March 21, 2009

Calling all datanauts

The federal New Immigrant Survey, which surveyed 9,400 new legal immigrants in 2003 and intends to track them for decades, offers a fascinating source of data, much of it free to the public. The databases can be downloaded formatted for users of each of the three high-end statistical packages: SAS, SPSS, and Stata. So, if you are a data analysis heavyweight, here's a relatively unplumbed but important data source.

Jason Richwine calculated the Wechsler Digit Span IQ subtest scores for different immigrant groups from it, but nobody has yet published the IQ scores from the four Woodcock-Johnson III IQ subtests given to 3 to 12 year-old children of immigrants with legal permanent residency in the NIS.

You'd have to be careful in evaluating the scores, since on most of the subtests, between 25-50% of the kids got scores of zero right out of up to 76 points. Presumably, they were utterly defeated by language problems due to the Woodcock-Johnson IQ test not having been translated into their exotic languages. The zeroes should be left out. (In contrast, the very simple Wechsler Digit Span subtest was translated into a huge number of languages. One immigrant's child took it in Amharic.)

However, 704 of the Woodcock-Johnson tests were given in Spanish, so those scores are probably more or less fair. And they're the most important ones for understanding the impact of massive Hispanic immigration on America's future.

And you'd also need to work on how to convert Woodcock-Johnson scores to IQ scores.

It would be an ambitious project, but a significant one.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 20, 2009

I'm shocked ...

... SHOCKED to learn that the numbers were phony on Obama's budget for turning America into a Nordic social democratic state while simultaneously cutting taxes for 95% of the population and blowing zillions on climate change. The Washington Post headlines:
U.S. Federal Deficits Soar Past [Obama's] Previous Estimates

Congressional Budget Office says Obama's request would generate deficits averaging $1T a year over next decade -- $2.3T more than Obama predicted.





But I thought that closing that loophole on hedge fund managers' income was going to pay for Green Jobs for everybody??? Surely, hedge fund managers are going to make gazillions and bazillions in the future, right?

Don't fear, the Democrats are resolute, and won't allow anything as uninspiring of Hope and Change as arithmetic to get in their way:

"Our priorities are the same," Pelosi said. "This budget is a statement of our values and our investments in education, health care and the health of America. That includes prevention as well as care, and the energy initiatives as well as tax relief for 95 percent of the American people, as well as an approach that takes the deficit down. Those are the priorities of the budget."

White House budget director Peter Orszag made the same point after speaking with reporters on Tuesday.

"There are always some adjustments," Orszag said of the legislative budget process. "But those four pillars" -- health care, education, clean energy and deficit reduction -- "will be represented."

"The Class"

An excerpt from my movie review in The American Conservative:





Read the rest in the magazine.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 19, 2009

Obama gearing up for immigration fight?

When listening to people who have talked privately to Obama announce that he totally supports them, it's always hard to tell if he just said "I have understood you," or if he really does agree with them. On immigration, it's starting to look like Obama really is enthusiastic for amnesty, although his handlers are trying to cover it up.

The WSJ reports:
Obama Tells Hispanic Caucus He's Willing to Tackle Immigration





The White House seemed to play down both the talks and their substance. ... Caucus members’ statements following the meeting said that overhauling immigration law was the only agenda item.



Hispanic Business reported:
But immigration legislation is on the agenda and moving forward, said Hispanic lawmakers who attended the West Wing meeting. The caucus consists of Democrats and one independent.

Perhaps somebody should have mentioned that fact to Karl Rove eight years ago: no matter how many votes George W. Bush picks up personally, over 90% of Hispanic elected officials are Democrats, so more Hispanics just mean more Democratic power.
"The president said more than any of us expected him to say," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.

Mr. Gutierrez, who is wrapping up a cross-country tour to highlight how families are affected by the immigration system, said the lawmakers "made it absolutely clear that this is a civil rights issue of our community."

Oh, boy.

