problem, by pouring more money into the South Side that keeps families there who would be better off heading for greener pastures.

I wrote about this in the context of Trenton, which is sort of a tiny toy version of “screwed up black-majority politically-connected city.”

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/trenton-makes-the-world-takes/

Phoenix Dobson would be a good name from a 30s cowboy movie; even Phoenicia Dobson, too (in opposite roles.)
The issue isn’t really about commonality versus creativity as how much cognitive load the name puts on someone, and how well the whole thing flows together. I had a college roommate who was mixed Sicilian and black (not in the way all Sicilians are) and he had a “Giancarlo Stanton” type name that most people didn’t find too difficult, combined with six different Italian middle names he’d roll out once in a while to impress girls. But Italian words flow into each other without any trouble, and his last name was even more common than Stanton, while Phoenicia and Habebe and Dobson and Mouad are hard to fit together mentally as well as to say out loud. Presumably, she’s a mixture of upper middle class English and Arab, and her parents wanted to proclaim that mixture to the world when it was still novel. And there’s a tradition in English books of aristocratic characters with comically long and awkward names (Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall for example), but while Digby-Vaine-Trumpington is long and funny, it’s not that hard to say.

There are some cultures where the impulse towards common names goes a little overboard: I had a class in the Bronx with three kids named Luis Garcia, all of whom had dads named Luis and two of whom had brothers named Luis (sort of a George Forman thing.) Everybody called them by their middle initial, sometimes by itself with no first or last name at all.

There was a fairly honest NYT article about the disappearance of the black caddy a few years ago: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/sports/golf/from-a-symbol-of-segregation-to-a-victim-of-golfs-success.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

I think they misunderstood it, but I’m no golfer: black guys don’t want to work in subservient roles anymore, and white golfers don’t want to show off that they have a black guy in a subservient role, so even though the salaries have increased, there’s little incentive for both parties to make it work.

There’s a broader question about whether making American blacks extremely conscious of status has directly hindered their job opportunities, aside from whatever preexisting dispositions existed before the full run of the Civil Rights movement.

The juxtaposition of Tim Kaine with Barack Obama last night was a reminder that most politicians are really terrible at the “my story is the nation’s story” shtick that’s been Obama’s bread-and-butter for the last twelve years.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/the-hr-departments-perfect-candidate/

Bill is good at sounding off the cuff because he really is talking off the cuff a lot of the time. He spoke to a group of Americorps volunteers I was in, in 99, right after Columbine, and he veered off topic to connect us to the massacre in a way that was pretty funny in retrospect. (“Those boys in Colorado had beef; all of us got beef, I’m sure all of y’all have beef with something or somebody, but it’s a choice of whether and what we choose to do with it,” was the flavor as I remember it.)

Obama was great at giving candidate speeches in 2007-2008 because he’s really, really fascinated with himself. The whole thing was also, to be frank, a pretty interesting phenomenon; I saw him speak in West Philly a few weeks before the election and it was thousands of people crammed into a few blocks of quasi-ghetto street corners and I think there was a real sense of everyone there of wondering whether a black guy was really going to be elected President.
He’s been a mainly undistinguished speaker as President, due largely to repetition and an absence of new themes, and because he tends to coast and preen when he feels like he’s winning. I liked the 2010 State of the Union and the second 2012 debate; in both cases recent political setbacks (losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in 2010 and performing terribly at the first 2012 debate) put him back on his heels a bit and made him a little more interesting and invested.

Length isn’t actually all that closely related to readability, which is more about how closely ideas are connected to each other within the sentence. The founding fathers and their era of writers often had a quite clear prose style (adjusting for changes in vocabulary and ideas about the world), and of course sentences like this one are hardly impenetrable:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The current elite has to pretend to love Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, remember (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/the-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture.html ) lest they be accused of being sexist snobs. Watching something that even mildly nods at more complex interests while extravagantly assuring them of its own suitability and wokeness is evidently a strong stimulation to the mind of a 2016-era patrician, like watching Frozen was for your average 6-year-old girl. (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/hamilton-and-shared-experience/ )

Yeah, there probably are lots of places more liberal than the Twin Cities, Seattle among them; I just get the sense that the Twin Cities are particularly earnest about it. I’m guessing the flash fire there this past month will just intensify that commitment.

The Twin Cities are also interesting because the Somali there are among the few African immigrant communities who aren’t economically selected- refugee status meant we got a more representative picture of the broader population. Seems like a useful tool for understanding the future.

My sense is that Minneapolis/Saint Paul is more earnest about the Diversity and Inclusion stuff than almost any other city.
For example, most cities try to have “commitment to racial equity” as a slogan on different school initiatives, but they don’t create a whole separate Department within their school system for it:

http://www.spps.org/equity

Reminds me of the 2007 murder of three Newark college kids, by all accounts total innocents, who were hanging out in a schoolyard during break when some moronic wannabe Sinaloa members showed up. Luckily a fourth kid survived and there were some convictions as a result.

There are probably good reasons to take gang violence more seriously than regular ghetto idiocy, since it pulls in innocents more often.

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2013/02/survivor_of_newark_schoolyard_1.html

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/chilling_details_emerge_in_new.html

Even though it was more comic and less tragic than Ferguson, the Irving, Texas Clock Boy incident was also about the Feds using media attention and the threat of civil rights law to assert greater control over a local government prerogative.

I still think the best take on Coates was this from John McWhorter:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.html

I bring it up because I think fundamentally, while all of us are predisposed to religion as human beings, some people and groups are more predisposed; until recently, blacks spend far more time in religious services than other groups (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/black/ )
My sense, however, is that church attendance for black men has fallen off a cliff (my wife and I intermittently attend a predominantly black church and it looks to be 6:1 female to male everywhere but the pulpit and the choir.) My guess is that for people like the Baton Rouge killer, the seductions of other manias- whether BLM, or alpha/beta silliness, or Africana pilgrimages, or “I’m a modern-day Budokan warrior” stuff- is much greater now that that old time religion has been displaced from regular life.

I also of course think that the abandonment of civic religion- call it citizenism or patriotism or just “all lives matter”- is a dangerous thing as well, leaving far too much room for other garbage to creep in to our civic space. (This is something I wrote about Christian rhetoric and civic/bourgeois identity in the civil rights movement and its aftermath: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/the-beloved-community-and-the-bourgeois-society/ )

Erica Garner isn’t as educated or polysyllabic as a lot of the Black Lives Matters advocates, but I listened to a short interview with her on Brian Lehrer’s show and came away very sympathetic to her for a few reasons:

A) Her brother’s story is probably the saddest of all of these.
B) She actually spent some time talking about some (putatively racially blind) methods that could conceivably, possibly, reduce police homicides.
C) I think she actually cares about the issue, rather than just seeing it as a way to get more Diversity Czar jobs for black Yale grads and get white 20-somethings to pull the knob for Hillary in the Fall out of guilt. You’ll notice that her behavior here is the biggest downside to the event for Obama/Hillary, because as ghetto as she’s arguably acting, she’s entirely correct that it was a farce that is exploiting pain and grief for political ends.

Well, Carlos Marcello ordered the hit, but I don’t see New Orleans being called the City of Ordering Hate.

Ignatieff’s scholarly reputation is based in good part on a readable but bland biography of the readable but bland Isaiah Berlin, the Fox and the Hedgehog guy and a wealthy Russian Empire Jew of Nabokov’s generation who decamped for Oxford after the Bolsheviks started their stuff. He became a perennial prize winner at Oxford, was Churchill’s eyes in Washington during the War, and then became a ubiquitous essayist and scholarly voice on the BBC, radio and TV. The paradigmatic immigrant who becomes more British than the Brits.
Ignatieff’s book about him has two highlights- in one, Berlin goes back to Soviet Petersburg/Leningrad and meets with Anna Akhmatova, the aging romantic poetess; they talk all night long but apparently don’t do the deed, and she especially seems to have fallen in love with him and written various encomia to their night of talk for years afterwards. The other good part in the biography is when Churchill’s wife invites Irving Berlin, the Brooklyn-born songwriter, to dinner and Churchill thinks he’s sitting with his man in Washington. (“What has your greatest contribution to the war effort been thus far?” “I dunno, White Christmas?”)
I’m not certain if Ignatieff’s biography is the reason the fox and hedgehog distinction became a big fad a couple years ago (538′s logo is the fox, from it) but the funny thing is that almost everyone wanted to be a fox (“knows many things”) rather than a hedgehog (“knows one big thing.”) This is silly because in practice these would-be foxes know at best one big thing (538′s is supposed to be, “trust the data,” or maybe just “average the polls”) and because in the original fable, knowing many things is how you get caught by the hounds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Cat_(fable) )

It would be good if Ignatieff decided if the one big thing he knew was that we live in a world of nations with borders, but everything in his own life and in the life of his intellectual subjects has taught him that borders are just there to be crossed.

It’d be nice if some mainstream folks admitted Steve got Obama right in 2008 when everyone saw him as a postracial figure. I’ll hold my breath.

Is there anything you feel like you misjudged about him? Obviously there are issues like WWG and WWT that swept in that werechard to predict beforehand. Anything about the man himself?

The image originated at 4chan /pol, and is pretty clearly intended to say she’s bought by the Jews. Trump probably didn’t see it that way when he tweeted it, of course.

Madison was 78 percent white in 2010- somewhat more white than the country as a whole, but not the extreme outlier that the rest of the list is.

I’ve thought a lot about why and how Madison was so very, very laid-back to grow up in, and even now when I visit there are a lot more kids running around by themselves than on the East Coast, where I live. It made for a happy childhood, but on the other hand, a good number of my smart, middle class childhood friends were pretty strikingly downwardly mobile, at least until they got their act together in their mid 20s and finally went to college or whatever. So the Tiger Moms aren’t 100 percent wrong.

Yeah, the “Hamilton! the Musical” crowd finds itself in a tenuous social position vis-a-vis the society at large, as well as other blacks. They have to convince white people that they’re worth listening to and inviting to Aspen Ideas (http://c8.alamy.com/comp/EWT177/aspen-colorado-usa-30th-june-2015-ta-nehisi-coates-senior-editor-for-EWT177.jpg ), which can only work if racial oppression is a constant mortal danger. But they also have to convince black people that they’re the right ones to be speaking for them, which, given the craptastic results (http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/images/2015/11/blogs/graphic-detail/20151128_woc522_290.png ) from most of this Mau-Mauing, is a challenge in itself.

I’m not sure that it will all fall apart all that quickly, though. The Aspen Ideas folks seem to feel that the Victim Olympics is the best bread and circuses they could hope for.

