Steve, what have you heard about Richard Herrnstein?

I ask because I know you know Steven Pinker and he has publicly expressed doubts about him.

I also know, personally, that Noam Chomsky has a low opinion of his intellect (and I’m pretty sure Noam has expressed that publicly).

Noam has lots of opinions but he is careful about what he says publicly. But he certainly understands Jewish intellectual culture so when he is willingly to publicly condemn someone (Robert Nozick and Alan Dershowitz are other Jewish intellectuals in Cambridge he has gone after), I take it seriously.

But maybe Herrnstein didn’t really understand Anglo society before the 20th Century?

Obviously he never read any Jane Austen novels.

Rich people mostly only marry other rich people and have been doing so forever, yes. Why is that so revolutionary to state?

Clark writes, “Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization.”

Surely things like student behavior in classrooms, to take one important example, are affected by parental investment and community socialization. There is such a thing as feral children, who are hard to explain in any other way, no?

All mating everywhere had been assortative according to some criteria. But Herrnstein is right that assortative mating by IQ was highly unusual until recently. Yes, even in Anglo society.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers. For this you need (a) universal female education and (b) universal female employment with no discrimination.

I wonder whether the presence of an aristocracy does something for assortative mating insofar as the aristocracy modeling things like public morals and a byzantine system of manners which the lower classes emulate is an analogue for our more standardized tests of intelligence and time preference.

Over time you’d expect more intelligent and industrious members of the population to achieve respectability even if they’re not technically aristocrats, and that they would in turn seek to improve or at least maintain their position by excluding individuals displaying bad habits like chronic drunkenness, spendthrift, bawdy behavior, etc. from their social circles and therefore as potential marriage partners for their children.

Codes of public morality probably do the majority of the weeding out of whoremongers and drunkards, and then the systems of manners test finer points of intelligence.

I don’t mean to minimize the efforts of the hard core analytics guys here but isn’t this a “well, yeah” kind of conclusion?

It seems to me that even just a rudimentary understanding of world history and the ability to compare the progress of previously isolated civilizations would bring a person to the same conclusions. But than again, the mis-education system has been hammering away at our young people for over a century now, successfully teaching them that their instincts and observations are wrong and everything opposite of them is actually the truth.

Now if the censors will allow this paper, and a connected paper describing the same kind of genetically-mediated phenomenon across geographic ancestries, to be widely read and understood, social science will again make some forward progress. In recent years it has gone nowhere, or backwards.

Perhaps Clark’s model works in a society like England where there has been continuity and rule of law and a path to economic (if not always social) advancement since at least 1750. So maybe if you are British and your ancestors have been working class drunks since forever, you might as well pick up that shovel and get that tankard out and start sipping – apparently there’s no hope for you. (People don’t want to hear that they are limited by their genetic heritage – don’t expect that there’s going to be any groundswell of support for Clark’s fundamentally pessimistic view).

But, I think his model breaks down in the modern world where people come from places where opportunity was limited and end up in places where opportunities are much greater. There are countless examples of people of very humble roots coming to America and doing great things. This is not to say that genetics are irrelevant – Koreans of humble roots are not the same thing as Guatemalans of humble roots. But if you come from a society where 95% of the population was once peasant farmers, there are not going to be a lot of opportunities for your ancestors to distinguish themselves.

“ famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid 20th Century in his his 1971 article”

No he doesn’t, not even close. It’s a great article though.

The closest thing is him saying that there will be more assortive mating for IQ as class barriers decrease and economic and technological growth makes more jobs skilled and g-loaded. But nothing to do with IQ tests, and more about greater ability for high IQ poor to rise in status.

Further, it is clear he did not believe what you ascribe. He discusses and approves Galton’s Hereditary Genius, and he also notes Termin’s kids are from high status parents.

Now Clark’s work has provided even more evidence of very long term IQ based social status stability than we previously had. However, Hernstein says IQ is 80% genetic in the article and highly linked to status, so the idea they are even partly in conflict is wrong.

My understanding is that by the first decades of the 19th century, some intermarriage took place between the children of a growing number of wealthy businessmen and landed gentry with cash flow problems. Young people could, within the limits of parental approval, choose their spouses. Lending libraries and cultural pursuits were popular sources of entertainment.

These three ingredients-growing upward mobility for intelligent people from the lower ranks (if we assume men who made fortunes were smarter than average, and their children likewise), some degree of choice of marital partner, and more scope for women to display their intelligence (discussing the latest literary works, for example) and I think assortative mating has all it needs to take place within the upper rungs of society.

“ But, I think his model breaks down in the modern world where people come from places where opportunity was limited and end up in places where opportunities are much greater … But if you come from a society where 95% of the population was once peasant farmers“

That’s not a feature of the modern world but of industrialization. Korea and China stand out as high IQ and late to develop. But the temporary relatively high social mobility as farms emptied out into industrial and service employment is a one-time event that was 150 years ago in Northern Italy, NW Europe, and the USA.

Hemingway or Donne?

Let’s see, social clubs, churches, play areas (parks), schools….. nah, there couldn’t have been any assortative mating before mass testing!

The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative [sic] in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible.

Note the passive voice. Believed by whom? And why?

Why would one not presume that like would mate with like?

Richard Herrnstein, the Bell Curve’s co-author, famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid 20th Century in his his 1971 article in the pre-woke Atlantic Monthly “I.Q.” But maybe Herrnstein didn’t really understand Anglo society before the 20th Century?

Back in the days when Rand Paul was still the “Internet’s candidate” for President many of us could be forgiven for looking forward to the imminent demise of this sort of Keystone Scholars-type bumbling, where an otherwise brilliant thinker advances a fundamentally unsound argument based on almost laughably poor grasp or even complete ignorance of the relevant/contravening data (hey, it’s impossible to know everything!) and then about a decade and a half is wasted in bandying about pro-Keystone and anti-Keystone arguments until finally a consensus more or less approaching the truth is reached and the progression of human knowledge can resume once again. Cf. Harold Bloom’s claim of Shakespeare having “invented the human” (false even if shorn of Bloom’s own wink-wink, knowing hyperbole) or that the “invention of childhood” did not occur until the mid-19th Century (again, false).

Meaning, with the breakthrough in the transmission and refinement of human knowledge represented by the Internet in general and Wikipedia specifically, some of us I think dared dream that this sort of lone genius retreating to his mountaintop to one day return with tablets of wisdom scholarship model was coming to an end to be replaced by a more collaborative one, where fundamental errors like Herrnstein’s could be caught and corrected early.

Silly me, though- reader comments at all major newspapers are to be turned off now, Blue Cheka will decide which NEW YORK POST stories you are allowed to read, and we are all simply to sit in reverent gratitude while Greatest Thinker of the Century T. Genius Coates ruminates on whether Black Superman would win in a fight with Black Panther, accounting for both Marvel-to-DC as well as DC-to-Marvel cross-reality rumble contingencies.

He can’t be completely correct in his “there’s been little social mobility” thesis – doesn’t he argue elsewhere (“Farewell To Alms” IIRC) that the UK population is mostly descended from the upper/middle classes, because they had more children grow to reproductive age than the poor?

Downward mobility on a large scale.

And I know a few families whose 19th century forebears were illiterate (from the “x” on birth and marriage certificates) yet their descendants are pretty bright and have decent careers.

Herrnstein’s assumption was (crudely stated) that sure like would mate with like in terms of social class but that in order to sort by IQ you needed to give everyone the SAT first.

He was partly wrong (because social class and IQ are correlated to begin with) but the modern assortment process is more powerful because it’s explicit. Mating by social class did not allow you to cut across economic (and in America racial and religious) lines where the smart grocer’s daughter could match up with the smart gentryman. Sure all the gentry daughters were fairly smart but maybe not as smart as that grocer’s daughter. But now you can put that grocer’s daughter in Harvard or get her a job at Goldman and match her up with a banker’s son and produce supersmart WASP/Jew/Asian kids. Never mind that these supposed geniuses seem to be in process of totally botching up our society worse than the old gentry ever did.

yeah, i don’t necessarily see any reason why there wasn’t mating by class for hundreds of years. maybe there wasn’t such a thing going on continuously for centuries, however i don’t see a convincing argument why not. most serious psychology research suggests that the English were slowly and steadily getting smarter for hundreds of years, thru Victorian England, until 1900 or so, when putatively that process stopped, if you believe the ‘we’re getting genotypically dumber now’ faction. that journey probably couldn’t have happened if sex was random for a 1000 years.

i suspect Clark and Murray are Scottish, and Hernstein is jewish. the smart studying the smart. whereas Flynn’s motivation if he had been studying class instead of population groups, probably would have been, the lower class is ALMOST as smart as the ruling class now, and has closed the gap significantly since the dark ages. although, it’s not true. there’s probably a bigger gap now than ever between the smartest people in the STEM departments today and the multi cultural rabble working for minimum wage in the fast food restaurants.

Don’t ask for the URL(s) but I’ve read in many places that the lack of upward social mobility in Britain is simply false. They do have it, as much or as little as the US. What you can’t do in Britain is become a true aristocrat, no matter how much money you make, or even whom you marry.

(This one’s for you, Meghs. Marrying a Spencer won’t make you one.)

“where an otherwise brilliant thinker advances a fundamentally unsound argument based on almost laughably poor grasp or even complete ignorance of the relevant/contravening data (hey, it’s impossible to know everything!) and then about a decade and a half is wasted in bandying about pro-Keystone and anti-Keystone arguments until finally a consensus more or less approaching the truth is reached and the progression of human knowledge can resume once again.”

Steve and his stance on lockdowns, masks, and vaccines fits this example pretty well.

Hey Steve; these three guys have succinctly encapsulated 245 years of race relations in America:

https://worldstar.com/video.php?v=wshhG5tJ4xLtH8S9ouf6

Herrnstein’s assumption was (crudely stated) that sure like would mate with like in terms of social class but that in order to sort by IQ you needed to give everyone the SAT first.

Which is ridiculous.

People know who’s smarter than whom without any formal testing.

And social classes are not homogeneous to begin with. One would expect like to marry like within the class even if marrying out were strictly forbidden.

He was partly wrong (because social class and IQ are correlated to begin with) but the modern assortment process is more powerful because it’s explicit. Mating by social class did not allow you to cut across economic (and in America racial and religious) lines where the smart grocer’s daughter could match up with the smart gentryman. Sure all the gentry daughters were fairly smart but maybe not as smart as that grocer’s daughter. But now you can put that grocer’s daughter in Harvard or get her a job at Goldman and match her up with a banker’s son and produce supersmart WASP/Jew/Asian kids. Never mind that these supposed geniuses seem to be in process of totally botching up our society worse than the old gentry ever did.

The modern assortment process is more powerful because both sexes are (or were) sorted at the top quintile or so by an IQ test proxy (SAT). The practice of encouraging women to undertake advanced study means that there are a sufficient number of women in post-secondary and graduate schools means that the men in those programs can date amongst their peers. Proximity is the greatest attractant.

