Steve Sailer thinks tattoos might signal that a woman is a bad decision maker.
"Whoa!" said the young man next to me, who looked like an unemployed bike messenger. "Check her out!"
"Yes, a beautiful girl."
"And she's got a lot of tattoos!" he exclaimed, with a wild look of excitement in his bloodshot eyes.
That struck me as, by far, the least of her charms. On further reflection, though, I assume that her tattoos signaled to him that, while you might think she wouldn't be interested in any fellow below the movie producer / hedge fund manager level, she was actually a really bad decision-maker. So, he had a chance!
Is she a bad decision maker? Does a tattoo lessen a woman's attractiveness to the most desirable males? Even if she is a bad decision maker what motivates the tattoo?
Half Sigma thinks tattoos are a sign of "prole drift".
If tattoos are becoming more popular, then it’s an example what Paul Fussell calls prole drift. Do tattoos make you more popular with the opposite sex? I don’t know the answer. I did, however, read a piece by a woman who was grossed out when she discovered her new boyfriend had a really ugly tattoo. Perhaps Roissy, who occasionally comments on this blog and who is an expert at knowing what turns on women, will be able to supply us with the definitive answer?
I know what turns me on, and women with tattoos don't do it for me.
I am confused by this. Did tattoos start out with the lower class and move upward? I associate tattoos with carnival freaks and enlisted men in militaries. Drunken sailors get tattooed while in port of some city. I thought tattoos have always been low class. BUt Wikipedia defines prole drift as the migration of upper class practices down into lower class use.
Anyway, I'm also curious what supposedly evil (with an evil retort) Roissy has to say about tattoos. I couldn't find anything relevant he said about tattoos on women. If you find anything please post in the comments. In his Dating Market Value For Women post he doesn't include tattoos in his rating system. In fact, in the comments someone even mentions this fact.
Alyssa Milano and Jessica Alba have tattoos. But they do not need a tattoo to be highly desired. Britney Spears has tattoos. But she also has poor judgment. Angelina Jolie has tattoos. But she also has a reputation for edginess. On the other hand Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Aniston have tattoos. Why? To seem more egalitarian? To show they are just as free to get tattoos as men are? To be rebellious?
Actor Robert Downey Jr. got hit too hard by reality to think like a liberal any longer. You've heard the "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality". How about "A conservative is a liberal who got beat up inmates"?
“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”
Acting in Iron Man must have had a fantasy escapist appeal. If he'd only had Iron Man's abilities he wouldn't have gotten beat up in prison.
The unfortunate thing here is that we do not have a way for most people to get their political beliefs tested in a manner that'll let them see reality. It is a measure of just how much our technologies insulate us from the consequences of our false beliefs that holding false beliefs on political topics is so easy to do.
Here's a literal example of someone getting sense knocked into him. While in prison Downey got knocked out in fights.
“If I see somebody who is throwing their life away with both hands and is raging around and destroying their family, I can’t understand that person,” he said. “I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore.”
Mr. Downey, who has said that he woke up in a pool of his own blood a time or two when he was in prison, is a fighter. “Probably the biggest thing that Tony Stark and I have in common is the hardware of conflict, the courage under fire,” he said, setting aside his lunch on a tray. “I don’t really fit in so good outside the military bases with my mentality.”
Our advancing technological capabilities increase the number of people who can live to varying degrees in fantasies. Virtual realms are the latest manifestation of this trend. Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other online virtual communities allow people to experience simulated worlds governed by rules more to their liking. Does that make people less realistic about the real world?
I see another manifestation of this problem with people who do not vaccinate their kids. They are able to harbor false beliefs about vaccination risks because most people still vaccinate and therefore their kids aren't likely to get exposed to the diseases that vaccines protect against. But at some point a critical mass of kids doesn't get vaccinated and then a disease can spread with harmful results. What political beliefs are likely to continue to spread until we reach a critical mass for some problem? Which problem will that be?
Francis Crick and James Watson famously discovered the structure of the DNA double helix back in 1954. This made them 2 of the biggest figures in 20th century biology. More recently Watson indicated he believes large differences in cognitive ability exist between the races. He was widely attacked for these comments and found few defenders. His attackers did not bother to examine whether the evidence really does support Watson's contentions. Well, Watson and Crick are portrayed as very different personalities and Crick has been portrayed as the smarter of this dynamic duo. So where did Crick (who is already dead) stand on racial differences? Crick's views were very similar to Watson's and Steve Sailer has the details.
Watson has, of course, been in the news lately, getting dumped from his post as chancellor of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. Now, a reader has pointed out to me that Watson's elder partner, Crick (1916-2004), was also guilty of holding the same views on race and IQ.
Some of the Francis Crick Papers are now online, and they are certainly illuminating. For example, during the controversy in 1969-1971 over IQ and race launched by Arthur Jensen's 1969 Harvard Education Review article and William Shockley's call for financial incentives and penalties to encourage higher IQ reproduction, Crick, a strong supporter of Jensen, threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to "suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons."
In contrast, in 2007 almost nobody stood up for James Watson.
Steve excerpts some of the letters where Crick engages other scientists regarding scientific flaps about race in the 1970s. Here's an excerpt of a letter that Crick wrote to another scientist on 22 February 1971 in response to a letter this scientist had signed.
Dr. John T, Edsall
Fogarty International Center
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 2 0014Dear John,
I have been very distressed to see the letter to the President of the National Academy by you and six other Academy members regarding a Proposal by Dr. [William] Shockley [Nobel laureate in physics]. Like you I have not published anything on the population problem, but f have become fairly familiar with the literature of the subject. I have also talked to Dr, Jensen when he visited the Salk Institute recently.
Unlike you and your colleagues I have formed the opinion that there is much substance to [Berkeley psychologist Arthur] Jensen’s arguments. In brief I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average I.Q. of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation.
While any present conclusions are tentative, it seems likely that the matter could be largely resolved if further research were carried out. I should thus like to know two things. Would you and your colleagues please state in detail why they think the arguments put forward by Jensen are either incorrect or misleading. Secondly, would they please indicate what research they think should be done to establish to what extent "intelligence" is inherited. This is surely the important point, and is equally valid for a country without a racially mixed population.
The most distressing feature of your letter is that it neither gives nor refers to any scientific arguments, but makes unsupported statements of opinion, This, I need hardly remind you, is politics, not science. The voice of established authority, unsupported by evidence or argument, should have no place in science, and I am surprised to find that you, of all people, should put your name to a letter of this character written to the Academy on a matter of scientific research. I am cure you will realize that if the Academy were to take active steps to suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons it would not be possible for me to remain a Foreign Associate.
Again, these are two of the greatest minds in 20th century biology.