Deep down, Obama thinks about the various ethnicities the way the Rev. Lovejoy thinks about the religions:
Homer Simpson: "God is punishing me."

Rev. Lovejoy: "No, but he was working in the hearts of your friends and neighbors when they went to your aid, be they Christian, Jew, or [looks at Apu, pauses] ... Miscellaneous."


Rev. Lovejoy: "Aw, that's super."

To Obama, there are only Blacks, Whites, and Miscellaneous.

But, if he's starting to think about amnesty not as another boring Miscellaneous issue (excuse me, Hispanic issue), but as a civil rights issue, watch out. At least, that's what Rep. Gutierrez's plan for manipulating Obama seems to be.
Obama told the group that he will work on immigration in a method similar to other major policy initiatives. There will be a public forum on immigration, possibly within the next two months, to unveil key principles of overhaul legislation.

A huge Congressional fight over immigration with unemployment pushing 10% would be great.

The recent history of federal votes on immigration is that the recessions come at the beginning of decades but the votes only come during the prosperous late middle periods of the decades. Thus, the 1981-1982 recession led to public demands to do something about illegal immigration. But supporters of the status quo stalled until booming 1986, then passed a "compromise" amnesty / enforcement bill, which they corruptly failed to enforce. The 1991-92 recession led to public demands for a crackdown, which the establishment fobbed off until making a few minor reforms during booming 1996. The 2001-02 recession derailed Bush's amnesty plan for half a decade, until he, Ted Kennedy, and John McCain revived it in the Housing Bubble years of 2006 and 2007, which the public still managed to defeat.

So, if Obama wants to fight for amnesty in 2009, bring it on. It's our best chance, ju-jitsu style, to get something positive done instead.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

The President's NCAA Office Pool Picks

One question that hasn't been explored is: How much times does the President spend thinking about sports versus thinking about the economy?

The New York Times offers us Obama's picks for the NCAA basketball tournament. This is apparently the first time a President has graced us with his March Madness predictions.

As one emailer comments, Obama's guesses are straight out of Chicago Politics 101: Don't make no waves, don't back no losers. Obama's picks for the Final Four consist of three #1 seeds and one #2 seed. For the Final Eight, he has four #1 seeds, three #2 seeds, and one #3 seed. Not a lot of hope and change on display.

I think the evidence is mounting that sports offer fruitful perspectives for understanding Obama.

A number of readers objected to the elaborate sports metaphor I used in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance." I analogized Obama's passionate feelings about the black and white races that suffuse Dreams from My Father to an old Boston Red Sox's fan's feelings about the New York Yankees. I suggested that if he had grown up in a city with major league sports teams, he might have channeled his ferocious competitiveness and need for victory into being a pro sports fan rather than into racial politics. His 2000 discovery that he'd never be black enough to black voters to beat more genuinely black politicians like Bobby Rush to run for mayor of Chicago (the most powerful position a black politician can attain qua being a black politician), caused him to rethink his political image the way a left-handed flyball pitcher might rethink his childhood allegiance to the Red Sox when he realizes that Yankee Stadium is better suited to him than Fenway Park.

Another question I haven't seen asked much is: How hard is Obama working? I have the vague impression that to keep his famous equanimity, he spends a lot of time on mental health breaks, such as making up his NCAA picks, rather than, say, staffing the Treasury Department.

Similarly, George W. Bush, for example, spent a huge amount of time exercising while in office, presumably as his way to stay off the bottle. Obama appears to be a fanatical exerciser, too, spending much of the interregnum at the gym rather than interviewing potential Treasury Department appointees.

Obama has a lot of alcoholics in his family tree. His father and his half-brother David both died while driving drunk. His half-brother Roy was a drunk until he became Abongo the fundamentalist Muslim. His grandfather Stan was a barfly. Also, Obama seems prone to depression (e.g., his New York years and following his loss to Bobby Rush in 2000, I would guess), and he seems to spend a lot of time on preventing recurrences.