So, the practice of lawyer/secretary, doctor/nurse, etc. pairings are less prevalent today than they used to be, and now you get more lawyer/lawyer and doctor/doctor pairings where the pair formed in school or residency etc.

To a certain extent, the ruling class’s belief in its own meritocratic achievement (often a gross overestimate), and the fact that the pairings are of like class or strivers means that the ruling class has little interest in those below it except as abstractions. Rather than the noblesse oblige of the former ruling class, the new ruling class seems to regard those it governs as something akin to an embarrassing reminder of their origins or their destiny but for their achievements and credentials. The instinct is to preserve its position often by diminishing those below it, rather than to accept the responsibilities of high position which was the accident of birth or good fortune.

I believe that Richard Herrnstein, the Bell Curve’s co-author, famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid 20th Century in his his 1971 article in the pre-woke Atlantic Monthly “I.Q.” But maybe Herrnstein didn’t really understand Anglo society before the 20th Century?

This is very puzzling. Why would IQ testing have much if anything to do with ‘assortative mating’ being present or absent?

The term is broadly defined (so Wikipedia tells me) as non random mate election. Surely IQ testing has little to do with that in any event. Sure, with university level admissions being partly based on IQ testing or simply results of IQ being expressed via grades and school achievement, you might find somewhat more bunching of similar IQ levels in young adult mating grounds like colleges and universities. But co-ed colleges were rare before say, 1950 and far fewer women attended.

In Great Britain you have long had a society centered around notions of “status” and “class” as expressed by occupation, wealth, and acquiring even lower levels of basic education like reading.

In heavily class conscious societies I would suspect there is less “mixing” of people from different backgrounds/wealth/education, not more. Also specific religions played a much larger part (what kind of Protestant were your parents?)

Of course prior to birth control you had perhaps more unplanned pregnancies where poorer women would bear children from higher status males, not usually chosen on the basis of perceived IQ (intelligence). But for marriage you normally would ‘mate’ in your ‘station’ in life as defined by economic/educational class characteristics. Hence non random.

It seems strange that IQ testing, done on only a small percentage of the population at one point in time, could be responsible for something as variable as mate selection. Cinderella is just a fairy tale after all.

People know who’s smarter than whom without any formal testing.

There’s a name for people who intuitively know this…I believe they’re still called “Parents”

It’s not really about “IQ”. The rich and connected marry the rich and connected. It’s just a few families. You could probably do the same thing analyzing last names. Also, it’s idiotic to think that you need an IQ test to know if someone is smart. People knew that well enough for centuries without any need of a specific test. And finally, “parental investment and community socialization” might also be partly genetic and are also related to intelligence (and to being rich and connected).

Ok, I’ll read the paper now. 😀 🙂

Why would IQ testing have much if anything to do with ‘assortative mating’ being present or absent?

Not IQ testing per se but sorting the whole population (most importantly women) into isolated social groups based on criteria which is strongly correlated with IQ. That’s very new.

What’s the point here? That rich people are more successful because their parents are rich? Duh. I coulda told ya that and saved ya a nickel.

Off-topic, but an SUV with reportedly 27 Mexicans/Guatemalans in it (apparently not counting the driver) crashed into a tractor-trailer. 15 died. How can 27/28 people fit in an SUV? How many were in the trunk? How many were in the dashboard? Must’ve been at least two, plus one under each of the front seats…

Edit: here’s a lowly sedan with what appears to be about the same number of individuals in it.

It seems like people of both sexes have a strong preference to marry others of similar intelligence in today’s society. I’m not sure if that means this is an innate disposition, which manifests more in any society where, in theory, everyone is allowed to marry anyone (so they end up marrying who they innately want). Or if it means that only in our current society specifically, people gravitate towards others of similar intelligence.

Have you ever dated someone 2 or 3 sd below you? Personally, I think even the best looking dummy would be agony to tolerate after a while.

People don’t want to hear that they are limited by their genetic heritage – don’t expect that there’s going to be any groundswell of support for Clark’s fundamentally pessimistic view

People adapt quite well to reality. Many hardworking guys have been told they don’t have the inborn talent for a pro sports career and they do okay.

Seems more damaging to push 100% environment and then start blaming failure on the patriarchy; systemic racism; ((( ))); etc.

Surely things like student behavior in classrooms, to take one important example, are affected by parental investment and community socialization. There is such a thing as feral children, who are hard to explain in any other way, no?

I’ll take a stab at it.

I think that what the author is trying to contrast is the standard, lower middle class level of parental investment, with upper middle class, sharp elbows level of parental investment. He doesn’t consider the return on investment to be large.

I don’t believe that he’s looking at feral children.

OT: Some Dr. Seuss books are being banned. Originally, I thought it was some random library or organization doing it. It turns out it’s the private press that owns the Seuss rights that’s doing it, Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

It’s massively sucky to be screwed by your own private publisher. From now authors who are corporations are going to have to write up wills forbidding the banning of their own works. Look out, GRR Martin!

The banned titles are already selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay.

Statement from the dirty scum weasels themselves: https://www.seussville.com/statement-from-dr-seuss-enterprises/

I have no reason to defend Seuss, since I never cared for his books, but this is really rotten behavior.

I think Herrnstein was talking about the way you might marry your high school sweetheart, or the way a bank VP might marry a teller, or an executive someone in the typing pool, or a doctor a nurse. In the case of the high school sweetheart, the relative statuses might not yet be so apparent, and in the workplace situations, the guy is looking at physical attractiveness while the girl is looking at the guy’s career, since you had one-income marriages ultimately.

In a socially stratified context like upperclass English society, things would be different, and that far in the past the family had more of a say in marriage matchups (which would be somewhat similar to the “met at church” or “introduced by a friend” models that also happened in the pre-SAT United States).

I think Clark is also hitting on the Robert Plomin “nature of nurture” idea. Actually the whole genetic-environment dichotomy is about 30 years out of date, but genetics is so siloed as a (taboo) field that nobody keeps up with it. The more recent thinking on genetics and environment is that much of environmental influence (half of non-shared environment) is essentially genetic. You make your own environment. You seek out environments that suit you and you seek out people that suit you. You enthusiastically devour environments that you like. No books in your parents house? You track some down, or you discover the library. Not interested in books? You ignore books that are in the house. Kind of a wild-side kid? You’ll find the delinquents no matter what kind of military school daddy sends you to.

So seeking out and marrying someone in your class may very well be something you are genetically predisposed to do. An environment may make it easier, but even then, your access to that environment is because of your parents, whose genes you share.

Gregory Clark is one of the “California school” economic historians, who as a group tend to argue that the economic and scientific rise of the West was a series of accidents rather than something that brewed in the late Middle Ages. I heard him give a talk at Davis suggesting that the 18th century Industrial Revolution was more an early modern modest bump that received some juice because it lay in the widely-connected textile industry, and the real story of massive growth really lie in the 19th century.

I suspect that in a decade or two when American wokeness burns out and leaves a husk of a society behind, that Chinese-based scholars will praise Clark for his cutting edge work. After all, the Chinese have even higher average IQs than Europeans, and no compunction when segregating and harassing out groups.

You may have a point, but in the specific case of Korean immigrants to the U.S., they are rarely of “humble origin.” They are often educated professionals who work menial jobs in the U.S. and then chain-migrate their family five years later.

In general, immigrants are self-selected from the top half of the society they came from. This was not the case in Ellis Island days (vd. Russell Warne’s In the Know, chapter 10).

I don’t see the mystery here. Why wouldn’t men prefer to marry women from similar social backgrounds?

Have only started to read the paper but something contextual I feel like noting is that it’s talking about persistence of relative standing.

A relatively low status 2020 UK person has a better life in most ways than a high status 1750 person. (like plumbing, air conditioning, telephones, doctors, antibiotics, (overall much lower physical suffering and death among one’s kids/friends/family), Netflix…)

But if you come from a society where 95% of the population was once peasant farmers, there are not going to be a lot of opportunities for your ancestors to distinguish themselves.

Wasn’t that the case in medieval England?

People don’t want to hear that they are limited by their genetic heritage…

First, let me say I haven’t read the book yet, but not wanting to hear something has nothing to do with whether or not it is true. Right now, many people do not want to hear that black-on-White violent crime numbers dwarf the reverse, that blacks are the perpetrators of almost all the recent violence against Asians, and that thousands of White women are raped by blacks each year while White-on-black rape doesn’t even exist statistically. But these things are all true.

don’t expect that there’s going to be any groundswell of support for Clark’s fundamentally pessimistic view

I don’t think a fact is “pessimistic” or “optimistic”, it just is. If I let go of a glass of whiskey, it doesn’t float, it falls. Though I may not like that it falls, acknowledging that it does is not pessimism.

My sense is that genes control more aspects of human life than we have previously thought – and not just intelligence – and more than we might wish to believe. It places limits on the plasticity we like to think the human mind and personality is capable of. I don’t think it is any reason for an individual not to try to reach his own highest potential. But it may help us to understand why larger populations of humans will never be brought to statistical parity in any area and we can stop banging our heads against the wall trying to make it happen.

Back in the early 1970s I took a brief interest in assortative mating and my masters thesis included a review of the pertinent literature, a theoretical discussion, and an analysis of survey research data that showed not only that it was a powerful influence on mate choice but that it affected marital outcomes, e.g., divorce and marital fertility rates.

There are several factors that account for the importance of assortative mating by intelligence in modern societies. These have nothing to do with “intelligence testing” or “intelligence” per se.

One such factor is that assortative mating can only become important in so-called, open, prescriptive mating systems, i.e. those in which one may choose or reject a mate free of any but a few prescriptive norms, e.g. incest taboos. Such mating systems first appeared in parts of post Enlightenment Europe. In more traditional societies mate choice is controlled by parents, tribal elders, and the like and governed by a broad variety of proscriptive rules, e.g. one must marry a mate from a certain family or tribe, one should preferably marry mother’s brother’s daughter, or one should preferably marry father’s sister’s daughter. Another factor diminishing the importance of assortative mating in pre-modern societies is that in such societies propinquity is a major limiting factor in mate selection. In earlier times, potential mates were drawn from a pool located within a relatively short geographic distance, although exceptions existed for the relatively small number of persons who had the kind of geographic mobility that is common today.

Once modernization creates an open, prescriptive mating system and provides the geographic mobility that ensures a wide pool of potential mates, individuals have much more opportunity to select mates on the basis of overall attractiveness, including the existence of shared interests and values. Under these circumstances there is bound to be a great increase in assortative mating by “intelligence”, i.e. the ability to thrive and prosper in modern society, which is basically what IQ and similar tests measure. Another factor of increasing importance is the attempt of parents to place their children in favorable mating pools, e.g. Ivy League universities.