Here for example, is Samantha Power, one of the most powerful people in the world, talking to graduating Yale students, some of the most privileged kids in the world, about how hard they and she have it:

Of the 15 permanent representatives sitting on the UN Security Council — where I have the privilege of representing the United States — I am the only woman.The UN is currently in the process of selecting a new Secretary General — a position that, in its 70-year history, has never been held by a woman. Not long ago, I was discussing the race with another ambassador to the UN, and I made the point that it is important that women be encouraged to apply. In response, the Ambassador asked: “Do you want to look at a pretty girl or do you want someone who can actually get the job done for women?” I was shocked. But perhaps I should not have been.
My point is not that the UN or Yale have done a particularly poor job of advancing women’s rights. My point is that the enduring inequalities we see in institutions like these reflect systemic injustices that persist in our societies — to the detriment not only of the people who are subjected to discrimination, but to all of us. And acting as if we have overcome these entrenched biases is part of the problem.
To the vast majority of you, this is obvious.To some of you, it is something you have experienced personally. You may come from a country where you cannot openly practice your religion without risking attacks or persecution.You may have felt it on this campus — when the gate to your residential college was closed and locked as you walked toward it. You may have felt it living in a college named for a man who once argued that enslaving your ancestors was a “positive good.” You may have felt it upon hearing U.S. politicians call on our country to ban people of your faith. So when you hear people claim that the work is finished, you say: Not for me, it’s not. Not for us.
And some of you who have poured a lot of yourselves into these and other struggles over the past four years might look at all that remains unchanged and feel discouraged. Whether that’s inside Yale, with the name of a college that did not change, or a faculty that does not look nearly as diverse as you and the rest of America do. Or outside Yale, in the horrific situation faced by refugees, whose situation only seems to get worse despite all that you and your peers have done to try to make it better.

Recall that one of the things the BLM-involved graduating seniors of Yale have done to make “it” better was to force out two faculty members because one of them had the temerity to say that the college shouldn’t be dictating what students where for Halloween.

To be fair, this is a job he was much more qualified for than mayor- he did something similar in Minneapolis and was a lower level admin in Baltimore before. The job would normally be in charge of all the teacher hiring, firing, training and evaluation for a district, so it’s considered pretty important; 165K would be what I would have expected for, say, NYC or LA, and is possibly high for Baltimore, but Baltimore does spend more per kid than any city in the country.

There was an interesting and perceptive if histrionic socialist critique of DeRay and BLM a few months ago:

http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2016/02/beyonce-slays-black-people/

A relevant essay summarizing just why the “race doesn’t exist” stuff is harmful as well as wrong:

http://quillette.com/2016/06/23/on-the-reality-of-race-and-the-abhorrence-of-racism/

One of the striking things that everyone has pointed out about the Brexit vote was how aligned with age the voting was, with over 55 going 70% for Leave and under 25 going 75% for Remain. This is nothing unusual– we’re used to talking in terms of generation gaps and age-specific economic and cultural interests.

What does seem to me a profound change in the world is the simple fact that the leaders of both major political parties and pretty much everyone respectable in British politics was firmly on the Remain side– ie, on the side of the young. This reminded me strongly of something the French novelist Michel Houellebecq said in his interview with Paris Review this week:

“I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.”

You could say that the old people voting “Leave” are responding to this depression with meaningless, symbolic nationalism. Or you could say that they recognize that the globalist, EU elite feels deep contempt not only for national identity but for them as aging representatives of vanishing culture. But it seems like a remarkable thing that political respectability has moved from the domain of the old to the young.

Steve has written about this at various times, but it’s really striking how different California’s racial consciousness was in the 50s and 60s from the rest of the country; that was part of Willie Mays’s story (my dad grew up in the Bay Area worshipping Mays). I was looking up something and ended up watching a 1957 montage of local San Francisco TV news ( https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/189592 ) and there’s one part where the Governor of the US Virgin Islands comes on as part of the Debate on Segregation and talks about how much he valued being in integrated schools in California growing up. Racial progressivity was something Californians were obviously expected to be proud of even in 1957.

(My favorite book about education and race, The Way It Spozed To Be, about teaching school in a black school in Oakland in 1958, makes clear that while the school is a mess, it’s not because of material deprivation or obvious discrimination. It’s very short and might be of interest to iSteve readers- pdf here http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/hendron.pdf )

I think while undergraduate affirmative action works mostly the way you’d expect it to (i.e., it puts black students in schools that are too competitive for them, but the colleges are still mostly grabbing the best black students they can get), affirmative action at other levels is actually more irrational still. I’ve seen quite weak students get into top grad schools because they knew how to talk the intersectionality lingo just right, while strong students, if they applied to fields like literature where there’s a fair amount of black applicants, struck out because they made the mistake of acting like they wanted to study Dostoevsky and Kipling instead of comic books and Chimamanda Adichie.

Coates was a quite good magazine journalist, within his narrow beat- his 2007 Cosby article and 2008 Michele Obama article were both fine, and I even liked Fear of a Black President. But there was an enormous pent-up desire for an authentically black public intellectual who said the things people wanted to hear- no wishy washy Glenn Loury or John McWhorter or Roland Fryer. (It was a lot like how Piketty became a #1 bestseller with a quite boring book saying the same thing as any number of magazine articles about inequality, simply because he was an Official Economist saying it.) All the better that Coates was a college dropout, and one from West Baltimore at that- the one ghetto neighborhood in America that, thanks to the Wire, every Goodthinking journalist in America knows well.

(A lot of the Ta-Nehisi Coates phenomenon of 2009-2015 was about how he related to other journalists. I think if you hang out on Twitter you realize there are twelve quadrillion journalists and would-be journalists all sweating each other, terrified that they’re going to get fired, jealous of every big “piece” that comes out but anxious to be seen as praising it, and so on. Ta-Nehisi Coates is, well, “like crack” to that precise demographic; he’s black and authentic when they’re white and all went to Vassar or Brown; he reads long books about distant history while they are all hysterical about the news of the last minute; he writes lyrically and is willing to make calls and interview sources while they all use the same jokey Vox/Buzzfeed/Slate lexicon, short sentences and do most of their interviewing by e-mail; he had a convivial (and then hagiographic) relationship with his blog readers and commenters while they are constantly shouted down by thousands of angry anonymous comments. Undoubtedly, he also offers something to the broader culture, but you have to see him as a choice of other journalists first (in a time when, due to the changing economics of media, journalists have more readers but less money and security than ever before.) The last piece is that he was unusual among journalists in talking with historians, and his blog had a lot of historians commenting for a while; it gave him a particular cheering section within academia that could expand rapidly.)

It’s funny that WEB DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) gets a cite there, too: it’s a good book, but I’m not sure the relevance.

I’ve been thinking that the last few years have been the final overwhelming victory of DuBois’s Talented Tenth (eg, Sotomayor and Obama) vision over the last vestiges of Booker T Washingtonism.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/du-bois-and-washington-yesterday-and-today/

“You can’t really mean that…Germany got fascism from Italy?!”

Umberto Eco’s passing was overshadowed, perhaps, by so many other famous deaths the first half of the year. One of the ideas from his essays that stuck with me was that intellectuals have trouble responding to events in real time, since they want to think things through first. He said that in response to the First Iraq War, which he felt hadn’t been interrogated or criticized much, and it seems like, since then, intellectuals have either gotten better at having something to say right away, or have given up on thinking things through.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/umberto-eco-and-the-hot-take/

In another dimension, the Atlantic published this same kind of getting-to-the-bottom-of-things article right after Rolling Stone published A Rape on Campus. Maybe we can have great, skeptical reporting on art frauds because it’s one of the few types of fraud that aren’t fully insured by ideology? This New Yorker article about another fraud isn’t quite as much of a roller-coaster, but it’s definitely worth reading (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/12/the-mark-of-a-masterpiece )

The main difference between Umberto Eco and most of these fabulists is that Eco knew a ton of history, while I get the sense that even the Harvard professor in this story knows very little. Ideology ends up taking up more and more mental space, and you go from “a feminist perspective on” accepted historical processes to just outright ignoring the historical record to never learning it in the first place. Which is too bad, because while knowing history is no protection against believing false and destructive things it would at least make for more imaginative inventions.

I was in a grad school teaching class with a guy who had recently come back from Afghanistan, and was at Toro Bora when we lost Bin Laden in December 2001. What he said, which matched reporting I read later, was that they were ordered not to advance on Bin Laden so as to allow the Afghan troops to do it themselves. They f-ed it up, and Bin Laden vanished into Pakistan.

Point being that even in the initial phase of the Afghanistan war, the crazy idea that we were going to turn them into a functional state had already messed with our ability to get anything done.

Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan in 2002, The Places In Between, is quite good. I don’t remember him mentioning the pederasty thing, though.

There was a Department of Defense intelligence report about Pashtun homosexuality/pederasty that became unclassified through Wikileaks in 2010.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/tolerance-and-freedom/

You’re right, I’m sorry about that (though I don’t think the play suffers from knowing what’s coming; horror versus surprise, I guess you’d say.) Equus was my high school drama teacher’s favorite play, and as he used to say, all the Greeks going to the Festival knew perfectly well who Oedipus’s mother was, before the play even started.

My wife told me this morning that she’d seen a quote from Shaffer not too long ago, calling whoever smuggled out video of Daniel Radcliffe’s nude scene in Equus a “creep” (fairly enough.)

That’s a spoiler of another color, though.

Amadeus is all about creative jealousy, which Shaffer presumably knew something about, and while Equus is about a lot of things, the attractions of difference (cross-species, in this case) and the fear of others knowing what is in your head (which twins maybe feel more keenly) are definitely in there. Here’s the climax of Equus-

After Jill dresses and walks out of the stables, the still nude Alan begs the horses for forgiveness, as he sees the horses as God-like figures. “Mine!…You’re mine!…I am yours and you are mine!” cries Equus through Dysart’s voice, but then he becomes threatening: “The Lord thy God is a jealous God,” Equus/Dysart seethes, “He sees you, he sees you forever and ever, Alan. He sees you!…He sees you!” Alan screams, “God sees!” and then he says “No more. No more, Equus!” Alan then blinds the six horses in the stable with a steel spike, whose eyes have “seen” his very soul.

Some economists studied the Houston Section 8 lottery; the applicants who won the lottery and received the housing voucher committed more crimes, mostly assaults. Men who won the lottery were twice as likely to get arrested than men who applied for Section 8 but lost. Basically, since spending the voucher is fungible with other spending, you can get drunk (or high, perhaps) more often if you win than if you don’t, and consequently get in more fights. The voucher had no effect on women’s propensity to commit crimes.

https://economics.nd.edu/assets/153486/carr_jillian_jmp.pdf

This is consistent with other findings that transfers fungible with cash tend to increase crime in the short term (aside from any increases in the long term due to “welfare dependency,” change in culture, etc.)