Writing in Slate William Saletan commits the outrageous sin of heresy against the left-liberal secular religion (at least as that secular religion has been defined in the last half century).
Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."
I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.
The latter link is to Jason Malloy's highly excellent Gene Expression blog post about the entirely unfair and anti-scientific liberal media attacks on James Watson: James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth: Faces the Consequences. Jason points to relevant psychometric and genetic research on racial differences. Saletan read Malloy's post and apparently even read a substantial amount of the supporting material that Malloy points to (much of it familiar to long term readers of ParaPundit).
The article is amazing. Saletan doesn't say that the measured differences in intelligence are genetically based. But he admits the science does not rule it out. To publically take the real science of human differences in cognitive abilities that seriously makes Saletan something of a novelty in liberal media. Is he going to get crucified? Or has he left enough room to defend himself from the inquisition while still drawing attention to the real evidence?
Curiously, this turn of events began as a result of the attack on Watson. Jason wrote his article in defense of what Watson said about Africa. That led to a New York Times piece by Amy Harmon quoting Jason and blogger Half Sigma in an article entitled In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice.
New genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the latest rallying point for a conservative political camp that objects to social policies like affirmative action, as happened with “The Bell Curve,” the controversial 1994 book that examined the relationship between race and I.Q.
Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there may be genetic differences between races is important in preparing to address them politically.
“Let’s say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black child to close the achievement gap,” said Jason Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr. Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society, he said, would need to consider how individuals “can be given educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents and limitations.”
Liberals have hung the defense of political equality on genetic equality in ability. This has been a big strategic mistake on their part since even within races people obviously vary greatly in ability and genetic differences play a large role in creating differences in ability. Research on selective pressures that have created differences in brain genes is not hard to find. Genes which code for the brain are not immune to selective pressures caused by differences in local environments. People who hold otherwise are effectively embracing a form of neo-Cartesian dualism where the spiritual side of the mind includes brain genes that are held above the influence of local selective pressures in the physical plane. Really, they don't want to think of their position this way. But that is what it amounts to.
Steve Sailer highlighted some comments Jason made about how liberals hung their entire argument for equality on genetic equality and what a huge mistake that was. Their character assassinations of the realists did not really further the cause of defending free societies. There was never any need to deceive citizens to get them to treat others as possessing of rights. Some of their motives for deceiving selves and others weren't even most effectively achieved by the deception. Though the Marxists involved in the inquisition probably benefited their (still doomed) cause by their role in suppressing psychometric research.
See Steve's articles on Watson's comments: James D. Watson—A Modern Galileo and James D. Watson: Broken By The PC Inquisition, Betrayed By The Righteous Right.
Also see Half Sigma's posts NY Times article: time to celebrate?, Race differences in intelligence: does genetic proof already exist?, DTNBP1 gene and racial IQ differences, and Response to comments on race and intelligence.
Drunks get violent toward what annoys them unless distractions shift their thoughts elsewhere.
The link between alcohol and aggression is well known. What’s not so clear is just why drunks get belligerent. What is it about the brain-on-alcohol that makes fighting seem like a good idea" And do all intoxicated people get more aggressive" Or does it depend on the circumstances"
University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and his student Michelle Corman decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. One theory about alcohol and aggression is that drinking impairs the part of the brain involved in allocating our limited mental resources—specifically attention and working memory. When we can only focus on a fraction of what’s going on around us, the theory holds, drunks narrow their social vision, concentrating myopically on provocative cues and ignoring things that might have a calming or inhibiting effect.
The scientists tested this idea on a group of young Kentucky men. Some of the men drank three to four screwdrivers before the experiment, while others stayed sober. Then they had them all compete against another person in a somewhat stressful game that required very quick responses. Every time they lost a round, they received a shock varying in intensity. Likewise, when they won a round they gave their opponent a shock. The idea was to see how alcohol affected the men’s belligerence, as measured by the kinds of shocks they chose to hand out.
But there was more to it. Giancola and Corman also deliberately manipulated some of the volunteers’ cognitive powers. They required them—some drinkers, some not—to simultaneously perform a difficult memory task. The idea was to see if they could distract those who were “under the influence” from their “hostile” situation. If they could tax their limited powers of concentration, perhaps they wouldn’t process the fact that someone was zapping them with electricity.
And that’s exactly what happened. As reported in the July issue of Psychological Science, the drunks who had nothing to distract them were predictably mean, exhibiting aggression towards their adversaries. However, the drunks whose attention was focused elsewhere were actually less aggressive than the sober non-drinkers. This seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not: The sober men were cognitively intact, so they would naturally attend to both provocations and distractions in the room, resulting in some low level of aggression.
It appears that alcohol has the potential to both increase and decrease aggression, depending on where’s one’s attention is focused. The psychologists speculate that working memory is crucial not only to barroom behavior, but to all social behavior, because it provides the capacity for self-reflection and strategic planning. Activating working memory with salient, non-hostile, and health-promoting thoughts, in effect reduces the “cognitive space” available for inclinations towards violence.
Create distractions when a person or group is starting to get belligerent.
Popular views of England in recent centuries seem to revolve around Victorian standards of behavior. But a new study argues erotic literature was widely available and cheap in 18th century England.
Prostitutes, perversions and public scandals – the stuff of the 21st century tabloids was familiar to readers three centuries earlier, according to new research from the University of Leeds.
The reading of erotic literature was already a social activity 300 years ago.
Erotic texts were read out loud in public settings.
And despite earlier work suggesting that these texts were only for solitary consumption – at home, alone, and behind closed doors – Skipp’s work throws up a surprising image of how these works were used. "They would be read in public – everywhere from London's rough-and-ready alehouses to the city’s thriving coffee houses, which weren't quite the focus of polite society in the way we sometimes think," she explained. "Some texts even came as questions and answers and were clearly intended for groups of men to read together, with one asking the questions and the others answering them."
But erotic literature of the 1700s was better written than modern era porno stories.
And Skipp describes a literary quality to the writing which you might struggle to find in modern erotic fiction or top-shelf pornography. "It is very different to today's erotica," she said. "It is more humorous, more literary and more engaged with the wider issues of the life and politics of the times." Its metaphors mirror the passions of the age: "At a time when military power was equated with virility, armed conquest is often used as a metaphor for sex – in phrases such as 'unsheathing the weapon', 'storming the fort' and 'releasing the cannon'."
Today's scandals and celebrity intrigues shown on TV and in tabloids find their parallels in the 1770s.
By the 1770s, the transcripts of adultery trials became a new source of titillation. To secure a divorce, a man would first have to successfully sue a rival for 'violating his property', before petitioning Parliament to dissolve the marriage. "There is something rather voyeuristic about these trials," said Skipp. "Often servants would give evidence while innkeepers would testify about lovers taking rooms together."