If this interpretation is correct then aspirations that by appropriate social design, rates
of social mobility can be substantially increased will prove futile. We have to be resigned
to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth. Personally
I would argue that this should push us towards compressing differences in income and
wealth that are the product of such inherited characteristics. The Nordic model of the good
society looks a lot more attractive than the Texan one.

(my italics)

At the end of his article, Gregory Clark’s cat comes out of the bag.

I remember a conversation some years ago in which a young, unmarried man repeated his father’s advice, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl as a poor one.” An older gentleman overhearing the conversation interrupted, “No, that’s not true. Rich people don’t allow their daughters to hang out with poor men, let alone marry them. Money sticks with money.” There’s more truth in that than we’d like to believe. There is a selection process and it isn’t entirely genetic per se, but rather one in which a genetic group seeks to protect it’s own.

Yes, some people do break out of dire childhoods to become leaders. But few doctor’s children end up running the fryer at McDonalds. I can remember an impoverished family from my youth with 9 children. One did pretty well, one did ok, and the rest pretty much repeated the same circumstances of their parents. Nature or nurture? It’s likely that both are factors. I’ve met several people in my life that can point to a single moment that changed their lives; one time when someone said the right thing (usually, “I believe you’re smart enough to do this.”). The space between success and failure can be razor thin or as broad as the support of an entire generation. We are not insects, destined to live a particular design. We are frustratingly complex.

OT: The organization that controls the copyrights on Dr. Seuss’s works and is, I suppose, charged with maintaining his legacy has said that they won’t publish four titles in their collection, including If I Ran the Zoo and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I guess they decided to prevent Dr. Seuss from being cancelled entirely by pre-emptively partially cancelling him themselves.

But of course, it won’t work. All they did was throw chum in the water. I expect Dr. Seuss to be completely un-personed inside of two years.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dr-seuss-books-canceled-over-racist-imagery

Your entire civilization will be slandered as shameful and unworthy. Nothing of that which is yours will be left to you.

To get close to a young woman, first, you had to get close to a member of her family. For males in Merry Old England, whom you married had a lot to do with your friend circle, especially your school friend circle. A lot of famous British men married their best friend’s sister or cousin. That sounds like assortive mating to me.

Off Topic:

I thought I would share this chart from NumbersUSA. It came up in my browser when I pasted in the link even though it is named as a pdf file, so I hope it comes up in your browsers, too.

The chart is “Estimated 10-Year Impact of the Biden Amnesty Bill (H.R. 1177 & S. 348) on Legal Immigration Numbers”

The bottom line number they come up with is that we will have an extra 37,328,845 legal immigrants within those 10 years. Now it is true that about 11.5 million of the new legal immigrants are people already here who will receive amnesty, so the net number of new people coming to the US would be around 25,000,000 additional legal immigrants. But still the numbers are staggering. They always are. But remember these are estimates based on current numbers allowed. We don’t know if the immigration-mad people will increase the number of extended family members like brothers and sisters allowed or if the cheap labor employers will get their way and get approval for a lot more foreign workers.

And of course we don’t know how many people will come to our borders to claim “asylum” who are actually economic migrants inspired by our amnesty. One way or the other we will get a lot more people who used to be called illegal immigrants coming here, I am sure of it.

Finally, all these new people will want their own family members to be allowed in eventually: Spouses, children, parents, brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces and nephews in a literally endless immigration chain.

https://www.numbersusa.com/sites/default/files/public/Biden-Amnesty-10-Year-LPRs_v2.pdf

Also there’s the foolish notion that traits in human beings exist in isolation from each other. High value individuals are usually so across multiple domains. The beautiful and the intelligent largely overlap.

The study starts around 1750 AD, after the Middle Ages.

Clark’s measuring period starts in 1750 which coincides almost exactly with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. To give you an idea, in 1750 Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, most of which was spun and woven by cottage industry. In 1787 raw cotton consumption was 22 million pounds, most of which was spun and loomed on machines. The British textile industry used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, which increased to 588 million pounds in 1850. This exponential growth in production produced vast upward mobility for some (and downward mobility for others).

Personally
I would argue that this should push us towards compressing differences in income and
wealth that are the product of such inherited characteristics. The Nordic model of the good
society looks a lot more attractive than the Texan one.

At the end of his article, Gregory Clark’s cat comes out of the bag.

The Nordic model was built upon homogeneity, and they were quite open about how that was an advantage that other, larger countries, especially America, did not enjoy.

But it was the Nordics who abandoned their set-up for the Texan one. Texas may be accused now and then of adopting the Nordic (ethnic) ideal, but there is no evidence for this.

Unfortunately, Texas, like the rest of Dixie, supported the rise of the federal welfare state without building much of a local one for balance. This backfired spectacularly when their party turned on them. Only five CSA states dared reject LBJ.

I hinted at the fact, that modern age England did have a history too.
His developmental metaphor thus might look a bit more like an explosion than the one I had in mind.

Someone else should publish and sell them. The copyright laws protect the rights-owners’ economic interests. There would no damages in a copyright infringement suit.

Did sorting women by intelligence and then matching them to their male peers make a better society or did it lead to our “Al Qaeda are the good guys/on our side in Syria” Idiocracy nightmare? Was there any moral criterion to these intellibreeders or are they like conformist greedhead careerists who will burn down the world, but do so marginally more efficiently? Is there really anything that makes humans less dumb (ie, not better able to take tests)?

English farmers are simply not comparable to, say, Russian farmers. England — island — every last little share of resource must be carefully managed. Russia — vast land with no Eastern limit until you hear spoken Korean — slash-and-burn migration and so on.

Hemingway or Donne?

Definitely Ernie; his previous books are “A Farewell to Alms” & “The Son Also Rises”.

Devil’s advocate: this is a fluke of Anglo and or white culture?

I also know, personally, that Noam Chomsky has a low opinion of his intellect

LOL; Chomsky gives Herrnstein an IQ test and announces that Herrnstein flunked. All before the internet allowed leftists to do this on an industrial scale.

Quite a nasty battle back in the day between the Behaviorists, led by Skinner and Herrnstein; and the Mentalists such as Chomsky. Chomsky is plenty happy to troll his opponents.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers. For this you need (a) universal female education and (b) universal female employment with no discrimination.

Is it really that difficult to get a decent guestimate of someone’s IQ? Certainly when talking with people in real life I have that going on in the background. When you get to know someone over years? That seems far easier.

Smart men tend to like smart women. Less smart men may fear being made subordinate/henpecked. I guess I’d be surprised if there *wasn’t* much assortive mating going on historically.

I believe they’re called people.

The beautiful and the intelligent largely overlap.

Well, each of them overlaps noticeably with the upper classes, but as to with each other, let’s just say there are many, many exceptions to the rule.

I generally agree with you but I point out that “optimistic” scientists like Flynn (“we are getting smarter with every generation”) have an easier path to selling their ideas to the general public than guys with pessimistic conclusions. Then again, Lysenko had optimistic conclusions and they were not only optimistic but also dead wrong.

But if you come from a society where 95% of the population was once peasant farmers, there are not going to be a lot of opportunities for your ancestors to distinguish themselves.

Disagree. Sure opportunity was much more constrained back in the day. And flat out serfdom–can’t leave, can’t expand–really ratchets down the opportunities. But England had been–even before the industrial revolution–out of serfdom for hundreds of years.

Farming is and always has been essentially a “business”. There’s a ton of stuff to manage and some people manage it well, have high work effort, make good decisions, have good health … and some don’t.

In terms of the catastrophe of “dying off” versus “surviving” some peasant farmers distinguished themselves from others far more than the across economic class in America today. (Bill Gates and i are similar ages, he has been somewhat more successful economically than me, but we both are alive and have three kids.)

It’s pretty clear that in terms of fertility successful farmers have been the winners. If a typical American starts dialing back through his ancestors in not too many generations it’s going to be a bunch of successful farmers. Cities were population sinks up until 200 years ago. The population growth was produced in the country side, and it was the more successful farmers who produced the bulk of it over generations.

End of the day “having your shit together” improves prospects in life and–back in the day, before the revolution–realized fertility.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers. For this you need (a) universal female education and (b) universal female employment with no discrimination.

Yes and no. Sure there was nothing like Yale Law School.

But c’mon, people had ideas of who was a “bright girl”–and of course a “bright boy”–even back in the day. And i think for the brights matching with a bright has always been desired. You need some of that frontline rip-her-clothes-off attraction. But the male-female thing is very powerful. It works for almost all couples if there’s something else going on.

Back in the day i was in school–yeah, ok it was school, but i wasn’t reading the girls’ report cards–and i liked some of the girls who seemed “bright” (and had other positive characteristics).

I doubt guys and girls 500 years ago were that different. And parental advice was probably better. People had at least a backhand farmer’s understanding of breeding. If required, i think most parents would try to dissuade a high quality boy from marrying a well put together girl who was a dimwit. (And bright girls are pretty good, i think at figuring out and avoiding the reverse.) I would bet most matches were within a standard deviation or so in smarts.

I think Clark was analyzing more that just fertility – in terms of fertility there are guys like the late Walter Wallace , who at the time of his death (perforated by the Philly cops when he came at them with a knife) at age 27 had 9, count ’em nine, children and surely would have had more had he lived, which makes him more “successful” than either you or Bill Gates. Clark looked at probate records and such to see who was ECONOMICALLY successful over the generations. There are a few farmers (especially in modern times when farming can be conducted on a large scale) who are very successful businessmen but in the days before automation and lacking the ability to use slaves in England, there were very few yeomen farmers who could have said to be rich. Sure there were rich gentry but that’s not the same thing.

Someone else should publish and sell them. The copyright laws protect the rights-owners’ economic interests. There would no damages in a copyright infringement suit.

If the works are registered with the copyright office, which I’m pretty sure they would be (a small fee and sending one copy to the copyright office), the rightsowners can collect statutory damages, which can go as high as $150,000 plus attorney fees in some cases, without even showing damages. And you have to deal with a federal court lawsuit, which is pricey. The Seuss guys are litigious and have sued over parodies claimed under fair use.

Pre-Renaissance, most men weren’t entirely sorted by intelligence, either. Might made right. Warrior types had more children than scholars, though admittedly there was probably sometimes an overlap.

Also, it would have been obvious even in the absence of formal education which women were better conversationalists, learned new skills faster, understood how to responsibly handle money, had common sense, kept up with cultural or religious trends etc. All of those things correlate with intelligence.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers.

It is obvious you haven’t read Jane Austen, either.

There is such a thing as feral children, who are hard to explain in any other way, no?

Feral kids are a world quite far away from what we’re talking about here.

Small amounts of stimulation can get kids up to speed.

Many historical greats had scant resources by today’s standards. Jaycee Dugard (kidnapped age 11 in 1991; held in a relatively severe isolation for eighteen years) educated her two kids to grade level.