The key character development of the movie “Creed” was from beating up black guys outside the ring to beating up white guys inside the ring.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/creed/

Muhammad Ali strikes me as evidence that Jensen’s “Level 1″ intelligence is better understood as heuristic-based or subconscious processing than as literal recall. Ali could be insightful, even creative, within a narrow band of topics and situations, but presumably had no ability to abstract outside that, the Level 2 intelligence that IQ tests evaluate. I also think there might be some tradeoffs between fast visual processing of 3D objects and fast 2D processing, that might have made him especially predisposed to illiteracy. The IQ test was correct as far as it went, but everything’s not IQ.

My wife saw him in Times Square once- the stretch limo pulls up, the window goes down, an enormous head with a big smile leans out, the crowd of people waiting to cross 42nd street goes suddenly wild.

Roger Ebert’s essay about watching Rocky 2 with Ali is quite good, and doesn’t have the hagiographic quality that things written more recently have: http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/watching-rocky-ii-with-muhammad-ali

Vigilante justice and the irrationality of the mob (for example, in the Monorail episode) are big themes in the Simpsons. They also were big themes in early 20th century literature, like Light in August and All the King’s Men. There must have been something (or things) about the 50s-80s consensus that pushed it out of people’s minds. To Kill a Mockingbird might be a counterexample, but I both think the understanding was that mob violence only happened in “places like that”; also, in the book, the lynching is pushed to the background, and the danger that is pushed on the reader is the isolated individual who kidnaps the kids and who Boo Radley saves them from.

It might be an interesting connection to the Kitty Genovese case– mid-20th century (Northern) Americans were constantly being told they were too apathetic or too given to accepting authority (as in the Milgram experiment), not that they were too given to collective emotion. The media was much more worried about people checking out of the common culture than giving into it fully.

Jacobs was very insightful, and the Le Corbusier idea that you could create cities out of nothing was clearly wrong. But I do think that Jacobs’ followers overapply the insights they *want* to hear and totally ignore the insights they don’t want to hear (for example, how dangerous it is to build additional “affordable housing” when housing is already pretty cheap:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/in-the-long-run-demand-curves-slope-down/comment-page-1/ )

Other key factors include the destruction of numerous lower class white neighborhoods by “urban renewal”-
I know this is the story of these days, anything bad that ever happened in New York was the fault of Robert Moses and his set, but it’s just so silly when you actually look at it. Stuyvesant town has the exact same design as most of those housing projects that are thought to be so destructive, despite staying middle-class and desirable for about 50 years.

Besides, places like Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem were, as Steve pointed out, very convenient to Manhattan jobs while boasting really nice underlying housing stock. For example, I was just visiting yesterday with some friends who bought and rehabbed a BedStuy brownstone, and this is clearly a house that was beautiful when it was built in the 1800s- Brooklyn is overpriced now relative to the commute, but it’s not some collective hallucination that makes people want to live there.Instead, the minute you could imagine living in the place without worrying about your kids getting beat up walking to the corner store, middle and upper-class people moved in.
In contrast, right after visiting our friends in Bed Stuy,we drove over to Corona Park in Queens, because my son wanted to see the Mercury and Gemini capsules they have there. Man, what a dump. You can say that it’s because it’s obviously all recent Latin American immigrants living in the area,but the underlying housing housing stock not to mention accessibility to Manhattan just isn’t there. Maybe someday it will get gentrified, but unlike Harlem or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights, it doesn’t happen merely because the threat of violence is removed.

This isn’t just for picturesque brownstones either. Lots of the huge public housing projects on the FDR drive in the lower East side have been quietly converted to million dollar co-ops, again the instant crime went down. These were exactly the “Garden City “design that Jane Jacobs urbanists constantly rail about as destroying neighborhoods and creating crime, but they are plenty safe and desirable now, thanks largely to various illegal police tactics and the “excesses of the carceral state,” as they say. (Other friends live in one of these converted buildings, and the building may be ugly, but the views are phenomenal.)

It wasn’t urban renewal that did it, it was the people urban renewal brought in, the malfunctional culture that mass cash welfare encouraged, and the unwillingness to throw everybody who broke the law into jail.

This is about as open a statement as I’ve seen that people advocating for immigration fundamentally don’t believe the immigrants will be productive workers; the goal is for them to be consumers of private goods and public services, as well as voters of course.

$5 million seems far too low to be the true value of the BB King estate; I’d guess the trustee is lying.

Even if people don’t buy albums any more, I can’t believe that no car company is ever going to use “Tired of Your Jive” or “The Thrill is Gone” or (more appropriately, perhaps) “Paying the Cost to be the Boss?”

BB King is kind of interesting as a foil to Willie Brown, since his lyrics tended to be a one man War on Women and their various claims and demands and betrayals. But classic blues is from a world in which black relationships, at least in the common culture, involved an expectation of commitment that could then be failed, rather than no expectation of commitment at all.

When I used to teach science to New York City 7th graders, I would do one pure lecture a year (7th graders aren’t going to sit still for a lecture, in general), about stages in hominid evolution. The kids liked it– I had a bunch of slides of different stages of hand axes and skulls and archeological sites, and then of Cro-Magnon art and technology.

I made a big deal about how Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans, and had some evidence of ritual behavior, but that we were able to displace them with greater group coordination and probably more advanced language. That was before we knew that AMH had interbred with Neanderthals, and more specifically before we knew that some of the students would have had Neanderthal ancestry and some would have none.

Not sure I’d teach that lesson the same way any more.

I don’t think it’s impossible that the Google Doodle is all just, as the biologists say, protective coloration. The company knows perfectly well that the abilities it needs among employees aren’t evenly distributed across populations, but supporting Black Girls Code and putting Maoist not-quite-revolutionaries on its Doodle are public obeisance to the dominant ideology to stop interference with the things it really cares about- hiring the smartest dozen programmers to come out of Stanford each year, or whatever really makes a difference.

She’s Andrew Gelman’s sister (the statistician/blogger).

It’s pretty typical for black and Hispanic kids to get steadily darker between birth and age seven or eight or so. A pre-schooler’s skin tone would be more helpful than a baby’s, but if you didn’t see their parents, it wouldn’t be a great guide to how they’d look as adults.

One thing that’s confused me is…gay marriage, for better or worse, was the culmination of decades of propaganda and social change. I mean, you had “Philadelphia” and “Will and Grace” and lots of other high culture and low to let you know that gay tolerance was really, really important. And while I’ve probably known more gay people than most, almost everyone has gay acquaintances in their mid-level circle. Even the fact that most adolescent boys tease each other about homosexuality at some point or another suggests that it’s an important topic. It’s not just out of nowhere. The SCOTUS argument from last year’s decision, that gay marriage arises in part from the historical development of straight marriage into its present egalitarian, companionate form, isn’t wrong. You can, ala Rod Dreher, see gay marriage as hugely consequential or harmful without seeing it as a huge leap from what came before.

But World War T is none of those things. It had none of the long-term cultural buildup, none of the connection to most people’s ordinary lives. It just arrived, ordered by the Megaphone. Boom, Caitlyn in a centerfold. It felt artificial.

I mean, I used to teach in the East Village. Most of the hippy-dippy parents there would have backed some kind of accommodation to whichever boy decided he was a girl that week– for that school, in that neighborhood, with some discretion for the school to figure out implementation. But ordering this in Alabama, or Wyoming, or even the South Bronx, displays a breathtaking yen for power.

Rhetoric in the NY Post article is a bit overblown, but characterization of the policy and the (missing) evidence behind it is correct.

a) We have no reason to think MTO will help recipients vs. existing Section 8. The original study said it didn’t, and Chetty’s update (linked here) is pretty unconvincing. (The one of his colleagues I heard present this work said, “we think moving in general is damaging in the short-term to kids, but moving to wealthier areas eventually has some long-term benefits.)

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/the-problem-with-moving-to-opportunity-in-one-nyc-map/

b) Why force poor families to move when they don’t want to? This is about pushing families to leave their neighborhoods, not just enticing them.
c) Everyone knows jobs and opportunities are moving to the cities. Do we just not care about poor people finding work anymore?
D) As for low-income kids, the evidence for integration by race or SES is quite mixed. There’s not a magic bullet here. https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/diversity-and-student-achievement/
e) The most important obstacle to this plan, of course, is that *majority* of kids in the country are low-income as defined by FRPL status.
f) Even if being a poor kid in a *very* low-poverty school is on average helpful to some outcomes, you run out of such schools very quickly.
g) In 1970s, last time the push for forced integration came, you had an 83% white non-Hispanic country: a lot more integration to go around.
h) Can’t help but feel political force behind this- and a lack of opposition- comes ultimately from declining birthrate of the bien-pensant.
I) While suburbs are routinely characterized as nexus of wealth & privilege,everyone knows cities are where it’s at.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/the-metropole-calleth/

J) It’s also just strange how little opposition is encountered by plans to make poverty programs more paternalistic.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/all-men-are-created-equal-is-about-the-rules-of-the-game-not-the-quality-of-the-players/

K) Between Bloomberg (and cigarette regulation) nobody really cares about freedom of the poor to make what their betters consider mistakes.
L) But now, apparently, choosing to stay in a neighborhood with your friends, family, and (most likely) more job opportunities is a mistake.

The second half of that Samuels/Weiner Tablet interview more or less confirms my suspicion that part of Matthew Weiner’s obsession with imaginary anti-Semitism in his 1980s private LA high school comes partly from not wanting to feel left out of the Holocaust.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/to-be-a-jew/

The NYC comparison was even more ridiculous: Moving to Opportunity moved recipients from 112th street, right off of Central Park and a short ways from, say, The Dakota or Columbia University, to wait out in nowheresville Bronx. The idea that you were “undoing concentrated poverty” this way was loony.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/the-problem-with-moving-to-opportunity-in-one-nyc-map/

I first heard about the race-toned emoji last year, during office hours for a college class I was teaching. Two black students were sitting doing practice problems (and playing on their phones), and one looked up and said to the other, “look! black emoji!” and then excitedly tried them out. (This student may or may not have appeared in one of the Black Autumn videos that Steve posted this past fall.)

At this point, I came dangerously close to talking myself out of my second job: “Oh that’s too bad- I liked it when everyone was just yellow. This seems like a way of making people even more conscious of race all the time…” and then corrected myself, “but of course people want different options. Let’s look at those practice constrained optimization problems.”

The Atlantic article is interesting in admitting that any sign of highlighting one’s own white identity is disfavored. Like my knee jerk response to my students, it seems to be walking up to the line of pointing out that every non-white group is encouraged to celebrate/overemphasize its own group difference, while whites are encouraged to hide and softpedal theirs. Then the author walks it back, because 2016 and because The Atlantic.

It may be irrational, but where I’m from the Sandy Hook massacre was a big deal. My kids’ school is locked from the outside now, for example, and you have to present yourself in front of a video camera before you’re let in.