Imagine if you could go back in a time machine with very small hidden cameras. You could go to trials and ale houses and record stories every bit as scandalous as anything that happens today.
Read Steve Sailer's latest: Average IQ by State: Honest Numbers at Last. He reports on a new study by Michael McDaniel, a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University. Here is an IQ table for the American states. New England and the northern plains states have the smarter people. One question: What are the North Dakotans doing with their brains?
Immigration is driving national IQ downward. This is a national disaster that far outstrips the Iraq Debacle in importance.
Update: Note that the method of measure for state-level IQ involved testing children using other types of tests. (in contrast to more rigorous IQ tests used in international IQ comparisons). But the correlation between some other tests (e.g. SAT tests) and IQ tests are high enough for this to be useful. But since children were used and the ethnic mix of children is different than the ethnic mix of adults (due to immigration and different rates of fertility) the results understate the current adult IQ of those states that have seen a large influx of lower IQ ethnic groups. But as the older whites die off some states are going to lose economic ground and become more corrupt as a result of increasing proportions of lower IQ workers and voters and ethnic group politics where people vote for their ethnic group rather than for the best candidate for the whole.
Ethnic pride can help teenagers maintain happiness when faced with stress, according to a new study by a Wake Forest University psychologist published in the October issue of Child Development.
Adolescents with positive feelings toward their ethnic group say they are happier on a daily basis than those who have a more negative attitude about their ethnic identity, said Lisa Kiang, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study.
The study, involving 415 ninth-graders from Chinese and Mexican backgrounds, shows the protective effects of ethnic identity on daily psychological well-being, Kiang said.
Each participant completed a brief questionnaire regarding their feelings about their ethnic identity. Then, for two weeks, the students filled out a three-page checklist at the end of each day indicating the kinds of stresses they experienced that day. For example, the students would mark whether they had a lot of schoolwork to complete or if they had a lot of demands made by their family.
Finally, the students were asked to rate their daily emotional states on a scale from zero to four, including how happy they felt that day and how nervous they felt that day.
Those with higher ethnic regard rated their daily happiness level higher.
“Adolescents with a high ethnic regard maintained a generally positive and happy attitude in the face of daily stressors and despite their anxious feelings,” Kiang said. “So, having positive feelings about one’s ethnic group appeared to provide an extra boost of positivity in individuals’ daily lives.”
Although the experience of more daily stressors predicted less daily happiness in individuals with a low to moderate ethnic regard, individuals with a high ethnic regard were protected from these negative effects, said Kiang, who teaches courses in developmental psychology.
The researchers focused on adolescents because that is when identity issues are at the forefront. Kiang said the positive effects of ethnic pride found in this study could suggest that parents and society in general should encourage strong ethnic identity in families.
Imagine researchers conducting this same study but with white teens. The teens would be afraid to answer the questions of the researchers, knowing that to say they feel ethnic pride would reveal a thought crime.
If you are white and want to feel better about yourself then commit thought crimes. But don't let the commissars know what you are doing in the privacy of your own mind.
Here's a study with obvious implications for immigration policy. In retail stores ethnic diversity leads employees to quit. (same article here)
Contrary to popular thinking among some diversity consultants, employing workers of many different races has little effect on average turnover in a retail workplace, although employees do quit more often if fewer colleagues are the same race, according to a recently published case study by two professors at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
In one of few studies to explore how workplace demographics affect employee behavior, Haas School Professors Jonathan Leonard and David Levine examined more than 70,000 employees at more than 800 workplaces of a national retailer. They outlined the results of their study in an article titled “The Effect of Diversity on Turnover: A Large Case Study” in the July issue of the journal Industrial and Labor Relations Review.
“The most important takeaway is diversity itself doesn’t matter much in terms of turnover for most groups of workers,” says Leonard, chairman of the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group. “It suggests that people are, at least in this sector, pretty tolerant.”
The diversity consultants peddling politically correct myths to businesses are all selling snake oil.
Leonard and Levine's findings contradict one argument by some diversity consultants who claim that having a gender and racially diverse workforce reduces turnover. Leonard and Levine also failed to find support for another line of thinking that argues that diverse workplaces experience more friction and thus require special training.
"We were interested in seeing whether in fact there really was an empirical basis for a lot of advice that is pretty commonplace in the diversity consulting industry," explains Leonard, who holds the George Quist Chair in Business Ethics at the Haas School. "We discovered that, at least in the retail sector, diversity itself is not a big driver of turnover."
Most people like being around people who think like them, look like them, act like them. Even the people who look down their noses at people who admit to preferrig their own kind also prefer their own kind.
Minorities do not like to work in white majority workplaces. I guess white Leftists could write this off as a desire to escape from their white male patriarchial capitalistic oppressors. Gotta invest in rationalizations if one is to maintain a secular faith.
At the same time, Leonard and Levine did find support for the old proverb "birds of a feather flock together" when they studied another facet of diversity -- racial isolation. They defined racial isolation as being in a numerical minority in a workplace, whether it's white, black, Hispanic, or Asian. For instance, in a group composed five black employees and two white employees, the white employees would be more racially isolated than their black colleagues.
“The problem for managers is that each new hire raises isolation for some groups at the same time that it decreases isolation for others,” Leonard and Levine noted.
Another discouraging finding was that all minority groups were more likely to quit a workplace in which a greater proportion of employees were white, suggesting that diversity is difficult to sustain. “Managers can benefit by helping employees thrive in a world of racial diversity – a prescription that is easier to state than to implement,” the authors wrote.
The courts do not recognize a right to free association in business. So exercise of the basic human desire to be around people more like yourself is not legal.
Here's a real interesting one: Females want to work in workplaces that are either male-dominated or female-dominated. This is an argument for having males clustering in some occupations while females cluster in other occupations.
One surprising finding was that women seemed to dislike gender diversity. Women were slightly more likely to quit when the gender breakdown of their workplace was closer to 50% female and 50% male, and less likely when their workplace was less diverse, with either mostly female or mostly male employees.
People do not like to wait on people of other races.
* Racial isolation from potential customers – not just coworkers – also increased turnover, the authors found. Black and Hispanic employees in particular were less likely to quit in heavily black and Hispanic communities, respectively.
* White employees left more often in situations where there were fewer whites. Although the sample was two-thirds white, almost a quarter of the workplaces had a nonwhite majority.
* There was evidence that blacks and Hispanics preferred each other to white coworkers. Black exits were particularly rapid when more of their coworkers were white or Asian, while Hispanic colleagues did not increase black employees’ exit rate.
* For Hispanics, unlike other groups, turnover was lowest with a mixture of Hispanics and others. Hispanics left stores with many whites or Asians, but were not more likely to leave stores with black coworkers.