My understanding is that by the first decades of the 19th century, some intermarriage took place between the children of a growing number of wealthy businessmen and landed gentry with cash flow problems.

This is similar to the Downton Abbey scenario, in which titled and landed-but-cash-poor Lord Grantham marries rich Jewish-American Cora.

Does anyone know how common this phenomenon actually was?

Dr Seuss’s key sin:

The study also argues that since the majority of human characters in Dr. Seuss’ books are White, his works — inadvertently or not — center Whiteness and thus perpetuate White supremacy.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/02/us/dr-seuss-books-cease-publication-trnd/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_content=2021-03-02T13%3A00%3A03&utm_source=twCNN&utm_term=link

Using that standard, a helluva lot of Occidental lit is going to have to be tossed in the garbage bin: THE GREAT GATSBY, VANITY FAIR, WAR AND PEACE, MADAME BOVARY, THE SCARLET LETTER, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, etc

Maybe they’ll do what film and television have started doing and retcon various characters into BIPOC status…..

…when he is willingly to publicly condemn someone (Robert Nozick and Alan Dershowitz are other Jewish intellectuals in Cambridge he has gone after), I take it seriously.

Nozick got into a rent dispute with Erich Segal right there in Cambridge. Segal was the landlord, and Nozick the presumably libertarian tenant, but rent control was somehow involved. Is anyone familiar with that dispute? Was it more personal than idoelogical?

Speaking of Segal, the other night we met a Jennifer born in 1952 or ’53. She told us she never met another Jennifer until junior high in the ’60s, and they both were stunned. A few years later Love Story came out and Jennifers were all over the nurseries shortly. She was named after her grandmother Sara(h) Jane, who went by Jenny, and would have been born before GB Shaw introduced the Anglophone world to the Cornish version of Guinevere.

The next night we met another Jennifer who seemed too young, born long after the J-curve had peaked. But she claimed she knew quite a few.

To get back on topic, did Chomsky ever discuss “baby names”, or onomastics in general?

My name changed bc I’m on a different device but I’m the person you responded to.

I have no recollection of Noam discussing names but I wouldn’t swear by that. Noam knows a lot about a lot and has a lot of opinions.

Funny thing about his beef with Dershowitz is he has known him since childhood. Small world in Cambridge. So when he expresses disgust for Alan, I listen.

By ‘a while’ you mean 5 minutes or so.

Dr Seuss’s key sin:

Oh, there was quite an array of those from which to choose. This bunch hasn’t been curated, but are the first seven, in order, that Google gives for “seuss war cartoons”:

[MORE]

21481c73fdd339aad9a5fbbed9768b95.jpg

That would be very interesting to know if the English gentiles who married Jews were in a cash crunch, but could offer pedigree and a title. and if the Jews were actually rich. How does that compare to other Western countries would also be interesting

As Steve himself has noted many of the UK’s leading lights are at least 1/8 Jewish:

Current PM Boris Johnson is partially Jewish

Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife –both 1/8 the Jewish

Prime Minister James Callaghan 1/8th Jewish despite his Irish last name. — btw a devout Baptist, a very decent and likable man who earned the approbation of adversaries such as Norman Tebbitt. BTW Callaghan was too poor to attend university a psychic wound he carried all his life. Only British PM of 20th century not to attend university

Helena Bonham Carter who played princess Margaret so well is descended from two British PM’s (I think). HBC is very proud of her family which is partially Jewish

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/helena-bonham-carter-my-extraordinary-grandfather-saved-thousands-of-jews/

DDL has much jewish b/g
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Day-Lewis

Right, you seek out someone similar no matter the circumstances. My maternal grandparents both had college degrees back in the 30’s when almost no one did (and in middle of nowhere Mississippi, not the East coast). The chances of that happening if people were picking spouses at random is pretty low.

The phenomenon – younger sons and daughters of minor aristocrats marrying well-off “commoners” (children of merchants and so forth) – goes back to the middle ages in England and was very much the norm. The only modern (19th-century) development was the importation of rich-but-“common” brides from the US.

It was especially frequent in England, compared with the Continent, because aristocratic status in England was not caste-like. Having “common” ancestors in the family tree did not result in debasement, but not surprisingly a large proportion of “commoners” in the tree was something you tried to avoid.

The system worked the other way as well: many younger sons of aristos not only married merchants’ daughters but themselves became merchants (or, perhaps, lawyers, medicos, clergy or army officers, who were borderline “gentlemen”). Once again the famous trade off: money for rank.

Just to be clear: I use the term “commoner” here in the popular sense of “non-aristocratic”. In English law, only peers and their wives are “noble” (a small fraction of 1 per cent of the population) and everyone else is “common”, even the children of peers. But the social distinction is between “aristocrats” (those considered “gentlemen” by those at the top of the tree), a group that includes large numbers of untitled but wealthy landowners, and the rest (including newly-rich merchants and manufacturers who haven’t yet bought their way into the landed gentry).

Someone else should publish and sell them. The copyright laws protect the rights-owners’ economic interests. There would no damages in a copyright infringement suit.

Interesting.

Cities were population sinks up until 200 years ago. The population growth was produced in the country side, and it was the more successful farmers who produced the bulk of it over generations.

Aren’t cities still population sinks, maybe even more so?

The anti-Irish and and anti-German stuff doesn’t count. You can make fun of them all you like:

(This one’s for you, Meghs. Marrying a Spencer won’t make you one.)

No, but it can get you into Marks and Spencer. Whatever their reputation in England, it will be two class levels higher in America according to Paul Fussell. And they did own Brooks Brothers for a while.

I believe that Richard Herrnstein, the Bell Curve’s co-author, famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid 20th Century in his his 1971 article in the pre-woke Atlantic Monthly “I.Q.”

Maybe it’s a issue of local selection vs national selection?

Maybe standardization tests only mainstreamed people into the same national candidate pool. You likely had much more localized proxies like reading groups, churches, and whatever to meet up and view potential marriage prospects. These may have acted as micro university nodes that kinda produced similar results.

(“My Father told me about this European town.”)

Eh, I don’t recall the article very well but you might want to take a look at Part I of The Bell Curve. It’s called “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite,” implying it wasn’t really there before. They say that modern society identifies the most intelligent children with much greater efficiency than previously (especially now with testing) and that this, along with assortative mating, is causing and will cause class to depend more on more on intellectual ability than ever before.

They say England was rigidly stratified and that the aristocracy tended to degenerate intellectually over a couple generations. They do note Galton’s findings to the contrary and acknowledge them but they suggest that such families were exceptions. And: “Even in less rigidly stratified societies, stratification by cognitive ability has been weak and inconsistent until this century because the number of very bright people was so much greater than the specialized jobs for which high intelligence is indispensable.”

The real question is HOW they got rich. That has changed profoundly in the past five hundred years.

800 hundred years ago the best means of gaining massive wealth was military conquest. The biggest corporate raiders of the day were massive actual raiders who could kill on demand. Then gradually, things became much more complicated favoring higher IQ traits.

I remember that dilemma helped produce Winston Churchill. His mother was an actual American heiress and his father needed cash.

So Dr. Seuss is a White Supremacist too now. The United States has gone full Simple Jack Tropic Thunder retard levels of Wokeness. We as a country deserve to lose to China and have our number 1 spot as king of the hill top of the heap overtaken by China!

I think what all are missing is that Clark isn’t focused solely on IQ but on preservation of status through changing social regimes. Modern sorting by IQ may make that one channel more prevalent. But traditional class sorting may have helped sort on non-IQ dimensions that are important for success and social status. Like not being too neurotic. Or combining smarts with conscientiousness — weeding out the hyper anti-social genius not protected by powerful family and wealth. And it may well be that the class sorting for some subjective mix of behavior, conscientiousness, sociability, physical health and attractiveness as well as athletic ability, plus intelligence almost certainly did better for long run preservation of successful social status than intelligence alone.

So Dr. Seuss is a White Supremacist too now.

What do you mean “now”?

Consuelo Vanderbilt is a representative example:

Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan (formerly Consuelo Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough; born Consuelo Vanderbilt; 2 March 1877 – 6 December 1964) was a member of the prominent American Vanderbilt family. Her first marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough has become known as one of the advantageous, but loveless, marriages common during the Gilded Age. The Duke obtained a large dowry by the marriage. Although the teen-age Consuelo was opposed to the marriage arranged by her mother, she became a popular and influential Duchess. For much of the marriage they lived separately and the marriage was finally annulled. She went on to marry a wealthy French aviator and continued her charitable endeavors.

Consuelo Vanderbilt married The 9th Duke of Marlborough at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York City, on 6 November 1895.[15] They had two sons, John Albert William Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford (who became 10th Duke of Marlborough) and Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consuelo_Vanderbilt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spencer-Churchill,_10th_Duke_of_Marlborough

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Ivor_Spencer-Churchill

I just don’t know whether Herrnstein had an accurate portrait of Anglo-American society before the Herrstein family arrived in it.

The Boston Brahmins certainly engaged in quite a bit of assortative mating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_family_(America)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_political_family

What did they study?

a helluva lot of Occidental lit is going to have to be tossed

Not just literature, but each and every accomplishment (artistic and otherwise) of Western Civilization because–alas–Europeans tended to be, uh, European until quite recently. So every single thing is at risk, with the notable exception of technological advances which just happen to make POCs lives easier. They’ll just be retconned of course.

Yes, thanks much.

This brings to mind a couple of scenes in Pride and Prejudice (we Calvinists have just re-watched the classic 1995 TV miniseries adaptation).

Miss Bingley mocks Jane Bennet for the low (i.e. commercial) connections of Mr Gardiner, her maternal uncle, who’s in business and lives in Cheapside in London. Lady Catherine de Bourgh also points out these status problems to Elizabeth as an objection to her potential association with Mr Darcy. But both Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine are being satirized — Miss Bingley especially, since her own nouveau riche family’s fortune was built on trade.

Darcy himself remarks on Elizabeth’s inferior breeding and connections in his infamous initial marriage proposal, but again this is his pride speaking. He sheds his snobbery, and the bewitching Lizzie is his.

Lizzie>Jane>Mary>Lydia>Kitty?

Or is Mary actually reasonably intelligent, just a bit odd, and hence:

Lizzie>Mary>Jane>Lydia>Kitty

Or is Lydia actually a clever and cunning schemer, which would move her up in the order?

Mr Bennet calls the younger three girls ‘three of the silliest girls in England’, but ‘silly’ could also mean ‘misguided’, not necessarily ‘unintelligent’.

In English law, only peers and their wives are “noble” (a small fraction of 1 per cent of the population) and everyone else is “common”, even the children of peers.

Wasn’t Elizabeth II herself, at birth? Or was she a peeress?

She may have started as a commoner, but she couldn’t marry one:

Was Queen Elizabeth II Allowed to Marry a Commoner?