For example, his Chicago circle of rich black friends put together a complicated schedule of flying to D.C. on weekends to give him somebody to hang out with. No doubt they just want to let people know that they hang out with the President, but they seemed to feel in what they said to reporters that it wasn't any secret that Obama needs an elaborate emotional support system. We really haven't had anybody in the White House in living memory who could be considered the sensitive artiste type, somebody so self-conscious and self-absorbed.

Also, because of the stigma against smoking, Obama seems to spend a lot of time each day ducking out for a smoke in private. At home in Chicago, during tense times such as the choice of a VP last summer, he'd drop in on his private bodyguard's apartment several times a day, presumably for a cigarette.

The good news is that Obama knows himself pretty well (he ought to: he's certainly spent plenty of time thinking about himself), so if he figures that the most number of hours he can work per week is X, well, then, he's probably right.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

Iceland, Again






- Inside information. You know people who know people.






They were naive.

On the radio now

I will be on the Chuck Wilder Show on Thursday at 4:05 E.T. / 1:05 p.m. PT to discuss “the minority mortgage meltdown.” The program airs in Los Angeles and can be streamed live here.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 18, 2009

Infrastructure stimulus in action!

Obama's first instinct after getting elected President was to promise to put America back to work through "infrastructure" projects. He seemed to have an image in his head of modern construction projects as employing roughly as many people as you see toiling on the Great Pyramid of Cheops in a CGI scene from a PBS documentary on Ancient Egypt.

So, I've been paying attention to an infrastructure project near my house that started up last fall.

A four-lane street near my house has been torn up for about four or five months now, with bigger water and sewer pipes going in to support all the huge apartment buildings on the street that are being finished. Two lanes remain open, while two lanes are shut for about 1,200 feet. There are usually 10 to 12 large pieces of equipment parked in the construction zone.

But, how many workers are actually employed on the job site? Often, I don't see anybody. At 2 pm yesterday, I counted three. Today was a busy day, with six hard hats on-site. Granted, only two of them were actually working, but that's not the point, the point is that six were drawing paychecks and thus, presumably, stimulating the economy. But six is a lot for this very expensive project that has made making a left turn onto the street an ordeal.

I presume they have good reasons for the lack of activity (perhaps they have to let concrete dry?), but it seems typical for a modern streets and sanitation-type project: the number of hard hats employed on any given day is vanishingly small.

Shifty-looking sorts

Reuters reports:

[Jefferson] Duarte [of Rice U.] and co-authors Stephan Siegel and Lance Young, of the University of Washington in Seattle, studied members of, an online lending site where people looking for loans are matched up with individual lenders.

Each loan applicant submitted a profile which included credit and work history, education level, income and an optional photograph of themselves for lender review.

More than 6,800 loan applications, 2,579 loans and 12,200 photographs from were used in the study.

Duarte hired a team of 25 people to rate the applicants' trustworthiness on a scale of one to five using only the photographs of the borrowers. The team also judged the probability that the borrowers would repay a $100 (72 pound) loan.

Those judged to be trustworthy by the team were more likely to get a loan from lenders and tended to have a credit score about 20 points higher than those determined to be untrustworthy, the researchers found.

"Untrustworthy" borrowers were seven percent more likely to default on their loan than a perceived trustworthy borrower with the same credit score.

"There is an array of information that you can get out of the pictures," Duarte said, adding that borrowers use photographs ranging from family portraits to snapshots of their pets.

"The pictures are revealing something about the behaviour of these people that is not taken into account in the credit score model," Duarte said.

To make sure that the evaluators' prejudices did not skew the results, the researchers controlled for race, age, gender, obesity, attractiveness and education, as well as financial factors like employment status, income and homeownership.

Of course, the really dangerous guys are the Bernie Madoffs and Sir Allen Stanfords who make the effort to look trustworthy. But, I'm always struck by how many dubious types make little effort to look less dubious. They seem to feel they are expressing their individualism, the Real Me.