In less ethnically diverse societies it is easier for people to live in neighborhoods and work in workplaces that have the same kinds that people want to be around. Denying this desire does not make it go away.
If either member of a couple writes about their relationship every day the relationship lasts longer on average. So then what would happen if they both wrote about it? And what would happen if they read what each other wrote?
AUSTIN, Texas—Writing about one’s romantic relationship may help it last longer, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin report in this month’s issue of Psychological Science.
In a study titled “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words,” Psychology Professor James Pennebaker and graduate student Richard Slatcher analyzed writing samples from 86 couples. One person from each couple was instructed to write for 20 minutes a day for three consecutive days. Volunteers in one group wrote about their daily activities while those in the second group wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings about the relationship. The participants’ dating partners did not complete any writing task.
The researchers found that 77 percent of volunteers who wrote about their relationship were still dating their partner three months later. In contrast, only 52 percent of people who wrote just about everyday activities stayed with their partner.
The study also showed that those who wrote about their relationship used more words expressing positive emotions such as “happy" and "love" in Instant Message (IM) exchanges with their dating partner during the days following the writing.
This brings up a perhaps unobvious question: If writing about a relationship will make it last longer is that necessarily a good thing?
If you are fairly young and are in a relationship that is not well suited to you then keeping it going has a big opportunity cost. You might end up getting married, having kids, and only then might the strains of the relationship push you apart and end the relationship. In that case writing about it is a bad idea.
What we need are measures of a relationship's health and long term prospects that would provide some guidance on whether to up the investment or write off the loss and move on.
A federal government survey recently confirmed what residents of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas already knew: people there drink to excess, at very early ages, well above the national average.
The survey, conducted over three years by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said south-central Wyoming led the nation with the highest rate of alcohol abuse by people age 12 and older. In Albany and Carbon counties, more than 30 percent of people under age 20 binge drink — 50 percent above the national average.
In examining behavior in 340 regions of the country, the survey found that 7 of the top 10 areas for under-age binge drinking — defined as five or more drinks at a time — were in Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota.
What I find curious about this: Video games, text messaging phones, and the internet have not become big enough sources of teen entertainment to stop kids in rural areas from getting blotto. How to keep teenagers in rural areas sufficiently distracted to prevent them from dying behind the wheel drunk out of their skulls?
Parents who think cities are poisonous influences on their kids with drugs and gangs ought to consider the threat of going too far in the other direction.
I'm thinking some day when DNA testing is really cheap and lots of genetic risk factors for drug and alcohol abuse are known parents will want to check for genetic risk factors for alcoholism before deciding to move their families out into the sticks. Given the wrong variation on alcohol dehydrogenase the prudent parent might want to consider raising their kids in a town where the local culture frowns on alcohol consumption. Anyone know which parts of America have very low levels of alcohol consumption?
Denmark is happiest. Next come Switzerland, Austria, and Iceland. Yet more evidence that the people who push for multiculturalism and ethnic diversity are either morons or malicious: Denmark and similar countries have the happiness populations.
A University of Leicester psychologist has produced the first ever ‘world map of happiness.’
Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University’s School of Psychology, analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.
The projection, which is to be published in a psychology journal this September, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.
Small affluent homogeneous countries make for greater happiness.
"I think there is a parallel between the state of a nation and an individual. If you are very depressed, you are less likely to go out and be ambitious which obviously impacts on the economy, creating a vicious circle of poverty and depression.
"Scandinavian countries have done so well firstly because they are rich with good healthcare and education systems. They also have a sense of collectivity and community because of a strong national identity. Bigger countries are often more fragmented and people there may not feel they are making so much of a difference. While not such a big indicator of happiness, this is also a factor.
"We also found that living in beautiful rural areas increased happiness by a small factor. However countries in Africa are very beautiful but more important factors there that reduce happiness are people dying of preventable diseases and war."
My guess is nationalized health care is not making people happier by keeping them healthier. My guess is that availability of government-provided health care make people feel more secure and that it is this feeling of security rather than objective services provided that causes an increase in happiness. People want security.
Immigration can contribute to lower average levels of happiness in a number of of ways. For example, it makes a population larger and therefore makes each person less important and less influential to the whole. Also, with ethnic diversity comes less trust and less commonly held values. A population that is more diverse in values about how a society should be organised is one where far fewer are likely to be satisfied about the rules and about what governments do and require.
Note that higher IQ enables the affluence needed for high quality health care. Also, a smarter population can become more educated. So a country's level of average intelligence plays a big role in determining how happy its populace will be. Also, an ethnically more diverse country will have a wider distribution of levels of intelligence. Part of the decreased happiness in ethnically more diverse nations may flow from having larger populations of lower IQ groups.
Going back to the first link above, note how many small and ethnically non-diverse countries come out on top in happiness:
The 20 happiest nations in the World are:
1 - Denmark
2 - Switzerland
3 - Austria
4 - Iceland
5 - The Bahamas
6 - Finland
7 - Sweden
8 - Bhutan
9 - Brunei
10 - Canada
11 - Ireland
12 - Luxembourg
13 - Costa Rica
14 - Malta
15 - The Netherlands
16 - Antigua and Barbuda
17 - Malaysia
18 - New Zealand
19 - Norway
20 - The SeychellesOther notable results include:
23 - USA
35 - Germany
41 - UK
62 - France
82 - China
90 - Japan
125 - India
167 - RussiaThe three least happy countries were:
176 - Democratic Republic of the Congo
177 - Zimbabwe
178 - Burundi
Some of the European welfare states rank incredibly high in happiness. How could anything less than a pure laissez fair libertarian free market utopia produce such a high level of happiness? Surely we can not suppose conventional free market economists are promoting theories based on wrong assumptions about human nature. Banish that thought. Keep the homo economicus faith.
One big puzzler here is ethnically homogeneous and affluent Japan. China's low ranking seems less difficult to explain given the rapid rate of change there and the feellings of insecurity that must cause. Also, China still has extensive poverty and the impoverished feel even worse when they look around and see others who are doing far better than them.
This is probably not what Ray Davies had in mind when he sang "I'm an ape man".
IF YOU are worried about being attacked or killed by a violent criminal, just be glad you are not living in Neolithic Britain. From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.
Brain trauma wasn't the only way people were getting killed. Was it the biggest cause? Or were chest injuries bigger killers?
Was the death rate from assaults as high in other parts of the world at that time? When did the murder rate start dropping toward levels seen in more recent times?
Money can't buy you happiness?
Britain is less happy than in the 1950s - despite the fact that we are three times richer.
The proportion of people saying they are "very happy" has fallen from 52% in 1957 to just 36% today.
The opinion poll by GfK NOP for The Happiness Formula series on BBC Two provides the first evidence that Britain's happiness levels are declining - a trend already well documented in the United States.