Note the author’s name. And commoner’s visage:

Prince George ‘may never be king’ – Royal expert explains why

Is author Clive Irving a republican or a Jacobite? “Irving” is suspiciously Caledonian.

“Mr Irving argues that Britons’ appetite for the monarchy is waning and claims it could be done away with before Prince George takes the throne.

“The expert said: ‘All polling shows that younger Britons don’t find the monarchy relevant.’”

Younger Britons, or the younger in Britain?

OT: The acceleration of wokeness continues to expand in all defiance of the laws of thermodynamics.

Here’s Why People Are Saying ‘Hamilton’ Is ‘Canceled’
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-people-saying-hamilton-canceled-192800429.html

Other critical viewers have pointed to audio clips of Miranda saying the n-word, once when reading from a Hamilton audiobook footnote, and once when reading an excerpt from the writer Junot Díaz.

I look forward to the NYT never allowing Lin-Manual Miranda to ever write for them ever again.

But really this is all just the set dressing for the Juneteenth musical that Kenya Barris has been writing with Pharrell to replace Hamilton. A predictable process, first American white history, at it’s foundation is ‘claimed’ by making all the characters black (Except King George…) and then you just jettison it completely and focus on it’s black history.

It will replace Hamilton as the thing school children will watch all across America in the singular example of a shared national curriculum. Juneteenth will be named a national holiday in the US this year with huge media campaigns and ‘Juneteenth episodes’ of more TV shows than you’d imagine. The NBA will make a big deal out of it etc. And expect an epic surge of shootings as Juneteenth bloc parties grow extra large with the media prodding.

If you want a preview of what the Juneteenth musical that will become the height of American elite artistic taste and be shown over and over to it’s school children, Kenya Barris’ ‘Black-ish’ did a mini version that contains some interesting lyrics.

Younger son: What else did we build?
Will Smith’s sassy aunt: Railroads.
Morpheus: Wallstreet.
Dre: The White House and Universities.
Older daughter: UVA.
Unison: We built that!
Younger daughter: Chapel Hill.
Unison: We built that!
Dumb son (Because this is still nominally a comedy): ‘Pyramids… *Gets angrily cut off*’
Will Smith’s sassy aunt: ‘No, sorry our hebrew brothers get credit for that!’

Dre: ‘It’s time to vote for me, take part in this democracy’
Tracee Ellis Ross: ‘Tear them freedom papers up please cause we don’t need to show no IDs’
Will Smith’s sassy aunt: ‘It’s June 19th we celebrate’
Morpheus: ‘Grab a blonde and miscegenate’

Small world in Cambridge.

Leroy Anderson claimed to have been educated from kindergarten to his Harvard graduate degree solely on Cambridge’s Washington Avenue. That’s what, 16, 17 years? Then he became a spy, but only in the sense that Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. was later.

As the son of Swedish immigrants, though, Anderson was as goy as goy gets while still being white. He also decamped for Connecticut, where he composed “Sleigh Ride” during a heatwave.

Who was this ‘Old Grudge of 42nd Street’? There are two cartoons that reference him, April 29, 1942 and May 1, 1942.

Was it a specific journalist at the NY Daily News, the proprietor (Joseph Patterson), or just a nickname for the paper itself?

As Steve himself has noted many of the UK’s leading lights are at least 1/8 Jewish:

Current PM Boris Johnson is partially Jewish

Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife –both 1/8 the Jewish

Tony Blair is descended from a family with the surname Lipsett that was in the grocery business. Recall Ralph Lauren’s real name.

It common to praise individuals for a long time by saying he has class. It comes up in baseball books all the time: Stan Musial has class, Lou Gehrig had class.

It would be interesting to know what people in different situations at different times meant by praising somebody for having class.

What would you say it means nowadays? Do people even say it any more?

The correct response to “slaves/slavery built America”— all credit goes to the slavers:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/obama-calls-for-reparations-since-wealth-of-america-is-built-on-the-backs-of-slaves/#comment-4494419 (#26)

Austen is very acute in her judgement of the relative status of Darcy and Lizzie, no doubt because her own social status was pretty close to Lizzie’s. Both were daughters of gentlemen, but gentlemen close to the bottom rung of gentry status.

G. E. Mingay’s English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (published 1963) has a helpful guide to the levels of the English gentry (although P&P was set in the Regency, 1810-20, these figures were probably still broadly valid).

The highest stratum in Mingay’s scheme are the “great landlords” (about 400 families), with an average income of 10,000 pounds a year, which happens to be Mr Darcy’s income. A large number of these families would have peerage titles and many of the rest baronetcies (sort-of hereditary knighthoods). Darcy would have been in a minority in this stratum as a “mere mister”.

Below them are the “wealthy gentry” (3000 to 5000 pounds a year), the “squires” (1000 to 3000) and lastly mere “gentlemen” (300 to 1000). Mr Bennet was firmly in the “squires” level, but his estate was entailed (meaning he only had a life interest rather than outright ownership, and on his death the estate would be inherited by Mr Collins) so his wife and daughters would have had little chance of maintaining their rank after his death without the fortuitous marriages contracted by Jane and Lizzie.

Jenny Churchill. Or Jennifer Juniper.

Arnold is pretty bright. As are successful generals, uh, generally. Intelligence is good for lots of things. Even witty conversation.

After Lydia’s elopement with Mr Wickham, imperilling the future of all the remaining daughters, Lizzie bitterly denounces her as a “Stupid, stupid girl!”

If you ask me, Lizzie lets the brainless little tart off rather lightly.

I kept reading the lyric transcriptions and thinking ‘Here’s where Altai’s parodying is starting’ — but I was wrong every time. They’re all real.

That ‘grab a blonde’ line is really putting it out there, so to speak; and if the words are too big for some listeners to follow, the accompanying pelvic thrust should make things clear.

As I’ve mentioned before at iSteve, my small-town midwestern, middle-aged cohort contains a substantial number of Hamilton fanatics, e.g. women in their 50s who have every last word of Hamilton memorized, and who will travel many hours at crushing expense to see a live performance. It will be very interesting to see if they are equally enthusiastic and obedient when they’re instructed to adore this new milestone in musical and moral evolution.

Off Topic

Texas Gov. Abbott fully reopens state, ends mask mandate on Texas Independence Day.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/mask-mandate-ends-business-open-15994001.php

Who’s next?

In regards to those two, modest deportment and gracious manners I should think.

Jenny Churchill.

Where the Jeromes got “Jennie” may be a mystery, but it sure wasn’t from Jennifer. Any 19th-century American Jennifers would have been limited to mining towns in the Driftless Area or Montana.

“Jenny” is an example of a diminutive that had severed from its parent name (Jane) to be used by itself independently. Even abroad, as with Jenny Lind. Few today connect Harry with Henry, Nancy with Ann, or Sally and Sadie with Sarah.

A Jenifer did sign the Constitution, however. Even honored with a street in Madison.

Or Jennifer Juniper.

Jennifer was a popular name in the UK before Love Story came out.

I believe that Richard Herrnstein, the Bell Curve’s co-author, famously laid out his theory that assortative mating couldn’t have been all that high until the widespread use of standardized testing in the mid 20th Century

Pretty amazing that he never spent time around women or read about European culture.

Jane Austen’s books are works of fiction that reflect not a small amount of wish fulfillment. Real life was not like that. Even in the novels you get glimpses of how things really were if you focus on secondary characters. For example, Mrs. Bennett is far dumber than her husband, who forever makes fun of her for that.

Also, let’s not forget that English landed gentry at the time numbered perhaps 5,000 families. Not that much opportunity for assortative mating.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers. For this you need (a) universal female education and (b) universal female employment with no discrimination.

No you don’t.

Smart women were not recently discovered by feminists after thousands of years of oppression.

If anything the Romans and Greeks were more in tune with female genetics than modern society.

They had no qualms about discussing intelligence, beauty or strength in women.

Around half of society still wants to believe that blank slate exists. The Greeks would have considered today’s blank slate egalitarians to be complete fools.

Upper class Roman statesmen were not picking their women from a lottery. It is absurd to think they were all procreating like rabbits and assortative mating didn’t occur until feminism.

Add to that the craftspeople, the trades, small businesses (printing, mills of many kinds), – and the clergy, maybe most important. (Look at those and – English music and literature and – universities and schools – well before 1750. Clark missed out on these factors by making an artificial cut at 1750. – This cut helps to produce clear results. They just aren’t that strong and expletive.

Jimmy Fallon is the prototypical postmodern (Jordan B. Peterson) market-character (Erich From) -all eyes on the bright side, always in a good mood (grim face for disturbers) – and except for that, a master in intellectual superficiality and shallowness (silliness too).

As I’ve mentioned before at iSteve, my small-town midwestern, middle-aged cohort contains a substantial number of Hamilton fanatics, e.g. women in their 50s who have every last word of Hamilton memorized

Hamilton somehow perfectly taps into the White guilt part of the brain.

I used to work with White liberal women that would talk about the show and rap along to the lyrics while working.

Not once did I ever see them with a Black man. They liked Black people so much that they patronized a complete historical fantasy but avoided them in real life.

I tried to watch 5 minutes and it was the dumbest play I had ever seen.

Don’t forget the mills* though (I remember your moving and impressive Ukrainian story). He forgot them – I think for clarity.

*and the small trades and the clergy(!)** etc. – An Italian study found, that shoemakers in Venice in the middle ages were quite rich, compared to their contemporaries – and that their families stayed well above average through the centuries up until today.

German universities were for centuries the field where you found way above numbers of the offspring of the clergy. This was well known and acknowledged.

In the era you describe, the various Protestant denominations played a significant role in this sort of stratification. Episcopalians might marry Presbyterians or Methodists, but rarely Baptists, and virtually never foot-washing Baptists, Pentecostals, and other more declasse sects.

My grandparents’ backgrounds — in terms of college education — are similar to what you describe, and both of my parents’ families were from small towns in Georgia. You tended to have pockets of relatively well-educated people even in fairly nondescript towns who socialized and married among themselves. I don’t know how much this still holds today.

Also, let’s not forget that English landed gentry at the time numbered perhaps 5,000 families. Not that much opportunity for assortative mating.

5,000 families offer ample opportunities for assortative mating.

Oh yes, but I’m referring to “Cohan The Barbarian.” Cohan’s ilk became increasingly mismatched against regimented armies with officers trained with rudimentary logistics. The old Viking method of getting your buds on a boat and raiding a regional monastery were coming to an end. Those long bows took the fun out of melee combat and head lopping.

Yes, it is a peculiarity of English law that most royal princes and princesses are technically commoners, at least in their youth.

Elizabeth the Second was a commoner until she married the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947, when she became a noblewoman.

And yet, on the official Table of Precedence for England, at birth Elizabeth had precedence over every nobleman and noblewoman in England, except for a handful of other royals.

It’s a very complex field with lots of anomalies and inconsistencies.