Granted, this is more Acela country than hunting country (although a few of my neighbors walk through my backyard to get to the train tracks and then to the open land where they can hunt, a few months a year), but I wouldn’t say all the concern about guns is displaced from concern about minorities.

Meh, these aren’t fights she expects to win, at least legislatively (executive actions might be a different matter), they’re fights she wants to wage, because they keep suburban white professionals and middle-income Hispanics on the D side of the line.

The policy that the Dems actually expect to get through are probably Chetty’s inclusionary zoning/Moving to Opportunity-style programs, police reform/drug decriminalization/sentence lightening, and mandatory maternity leaves and child benefits. Making suburbs poorer so the cities can keep getting richer, emptying the jails and reenfranchising the parolees, and making sure the gender wage gap is still big enough to run on in 2020 and beyond (maternity leave has its benefits, but it pretty much assures slower career advancement for those who take it.)

The insight is that Section 8 vouchers -increase- crime among recipients; it’s a lottery, not a cross-section.

I stayed with friends in one of these new, upper middle class majority-black (I saw multiple white families) developments in Atlanta in 2007: the houses really were well built (much nicer than the McMansions I’ve been in in the North from the same period, maybe because of lower cost structures), the woods next to each house were very pretty, the neighbors were excited to visit each other and hang out.

But the combination of greater family instability and reversion of income to a lower mean is a bad one-two punch; and a layoff and an ugly divorce later my friends were short-selling their house three years later, in 2010. I had heard they could hardly get anything for it, relative to what they paid.

Jillian Carr is a smart young economist who doesn’t seem averse to uncongenial conclusions in her work. In her PhD thesis, she used a randomized lottery to show that men in Houston who received Section 8 housing vouchers were roughly twice as likely to be arrested in the months following, presumably because the voucher was fungible with cash (which could be used to get drunk and then get in a fight, for instance.)

https://economics.nd.edu/assets/153486/carr_jillian_jmp.pdf

Interesting. I wrote something after Prince’s death arguing that cultural icons are much *less fey* than they used to be, perhaps as a result of the opening of officially recognized alternative sexual identities.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/shakespeares-prince/

Tycho Brahe was actually a good example of the challenges of applying Occam’s Razor in practice. He avoided fully accepting the Copernican system mostly because he was keeping very careful observations (one of the first modern astronomers to do so systematically) and they didn’t fully match circular orbits, while he could use his various kludges (epicycles, sun around earth and planets around sun) to make them work. Then Kepler took his data and used a slightly different Occam’s Razor- elyptical orbits in heliocentric system- which worked perfectly.

Reading Watership Down was the first time I remember thinking about there being such a thing as a political system. The chapter with the rabbits living in the “fake” warren, kept fat and well-fed by the farmer who left the carrots and then periodically disappeared by him, made a big impression on me.

We have oodles of semi-wild rabbits in our backyard, who eat up the dandelions and eventually draw hawks and the occasional fox to re-enact suburban Wild Kingdom.

Steve’s main goal as a journalist, as I interpret it, is to say things that many or most people are thinking but not saying, because ignoring everyone’s obvious intuitions is a problem, both in the way of forcing people to talk further and further around the observable truth and more importantly by creating incoherence in how people think, as they try to resolve cognitive dissonance.

For what it’s worth, one of the things that keeps me away from many alt-right sites is a frequent focus on relative attractiveness of different races, particularly since I don’t share the same preferences as most commenters. That said, in this case, pretending physical attractiveness is not on the minds of people imagining the use of the new $20 is just a lie.

The government has both good reasons and bad for wanting to discourage cash and encourage credit, so in some ways having an unattractive currency is a feature, not a bug.

The rise of Hamilton and the fall of Jackson is, as Steve has documented, a pretty fascinating case of the power of identification (and live performance.) That is, Hamilton presents a quadruple-threat of identification to the Diverse, Rich, and Powerful, like Michelle Obama: they related to the performers and to the hip-hop infused music (because Diverse!), to the Founding Fathers Characters (because Powerful!) and to the other members of the audience (because Rich!)

I gab on a bit about this here, and tell about the time I got quasi-arrested by Turkish police in an ancient Greek theatre ( https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/hamilton-and-shared-experience/ )

If you ever spend a few minutes in his presence, Elliot Spitzer is obviously an enormous asshole, especially to women. The choking accusation didn’t surprise me at all.

This is a side-note, but I’ll rush to redeem Kipling from inclusion in this list of august but arguably naïve figures of Orientalist artistry:

Or, perhaps, to know the cabdrivers of Rotherham and Malmo is to become disillusioned with the pleasant Orientalist fantasies of Delacroix, Kipling, Mozart, Verdi, and Byron?

I think that Kipling understood India as well as someone with a fairly open mind and moderately rich experience of the country could be expected to. Perhaps a century of explosive population growth and misgoverance has made the subcontinent more chaotic, but the country of Kim was still pretty recognizable when I travelled around in 2003.

Most of the people on this site probably aren’t going to a lot of kids’ movies, but for what it’s worth, I loved the new version of The Jungle Book, and thought it was quite true to the spirit of Kipling’s original even if it is based nominally on the 1967 cartoon. (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/the-jungle-book/ )Manohla Dargis’s negative NYTimes review was a masterpiece of know-nothingism: “It also feels strangely removed from our moment,” from the woman who thought that “Trainwreck” was great cinema; she also made the hilarious allegation that “The Law of the Jungle” was intended to be a metaphor for *British rule*, when it’s perfectly obvious that, to the limited extent that the Jungle Book is about colonialism, Mowgli is the British, trying to learn the “Laws” of the Indian social Jungle.

The lack of avariciousness and imperviousness to temptation by luxury by the people running the world is, I think, an underappreciated problem. Our society produces a lot of bounty, and even a cynical powerful person who just wanted to live the good life might be disposed to just keep things on an even keel. But someone who doesn’t care about material things- because of a lifetime of educational socialization to value prestige over material luxury, because the Internet is partially displacing the enjoyment of the physical world, and most of all because of falling birthrates among the upper class, which reduces the desire to provide for your near ones- can screw things up almost without limit.

One of the interesting patterns in recent decades is that the people who are a Thing (and who need to be a Thing to be listened to) have expanded from, say music and movies to politics and journalism. That is, identity politics isn’t just about basing your politics around identity, it’s about basing identity around politically-salient categories, and consequently we’ve increasingly taken to say, awarding the Nobel Prize to people like Barack Obama and Malala Yousafzai for what they represent as a symbolic token rather than any clear action, for being the Thing that the ideology requires.

Here’s one (potentially) relevant data point: when I taught a few blocks from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, during some of the Yankees’ best recent seasons, the Hispanic 70% of the student body was, not surprisingly, obsessed with baseball, but the black 30% were still all about football and basketball.

It’s actually a pretty good example of how local or neighborhood culture can exaggerate national trends but has a hard time going directly against them.

If this election were in a Troloppe novel, it would have all been planned long in advance in someone’s Scottish estate. Oh wait, it was:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/scotland/article3606892.ece

Just think: he paid 150 grand and learned nothing, but if he’d paid the same amount and gone to a real American college in 2016, he might have learned less than nothing.
He got a good deal!

My local science museum had an amusing mural of Copernicus in the demonstration theatre:

https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/696129845491855361

It’s really painful how the NYTimes tries to make the Green/LaCour study into a boring case of “problems with data” rather than outright fraud and fabrication. I think that theme- of prestige media deliberately making sleep-inducing what in truth is quite juicy and scandalous, is one of Steve’s greatest insights, though once it’s pointed out to you it’s amazingly obvious and pervasive.

The Betsy Paluck (she’s worth a google image search) Trans-acceptance study may not be fraudulent, but it does seem like another case of Social Science with its Comedy mask on instead of Tragedy mask (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/social-sciences-two-masks/ ). Every Comedy ends with a marriage, it used to be said, but perhaps in the future, every Comedy will end with a surgical slice.

There’s a somewhat surprisingly large portion of the Bronx that is still majority white: http://www.lehman.edu/deannss/bronxdatactr/discover/ETHCONa20.jpg

More surprising is that there are now next to no majority black areas in the entirety of the southern half of the borough, since they are all majority Hispanic. The South Bronx was never Harlem or Bed-Stuy, but this seems like an undiscussed transformation.

FWIW, apparently my experience was a relatively early incarnation of one of the Children Defense Fund’s current programs. (Which makes me wonder if the lady yelling at us because of the kid who graffitied his tag onto a wooden bench was Marian Wright Edelman.) Apparently, they do the Haley Farm curriculum with college kids and graduates rather than on high schoolers, or maybe we were just an abortive experiment. I’d guess the warnings about the Klan continues:

http://www.childrensdefense.org/programs/freedomschools/

Not sure if I’ve told this story here, but in 1999 I went as a chaperone with a group of high school kids to Alex Haley’s farm in Tennessee as part of a summer program the School District of Philadelphia was organizing, where high school kids would be trained to act as tutors for elementary kids for summer school. I had been organizing some similar, smaller-scale tutoring programs for Americorps, which I guess is how I got the gig ( https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/philadelphia-stories/ ).
Haley’s “farm”, which is now a fancy training camp, looks like a beautiful liberal arts college without the dorms, and the Southern food was great. The kids were pretty well-behaved, too: I had a mostly-Hispanic crew from Kensington, and they had obviously been chosen to be the kind of poor 16-year-olds you could take on a plane and have stay in a hotel without havoc breaking loose; some of the other kids were a bit more adventurous, and me and the other chaperone camped out in the hall and turned back a few boys making a run for the girls’ rooms in the middle of the night; there was also one graffiti incident, but otherwise pretty uneventful.

What was more interesting was the design of the training itself, which had zero to do with how you help a seven year old learn to read, or whatever they were going to be doing that summer, but had a lot of I-Stevey elements in it, partly the mesmeric focus on the Civil Rights movement (the theme was somehow that these kids were going to be running “Freedom Schools” through their tutoring, analogous to the 1964 Freedom Summer), partly the insistence on Afrocentric elements (there was a Swahili call-and-response with hand gestures the kids resolutely refused to do), in spite of a good portion of the kids being Hispanic and not particularly African-affiliated, but mostly because the trainers kept bringing up the KKK. It was a way of frightening the kids, who mostly hadn’t been out of Philly, into not wandering off (“This part of Tennessee is a national center for the KKK, and we know for a fact that there have been rallies just a mile from this farm,”) as well as an all-purpose historical explanatory tool.

It was a fun time- great biscuits and gravy, as I said, and we watched a good part of Eyes on the Prize, which in spite of how done-to-death the Civil Rights movement is in our consciousness, is a really impressive set of documentaries. But I don’t think I understood until that trip how much people love love love talking about race and racism, probably because it’s more fun than talking about the more complicated things you have to do tomorrow.