Polling data from Gallup throughout the 1950s shows happiness levels above what they are today, suggesting that our extra wealth has not brought extra well-being.
It could even be making matters worse.
Americans have become less happy as well. The article also claims this pattern has been observed in other Western countries.
The British experience mirrors data from America, where social scientists have seen levels of life satisfaction gradually decline over the last quarter of a century.
In the early 1970s, 34% of those interviewed in the General Social Survey described themselves as "very happy".
By the late 1990s, the figure was 30% - a small but statistically significant drop.
These people are not behaving like homo economicus. Someone tell them to stop doing that. They are disappointing economists.
People think their neighborhoods are becoming less friendly. I suspect people are becoming more mobile and therefore know their neighbors less well.
Our poll asked whether people felt their neighbourhood was more or less friendly now than it was 10 years ago.
43% said less friendly, compared to 22% of people who said it was friendlier.
I wonder if people feel less secure than they used to and hence less happy. Also, marrieds are more happy. Has the decline in marriage boosted the number who are unhappy? See page 17 of the report below and you'll see that relationships and family are the most important factor in happiness followed by health. Parenthetically, advances in medical science therefore promise to improve happiness by contributing to the second most important factor for health. The gap between relationships and health as determinants of happiness gets progressively smaller with age. Again see page 17.
On page 22 of the report linked to below they ask what the second most important thing is in determining happiness. Two mostly financial factors "A Nice Place To Live" and "Money And Financial Situation" come close to relationships in importance. This is an argument against immigrant-driven population growth that drives up the cost of housing and raises crime rates.
You can download the full report as a 1 meg PDF file. Some interesting facts emerge: "Very Happy" has an age peak between 25-34 of 38% and then a decline to 30% at 45-54 and then a rise to 41% at 55-64. They have happiness by social classes AB, C1, C2, and DE. Anyone know what those mean? C1 has the highest happiness rating.
On page 72 if we are to believe the results men have more close friends they speak to regularly than do women. I wouldn't have expected that.
On page 77 people report their neighborhoods as becoming less friendly. Does this attitude measure a real change in crime rates or in influxes of immigrants? Or higher mobility and therefore less longer term friendships in neighborhoods? Or do people have distorted views of a rosier past that never existed?
Experts and commentators make predictions with high error rates and rarely get called on it.
It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be.
Go read the article for details on the research which Tetlock conducted to reach these conclusions. The whole article is worth your time.
What we really need: Studies like Tetlock's but designed to survey a much larger group of people in order to identify people who have much better rates of being right. We can't trust TV news show producers to wisely choose experts whose rates of accuracy are greater than sheer chance. In fact, the only thing we can count on is that the most famous prognosticators and commentators will be wrong more often than most people. If the talking head consensus is X then the truth is not X.
Consider what the article says and introspect about your own thinking. There are some obvious simple rules of thumb to follow such as resist committing to a position if you do not have strong proof for it. If you commit publically you will become less likely to recognize the incorrectness of a position if you feel your reputation is at stake. Also, just because a person spouts lots of details doesn't mean the details somehow prove the argument. Experts have tons of facts and terrible track records in predicting complex human events. When it comes to human affairs the factors influencing outcomes are so many and so little understood that the feeling of certainty is not something you should feel too often.
I found one part of the article gratifying: The bit about people who ascribe big single causes to explain events are wrong more often than the people who think many factors contribute. For example, I think the Iraq democracy project is doomed for a whole host of reasons including cousin marriage, Islam, ethnic divisions, low IQs, Arab culture, and still other factors. Contrast that with the position that liberal democracy is an inevitable historical force, a sort of Manifest Destiny.
Tetlock says big name commentators are so bad because their predictions are designed more to make people feel good about their side than to be correct.
Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis.
This is a problem. The market of information for those who want to know the truth is an awful lot smaller than the market of information for those who want to feel good about themselves and their faction.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Women who have children outside of marriage are less likely than other single women to marry, and when they do marry, their husbands tend to be less well-matched, according to a new study.
The results show that the odds that unwed mothers marry rather than cohabit are about 30 percent lower than those of childless single women.
When they do marry, mothers are more likely to have husbands who are significantly older and less educated than those of childless women.
“It's more difficult for unwed mothers to get married, and if they do, they tend to not marry well,” said Zhenchao Qian, co-author of the study and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
The results suggest that efforts by the federal government and states to promote marriage among young, poor Americans need to do more to prevent out-of-wedlock childbearing, Qian said. He conducted the study with Leanna Mellott, graduate student in sociology at Ohio State, and Daniel Lichter, professor at Cornell University .
I bet those single childless women are seen as better catches on average even before considering their lack of children. Part of their poorer marriage prospects stem from the fact that women with illegitimate children tend to be dumber, less educated, and lower wage earners on average. Still, most men see existing children as a liability when looking at a single women. So these results are at least partially due to that simple fact.
For example, the study showed that single mothers were less likely than childless women to marry a man with at least some college education. That suggests unwed mothers are unlikely to improve their economic prospects through marriage, she said, because potential husbands are less likely to have opportunities for good-paying jobs.
That is not entirely true. Even if their husband earns low wages those wages would be added to the wages of the woman. Also, a second parent in the household would provide extra labor for child care so that each parent could more easily manage to go to work and still have the kids looked after. Sometimes that is accomplished by having the two parents work different times of the day and days of the week.
In addition, a white woman who had children outside of marriage was more likely to marry a man who was significantly older – at least six years older – than she. That wasn't the case for Black and Hispanic women, but only because they were less likely than whites to be married at all, Qian said.
“Our analysis suggests that Blacks and Hispanics may be less likely to marry or cohabit because they face shortages of potential spouses,” he said. “If they had been married or living with someone, they would likely have husbands or partners much older than themselves.”
Of course, part of the problem for most of these women who have children out of wedlock is that even if they didn't have illegitimate babies their marital prospects would still be bleak. Still, illegitimate children do make their lives and their prospects even poorer.
The United States as a whole would be much better off in the long run if reproduction outside of marriage became as stigmatized and punished as it used to be in the early half of the 20th century. We all pay for illegitimate births in higher taxes, higher crime, and in other ways. We'd be better off if single women had fewer children and had those children much later. At the same time, we'd be better off of smarter married women had more children. This sort of talk is taboo in the mainstream media. But that taboo does not make the facts any less true.
Over at Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok says early 20th century progressives advocated a minimum wage for women only in order to promote their eugenic goals.
Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.
Unlike today's progressives, the originals understood that minimum wages for women would put women out of work - that was the point and the more unemployment of women the better!
Are today's progressives dumber than the progressives of a hundred years ago? Or are today's progressives more brain washed by the accumulated lies of politically correct ideology? My guess is the latter. People have become more unrealistic because public discussions are conducted under taboos that prevent honest discussion of obvious truths.