In truth, they want affirmation and support from their peers, who are dubious sorts, too.

For example, why do car salesmen so often dress like car salesmen straight out of the Robert Zemeckis comedy "Used Cars?" Journalist Chandler Philips went undercover for Edmunds and worked at two San Fernando Valley car dealerships. His "Confessions of a Car Salesman" is well worth-reading.



Hey, that's my old look (minus the gel) ...

The general public doesn't think all that highly of high pressure salesmen, and that air of social disapproval will eat away at the crucial self-confidence of the salesmen. So, they tend to impose and Us vs. Them attitude on each other, hanging around after work with each other and with the kind of women who like high pressure salesmen. Moreover, the sales managers encourage their salesmen to go into debt to buy fancy cars, clothes, jewelry, houses, and the like, telling them they have to maintain a professional appearance and challenging their manhood if they don't think they can afford all that. That keeps them on the hook working at a job they may not really like but that makes them more money than they can make elsewhere.

I suspect when all the foreclosure statistics in the Sand States are toted up, we'll see that real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and other insiders got themselves in over their heads at a disproportionate rate. A similar dynamic was probably at work on Wall Street, just on a higher dollar scale.

Why they don't get it

The New York Times offers an elaborate quantitative map showing the number of foreign-born people per county over Censuses from 1880 to 2000.

The maps make clear a point I've harped on before: that our NYC/DC/Harvard punditocracy is completely clueless about the multi-generational prospects of Mexican-Americans.

If you look up Mexicans on the NYT's map, there were only 2,138 people of Mexican birth living in Manhattan County in 1980. A goodly fraction of those were likely scions of rich Mexicans working at, say, the U.N. and/or partying at Studio 54. In 1990, there were still only 6,003.

In Washington D.C. in 1980 there were only 514 Mexican-born residents, and in 1990 there were only 1,034.

In Suffolk County, MA, (Boston, Cambridge, etc.), there were 271 in 1980 and 1,006 in 1990.

In other words, Mexican immigrants are a new phenomenon to America's media establishment. So, it's easy to apply Ellis Island-based fantasies to immigrants from Mexico: by the third generation, they'll be doing as well as Italians! Who can say we're wrong? Mexicans in the U.S. are an utterly new phenomenon. There are no track records!

In contrast, in Los Angeles County, there were 33,644 Mexican-born individuals way back in 1920. And there were probably an even larger number of American-born Spanish-surnamed people. In 1980, there were 697,000 Mexican-born folks in LA County. More importantly for analytical purposes, by 1980 there were already a huge number of third, fourth, and fifth-generation people of Mexican descent in LA County.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 17, 2009

AIG v. Earthquake Insurance

There has been a lot of talk about AIG's Financial Products division, which made a lot of credit default swaps (i.e., bets) against defaults (on mortgage-backed securities and the like) happening. And then, what do you know, lots of defaults happened, so many that AIG is insanely broke. And the government has been handing AIG vast amounts of money to pass through to the financial institutions that made bets with AIG (e.g., Goldman Sachs, that Cradle of Treasury Secretaries).

Personally, I've never been a big enough player to be in the market for credit default swaps, but they are analogous to something I've considered purchasing: earthquake insurance. About 7/8ths of California homeowners do not have earthquake insurance. If a small earthquake directly under my house knocks down my house and a few hundred around it, then having earthquake insurance would turn out to have been a great idea. But if The Big One knocks down a million houses, will any insurance company in the business be able to pay off? Would the federal government subsidize the obligations of the insurance companies? Or would the federal government just step in and pay off everybody, insured and uninsured? Or would SoCal revert to a permanent Mad Max wasteland of rubble?

I don't know.

The state legislature set up a public-private entity called the California Earthquake Authority, which boasts that it has $8 billion available to pay off earthquake damage. At $250,000 per house, say, that's 32,000 houses. But most houses aren't insured. On the other hand, a very large fraction of the damage would be done to commercial properties and infrastructure.