My proposed amendment to Sailer’s Law of Counter-Contrarianism is that things that are praised to the skies are the things that *artfully* advance the Spirit of the Age. They’re pretty good, by-and-large, but they are hyped because they promote Megaphone values efficaciously.

For example, with children’s movies: Pixar made a series of quite brilliant movies starting with Toy Story and proceeding through Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and several more. But some time in the later oughts, their movies began being praised absurdly highly even when they weren’t all that good, because the Bay Area guys making the movies understood implicitly exactly What Reviewers Want. For example, “Wall-e” understood that reviewers didn’t just want an environmental message, as many previous kids movies had given, but a healthy dose of scorn on fat, lazy middle Americans, and their Walmart shopping, George W Bush voting selves (Fred Willard, the only live action actor in a Pixar movie I can recall, is clearly supposed to be GWB). The film had undeniable artistic elements (the silent beginning, the robots’ space dance), but it was praised to the skies because it provided the scorn combined with artistry that reviewers craved.

Contrast with, say, the first Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, or Big Hero Six- all brilliantly executed, often beautiful films, but without the microtargeting to the People that Matter that have made recent Pixar movies so oversold.

As Sailer’s Law would predict, movies that are terrible but appear to support the Spirit of the Age, like the Annie remake, are still panned, but it’s mostly because they are a bad vehicle for their intended values.

That speech by Hillary reminded me of the recent Star Wars, which I guess was sorta like “Hamilton” but for the people who can’t afford $800 ticket prices (really, I’m not kidding, that’s what the tickets are going for.)

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/star-wars-and-identitarian-power/

Yeah, at the time I thought, “well what about aversion to birth control?”

Tattersall and one of his colleagues wrote a pretty good children’s book that I read to my kids about using genomic data to understand human evolution (http://www.amazon.com/Bones-Brains-DNA-Evolution-Wallace/dp/159373056X) and the new version of the AMNH’s Human Evolution Hall they designed (with Elliot Spitzer’s family money) focuses a lot on genes, but my guess would be he views genetics more as a data source for understanding relationships than as the active process guiding things along. There was this funny coda to the remembrance he published of Stephen Jay Gould several years back (http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/perspectives/112413/remembering-stephen-jay-gould ):

Tattersall: There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation. As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

In 2007, I went with a group of science teachers to some workshops led by the bigwigs at the American Museum of Natural History. The curator of vertebrate paleontology went first, talked about the biological species concept, and we talked some about how bacteria made this concept so problematic- they can exchange DNA with each other even when they’re not closely related.

Next came Ian Tattersall, a great physical anthropologist who presented a brilliant hour-long lecture on human evolution culminating in the Lascaux caves and other Cro-Magnon artifacts. I loved teaching evolution, so I’d already seen a lot of them, but he really tied everything together in a coherent way. Then, he said, in a not hidden note of relief- “and now thanks to the Blombos caves in South Africa, we have evidence that symbolic reasoning dated from 75,000 years ago in Africa, not from the later Cro-Magnon dates in Europe.” And he showed the not-entirely impressive (particularly after the range of Cro-Magnon art) marks on ocher that were found at Blombos. And he said, by way of wrapping up, “we can be sure that no human evolution is happening now, the population is too big for any directional selection in the past many thousand years.” It was only too clear that he was emotionally invested in the idea of a global, biologically undifferentiated human species. In spite of his vast knowledge, his dispassion about results ended at the moment at which presently-living human beings split off from one another.

More recently, it occurred to me he might have been directly responding to Cochran and Harpending.

I wrote something related today, though I called the replication crisis “social science’s Comedic mask” and the repetition crisis “social science’s Tragic mask.”

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/social-sciences-two-masks/

Of course, in an ideal world we could resign ourselves to the things that cannot be changed; though, I suppose that Tragedy is all about resigning yourself to the inevitable.

If all the people holding views that most non-idiots once held are now deemed idiots, two possibilities.
A) Evidence discrediting those views became available and universally acknowledged, such that only an idiot would still hold them.
B) Incentives shifted such that if you care about not seeming like an idiot, you no longer can hold them (or be seen to hold them).
Humans so good at conforming- & intellectual conformity has so many benefits- that it’s just about impossible to distinguish between the two possibilities. That’s why genuinely intelligent people can choose to believe so many silly things.

On the other hand, Trump has been acting like a buffoon for going on four decades now and has little reason to stop now, so he can walk right through the fourth wall and keep on going.

I did a riff about the “Black Rocky” thing here: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/black-rocky/

In short, in the original “Rocky,” Rocky and the other white characters are already kind of black.

I think Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign is the white, late middle-aged version of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign.( https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/2016-is-1988/ ) Of course, if he wins the nomination, the analogy is totally off; but even if he loses, I think he’ll influence the long-run development of the GOP, just as the Democratic Party has been ever-more tightly reconfigured into the image of Jackson’s ’88 “The Rainbow Coalition” campaign.

I was listening to an audiobook of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at 3 o’clock in the morning last night (I know, it’s a wild and crazy life I lead), and there was this passage that stuck out to me:
“Usury” [to Aristotle] means all lending money at interest, not only, as now, lending at an exorbitant rate. From Greek times to the present day, mankind, or at least the economically more developed portion of them, have been divided into debtors and creditors;debtors have disapproved of interest, and creditors have approved of it. At most times, landowners have been debtors, while men engaged in commerce have been creditors. The views of philosophers, with few exceptions, have coincided with the pecuniary interests of their class. Greek philosophers belonged to, or were employed by, the landowning class; they therefore disapproved of interest. Medieval philosophers were churchmen, and the property of the Church was mainly in land ; they therefore saw no reason to revise Aristotle’s opinion. Their objection to usury was reinforced by anti-Semitism, for most fluid capital was Jewish. Ecclesiastics and barons had their quarrels, sometimes very bitter; but they could combine against the wicked Jew who had tided them over a bad harvest by means of a loan, and considered that he deserved some reward for his thrift.

With the Reformation, the situation changed. Many of the most earnest Protestants were business men, to whom lending money at interest was essential. Consequently first Calvin, and then other Protestant divines, sanctioned interest. At last the
Catholic Church was compelled to follow suit, because the old prohibitions did not suit the modern world. Philosophers, whose incomes are derived from the investments of universities, have favoured interest ever since they ceased to be ecclesiastics and therefore connected with landowning. At every stage, there has been a wealth of theoretical argument to support the economically convenient opinion.

I’m beginning to wonder if the cultural shift against finance and the 1 percent (ala Piketty or Sanders) has less to do with any kind of the upwelling of shared sentiment than that the governing rich themselves (and university endowments and even corporate portfolios) have so much of their wealth tied up in land, and the relationship with credit and finance is like what Russell describes historically for landowners. Certainly, the Davos set isn’t *afraid* of Piketty, and is happy to encourage his views, which suggests that he isn’t actually a danger to their interests.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/aristotle-usury-and-land-in-the-21st-century/

My theory about this is that places like Trenton basically have a resource curse problem like oil states: the state government pays big wages and throws around money in general, which keeps a sufficient portion of the population in a rentier state and stops more competitive businesses from moving in. Public services get showered with dough (Trenton schools get over $22,000 per kid) but are terribly administered because the local pols have enough cash to be secure in their jobs without any kind of accountability (until the feds belatedly show up to indict them.) Poor people stay or even move in, because of the endless availability of poor people stuff, but you don’t get the stabilizing influence of working two-parent families or the creative influence of gentrification, because of the available of better suburbs and more interesting cities just around the bend.

Oddly enough, both Scalia and Alito were more-or-less from Trenton, as is (despite his Brooklyn claims), Jay-Z.

DC proper (as opposed to the Maryland/VA suburbs) until recently was an example par excellence of this, though thanks to the growth of Big Deep State, it has pulled out of its perennial funk and just become a place for rich young people with a lot of dangerous spots.

Right- I think Scalia managed to maintain the imprimatur of old-school respectability while pushing forward conservative thought, which is an increasingly difficult feat:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/scalia-and-the-battle-royale/

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see anything to get upset about here. They are extremely powerful people, and they (consequently, in part) have nice lives. Of the various potential ways for them to be corrupted, teaching a few silly classes in exchange for a summer in Salzburg sounds pretty innocuous.

I made some related points in this post about the Chetty-inspired push to move more poor kids to richer schools– you run out of rich schools pretty quick. Due to differential fertility, kids are already considerably poorer and less white than the country as a whole:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/diversity-and-student-achievement/

The David Coleman-designed Common Core tests have unsurprisingly widened the Gap, which I assume is because they are more g-loaded:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/the-g-loaded-common-core/

Yeah- we refied with Quicken, and they’ve been a better lender than the original issuer of our mortgage, but it was pretty crazy when we were thinking about moving this past summer and went ahead and prequalified for another mortgage, they called us constantly, asking when we were going to close, yadda yadda yadda, for months. At one point, the supervisor of the nice young woman who had been calling us began calling us himself to ask if she’d been doing something wrong that we weren’t moving ahead with the loan. I said, “no, like we’ve been saying, we don’t even have a house we want to buy, stop calling us,” but they kept calling us until the loan expired. There’s a lot of money sitting there that they are desperate to loan out to someone with decent credit and a verifiable income, but there aren’t that many such people these days who aren’t already carrying their maximum possible debt load.

The solution, if the money doesn’t find a more congenial home, will probably just to encourage people to lie, the way they did last time- I’m not sure if you wrote about Atif Mian’s recent fraud papers, that use the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago as a case study- it seems like perfect ISteve bait but maybe I missed it:

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/magazine/summer-2015/how-fraud-fueled-the-housing-boom-and-increased-poverty

Yep, looks like I fell prey one of the classic blunders– thinking that Hamilton was the reason for the “natural born citizen” clause is prominently featured on a “Myths about Hamilton” web site.

(The classic blunder being, listening to your family member the legal historian when legal history is on the line, since that’s where I heard this, in a recent conversation about Ted Cruz’s eligibility.)

The reverse gender gap is real and growing, and is a reason why black social statistics don’t really tell a coherent story- black women’s earnings keep going up, black men’s keep going down:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/disaggregating-by-gender/

I’ve thought about this some with regard to the PUA/Game phenomenon. It emerged after I was already married, but from what I can tell, it’s a mixture of techniques to assert masculinity for young men who- both in response to the general culture and by dint of how they were raised- are uncomfortable doing so; it’s also a way of convincing men to accept the terms of the low-stakes, low-commitment sexual marketplace so they can survive in it. Described as such, it seems pretty innocuous.