Alex is reacting to a paper by Princeton academic Tim Leonard: "Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work."
Seems to me these progressives who were pursuing eugenic goals made a fundamental mistake. To the extent that a minimum wage would keep some women home and pregnant it woud tend to have a dysgenic effect. Why? Because a minimum wage would reduce labor market participation of dumber women more than smarter women. Dumber women are more likely than smarter women to have their market wage fall below the minimum wage. Very smart women will still go off to work at higher paying jobs which their cognitive abilities enable them to do. Dumber women will get locked out of the labor market given a sufficiently high minimum wage.
A maximum wage for women only (and mind you I'm not advocating this) would be far more eugenic than a minimum wage. But a maximum yearly income would be even more eugenic. Smart women would, on average, work a fairly small fraction of the time to achieve their maximum income, freeing them up for child-rearing duties. Whereas dumber women would, again on average, work many more hours to achieve their maximum allowed yearly income.
To the extent that dumber women get locked out of the job market by a minimum wage that creates conditions that create support for the welfare state. Any woman whose husband died, became ill, or left her who was also locked out of the job market could be left in a position of being unable to support herself. At the same time, the welfare state encourages reproduction among those who have the least earning power in the job market. No need to spend time at work? The state will pay for your babies? Some (though not all) women will have more childen under those circumstances.
The progressives probably lost the ability to use state power to coerce for eugenic goals when women gained the vote. However, when DNA sequencing costs fall far enough to demonstrate in undeniable ways that genetic variations cause large variations in cognitive ability I predict the political Left will once again take up eugenic politics. I expect most of us will live to see progressives promote the use of state power to achieve eugenic goals in order to uplift the poor with genetic engineering and with restrictions on reproduction by those who refuse to use genetic engineering to have smart babies.
Temple Grandin, an amazingly high functioning autistic with a number of impressive intellectual accomplishments to her credit (including livestock slaughter facilities designs), reviews Frans de Waal's book Our Inner Ape which advances the argument that examination of Chimp and Bonobo behavior yields two sides of what makes up human nature.
In this fascinating book, de Waal suggests that the two species represent sides of our own nature. We have "not one but two inner apes," he writes, speculating that humans may act like a hybrid of bonobos and chimps.
Grandin notices that de Waal avoids the genetic significance of his observations.
De Waal does not discuss the possible genetic implications of many of his observations. Animals who have high-fear genetics are less inclined to be aggressive because they are afraid to fight, and stressful, scary situations can affect them more dramatically. When bombs fell on Munich during World War II, de Waal tells us, all the bonobos in the zoo died of heart failure, but all the chimps survived. Unfortunately, he does not discuss how these differences in fearfulness might affect social behavior. Fear and other traits, like aggression and sociability, have a strong genetic component. In my own work with antelopes, I have observed huge differences in the startle and fear response between individual animals. It is likely that there may be genetic differences between the most peaceful and most violent chimps.
Since personality characteristics vary between humans due to genetic and development differences some humans are closer to the average chimp and others, relatively speaking, are closer to the average bonobo.
The more precise terminology for labelling the Chimps and the Bonobos is Common Chimpanzee or Pan troglodytes for what we commonly just call Chimp and the Bonobo is called Bonobo or Pygmy Chimpanzee or Pan paniscus.
We aren't technically a hybrid of Chimps and Bonobos. The Chimps split off from the humans before the Common Chimps and the Bonobos split off from each other. But different humans share characteristics with Chimps and Bonobos to varying degrees.
Noted primatologist de Waal (Chimpanzee Politics) thinks human behavior cannot be fully explained by selfish genes and Darwinian competition. Drawing on his own primate research on chimpanzees and bonobos—our closest animal relatives—he shows how much we can learn from them about ourselves: our qualities of "fellow feeling and empathy" as well as our power-obsessed, violent side. We are "bipolar apes," de Waal says, as much like bonobos as like chimps. The latter are known for their viciousness and "red in tooth and claw" social politics, but bonobos offer a radically different social model, one of peace and hedonistic orgies; de Waal offers vivid, often delightful stories of politics, sex, violence and kindness in the ape communities he has studied to illustrate such questions as why we are irreverent toward the powerful and whether men or women are better at conflict resolution.
Advances in genetics and neurobiology are going to undermine more sentimental, religious, and ideological views of humans in favor of a view of humans as smarter primates. The political implications for this coming change will be profound. Liberalism, even among secular liberals, is still based upon a mystical view of humans as magically equal and hence entitlted to equal rights. That view is not going to survive the coming avalanche of scientific evidence. But religious views are in for similar rough times as urges to commit many sins are traced back to genetic sequences and neuronal wiring patterns.
I do not know what sorts of political schools of thought will emerge after human nature becomes demystified. Dumber people will probably to continue to believe many myths because much of the evidence against their myths will be incomprehensible to them. Also, some smart people will opt for self delusion. But quite a few people will come to understand the real score. What will they decide to have as their political philosophies and ideologies?
I'm expecting a partial return to some ancient pre-Christian Roman and Greek schools of ethics and political philosophy. Take away Christianity and liberalism and high pagan culture might appeal to Western elites of the 21st century. But I'm just guessing.
Update: Of course people do not always change their beliefs when confronted with new evidence. Michael Gazzaniga argues in his book The Ethical Brain that not just religious people but also highly scientific people resist changes in their beliefs when confronted by new evidence.
Nowhere does the human capacity to form and hold beliefs become more stark than when clear scientific data challenge the assumptions of someone’s personal beliefs. It would be easy to spin a story line about how a particular person with a set of religious values resisted the biological analysis of this or that finding in an effort to reaffirm his or her belief. There are many such stories, but they miss the point. Scientists themselves are just as resistant to change a view when confronted with new data that suggest their view is incorrect. All of us hold on to our beliefs, and it now appears that men are even more tenacious about not letting go than are women
Let me be as clear as I can about what I mean by “holding beliefs” or having belief systems. Many roads lead to holding beliefs. For many religiously oriented people, rules and codes to live by are spelled out and delivered by the religion in question, when one signs on to it. For the scientist, scientific rules and codes become part of the beliefs one must uphold upon joining the ranks of the particular science. For utilitarians, the decisions society makes about life’s challenges become their own beliefs. Overall, and this is my view about the nature of beliefs, our species instinctively reacts to events, and in a specialized system of the human brain that reaction is interpreted. Out of that interpretation, beliefs emerge about rules to live by. Sometimes they have a moral character; sometimes they are of an utterly practical nature. We can form beliefs slowly or quickly. Studies have shown startling aspects of how we can generate and hold onto a belief. People who buy a computer-generated lotto ticket for a dollar are reluctant to part with it if offered more money for it seconds after its purchase. Offering two bucks—a 100 percent increase in their investment—doesn’t do it. In many instances the offer has to be extended to twenty bucks. Why? Why do we hold onto our beliefs—new or old? Interestingly, it turns out that scientists are slower to change their views in the face of new data than are preachers.