They will absolutely love it. And if it displays a hint of transgression here and there, that will give them an occasional frisson–allowing them to imagine that they’re somewhere near the cutting edge. Which happens to be exactly how all automatons prefer to see themselves.

They also had a equivalent to Facebook.

On the other hand, William Waldorf Astor simply had himself made a peer :

William Waldorf “Willy” Astor, 1st Viscount Astor[1] (March 31, 1848 – October 18, 1919), was an American-British attorney, politician, businessman (hotels and newspapers), and philanthropist. Astor was a scion of the very wealthy Astor family of New York City. He moved to Britain in 1891, became a British subject in 1899, and was made a peer as Baron Astor in 1916 and Viscount Astor in 1917 for his contributions to war charities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Waldorf_Astor

I cribbed this from answers.com

“Unlikely .The Lipsett family of Ballyshannon are believed to have arrived in Ireland from possibly Germany in the 17th Century and fought with King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. For their loyalty to the Protestant cause they were apparenlty given land by King Billie around Cashel in Co.Donegal. The family remained almost exclsusively protestant “Irish planters” in Donegal up until this day.

Whereas it may be possible that the Lipsetts were of Ashkenazi Jewish origin , the fact of their being essentailly protestant mercenaries some 400 years ago suggests that this would not probably be the likley profile for European continental Jewry at that time. More likley they were of German or Flemish low country ancestry.”

When I try to define class all I can come up with are things which would be derided as “acting white:” respecting proper categories and definitions but not correcting others if they err, deferring to somebody else or giving space to accommodate their mood, helping someone when you don’t really have to, refusing to exploit an unfair advantage, not boasting. Having class is systemically racist.

Chomsky is plenty happy to troll his opponents.

Herrnstein can’t be too bright because he is against me. The brilliance fallacy.

That’s because no society in the past sorted women by intelligence and then matched them to their male peers.”

Rich, intelligent men obviously preferred to associate with each other in past societies. And it seems obvious they chose wives from among the sisters and daughters of their peers. By virtue of being members of rich, intelligent families, these women were automatically selected for intelligence.

Getting b[l]ack to IQ in America, it’s official–NASA’s HQ is officially named for a Hidden Figure this week:

NASA Celebrates ‘Hidden Figure’ Mary W. Jackson With Building Naming Ceremony

Compare that to the recently-resigned Governess General of Canada, who actually went into space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Payette

She evidently picked up some bad habits there, culminating in “toxic” work environments in future workplaces. The first crime ever committed in space was that of another woman on the ISS. The victim? “Her wife.”

Is anyone surprised?

The key guide books were:

Burke’s Landed Gentry 1833-

Burke’s peerage etc.

Kelly’s Handbook

Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage

Reading Clark’s Farewell to Alms now; the chap can write – what night have been a dry text is littered with references to ‘turds in the cellar’ from Samuel Pepys’ diaries plus the vibrant infanticide methods of many parts of ‘the South’ and ‘the East. Maybe it’s his facility for communication that puts a cancellation target on his forehead – nothing threatens the Narrative than someone able to tell another, more credible narrative convincingly. There’s no mystery why this new paper got him cancelled though – the single reference to Francis ‘Mr Eugenics’ Galton (how height correlates from father to son – heresy!) would be sine die. While his conclusion – genetics dominate social outcomes – is damning to the entire post-war mania to equalise everything through bigger government, note also the (self-preservative) olive ranch to the woke mob: “If this interpretation is correct then aspirations that by appropriate social design, rates of social mobility can be substantially increased will prove futile. We have to be resigned to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth. Personally I would argue that this should push us towards compressing differences in income and wealth that are the product of such inherited characteristics. The Nordic model of the good society looks a lot more attractive than the Texan one.” Non sequitur of the year?

Did sorting women by intelligence and then matching them to their male peers make a better society

It’s not a new development, at all. Most men are rarely attracted to women significantly stupider or significantly smarter than they are, and it doesn’t take testing or sorting to accomplish that. The real change is simply that urbanization and rapid travel allowed everyone access to a far wider pool of potential mates and so increased the likelihood that “like meets like”. There was no conspiracy to start a eugenic breeding program, it is what happens when people are given a choice. Now we have to live with the consequences of technological change, and we aren’t doing well.

Not once did I ever see them with a Black man.

White American liberal women definitely avoid romantic entanglements with Black men. I have noticed that too. It is an interesting phenomenon. I suspect it is more nurture than nature because European leftwing females seem happy to pursue African men. Also interesting that lower class American white women, many of whom probably vote Trump, have no problem sleeping with Blacks. This must say something about the unspoken class signifiers in our society.

I made the duplicate point, later ‘Dieter’. Apologies.

That’s my thinking as well. Before the Industrial Age, elite women in most European countries were expected to be literate and be conversational in the events of the time. For example, Sarah Churchill may have lacked a PhD in Physics but see seemed like a fairly sharp woman to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Churchill,_Duchess_of_Marlborough

Professional Manegerial Class women (a class which most white American liberal females fall into) want PMC men to mate with. Black men are far less likely to have a successful PMC career than white men.

There’s also more than a hint of DR3 involved. While obviously cuckservatives rely far too much on the limited rhetorical power of saying that progtards are the real racist, it’s also undeniably true. Libs infantalize and fetishize blacks while conservatives tend to view blacks essentially as equals.

Sad.

One fact I’ve never seen mentioned here is that Mexico had a TFR over 6 less than 50 years ago, back when the US TFR had gone from 4 to 2 in a decade, thanks to “women’s liberation,” the pill and abortion. Now the Mexican TFR is below replacement rate and not much higher than the US. Guatemala has a significantly higher TFR but it’s still plummeting. So mass immigration in recent decades has been largely a function of Mexico’s and GuateHonSalvador’s population being much younger. There are obviously many other factors, but age and fertility are big ones.

Now immigration from south of the border will start to dry up as Mexico ages (and reaches more economic parity with the US). But there are still billions of Africans to import by the end of the century. The question is how economically necessary they will be. I’m guessing: not very, especially with more automation and UBI on the way. Of course, importing alien populations isn’t only done for economic reasons.

So when he expresses disgust for Alan, I listen.

Has not Dershowitz a canon from which you can judge for yourself? Are other opinions from Chomsky’s not also valid?

Plenty of left-wing intellectuals are pathetic poseurs. Has Chomsky ever criticized one of them (other than the few times he had a political belief with one)?

Chomsky bothering to trash someone’s mental horsepower is fully in the realm of narcissism of small differences.

That used to be true, until a lynch mob attacked him for daring to treat Bad Orange Man as just another politician to joke and play with in the same way that all other politicians (or at least the Democrats) get treated on these shows. Now he’s always careful to make clear just how bad Orange Man really is, and what a threat to our Democracy he is.

Yours is the best comment here. Add natural assortative mating to urbanization to Jewish hegemony, and the result is today’s world.

Plenty of left-wing intellectuals are pathetic poseurs. Has Chomsky ever criticized one of them (other than the few times he had a political belief with one)?

He is famous for doing so. Wasn’t Richard Herrnstein a liberal too?

where 95% of the population was once peasant farmers

This is a good description of modern Korea.

First to leave the farm were the Korean Boomers, born in the chaos of independence and capitalism. It was a unique time that erased class, and mate selection has since been based largely on how well they and their parents made the economic transition — or whether news of it even reached their village.

If farming itself held anyone back, it’s hard to tell whom.

gent wrote:

High value individuals are usually so across multiple domains. The beautiful and the intelligent largely overlap.

I attended Caltech back when being very smart was essentially the one criterion for admission: since there was no affirmative action, even the handful of blacks and Hispanics who got in were indeed very smart.

Beautiful? Ummm… not so much.

N.B. As I have mentioned before, that Caltech is gone. For us, “diversity” meant that even though you might be a chemical engineering major, you were willing to be friends with physicists and biologists and, maybe, even one mathematician (no one should have to suffer more than one mathematician!).

It would be more precise to date some of that to the imperial Japanese era and the modest start of industry two generations earlier, but that’s almost splitting hairs.

Chomsky bothering to trash someone’s mental horsepower is fully in the realm of narcissism of small differences.

One more fun fact: The difference in IQ between Noam Chomsky and most everybody else is not small, so Freud’s observation might not necessarily be right here.

Did you read the link?

The statement is from Dr. Seuss Enterprises. Think it’s possible that they own the rights, and that they are simply taking something off the market whose rights they own?

Answer your own question. Sorting women by intelligence didn’t do anything. The reason the US/West is in such dire straits is because of the Jews.

Liberating women (from high maternal mortality rates, illiteracy, slavery to abusive husbands, continual pregnancy) has led the West into a ditch. Life was paradise in “traditional societies.” I suggest you visit rural Ethiopia for the good life.

I’m afraid you’re going to be exactly right.

“ will cause class to depend more on more on intellectual ability than ever before.”

Which is obviously true, and it’s just an empirical question of how much. Starting in the early 20th century and ramping up in the 1950s, we made a giant investment in identifying high IQ non-elite children and providing them with training and resources previously limited to elites, and putting them on high status career tracks. Horatio Alger stories existed before then, but there was not an organized public effort that benefited high IQ non-elites who lacked that Alger drive.

Not mentioned by RH and not in Clark’s earlier book are then effect of the two world wars and then the great inflations and inheritance taxes of 1930-1990 of wiping out old fortunes. The combination of insecurity of old fortunes and strong economic growth in this period resulted in a re-sorting of economic status favoring new men.

Steve’s comments here are just strange and unlike him. He says RH says something in an article he links to, but it doesn’t say that. You find something closer, but still doesn’t say that. Mistakes happen, but then having a thread speculating about the non-existent claim by RH is worse.

“ They say England was rigidly stratified and that the aristocracy tended to degenerate intellectually over a couple generations. ”

It was the gentry driving England’s 18th and 19th century eugenic expansion, not the aristocracy. In any event, RH’s estimate of the genetic component of IQ is 80%, which is on the high side of estimates. His view of how fast upper class IQs regress to the mean would thus be on the low side.

so, for example, here’s the unpaywalled version of the quoted article:

https://archive.is/Ltx1z

Only British PM of 20th century not to attend university

John Major, Winston Churchill, Ramsay MacDonald, Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain.

An equivalent …

😏

But has he criticized them as intellectual lightweights? Maybe he has. I just suspect that Herrnstein, Dershowitz, et al got under his skin and he lashed out.

Herrnstein was liberal by general standards but conservative by academy standards.

Marriages were determined by social class, geographic proximity (at the time of lower mobility), approval of both families, money considerations such as the size of dowry, to some degree by physical attraction. Other things you listed were merely “nice to have” and influenced mating only weakly.

Social class is still the the biggest factor today, just like it was 200 yeas ago. It’s just that today’s social classes are strongly selected on IQ.