Both earthquake insurance and credit default swaps raise the issue of moral hazard. The hazard is obvious with credit default swaps. If you could get AIG to insure for a cheap price that your bundle of liar loans wouldn't default, why not create mortgage backed securities even more likely to default?

Moral hazard seems more implausible with earthquake insurance, but it does exist because there are big differences in potential earthquake damage in Southern California just blocks apart. After the big 1994 Northridge Earthquake, my dad saw a map in the newspaper of all the condemned buildings in the San Fernando Valley. He then looked up a geological map of the Valley that showed where all the old river beds ran.

A typical California riverbed has a trickle of water two feet wide in the midst of a "wash" of sand and gravel hundreds of yards wide. During a major winter storm, the entire wash fills with roaring water, depositing more sand and gravel. After the destructive flood of 1938, the LA River and its tributaries such as the Tujunga Wash were channelized into giant concrete ditches, allowing construction right up to the edge of the channel.

About 80% of the condemned buildings in the Valley after the 1994 earthquake turned out to have been built on top of the sand and gravel of the old river washes. You could see on a street built originally along the banks of the old LA River wash, apartment buildings on the sandy side of the street fell down, while the apartment buildings on the soil side stayed up. As the Bible says, the typical house or apartment building that fell down was a house built on sand:

For awhile after the 1994 earthquake, there was some interest in figuring out what parts of Southern California were more likely to fall down again. Maybe we should convert the place that were hardest hit to parks, or at least downzone them from multistory to single story dwellings. But, then, people seem to have lost interest in the subject.

And now that I think about it, this analogy is particularly fruitful. The global financial structure turns out to have been built upon the mortgages of the houses of what Wall Street called the Sand States (California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida)...

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 16, 2009

Legal immigrants: hints of IQ scores

Here are Jason Richwine's calculations of scores from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey of the backward digit span subtest from the Wechsler IQ test. These are for the children of legal permanent resident immigrants:

White natives are at 100, with a standard deviation of 15.

European legal immigrants' kids: 99

India: 112

Northeast Asia: 106

Southeast Asia: 104

sub-Saharan Africa 89

Mexico 82

Central America/Caribbean 83

South America 86

Anyway, this is just a single subtest, but it's interesting stuff, although, as usual, not too interesting, in that it comes out about the way you'd have figured.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

Is this Bush or Obama? (Part II)

Is this from a 2001 George W. Bush speech on education or from a 2009 Barack Obama speech on education:



Judging from the inelegant diction, misunderestimated statistics, dubious logic, and MBA buzzwords, you might think it's Bush in 2001. But it's Obama last week in his big education speech. The shout-out to Massachusetts is the most obvious give-away.

But it's the same cargo cult mentality that thinks that the big difference between students in Mississippi and students in Massachusetts is that Massachusetts' grades them tougher on state achievement tests to see if they are "proficient" in math and reading, so, therefore, the Massachusetts students Rise to Meet the Challenge.

In reality, Massachusetts has been the intellectual center of North America since the 1600s, and Mississippi has not. And the toughness of the grading of the Massachusetts test doesn't have much of anything to do with it. As I pointed out in VDARE a couple of years ago, Massachusetts is one of the toughest graders, but the toughest grader of all is ... Louisiana.

As I explained, The basic problem, which Obama didn't mention, is the NCLB's

It's nuts.

... In the current NCLB, which was largely the result of an alliance between President Bush and Senator Kennedy ... . Each state is allowed to concoct its own test to determine whether its own students have reached "proficiency," which the state can define however it pleases.



(The most honest state, surprisingly enough: Louisiana—with Missouri, Massachusetts, and South Carolina deserving honorable mentions.)

Overall, the typical state claimed that 68 percent of its 4th graders were proficient readers, compared to the 30 percent found by the honest NAEP.