I was reading this article, though (http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/jared-rutledge-pickup-artist-c-v-r.html ), about a man who successfully used the techniques and was generally liked and viewed warmly by the women he dated, but who began trying an identity in the PUA world, which was found out (to the women’s great consternation, given the coolness with which he described them online.) He was subsequently ostracized from the Asheville community and shut down his business.

At one level, the culture is completely hypocritical, in that engaging in behavior is rewarded but describing dispassionately what you are doing is censured. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that overall, he would have been better off keeping some of his illusions and getting married long ago, rather than pursuing a dream of strings-free promiscuity that was bound to end badly one way or another.

Now that I’m pushing 40, my single friends are often a cautionary tale, some of them lonely and some of them- the successfully promiscuous ones- self-destructive.

I wrote about this (and the subsequent dust-up between Philip Cohen and Bradford Wilcox over it) here:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/why-have-marriage-rates-declined/

The “natural-born citizen” clause was introduced into the Constitution mostly to keep out the West Indian-born Hamilton, whom none of the other Framers could stand.

Guy was a genius, though.

There was a good essay (somewhere… I forgot where) that argued that progress in science originates less from shifts in methodology than from successes in defining homogenous objects. That is, genetically identical mice living in labs have a lot in common with each other, so we’ve made a lot of progress in genetics thanks to genetically-identical mice. But genetically-identical mice living in labs aren’t really all that much like people, so their utility in understanding human disease is constrained. Similarly, enzyme kinetics of a given protein and substrate is pretty much the same one time and the next, so we make progress defining and understanding it. But we don’t have a whole bunch of identical Earth’s atmospheres to mess with and manipulate, so climate is a fundamentally harder problem. Same with understanding how to influence people- not only do they learn and adapt to your attempts to influence them, but they are all different from each other anyway.

One large and related advantage of natural science over social science in advancing our understanding of the world is not just the relative durability of natural science theories but the relative constancy of those theories’ parameters, the constancy of the constants. The speed of light and the Boltzmann constant and the estimated heat absorption of a CO2 molecule have all changed less since 1900 than the elasticity of labor demand in low wage markets changes from one National Bureau of Economics Research paper to the next.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/constants/

Obesity and SSI-disability receipt are perhaps the best predictors of the county-level White Death rates. Alcoholism and suicide must be part of the package, too:

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/correlates-of-middle-aged-white-mortality/

My general thought about the Black Death is that it follows a collapse of the (within-community) conservatism of many black leaders that probably contributed to some of the fall in crime rates since 1999; it’s worth noting that for example the NAACP largely supported welfare reform in 1995. The last few years have been about an institutionalized and collective forgetting of the hard-won lessons of the social disintegration and crime wave of 1969-1989 black America (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/the-beloved-community-and-the-bourgeois-society/ )

I’ve admired Bob Trivers since reading his early papers on the evolution of behavior (and his very well-written textbook on Social Evolution) in my senior year of college. I didn’t know about his Jamaica or Huey Newton connections then. Although I never became a famous evolutionary biologist, I’ve had a few parallels to his life in my own, and I shared his stories of murderous Jamaica with my mother-in-law to deflect her attempts to have us move there. I’d agree with one of the commenters above that the thrill of the possibility of violence in your vicinity (even if you yourself are not so inclined) is something that young men often enjoy and that palls somewhat as you age, for most people but perhaps not Bob; I remember distinctly that a few weeks after my oldest was born I was in the corner store in Crown Heights buying milk when a group of young and argumentative men walked in and started yelling at each other; the slight feeling of anxiety was just tiring.

I moved to the suburbs soon thereafter.

Just so you can all mock me when I turn out wrong, I’ll lay down a marker:

Trump will not win the nomination. The only thing that matters is who gets their supporters to show up and vote. Trump won’t do it.

What makes someone vote? It’s not a belief that their individual vote will make a difference, because it almost definitionally won’t. It’s instead a belief in certain institutions and a desire to stand by them. For evangelical conservatives or older African-Americans, this is generally their church. For union workers, it’s their union. For middle-class home owners, it might be investment in their community. For Obama voters in 2008 in Iowa, there might have been a general euphoria that allowed him to unseat Hillary, but there was also a lot of well-executed college activism and get-out-the-vote organization that got people to the caucuses.

Trump is almost the opposite. His appeal is exactly to people who feel abandoned by mainstream institutions, and mainstream institutions are in no way eager to help him out. Churches aren’t going to help him, unions aren’t going to help him, college Republican groups aren’t going to be driving kids to the polls.

If you imagine a distribution of a latent variable of propensity to vote, you could have different thresholds for actually voting in presidential elections, congressional elections, primaries, and caucuses; those tend to be very correlated; the little old ladies who take my signature at my polling place have probably voted in every county commissioner election since 1965. What isn’t all that correlated is general political affect or beliefs. I’m sure lots of poll respondents are perfectly sincere in their support for Trump, but I think he will disappoint them (or maybe they will disappoint him) when the primaries actually roll around and the votes are counted.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/trump-will-not-be-the-gop-nominee/

This was my problem with the new Star Wars- that every casting choice was so clearly laden with 2015-era political significance. The whole point of sci-fi and fantasy is escapism from our current cultural milieu, but in spite of some good scenes, the movie kept telling me the galaxy far far away was engaged in a titanic battle of Hillary’s Democratic Party versus the Space Nazis.

Castro is certainly a possibility, but I have a moderately strong feeling it will be Booker. Running against him in the Democratic primary for Senate were two popular House members, both of whom are personally quite close to Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi almost immediately endorsed Booker (in the first week of the race, I think), and signaled to other prominent Democrats to do the same. In some ways, this is justified by the fact that he was a more prominent figure than his opponents, but it seemed more likely to me that he was thought of as a strong VP choice for 2016, were he a Senator, given the importance of African-American turnout in the last two elections.

There’s a meta/methodological point here, that Steve has made a few times in different ways, but I think is worth drawing out. That is, the reason the NYTimes is doing this analysis of young adult white death rates is because Case & Deaton found the remarkable rise in middle-aged white death rates a few months ago, and the reason that the finding made such a stir was that Deaton had won the economics quasi-Nobel a few days before. But the data was just sitting around on the CDC’s web-site (and their article was rejected several times before being accepted by PNAS) largely unmentioned, not just because it was about white people’s problems (and who cares about them) but because social science is increasingly oriented towards what you might call “doing rather than knowing.” As Steve quoted in his article about the fraudulent UCLA Meet-a-Gay-Person-for-Twenty-Minutes-and-You’ll-Support-Gay-Marriage-for-Life study, “the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”

The UCLA study made a big stir because it was a massive (if imaginary) randomized controlled trial that appeared to show an Effective Way of Reducing Homophobia. The penchant towards RCTs goes beyond what is published in academic journals: an increasing fraction of federal spending in domestic policy and international development is targeted towards directing funds towards programs and policies which have evidence of success from randomized controlled trials. There are strong reasons for RCTs to be used– and in fact RCTs tend to have a rather conservative bias and indicate, when well-run, that most government programs are of null or negative use– but as a central or sole support for social science, they are deeply flawed. Before you can figure out how to change the world, you need to understand something about it, and part of that is just looking at the damn statistics all the agencies are collecting and trying to see the patterns. Focusing only on what can be done– on what rich people can do to poor people to make them different, as Deaton put it in a recent interview, is not only paternalistic but makes paternalism our only way of seeing the world. It also lessens our ability of conceiving a coherent picture of the world– there are merely random effects from one program or another, to be replaced ever onward with the next big thing.

As Steve often points out, the patterns of social phenomena are often clear, and interesting, and important for figuring out the kinds of things that might work or might make things worse. But you have to observe those patterns first, before trying to make them different.

The Scots-Irish aren’t particularly alcoholic, compared to the Germanic/Nordic upper Midwest ( http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/images/map3-weighted-binge-drinking.png ) and wherever it is dark and cold. But, even aside from the low-level lawlessness that we associate with Appalachia, a culture that prides itself on independence and isolation may be particularly dangerous when we are all in general so liable towards isolation.

Utah and Nevada have surprisingly high drug-overdose rates as well ( http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html ); perhaps Mormons particularly susceptible to prescription drug abuse (whether as a substitute for drinking, or for other reasons)

When I looked into the dataset that Case and Deaton used ( https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/correlates-of-middle-aged-white-mortality/ ) and mixed it with Census Data, it appeared that there were three main predictors of county-level death rates for middle aged whites:
1) Median income
2) Obesity
3) SSI-Disability

It can’t be all economic, since income isn’t fully predictive by itself. And while rural counties have higher death rates overall, when you control for obesity and disability rates, population size of the county is no longer predictive. Marriage rates, and employment rates (controlling for income) aren’t strongly predictive, either.

My guess is that while the broader social changes may set the stage, uncontrolled pain management, perhaps worsened by obesity, isolation and sedentary lifestyles, and the ready availability of guns, liquor, and opioids to end the pain, are giving us this increase in mortality.

No offense taken. My grandfather always maintained that he had two main lucky breaks in life- walking into the UCLA English class where he met my grandmother, and the unit he was commanding getting assigned a new and very competent medic the day before he stepped on a land mine, who ran in and pulled him back out of the field when he was thrashing around, before he could trigger another mine.

…but she’s responding to you on Twitter?

Maybe it’s because I’m a minor Deep State functionary (in its boring domestic policy incarnation), but I think there’s kind of no there there. Yes, understanding how academia, the media, formal government policy, large corporations, and the Deep State function in a continuum of coordination and control would be interesting, but it is deliberately impossible. Our system doesn’t have any man behind the curtain, just people who can pass the buck effectively, and so it is extremely difficult to understand where decisions and priorities come from. The guys who look like they’re calling the shots- the Goldmans and Soroses and Slims- are just skimming off the top of the great flows of capital and resources that are kept in endless motion by forces that are almost entirely opaque. Well, I guess that’s why we’re reading ISteve.

Of course, if sociology knew what it was doing, this is the kind of thing it would seriously investigate, instead of interviewing lesbian Latinx ceramic artists in Dumbo about how they feel about making Zuni-style pottery or regressing mortgage default rates on race and calling racial discrimination. Not holding my breath.

That was the corner my parents lived on when my brother was born, a decade or so earlier. The bathtub in the kitchen was part of family lore.

I agree, it is a wonderful essay.

On the other hand, I think that he overlooks the almost mortal blow that the welfare state (and perhaps the decline of universal Christianity) had struck against the culture of the English working class well before 1997. For example, from this 1999 essay by Theodore Dalyrimple:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html

Such redistribution was the goal of the welfare state. But it has not eliminated poverty, despite the vast sums expended, and despite the fact that the poor are now substantially richer—indeed are not, by traditional standards, poor at all. As long as the rich exist, so must the poor, as we now define them.