“No, that’s not true. Rich people don’t allow their daughters to hang out with poor men, let alone marry them. Money sticks with money.” There’s more truth in that than we’d like to believe. There is a selection process and it isn’t entirely genetic per se, but rather one in which a genetic group seeks to protect it’s own.

Quite so. In the US, also known as ‘the Ivy League’. And, really, it’s natural that as a modern you end up married with someone you meet a lot rather than a street random.

Perhaps it’s too far outside Clark’s subfield, but gosh, we have a couple of non-european population groups whom one might say show signs of assortative mating for IQ.

Guatemala’s fertility rate is very similar to Haiti’s, at about 2.8 births per woman, and also falling off a cliff. But as the video appears to show, Haitian immigrants (I assume) are still giving some work to neighboring Dominican Republic (fertility rate 2.3 births/woman). Both Guatemala and Haiti had fertility rates of around 4 as late as 2003. Mexico has a much larger population than those countries put together and thus matters more, but it will be a good few decades until immigration into the US from Haiti/Guatemala truly dries up due to their plummeting birth rates.

Note that even if the US collapsed into a fully failed state, life there would still be better than anywhere in Haiti or Guatemala, so immigration from those countries into what used to be the US will not stop.

I’d never made the Love Story connection and was under the impression that like half the girls my age (born 1965) were named Jennifer so doubted the movie’s effect on popularity. But yeah, it seems at least to have redoubled a trend: https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=jennifer&sw=both&exact=false

Brooks Brothers has gone down the tubes. You used to be able to get a good suit there for $400.

The old money goes to small shops on the UES.

It’s funny how everyone rushed in to assure me that men preferred bright women. Perhaps they did, other thing being equal. Many, many other things. Even then, there were different opinions on what constituted “bright” in the past. For example, it was considered to be a negative if a girl read too many books.

I can guarantee that never before in history women had to pass a math proficiency test in order to be able to marry into the upper class. Which is the situation we have now.

By the 18th century, if not earlier, brides for the aristocracy and well to do merchant families in most of Northern Europe were also expected to have skills that selected for intelligence and ability to concentrate such as playing a musical instrument well, sewing and embroidery, etc. Most importantly, women had to manage the household, which in many cases was like managing a small business, given the servants, the animals to be managed, the family garden, etc. No smart man wanted a stupid woman in that position.

What we might be forgetting is that elite males very often fathered children with non-elite females in those days – servants, the impressionable dairy maid on uncles’s estate, or just common prostitutes. That seems to happen less often today, unless you are Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Hidden Figurers! All of this rumination about the smarts of the descendants of white Europeans is now moot:

The African Enlightenment: The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave

As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637)… But what if this story is wrong?

For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy.

When will you Johnny-come-lately pink apes realize that black people made all the money and figured out all the best stuff long before you did?

1. The initial news stories were totally evasive about whether these were illegal immigrants who had just crossed the border. It was bloody obvious that they were but the news media weren’t not eager to concede something that would make Biden look bad. Maybe in a day or three when the story had faded they could print the truth but until then there was no “proof” that they were illegal aliens so they didn’t have to print that.

2. Apparently the rear seats had been removed and I assume everyone was (more or less) standing up (Mexicans are not very tall).

the aristocracy modeling things like public morals and a byzantine system of manners

I see what you mean, although many (most?) of the actual aristocrats I’ve known have been pretty big on bad behavior themselves–Brits and Spaniards more so than Italians, but maybe that’s because the Italians tend to drink a lot less.

On the other hand, byzantine systems of manners definitely still obtain in the upper reaches of European society, and I suppose one could say that selective personal amorality is just a part of those systems of manners. But even then, I’m not sure how all of that could possibly be the good influence you posit.

Yeah, that’s what’s funny. I don’t think Chomsky is lying when he says he thinks Dershowitz, a Harvard law school professor, is “not very bright.” There are levels to this. Chomsky said that about William F. Buckley, too, and again he was just being honest. People like Buckley and Dershowitz really don’t strike someone like Chomsky as “bright.”

I don’t even think Dershowitz thinks the gap isn’t large; at one of their debates he acknowledged he’s known since he was 11 years old at summer camp (where Chomsky was his counselor) that everyone knew Chomsky was the most brilliant guy in the world. He said it in exasperated, bitchy way but it was clear everyone in that community did know who was smarter. He might have even literally said, “I’m not as smart as Noam” which is probably not the type of phrase Alan Dershowitz of all people tends to utter.

The study also argues that since the majority of human characters in Dr. Seuss’ books are White, his works — inadvertently or not — center Whiteness and thus perpetuate White supremacy.

From the ‘Orwell was an Optimist’ dept.
https://thepostmillennial.com/arizona-department-of-education-crafts-equity-toolkit-teaching-that-three-month-old-babies-are-racist

Now we have to live with the consequences of technological change, and we aren’t doing well.

What technological change do you mean?

Chomsky has not hesitated to go after leftist intellectuals.

Specific comment. Phetland asked who I’m referring to when I speak of “Paris school” and “postmodernist cults”: the above is a sample.

He then asks, reasonably, why I am “dismissive” of it. Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I’m not going to undertake it. I wouldn’t say this if I hadn’t been explicitly asked for my opinion — and if asked to back it up, I’m going to respond that I don’t think it merits the time to do so.

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.

Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I’ve discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven’t met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones — the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish. When I proceed as I do in other areas where I do not understand, I run into the problems mentioned in connection with (1) and (2) above. So that’s who I’m referring to, and why I don’t proceed very far. I can list a lot more names if it’s not obvious.

For those interested in a literary depiction that reflects pretty much the same perceptions (but from the inside), I’d suggest David Lodge. Pretty much on target, as far as I can judge.

Phetland also found it “particularly puzzling” that I am so “curtly dismissive” of these intellectual circles while I spend a lot of time “exposing the posturing and obfuscation of the New York Times.” So “why not give these guys the same treatment.” Fair question. There are also simple answers. What appears in the work I do address (NYT, journals of opinion, much of scholarship, etc.) is simply written in intelligible prose and has a great impact on the world, establishing the doctrinal framework within which thought and expression are supposed to be contained, and largely are, in successful doctrinal systems such as ours. That has a huge impact on what happens to suffering people throughout the world, the ones who concern me, as distinct from those who live in the world that Lodge depicts (accurately, I think). So this work should be dealt with seriously, at least if one cares about ordinary people and their problems. The work to which Phetland refers has none of these characteristics, as far as I’m aware. It certainly has none of the impact, since it is addressed only to other intellectuals in the same circles. Furthermore, there is no effort that I am aware of to make it intelligible to the great mass of the population (say, to the people I’m constantly speaking to, meeting with, and writing letters to, and have in mind when I write, and who seem to understand what I say without any particular difficulty, though they generally seem to have the same cognitive disability I do when facing the postmodern cults). And I’m also aware of no effort to show how it applies to anything in the world in the sense I mentioned earlier: grounding conclusions that weren’t already obvious. Since I don’t happen to be much interested in the ways that intellectuals inflate their reputations, gain privilege and prestige, and disengage themselves from actual participation in popular struggle, I don’t spend any time on it.

The entire western world is a population sink, and has been for 50 years, mostly for whites. The population of the United states would be about 220 million today if we kept immigration levels below 400,000 per year (as we did from 1921-1970). Currently 45 million immigrants live in the United States and another 75 million Americans have immigrant parents

US population under the age of 40
census- White – Blacks
-1990 – 122 M – 13 M
-2020– 93 M – 25 M

since 1990 the White population under the age of 40 has fallen 24% as the Black population under the age of 40 has risen 85%. Is this due to systemic racism ? or miscegenation ? At current fertility trends the white population under the age of 40 will be below 80 million whites in twenty years, a white population decline of 14%. In twenty years whites will be a minority of Americans under the age of 70.

I read somewhere that in the feudal era it was rare for a noble family to stay on top much more than a century. The problem was the young male heirs often got killed in wars…

So maybe Wars of the Roses are good for assisting in the rotation of elites.

The Black lady interviewed in your link was pretty frank in stating that the purpose here was to put a Black author in place of Suess to brainwash the kids.

Suess was a reliable liberal: Green Eggs and Ham taught us not to be biased; Grinch taught us to always be nice. Doesn’t matter in this age of race trumping all.

Yet another lesson.

Jane Austen’s books are works of fiction that reflect not a small amount of wish fulfillment. Real life was not like that.

Aspirational fiction that nevertheless includes accurate observation of not a small amount of human behavior. Yes, there was assortative mating in England for centuries.

Also, let’s not forget that English landed gentry at the time numbered perhaps 5,000 families. Not that much opportunity for assortative mating.

5,000 families is more than adequate for assortative mating.

You might as well argue that there was no opportunity for assortative horse or dog breeding, either, an obviously risible assertion.

Due to abduction, Jaycee did not receive much formal education, yet she was able to successfully homeschool her kids, and under extremely difficult circumstances.

As her success made the public school system look ridiculous, the reporters deliberately avoided exploration of that part of her story.

I hope that she continued to home school. It was my impression that psychologists and other “experts” were urging her to socialize her kids in public school, i.e. ruin them.

Talk like MLK, live like KKK.

And how many children do you have? 0-2 I can correctly assume The MEN OF UNZ are such ignorant morons about abortion and birth control. Absolute ignorance of history and human reproduction displayed hundreds of times every day by the ignoramus MEN OF UNZ

Abortion wasn’t invented by the feminazi plaintiff’s attorney’s and the SC judges in 1973. Humans have been aborting babies for the last 10,000 years. For slave women, it was after birth abortions or infanticide by the men slave owners.

Abortion was completely legal in every Christian western civilization country on earth until the mid 19th century. Something of which you and the other MEN OF UNZ are completely ignorant. But you and the other ignoramuses post every day no matter what the context of the discussion.

Anti abortion was first pushed by 1850s-1860s British men Drs. By 1860 the cause was taken up by women’s clubs wealthy women and all the Christian churches. Within a few decades, abortion was illegal in all Christian western civilization countries.

Instead of endlessly repeating the standard MEN OF UNZ completes ignorance of the history of abortion laws, why not at least ask Mr google you ignoramus????????

Contraception wasn’t invented in 1960 when the pill went on the market you ignorant idiot. Birth control contraception has been around since caveman days. Again, at least ask Mr. google about the subject of which you are totally completely quite quite ignorant.

I believe at least 100 million, maybe more persons have been added to the US population since that bane of the ignoramus MEN OF UNZ the birth control pill came on the market in 196o.

If you and the other MEN OF UNZ want more White children, get married do the deed and raise 4 or 5 White children instead of blaming everybody else for not having White children.

It’s not difficult. Easiest thing in the world.

And if, like most of the MEN OF UNZ you can’t afford children, move to a White rural county go on welfare and have several White kids. What with 50 years of wage stagnation, high taxes cost of living in urban areas, commuting etc 5 or 6 welfare kids and adult disability will allow you and whatever White woman you can find to live as comfortable a life as in a thriving urban area.