But, Obama is pretending, just like Bush, that we can make NCLB come true just by wishing hard enough.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

March 15, 2009

Indian immigrant IQ

Jason Richwine writes in Forbes:
Indian Americans: The New Model Minority





The New Immigrant Survey is being run out of Princeton. It's one of those massive projects like the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. It only applies to legal immigrants. The first round of data was collected in 2003, and papers have been coming out for a couple of years. Parts of the Woodcock Johnson IQ test were given to immigrants, as well as the digit span test. The data is available to registered users.

If you know more about this research, such as what other legal immigrant groups scored, please let me know.

I'm guessing that Richwine crunched the numbers himself, because I can't find anything published on them, and he is writing his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard on IQ and immigration nexus. (Here's Marcus Epstein's VDARE blog post on Richwine's forthright statements at an AEI conference.) The SPLC is already on Richwine's case for uttering hatefacts.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

The coming Amish tidal wave?

Congenial Times has a blog post and a long comment on Amish demographics. There are now somewhere approaching a quarter of a million Amish in the U.S., up from less than 10,000 a century ago. At the current growth rate of doubling every twenty years, there would be approaching eight million Amish by 2110. (Warning: Projections 100 years into the future not likely to turn out right.)

My impression is that the Amish are not a major drain on the taxpayers the way the polygamous Fundamentalist Mormons are, who put their junior wives on welfare and run a lot of scams to get federal and state funds for the their town on the Utah-Arizona border. Of course, an all-Amish country wouldn't work due to the pacifism of the Amish.

Somebody might wish to create a model of the optimal sect for increase in share of the population. The components would consist of:

1. Fertility rates
2. Retention rates
3. Conversion rates
4. Death rates (which usually are pretty much the same these days, as long as the sect doesn't oppose vaccination, or whatever).

The Amish, for example, have quite high fertility rates, high but not 100% retention rates, and very low conversion rates. There are probably trade-offs between the different components.

It seems plausible that the human race in 3000 A.D. will largely be descended from cultures that achieved optimal combinations of these trade-offs for population growth.

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

The Bush-Obama Era

From my new column:

Are we in the middle of what future historians will refer to as the Bush-Obama Era?

That might sound bizarre—until you notice the continuity of policy on crucial issues such as the economy and immigration. Remarkably, under Obama, much of the conventional wisdom of the Bush years continues to reign unquestioned.

Education policy showcases the stability of the Bush-Obama Age. Last week’s big speech on schools given by President Obama to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was essentially a sequel to President Bush’s speeches on the same topic in 2001.

Granted, Bush didn’t start his orations on American education by leading mass chanting in Spanish as Obama just did:

THE PRESIDENT: “Thank you. [Applause.] Si se puede.

AUDIENCE: “Si se puede!
Si se puede! Si se puede!

Somehow, though, I suspect that Bush is now kicking himself that he didn’t think of that cool opening. Si se puede!” That rocks!

Since the topic is schooling, let’s take a test.

Which President orated:

“The highest percentage increase in our budget should go to our children's education. Education is my top priority and by supporting this budget, you will make it yours as well. … Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind. … “

  1. Barack Obama

  2. George W. Bush

  3. Dwight Eisenhower

It definitely wasn’t Eisenhower. When Sputnik alerted America in 1957 that we were in a dead-serious competition with the Soviet Union for technological mastery of ballistic missiles, the 1958 National Defense Education Act responded by delivering stronger education to the stronger students—where the highest return on investment was attainable. In contrast, both Bush and Obama believe in investing more where the ROI is lowest.

OK, you can tell from the clunky prose style that the quotes above come from Bush in 2001. But the philosophy remains the same.

In his speech last week, Obama told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce:

“And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we've let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. Let me give you a few statistics.”[Transcript, March 10, 2009]

Uh-oh. Obama is into words, not numbers, so his rhetorical statistics tend to be half-digested factoids that raise more questions than they answer:


How do American students do compared to foreigners?

For the answer, click here

My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan




I think I understand this part of the article, though:














Move along now, nothing to see here.




My published articles are archived at -- Steve Sailer