Certainly they are in squalor—a far more accurate description of their condition than poverty—despite a threefold increase in per-capita income, including that of the poor, since the end of the last war. Why they should be in this condition requires an explanation—and to call that condition poverty, using a word more appropriate to Mayhew’s London than to today’s reality, prevents us from grasping how fundamentally the lot of “the poor” has changed since then. The poor we shall always have with us, no doubt: but today they are not poor in the traditional way.

From my grandfather’s stories about the Italian campaign, where he lost his leg, and Calvino’s short stories about the war, it always sounded plenty tough. But I suppose it was mostly Germans doing the fighting there?

You know, as Steve is suggesting here, the places that place poorest in Chetty’s study aren’t simply where lots of black people are, and in particular they aren’t the classically depressed black belt of the Deep South. Instead, they are the rising stars of the New South, Charlotte and Atlanta in particular. The simplest explanation is that places which have lots of middle class black people will place the poorest in Chetty’s methodology, since regression to the lower black mean will affect them more than poorer black counties. But another perspective is that this is an interaction effect- these are places where the overall economy was hot enough to attract lots of immigrants, with a substantial enough black population both to create a substantial population to be elbowed aside by the low skilled immigrants and to have a relatively less achievement oriented municipal culture. (Chetty does some statistical tricks to purportedly isolate the effect of municipalities in high-white zip codes, and the same high-black New South counties do the worst- so the effect presumably extends beyond black people themselves.)

Think about two deliberately paralleled images: the black stormtrooper Finn becomes good the moment he removes his white mask to reveal his (black) face, while Bad Guy Ben’s two acts of evil with emotional weight in the film- the unsuccessful, explicitly rape-like attempt to read the girl Jedi’s mind, and killing his dad- occur after he removes his black mask to reveal his (white) face. In the terms of the film, it is the bad guy’s real face that is the embodiment of evil, not his mask.

The irony is that making him lose to the girl Jedi on both their first and second encounter shifts sympathy away from her as a protagonist. We just naturally empathize with those who struggle, not those who too easily succeed. ( Think of how Luke is shown whining ineffectually to his adoptive parents, being knocked out by the Sand People, almost getting killed in the cantina, messing up in his first light saber training, and watching impotently as Obiwan is struck down before his first triumph against the Death Star. And the whole second movie is pretty much Luke screwing things up over and over and only barely scraping by.)
Rey (the girl Jedi)’s problems are entirely external to her, while Luke is narratively successful as a hero because his main obstacles are internal- anger, impatience, pride.

I’m sure there will be some training scenes in the next movie where she is ostensibly being tested mentally as well as physically. But the absence of any visible failures or weaknesses in this film (apart from the privation imposed on her from outside) makes her triumphs feel kind of hollow.

I thought it was striking how well the movie embodied a few ISteve themes:

a) The KKKrazy clue that keeps the Coalition of the Diverse together is the presence of literal Nazis right around the corner.
b) The Evil WMs are oddly both infinitely powerful in their ability to cause harm and incredibly weak when confronted.
c) The individual journey of a hero who is a member of a disadvantaged group is not, as in Joseph Campbell and the original movies, to conquer their internal or moral weakness, but merely to get together with the inclusively diverse Right and the Good people. You don’t become a hero by growing or improving or questioning yourself (ala Luke with Yoda and Obiwan), but by embracing your identity and joining with those are like you or who, most of all, Finally Understand You.

Yeah, my sense is that today’s superrich live perfectly nice lives but are not especially empowered- they’re going to Davos to get their marching orders, just like we’re getting them from the media. I think it’s a mistake to see them as “in control”: it is the ideology itself that is in control, and if any of the elite steps outside the bounds or is unwanted- think of Dennis Sterling- they can be chucked out of the circle of light without a second thought.

I think that’s why we get an increasingly religious tone in left-liberal rhetoric, drawing from a specific Northwest-European religious tradition.

Consider these two examples of a tradition in American prose:
2015:
“If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being neither a “good” white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook. I consider myself to be a decent human being. Yet, I’m sexist. Take another deep breath. I ask that you try to be “un-sutured.” If that term brings to mind a state of pain, open flesh, it is meant to do so. After all, it is painful to let go of your “white innocence,” to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?referer=https://www.google.com/

1741:
“They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins. Divine justice says of the tree that brings forth such grapes of Sodom, “Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?” Luke xiii. 7. The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and ’tis nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God’s mere will, that holds it back.”

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34632/34632-h/34632-h.htm#V

(As John McWhorter put it- anti-racism, our flawed new religion

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.html

)

For the same reason that most iSteve readers probably believe the Econ 101 story that an increase low-skill immigration produces an decrease in low-skill wages (and don’t trust the Econ 301 story that “David Card discovered that immigration doesn’t affect wages!”) the identical story applies to the minimum wage- the Econ 101 story that the minimum wage has disemployment effects is to me more plausible, and for identical reasons, than the idea that Card and Kreuger magically disproved those effects.

Obama in 2008, saying more-or-less the same thing:

OBAMA:
Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is — so, we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American. So we’ll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Affirmative action has always been mainly about increasing the moral legitimacy of elite institutions, not helping black people. Since the civil rights movement, racial inclusion has in the United States been the central measure of whether an institution has stood by its ethical commitments. Universities and academics were, more than any other institutions, the ones that pursued and promoted that measure of legitimacy, incorporating it into law in the form of disparate impact legislation and a large portion of federal regulations; clearly(from Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory and the Black Autumn) their commitment to that ideology extends beyond admissions. Universities sincerely believe that their role in the world would diminish if they were seen to be non-inclusive institutions. (Seen to be is perhaps the operative term here, since visible diversity is what is important.)

As Steve says, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past half century, it’s that Harvard is good at staying Harvard. So it will be quite interesting watching the contortions they twist themselves and the law in to keep black students a substantial portion of the student body, if race based holistic admissions is overturned.

I think everyone who actually cares about the welfare of black Americans should take seriously the success of programs like the Meyerhoff Scholars at U Maryland Baltimore County. The Meyerhoff Scholars program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore operated for many years as a segregated school-within-a-school for high-achieving Black students interested in STEM; it had, by both anecdotal account and some plausible research, much better outcomes for its targeted population than Ivy League schools. The students who attended UMD-Baltimore on a Meyerhoff scholarship were for example ten times as likely to get a STEM PhD and twice as likely to become a doctor as students who were offered the scholarship but turned down the program, most of whom went to more elite Ivy schools. ( see http://cssiacyberwars.org/pdf/20000255-AfricanAmericanCollegeStudentsExcellingintheSciences-CollegeandPost-CollegeOutcomesintheMeyerhoffScholarsProgram.pdf )

And of course unselective HBCUs regularly do better with black students than higher status schools with far more resources- http://papers.nber.org/papers/w21577.pdf

That’s the “Big Man” theory of African political dysfunction– that anyone that moves up has to hand out bennies to everyone in his extended family/village/tribal group, making corruption of one sort or another a near-necessity.

You’d still need to explain why this pattern of behavior has emerged to such an extent only recently. The end of the Obama presidency is certainly part of it, as is the hard left turn on racial issues by white elite institutions both inside and outside the academy. These kids may also no longer see that if they keep their head down for a few years, they will get a big payout upon graduation; there were a few years in which even Yale grads were fighting for scraps in the job market, once finance downsized and tech only hired STEM grads. The incentives to turn upon the institution itself for succor may become much more strong since you no longer have Goldman Sachs to look forward to.

My sense

I tend to think the kids are doing this because the society (the NY Times, T. Genius Coates, Twitter, etc) is telling them it’s a Good Thing to Do.

Look, you go to your average integrated public high school and it’s not like every black girl in your class is going to be a source of panic and disruption. Plenty will be quiet and studious- there’s a reason the percentage of black girls attending college keeps going up. Many of them won’t have the skills to graduate from their local community college, let alone Princeton or Yale, but they’re doing their best, and not pinning the principal in his office and screaming about oppression.

Later, I taught at one of the Black Automn places, including one of the girls in the background of one of the videos. She was okay as a student, enthusiastic if distractable in class and not quite at the bottom of the class on tests. (Because of just how strong Asian and nerdy white students are at these places, but how many disaffected jocks there also are, the distribution of grades tends to be very very wide on any test with objective content.) There were better black students in previous years, in the upper half of the distribution even.

But when she and one of her friends stayed after class one day discussing their plans for the next few days, it was clear that it was one event in the Oppression Olympics after another, a continuous round of low-level protest and consciousness raising, all paid for by university budget and facilitated by university staff. Meanwhile, the President was already abasing himself on racial issues on a regular basis, sending out horiffically contrite emails in response to the most anodyne occurrences and being confronted by brigades of students for not being contrite enough even then. The sense of entitlement has been deliberately cultivated over years and years. And now the protesters are just repeating the same words they hear in every corner of respectable opinion ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html?referer=

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/opinion/the-case-against-woodrow-wilson-at-princeton.html

)

Now that we have a prestige media that speaks with one voice, endorsing views on race that only wacky 19-year-old activists used to old, now that old gray-haired college administrators are on board with reparations as a Genius idea, what are wacky 19-year-old activists going to do? They have to just get louder and more threatening, just to stand out.

The girl in the Princeton video referred to the “genocide being perpetrated” on her people- not “that was perpetrated,” which would be the formulation of moderates like Spike Lee of yesteryear.

So no, elite college activists are not embarrassed by much these days.

The NY Times knows what’s important: Getting Woodrow Wilson out of Princeton!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/opinion/the-case-against-woodrow-wilson-at-princeton.html?_r=0

The NY Times knows what’s not important: 11 to 16 percent more murders!

This is an obvious Sailerian point, but in a weird way the NY Times editorial endorsing that Princeton should bury Woodrow Wilson explained what was so obvious about the video of President Eisgruber and the kids in his office: the strange inversion of power. It was clear in that clip that Eisgruber had no power and the girl yelling about how walking past a building named after Woodrow Wilson constituted genocide had all the power. You might think on first blush that this was just some strange mesmerism, some trick of who can talk louder, but the much more sensible explanation is that Eisgruber’s world is dominated by the NY Times editorial page and people who think like the NY Times editorial page, the MacArthur grant committees and National Book Award committees and so forth. (There is also the question of how much the average important donor has shifted to reflect Today’s Priorities- no longer are schools courting that average millionaire who just wants his two field hockey-playing daughters to be given an extra look in admissions season; now they’re courting megagazillionaires who have been to Davos and know the score. )

This may also explain some of the anti-majoritarianism implicit in the NY Times editorial. The University had given the kids what they want, they were launching some official process of investigating whether to change the name and soliciting broader input, yadda yadda yadda. But that kind of dialogue is not what the arc of Justice bends towards- the NY Times editorial page already knows that it bends towards the Black Justice League!