People will often put far more effort into rationalizing a reconciliation of their beliefs with new evidence than they will put into abandoning their beliefs. Beliefs are like possessions. People feel a sense of loss when they have to give up a belief and they resist the potential loss.
Charles Murray argues that a great increase in incarceration rates has kept down the amount of crime committed while obscuring an increased willngness of America's underclass to commit crime.
The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.
A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate. When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.
This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.
America is the incarceration nation. But what choice do we have? The crime rate would skyrocket if we weren't locking up so many young black men. We should at least stop adding to the problem by allowing the importation of an additional underclass from Mexico.
Murray points to a large decrease in young black male labor market participation rates even after adjusting for the increase in incarceration rate for black males.
Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.
That is a staggeringly high rate of drop-out from the labor market. Some of that dropping out is caused by immigration driving down wages at the bottom. Black males see easier money in crime and parasitism off of girlfriends. But some of the change is due to the breakdown of black families. Illegitimacy reduces the forces of socialization on black male boys and adolescents.
Murray makes a point you've heard here: The social program proposals in response to the looting and lawlessness in New Orleans are all ideas that have been tried before and failed.
The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.
He makes several other important points. It was hard to choose what to excerpt. Read the whole thing.
America is growing its underclass through immigration. But this gets little attention. Our liberal press and educational bureaucracy try to deceive us into believing that ways to close the inter-racial test score gaps exist. America's elites are lying about race. We live inside an elaborate mythology which needs constant defending to prevent us from publically uttering that which we see with our lying eyes. The need to lie about race ends up requiring lies about other subjects such as a recent lie about the effect of Christian religious beliefs on crime rates.
I see the news coverage of New Orleans as akin to that of workers on a Dutch dike running around patching leaks. Rather than plug up leaks in a physical wall reporters try to patch leaks in a mythology that walls us off from discussing taboo truths. The mythology patching has to ignore Indian response to Bombay/Mumbai flooding and somehow explain away the total absence of Japanese looting after the Kobe earthquake killed several thousand in 1995. An essential strategy for mythology leak patching is use of strawmen to build up and then knock down (no black crime problem to see here folks, just wild exaggerations).
Another essential element of mythology patching is to proclaim that something can be done about some problem with the underclass because, hey, it is all due to environment. Hence Bush's reaction to New Orleans turns into a mini-Great Society proposal for the Gulf Coast. The press's reaction includes underreporting, misleading reporting, and false proclamations that if we just pay attention to poverty and "feel their pain" we can solve it. The mythology dike can hold up even if some small media outlets and a very small minority of blogs point out the leaks. As long as most minds do not hear the discordant messages they will not try to flow through the holes and publically proclaim their loss of faith in the mythology. The latest flurry of patching is enough to ensure that the racial mythology dike can hold.
The mythology hole repair team faces two big problems in the medium to long run though. First of all, the underclass is growing mostly due to immigration but also because of the high rate of illegitimacy in the underclass. So many costs for management of the problems caused by the underclass are going to keep rising. The problems of the underclass could be managed more effectively with the truth. Therefore the costs of ignoring the truth are also rising. Secondly, science is not on the side of the defenders of the faith. DNA testing costs continue to fall and the evidence for substantial and differential rates of evolution of genes for cognition is becoming harder to ignore.
Obviously, there's a chicken or egg issue involving the relationship between black fecklessness and illegal immigration. The more illegal immigrants pour in, the fewer people willing to hire poor blacks, so poor blacks don't get the discipline of holding a job, so they get even more feckless and unemployable.
Think about the numbers above folks. We have a huge problem that our elites are intent to either ignore or to spend money on in counterproductive ways in order to morally posture as caring.
Update II: Why is the volume of media lies about race currently running far above average? New Orleans created a huge need for mythological dike repair. All the "You Can't Talk About That" subjects intruded into the nation's collective consciousness as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The collective mind needs reminders both of what the official lies are and that the media, academic, and political elites stand ready to marginalize anyone who tries to deviate from the enforced mythology. This marginalization is an essential step in mythological dike repair. Plug those leaks in the collective public consciousness. Force forbidden thoughts back into the privacy of individual isolated minds rarely to be uttered out loud.
Bobby Bellew, until recently a resident of New Orleans, describes the criminality and cruelty of the Thunderdome people of New Orleans.
I can say that the looters were much more organized than the police or relief efforts. The day of the hurricane, while the winds were still in the 60-70 mph range, there were already groups of people in the back of trucks and stolen U-Hauls roaming areas where police cars could not get through.
...
The attitude of these people came right out Mad Max. They were reveling in this, happy and exultant in their ability to destroy and hurt and terrorize. They were, by definition, terrorists, and they were having the time of their lives. I know because I had to fight two of them just to leave the city with the few possessions I was able to carry.
I tried to get to the Superdome but the water was nearly waist deep and a family walking away from there told me someone had tried to set a fire in the stadium that morning. So I walked to the alternate pick-up at the convention center. The amount of people there was staggering. In less than fifteen minutes, I witnessed more crime than I had in the entire time I lived in New Orleans.
I saw three guns in the first 15 minutes I was there. I saw people break into the Riverwalk Mall and bring back piles of stuff. Not much of it was clothing or anything that could help you in an emergency. People were posing for news cameras with their newly stolen loot.
The families that pray together loot together. Does this fall under the rubric of Bush's faith-based initiatives?
In a corner of the parking lot, I watched a large prayer circle gather. The people were holding hands, praying for their safety and the safety of their families. There was no mention of other people in the prayer. When the circle broke up, most of those who'd been praying marched across the street and broke into a small grocery store, leaving with alcohol and cigarettes.
Racial taboos in America prevent an honest discussion in the mainstream media of why New Orleans so rapidly decayed into something resembling Haiti or Somalia. Our destructive mainstream media elites have already decided to go with the conventional wisdom (folly) that black lawlessness is the result of white racism. George W. Bush, a foolish and vacuous man, has decided to embrace this folly and has chosen to pursue a mini-Great Society redux of social spending in complete denial that social spending does not improve the academic performance or job performance or law-abidingness of blacks.
Steve Sailer discusses the implications of what is known about racial average differences in criminality and IQ as applied to what happened in New Orleans:
The black imprisonment rate is a striking 33 times higher than the Asian imprisonment rate—a figure I've never seen quantified before (although I don't think anybody could be too surprised by it).