Practice what you preach you ignoramus. With idiots like you and the other ignoramus MEN OF UNZ around, no wonder White Americans are in such dire straights.

Except the Alden family, thriving economically and reproducing rapidly. 3 brothers, 18 grandchildren.

English farmers are simply not comparable to, say, Russian farmers. England — island — every last little share of resource must be carefully managed. Russia — vast land with no Eastern limit until you hear spoken Korean — slash-and-burn migration and so on.

While Russian and English farmers were vastly different (serfdom was not legally abolished in Russia until about 1870) your analysis seems very off track.

When did Russian peasants ever do ‘slash-and-burn’ farming? That is mainly in tropical rain forests and similar. Russian peasants could not just wander over the Urals for more land. Most of eastern Russia is tiaga forest or unfarmable deserts or remote tundra. Even today Siberia is not farmed.

Few Russians ventured past the Urals in any event, and the somewhat less harsh lands in the southern areas were and are full of Tartars, Kazakhs, Mongols, Turks, Uzbeks, Chechens, etc. who were very territorial. And still are.

Russian and English farmers were not comparable. But not for the reasons you suggest.

You could sue for copyright infringement if someone pirated a Seuss book even if the damages were minimal.

People can and do sue over $1 damages. Taylor Swift famously did so over unwanted groping, and won. Didn’t collect the dollar though.

With intellectual property there is a doctrine that if you fail to protect your property from infringement you can lose it for all similar kinds of property (say, book chapters or series).

Whether these works are still under valid copyright is another open issue.

I am not an attorney but I would warn against believing technical legal arguments solely based on anonymous blog posts.

I see what you mean, although many (most?) of the actual aristocrats I’ve known have been pretty big on bad behavior themselves–Brits and Spaniards more so than Italians, but maybe that’s because the Italians tend to drink a lot less.

On the other hand, byzantine systems of manners definitely still obtain in the upper reaches of European society, and I suppose one could say that selective personal amorality is just a part of those systems of manners. But even then, I’m not sure how all of that could possibly be the good influence you posit.

Certainly. I’ve read that the English aristocracy’s weekend country “shooting parties” were events wherein the aristocrats would discretely pursue affairs with one another’s wives (and perhaps one another from time to time). But the difference is that those who emulated them didn’t know about this, and the Ladies were all as pure as driven snow as far as the lower classes not “in the know” would be aware. It was the public example rather than the private reality that had the power to shape behavior.

Of course, Edward VIII’s abdication in pursuit of Wallis Simpson was a peek behind the blinds, and the public degeneration of the English aristocracy is more or less on full display now – taken together with the loss of the great houses and estates there seems to be little practical use for the aristocracy at this point.

World population review and other IQ sites always show Italy, at 102 IQ average, to have the highest European IQ with the UK at 99 or so. Destruction of the 11 plus exam and old fashioned grammar schools hasn’t helped. Some IQ sites show Germany and Poland having average IQs over 100. Others have Germany and Poland at 99,98.

Affirmative action has made race and sex, not IQ the most important thing for middle class American success.

You’re right. There’s more to it than I realized.

Yes, they could’ve bread a population of a few dozen geniuses out of the 5000 families if they set such a goal before them (which they didn’t.)

I was making a different point. Jane Ausin was writing about a really narrow slice of British population, so you can’t extrapolate her books to the whole “Anglo society.”

While Russian and English farmers were vastly different (serfdom was not legally abolished in Russia until about 1870) your analysis seems very off track.

Perhaps a difference with a distinction is the fact that much English farming and animal husbandry was done by tenant farmers who were required to generate sufficient proceeds to pay rents rather than by serfs tied to the land, and those tenants who couldn’t make the rents would be evicted in favor of those who could. The landlord often inspected his lands to arrest or sanction waste to his estate, and both the tenants and the landlords had an interest in the improvement of the land – one as its owner, the others as the pecuniary beneficiaries of surplus salable production.

I don’t think the Noble/serf relationship was quite as adept at weeding out those who were not industrious by nature.

I can guarantee that never before in history women had to pass a math proficiency test in order to be able to marry into the upper class.

Lol. Show us on the doll where the math section of the SAT touched you.

Which is the situation we have now.

Nah. Now you’re just being emotional and superficial. Did you get an advanced degree, but fail to find the man you deserve? Or something else?

Wasn’t that the case in medieval England?

Tenant farming was commonplace in England from at least the Tudor period onward.

There is a series of BBC documentary shows wherein English historians and Archaeologists spend a year working a farm with the available agricultural technology and so forth from a period as tenant farmers.

The first by period is “Tudor Monastery Farm” (although “Tales from the Green Valley” was first in time) and subsequent series proceeded through “Wartime (WWII) Farm.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series

Some of the series are available and included on Bezos Prime.

Tenant farmers in England were selected for their entrepreneurial abilities to meet the rent with the proceeds of sale of the land’s produce on pain of eviction (and subsequent relegation to a Work House) – they weren’t simply the people too stupid to do something else.

Whether these works are still under valid copyright is another open issue.

Most likely yes. Generally speaking anything more recent than 1925 (95 years ago) is still in copyright. Gatsby just went out. His earliest children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was published in 1937 so it won’t go out of copyright until 2032. Most of his other books were written postwar and won’t go into the public domain until the 2050s or later.

The whole thing makes no sense – there is exactly one “offensive” page in Mulberry Street where he sees a yellow “Chinaman” with a pigtail (since the 1970s, a “Chinese man” who is no longer yellow and lacks a pigtail). Since they already censored the book once, couldn’t they just censor it a bit more – delete that page entirely or substitute a different image? Even the Soviets did not burn the “B” volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia after Beria was unpersoned. Subscribers just received a lengthened article about the Bering Strait and were instructed to paste it over Beria’s page. We are now outdoing the Soviets.

The logic of cancel culture is that you have to be COMPLETELY cancelled – just editing a bit like they did in the ’70s is not going to cut it anymore. It’s almost as if their goal is not just to get rid of racist imagery, but to get rid of white people entirely.

You get my vote for comment of the month!

Mrs. Alden, I can’t speak for AndrewR but I don’t think anyone is preaching here. We’re discussing trends and differences in fertility rates between third world countries, starting from a comment reporting that an SUV full of possibly illegal immigrants crashed, resulting in a bunch of them dying. Worry not about the MEN OF UNZ, for whatever you may have read or heard about them they are completely fictional and cannot bring you or your beautiful, thriving family any harm.

Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Jane Austen’s father was not a gentleman. He was a Church of England clergyman, a Vicar, not a curate. Church of England clergy, especially Vicars were of a higher social status than gentlemen. The actual social economic status of the clergy men depended much on family connections, the landowner who actually owned the church and it’s rental properties and the rental income of the church.

Lawyers were of a lower social status than gentlemen. Hence the suffix esquire. Army officers were considered a much higher social class than Navy officers. Not from family background but simply from the fact that the Navy was considered middle class and the army upper class.

The Jerome Family was not all that wealthy. Leonard Jerome like most financiers of the time went through several crashes. Mrs Jerome and her daughters de camped to Paris after one of those crashes. Partly because of Leonard’s scandals, partly because France kept its currency artificially low against the pound and the dollar to increase exports foreign students and the tourist trade.

The currency difference meant they could continue a splendid upper, upperclass life in Paris instead of descending into dreadful upper middle class life in NYC.

Similar to retiring on $3,000 a month to Mexico in luxury to barely maintaining the house car utilities and necessities in America on $3,000 a month.

And Lord Randolph wasn’t a poor younger son. He had a large income from his family, sufficient to support his wife and family in great luxury. They moved in the very very very expensive Prince of Wales circles.

Per Wikipedia: The loi Veil that legalized abortion in 1975 marked a momentous victory for French feminists. Abortion was legal for the first time since it was made punishable in the 1810 Penal Code.

This is just one example of your own “ignorance” which you are happy, even giddy, to accuse others here of. While the Wikipedia materials about this subject are heavily slanted in favor of the legalization side, various questions about “when abortions were made legal” come up with lots of similar examples. The historical default here seems to be that it was usually illegal.

Historically in both the Eastern and Western (Roman) Christian rites, abortions were considered a grave sin. Nearly all western nations up until modern times reflected Christian values when defining what was legal/illegal. Abortion was included.

As for Muslims, per Wikipedia: in 18 out of 47 Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq, Egypt, and Indonesia, abortion is only legally permitted if the life of the mother is threatened by the pregnancy.

This also says that the Muslim rule starts to apply after 120 days from conception. Obviously historically what was legal and enforceable varied with local customs, rulers, etc. Miscarriages also factor in to this since that would be a common “explanation” even for deliberate abortions.

As a commentator here you seem to have a lot of hostility about the “MEN OF UNZ” and not all commentators are men. Your accusations of ignorance and laziness seem to apply to you, since “easy searches Mr. Google provides” as you suggest prove your many assertions incorrect.

Not everyone on Unz is as obsessed as you seem to be about having “big families of White children.” Okay. But based solely on your hostile language and accusations, those Big Family reunions you seem proud to have must be loads of fun.

I assume that you are female from your post here. Maybe cut down on the dose, or up that. Otherwise at family gatherings, “loser has to sit next to Grandma…”

Most intelligent perceptive comment so far on this thread. Parents produce children of approximately the same intelligence. So it’s not difficult to find a spouse of similar intelligence among your friends and associates relatives.

“Feral kids are a world quite far away from what we’re talking about here”.

I would say it’s more the case that — according to him, anyway — any ferality that isn’t accounted for by heredity is primarily just noise. Yes, some kids turn out feral, and this negatively impacts the likelihood that they will be able to maintain or better their status (and some children turn out less feral), but the same can be said of any other shock/perturbation that introduces noise to any of these multi-generational paths, be it disease, the unlucky cannon blast, invading horde or Tatars, etc. (though it’s worth noting that the odds of encountering any one of those shocks changes the higher up the social ladder one climbs).

Historically in both the Eastern and Western (Roman) Christian rites, abortions were considered a grave sin.

Not to mention unethical in the Hippocratic Oath. (But that means “ruled by horses”, and what do horses know?)

I assume that you are female from your post here. Maybe cut down on the dose, or up that.

She goes running to the shelter of her Mother’s Little Helper…

Otherwise at family gatherings, “loser has to sit next to Grandma…”

Yes, they could’ve bread a population of a few dozen geniuses out of the 5000 families if they set such a goal before them (which they didn’t.)

That’s the yeast they could have done. However you are confusing the central tendency of the Gaussian distribution with the variance. Frankly, you don’t really understand assortative mating.

I was making a different point. Jane Ausin was writing about a really narrow slice of British population, so you can’t extrapolate her books to the whole “Anglo society.”

Do you know what the word “aspirational” means? Or “assortative” for that matter?