It’s worth noting that statistically, it is unlikely her ancestors– at least most of them– contributed to Princeton’s early years, since a very small percentage of Ivy League black students are the descendants of American slaves. This fact was part of official reality as recently as 2004, when the NY Times wrote ( http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html?_r=0 )

“While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.”

Unofficially, I was told by someone in the program that the African-American studies program at Princeton did a survey of current black students three or four years ago and zero of them claimed that all four of their grandparents were the descendants of American slaves. I find that hard to believe (does everyone just want to claim some Native American or Jamaican ancestry just to liven things up?) but in broad strokes it seems likely that most black Princeton students are closer to Barack Obama or Colin Powell’s ancestry than Michelle Robinson Obama’s.

University liberalism was until recently dominated by a pretense to noblesse oblige; the basic theory of action since the 50s has been that elite institutions would deliberately facilitate entrance by underprivileged groups into the halls of power, providing moral legitimacy to the institution and establishing a nexus of power within underprivileged groups who could provide leadership within their communities.

But at the same time as this occurred, the economy as a whole became radically less accommodating to the unskilled, and seemingly average bourgeois life- by the standards of the late 70s- became out of reach for an ever increasing portion of the population. The pressure to gain access to elite institutions grew greater for any family that could manage it, at the same time that a shrinking section of the population lived the kinds of stable and well organized lives that facilitate success for kids. The end result is a shrinking sense of opportunity for almost everyone, and a ruthlessness to childhood that has now spilled over to higher education.

I don’t know what it’s like to be black on an Ivy league campus, but I’d imagine it involves a lot of cognitive dissonance; at the same time as you are clearly a member of the privileged of society, you hear constantly about your own oppression, and inevitably worry about the ways in which your education is cutting you off from a broader community you are supposed to be a part of. We have a black Ivy leaguer as President– clearly you, too, are meant to be one of the elect– and yet almost every other media image is of the degradation of blacks, and even within a society of broadly deteriorating incomes, blacks stand as having objectively lost more ground in the last thirty years.

Grade inflation has meant that it’s hard to do that poorly in your classes– you’re very unlikely to flunk out– but the number of incredibly well prepared kids means that even if you study hard you might not do that well. So both the costs of not studying and the benefits of studying have been reduced.

It all adds up to a lot of free time, and a lot of alienation and anger. Meanwhile, university administrators have identified with radicalism and protest of all stripes, for so long (even if they themselves are the soul of the genteel bourgeois) that they have no defense at all against attacks on them from those same perspectives.

“that one HUNDRED percent of the kids will get one hundred percent of the questions right” that is

I know one of the schools involved well. There are basically two issues. One is that the models that Bloomberg Administration began using to measure school quality does everything conditional on racial composition and percent eligible for free lunch- fair enough, but as you get whiter schools with fewer poorer kids the model starts predicting that one percent of the kids will get one hundred percent of the questions right (see this old NY Times article to get the flavor- http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07winerip.html?referer= ) The other issue is that these schools become popular with white and middle class parents precisely by promising not to emphasize test prep and the academic slog that characterizes most NYC schools these days. So the schools were both oversubscribed and extremely popular among the in the know Manhattan parents and getting “F”s on the School Report Cards. Some of Blasio’s remaining supporters among white New Yorkers are also the same people complaining about the overly rigid Bloomberg educational reforms and creeping charterization – the Ed School professors and Class Size Matters groups. The schools in the article, which do all the hippy-dippy stuff those groups love and have politically active and engaged parent bodies, need an out from disciplinary action for not getting perfect test scores, given their favorable/unfavorable demographics, and here it is.

True story: yesterday morning, I was standing waiting in line for coffee behind Chris Eisgruber, President of Princeton, presumably a couple of hours before his office was occupied. In front of him was a somewhat overweight middle-aged black man in workout clothes, silently listening to headphones. The President went out of his way to anxiously smile and say “hello” to the man, who totally disregarded him.

Tough time to be a university administrator.

Moldbug:

The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.

Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake! Priorities! No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

I would guess that this graph of the rising percentage of never-married women might contribute to that last finding:

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-americans-have-never-married/st-2014-09-24-never-married-19/

I don’t know if Steve has linked to the actual Deaton/Case paper yet; it is short and very clearly and convincingly written.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf

Gelman’s analysis may or may not cast doubt on the idea of a *general* increase in mortality across all whites, particularly among men, but I don’t see how anybody can look at the dramatic increases in suicide across all age groups (Figure 4) in poisoning and suicide in all regions of the country (Figure 3) in the ratio of mortality causes between lower and higher education groups (Table 1), and in reported pain morbidity and disability (Table 2) and think that lower-education whites are in a good way. The single most striking figure is not Figure 1, which has been reproduced in many outlets and is what Gelman takes issue with, but Figure 4, which shows that the collective mortality due to suicide, alcohol, and drugs has doubled across *all* age cohorts of whites, clearly not due to age composition.

My initial assumption was this was a combined result of a lot of the Fishtown trends:
A) actual back pain, exacerbated by more sedentary lifestyles and obesity
B) lower employment prospects and more opportunity to get on the dole in the form of SS-Disability
C) lots of guns in the house, and fairly cheap liquor; easy access to opioids
D) social atomization, living alone or unmarried, lower church and social group/neighborhood involvement.
E) less valorization by the culture at large

I really want to see the gender-disaggregated graphs.

Yeah, I agree. And in a way, it’s like the Dreyfus affair- making a huge deal out of what, to non-French people, seems like a relatively minor event may have helped France to develop a commitment to secularism that has, on balance, been a net positive to the nation. And while I’m commenting on a Steve Sailer thread (and am a Sailer fan, and have even gotten into recent arguments with my dad about some Sailer-style issues), I can’t say I’m too too put out that the United States has a hyper-sensitivity to anti-Semitism in many settings. The issue, as I understand Steve arguing it over many posts, is rather that the heightened concern over minor or questionable incidents of anti-Semitism is combined with the general jumbling of all history prior to 2008 into a box labeled “the awful past.” We don’t have a good sense of the extent or timeline of different problems, we don’t have a good sense of how long our current dominant attitude toward race or national identity has been ascendant, and we don’t have a good sense of when things might have changed and made the concerns of the 50s much less salient. Rhetorical tools that were developed at a time when multiple groups competed for ideological control are redeployed for use as political weapons at a time when only one side is really making the rules, and sharpened in case the losers of the culture wars get restive.

But, while there are a lot of Jews on the winning side of the culture wars, it’s not really a Jewish issue, kike-haters on this site to the contrary. A transnational, anti-solidarity identity among elites is an enormously important phenomenon of our times, and it’s not primarily about the Elders of Zion calling in any favors. It’s about, I would say, the dangers of democratic politics to control, and the seemingly pervasive fear and distaste of their own citizens that animates political and cultural leaders. The constant cataloging of micro-aggressions is perhaps the self justifying projection of this fear, which for Jews takes the form of anti-Semitism warning lights, but it is presumably born of a genuine belief that a nation-state of settled borders and stabilized demographics is innately violent and murderous, and that a shared national identity will soon combust rather than function as it once did.

I know it’s comical, but I think you have to see the obsession with country club exclusion and minor 40s and 50s anti-Semitism as an attempt by Americans to assert “real Jewness” in the wake of the Holocaust.

Ironically, as my grandparents were actual survivors, when they moved here they pushed their two sons to assimilate as fast as possible, sending them to Baptist Sunday School for example, and my grandparents had almost no Jewish friends in America.

For them, it made sense to hate Germany and to disdain the country of their birth but to love America and Americans. They were still quite liberal- my grandfather’s brother later married a black woman, whose sister spoke at my grandfather’s funeral- but the assumption was that racial intolerance for example was a solvable problem, because this was America. (My dad’s last conversation with my grandfather was about the Maastricht treaty creating the Euro. “What an idiotic idea,” my grandfather said. “That’ll never work.”)

For American Jews who were cut off from the central 20th century experience, keeping it real may have felt like a bigger deal. So now we hear a lot about the stories of country club segregation, handed down from one generation to the next.

Yeah, I saw this article, and thought, “Steve Sailer writes the news!”

These data are from 2008- before the crisis- but Eurostat put together a bunch of indicators of migrant economic integration. You have to wade through a lot of confusingly agglomerated figures, but for example then find that prime-aged recent migrants from low and middle HDI nations had, as of 2008, an unemployment rate of 21 and 23 percent in Germany and France, compared to 6 percent for the native population. (Table 1.8) I’d be curious how these numbers have changed since then.

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5727749/KS-31-10-539-EN.PDF/bcf27a60-7016-4fec-98c5-e8488491ebbd

Let’s look at the demographics of the kid’s high school, courtesy of the Department of Education (http://nces.ed.gov/globallocator/sch_info_popup.asp?Type=Public&ID=482442002733 )

Race/Ethnicity Enrollment
American Indian/Alaska Native: 20
Asian/Pacific Islander*: 147
Hispanic: 1349
Black, non-Hispanic: 711
White, non-Hispanic: 357
Two or More Races: 45

The school is 6% Asian, 51% Hispanic, 27% Black, and 13% White. You’ll also notice from the link above that as of 2012-2013, over one in three 9th graders were not moving up to 10th grade. Was this the environment that you were imagining from media reports?

Within-sex competition is always more cutthroat than between-sex competition. So documents like this are about extolling the virtues of Ms.Dargis’s style of femininity and denigrating a more traditional style of femininity. Not that Ms. Dargis is most likely leaving work to six shots of Cuervo and a professional wrestler every night. No, it’s more like Ms. Dargis goes home to compete with the other Westchester or Park Slope moms, many of whom are younger than her and have less-demanding jobs (or no jobs at all.) Promiscuity per se is probably not what is driving these encomia to Drunken Bachanallia as Liberation; instead, for a media written for and largely by women, the desire to elevate the writer’s own station (as someone who almost definitionally is sacrificing personal and family fulfillment in order to climb the greasy pole) and tear down the competing approaches to social standing, must be ineluctable.

My sense is that there is a hunger among some liberal college-educated Asian-American (women) to define themselves as Oppressed People of Color. The level of excitement about this event displayed by my classmates on Facebook was pretty remarkable.

I can’t see it being a big deal among Asian American men, because they tend to see themselves in competition with both whites and NAMs, correctly.

In the first case, thirteen men died, most likely unnecessarily. In the second, five kids were possibly made uncomfortable, though given the political context the whole thing seems suspect. But the settlement in the latter case was eight times the former in aggregate (and eighty times on a per beneficiary level.) This seems a bit nuts, but the media coordination point of the Times puts it forward uncritically, because of the hunger for hate.

Wow, so surprising that the guy who became the most famous man in the world by sharing (multiple conflicting versions of) his story would find it courageous to “share your story.”

Kind of like Bill Clinton saying “real men raise the gas tax.”