These incarceration statistics, the report shows, are very much in line with the racial patterns also seen in both arrest rates and in the FBI's Annual Survey Of Crime Victims.
So unfairness in the justice system plays little or no role in these disparities.
High crime rates in black neighborhoods are a terrible burden on local entrepreneurs, thus holding back the economic of the race. But it is largely taboo to discuss racial disparities in criminality in the media, even though most of the data Taylor assembles is currently available on scattered government websites. For example, the federal Department of Justice's page on homicide statistics by race states, "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002."
In the full text of his article Steve also draws on information about racial differences in criminality from the New Century Foundation's new The Color Of Crime report:
• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
That is not a picture of inter-racial harmony.
These facts need to be combined with one other observation to fully explain the recent events in New Orleans: the smarter and more law abiding of all races left New Orleans in far greater number and the average IQ within the city plummeted. Zach at the Our Way Of Life blog draws attention to an IQ and behavior chart that illustrates the predictive power of IQ (same chart here). It is much easier to make sense of the world if we step outside of the taboo-constrained dialog of mainstream discourse. A great deal of evidence needed to understand human behavior is available to anyone willing to study it.
Heather Mac Donald examines a recent New York Times story that falsely claims a new US Department of Justice report supports the charge that police unfairly profile based on race.
The Times, for instance, does not reveal that blacks and Hispanics were far more likely to be arrested following a stop: Blacks were 11 percent of all stopped drivers, but 24 percent of all arrested drivers; Hispanics, 9.5 percent of all stopped drivers, but 18.4 percent of all arrested drivers; and whites, 76.5 percent of all stopped drivers, but 58 percent of arrested drivers. The higher black and Hispanic arrest rates undoubtedly result from their higher crime rates. The national black murder rate, for example, is seven times higher than that of all other races combined, and the black robbery rate eight times higher. Though the FBI does not keep national crime data on Hispanics, local police statistics usually put the Hispanic crime rate between the black and white crime rates. These differential crime rates mean that when the police run a computer search on black and Hispanic drivers following a stop, they are far more likely to turn up outstanding arrest warrants than for white drivers.
Heather points out that false charges of racism translate into less effective policing which means criminals get to commit more crimes and more people suffer as victims. Law-abiding blacks and Hispanics therefore get victimized more by criminals and poor areas become that much less livable.
The notion that the police target blacks and Hispanics because of their skin color has damaged urban life. Thanks to racial-data-collection mandates, every officer knows that if he has “too many” interactions with minority citizens - including responding to crime calls or preventing a mugging - he could face a bias charge. Some officers will decide that it’s wiser for their careers not to fight crime aggressively, leaving law-abiding inner-city residents at the mercy of thugs. The drumbeat against the cops increases the hostility against them, poisoning the trust needed for the most effective police work. The New York Times’s endless crusade against phantom police racism ensures that the poorest neighborhoods will continue to be held back by fear and violence.
The great liberal bright shining lies about racial differences do not reduce suffering. The lies increase crime and increase victimization of innocents in all races. The lies do not make inter-racial relations more amicable. Look at the figures above about black-on-white crime rates. These lies have not caused blacks to hold more friendly feelings toward whites.
The white liberal lies about race are moral posturing for their own benefit. They want to proclaim their moral superiority toward non-liberal whites. So they tell lies about how racism by non-liberal whites is to blame for black poverty and pathologies and crime in black neighborhoods. Their selfish lies continue to do lots of real damage to American society. Their defense of taboos about human nature prevent more rational policy discussions and provide rationales that lead to harmful policies such as racial preferences and obstacles to effective policing.
Also see my previous posts "New Orleans Police Go AWOL" and "Blacks Turn On Whites In New Orleans Superdome". On the first of those two posts note the part about how after the earthquake in Kobe Japan in 1995 killed thousands of people the sole report of looting in Kobe was by Iranians. No Japanese looted. The incarceration rate difference between Asians and blacks in the United States is unsurprising given crime rates in the nations of origin and selective effects of smarter people coming from Asia to the United States to study and work in engineering and science.
Goodson continues: "We soon realized these weren't soldiers rescuing people, they were engineers clearing debris and they owned the only vehicle large enough to reach our home. They were wearing body armor and the men in back were manning machine guns, because people had been shooting at them for days as they tried to clear debris from the roads."
Traveling to the St. Charles Avenue military processing area, Goodson began to witness first-hand
the extent of looting throughout the city. "I can't describe it other than widespread mayhem, just unbelievable. Having now seen the media coverage, I can tell you that no one is telling the American public how rampant this problem is, for whatever reason."
The press censors when the subject affects public views of racial differences. The public is not trusted with the truth. One has to read smaller regional papers and foreign papers to get accounts of what really happened in New Orleans.
The New York Times has a long excellent article reviewing many different things that went wrong in disaster response for Hurricane Katrina. It includes pathetic quotes from politicians at different levels of government who are busy playing a game of hot potato so that they do not get the blame. The Louisiana National Guard was as dumb with its vehicles as the New Orleans government with their 255 flooded buses.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard officials said.
The article also relays how the local governments around the state wouldn't send buses to evacuate New Orleans because the bus drivers were afraid of criminals. Couldn't the state government have offered the bus drivers the ability to pick up only old folks and children? Or brought the people out of the city and let the bus drivers pick up the people after the people had been brought out to a safer location by a smaller number of vehicles?
Putting FEMA between volunteers and the disaster areas was a huge mistake.
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans.
"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?' " said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's ridiculous."
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of Mr. Vines, said, "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA. Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA." When the state of Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people displaced by flooding, she said, "they were told they could not go. I don't really know why."
There is a lot to be said for not requiring or even allowing top-down control of volunteers who want to help in disaster responses. Let people in the field spontaneously agree with each other on how to form up teams. Let them cooperate in whatever ways they decide make the most sense given the situations they see arising in front of them. FEMA should not have the power to make firemen go through training before entering a disaster area. Firemen know what to do. Let them do it.
Even if someone competent was running FEMA I still do not think it should have power over volunteers. Informal society should not go under government control in a disaster.
Update: But it bears repeating that the big mistakes were made by elected politicians from Louisiana before the hurricane hit.
In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.
You can bet that the Louisiana Congressional delegation does not want the public to take a hard look at how they allocated their pork barrel spending in Louisiana.
Update: To put that $1.9 billion a year chunk of money Louisiana got each year for Army Corps of Engineers spending in perspective: Al Naomi, senior project manager for the New Orleans District of the Army Corps of Engineers says that the category 5 levee protection system for New Orleans would have cost $2.5 billion. The elected officials of Louisiana steered that $1.9 billion away from projects rated more urgent and important by the Corps. They have done this for decades running.
Update II: On MSNBC Joe Scarborough interviewed a city official from Jefferson Parish south of New Orlea
