Apple needs more immigration to pay lower wages to make higher profits to not pay taxes upon

Apple CEO Tim Cook swearing to tell
Congress only legally-vetted whoppers

Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs is a big pusher of Immigration Reform:

Ms. Powell Jobs has a net worth of about $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. Her husband, the Apple co-founder, wasn't a big philanthropist.  ...

It was through her work at College Track that Powell Jobs got on the track to immigration reform. Some of the students in California in the program came into the US at a young age illegally. Now, as high school graduates, they are ineligible for state or federal college assistance. And that has led Powell Jobs to take a more public and active stance on the immigration.

One might think that Ms. Powell Jobs could use some of the $11.5 billion she inherited to aid the Dreamers, but it's so much more cost-effective to invest in Immigration Reform, which will also increase her net worth by driving down the pay of Apple employees and thus increasing Apple's profits.

And Apple needs to pay its engineers less because tax-avoidance lawyers don't come cheap:

J. Richard Harvey Jr., a professor at Villanova Law School, estimated that Apple’s legal maneuvering had saved the company $7.7 billion in potential American taxes in 2011. ... 

For example, he noted, about two-thirds of Apple’s global pretax income in 2011 was recorded in Ireland, yet only 4 percent of its employees and 1 percent of its customers were located there. 

Apple negotiated a 2% income tax rate with the Irish government, but has also managed to concoct theoretically profit-garnering entities that legally don't reside in any country at all.

While Apple has repeatedly insisted it does not engage in “tax gimmicks,” Mr. Harvey was unswayed. 

“Apple does not use tax gimmicks?” he said rhetorically. “I about fell off my chair when I read that.”

How can Ms. Powell Jobs afford to lobby for more subsidies for the children of illegal immigrants if Apple has to pay the market rate for American engineers?

Preet Bharara is the new Patrick Fitzgerald

A Belgian hedge fund guy paid $17 million for this "Jackson Pollock"

In an era when everything seems to be rigged for the powerful, one small consolation was that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hadn't seemed to have gotten the memo. Fitzgerald was constantly putting governors of Illinois or West Wing apparatchiks on trial. 

Granted, being a prosecutor in Chicago ought to be a license to have a fun and fulfilling job.

Lately, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan United States Attorney, has become the prosecutor walking around with a bucket while it rains money (e.g., the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading trials), such as this case:

Dealer at Center of Art Scandal Arrested on Tax Charges 

By GRAHAM BOWLEY, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and PATRICIA COHEN 

In a case of alleged forgeries that roiled the New York art market and led to a host of civil lawsuits, federal authorities on Tuesday declared a series of works sold as Modernist masterpieces to be fake and charged a little-known Long Island dealer at the center of the scandal with tax fraud. 

Glafira Rosales

Prosecutors charged that the dealer, Glafira Rosales, 56, of Sands Point, N.Y., failed to disclose $12.5 million that she had earned from the sale of the works and had never reported, as required, that she had Spanish bank accounts where she had hidden much of the proceeds. 

“As alleged, Glafira Rosales gave new meaning to the phrase ‘artful dodger’ by avoiding taxes on millions of dollars in income from dealing in fake artworks for fake clients,” Manhattan United States Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement announcing Ms. Rosales’s arrest. 

... But according to the government’s case, an apparently talented forger — or forgers — confounded the art world for years by turning out realistic-looking works said to be by masters including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. 

... Beginning in the mid-1990s, Ms. Rosales sold most of the disputed works through the East 70th Street offices of Knoedler & Company, which was at the time New York’s oldest gallery. The works, all new to the market and many said to be from a collector based in Zurich and Mexico City whom Ms. Rosales initially refused to name, were embraced by Knoedler, which sold them for millions. They became an important source of revenue for the gallery. 

But then several experts called the works fake, and the F.B.I. began an investigation. In 2011, after 165 years in business, Knoedler closed and was later sued by a half-dozen clients who had bought the Rosales works. ... 

In presenting their charges on Tuesday, the authorities outlined the details of an international scheme they said clearly showed Ms. Rosales’s efforts to profit from counterfeiting. 

In all, they say, she sold about 63 works to two prominent art dealers in New York between 1994 and 2008. ...

One of the civil suits claims that between 1996 and 2008, Knoedler earned about $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. ...

One of the suits, over the authenticity of a $17 million painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was settled last year in a confidential agreement....

Ms. Rosales was arrested at her home and was presented in Manhattan federal court, the authorities said. She is being held without bail. 

Mandelbrot Set 'do

“The sale of a piece of art for profit is a taxable event and the seller is responsible for paying his or her fair share of tax, even if the art is counterfeit,” Toni Weirauch, a special agent in charge for the Internal Revenue Service said in a statement.

The success of Ms. Rosales, a Mexican immigrant doing the kind of job that Americans just will do, is more proof that Jason Richwine is wrong.

By the way, Ms. Rosales's Spanish boyfriend, Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, was sued by painting buyers in the past, over a purported Basquiat painting, which is a good excuse for once again trotting out John Derbyshire's joke about Basquiat's hairstyle.

The portrait of Ms. Rosales above is attributed to Yelena Tylkina from Belarus, seen here in a self-portrait. There's no evidence that Ms. Tylkina is the mysterious forger, but that won't stop me from bandying her name about.

The "Jackson Pollock" shown above was bought from Knoedler for $17 million by Belgian hedge fund guy Pierre Lagrange, who made much of his money investing in Avatar. M. Lagrange had the Pollock appraised for his upcoming divorce settlement from his wife who bore him three children, which is expected to break the late Boris Beresovsky's English record for largest payout. Mr. Lagrange currently resides with Somali-born fashion designer Roubi L' Roubi.

Roubi L' Roubi and Pierre Lagrange:
Roubi is wondering: "How soon until
Gay Divorce is legal?"

It turned out that two of the paints in the "Pollock" hadn't gone through the formality of being invented before the painter's 1956 car crash death. Ms. Rosales never bothered to provide any documentation of the provenance of the 63 paintings she sold. You might think that the forger of the paintings would have gotten around to forging the accompanying paperwork, but that just goes to show you aren't the kind of high-level financial genius like all the people in this posting.

The War in Italy

At Taki's Magazine, my new column continues my intermittent series on the roots of postwar America. 

... For example, the fight against the Japanese furnished California with a national epic. After the war, the Golden State filled up with ex-servicemen who had passed through California in 1942-1945 and vowed that if they made it back alive, they were going to raise a family in the sunshine. They brought back from Hawaii not just a comic penchant for Tiki torches, but, more lastingly, for board-riding—first surfing and then skateboarding, laying the foundation for X Games culture. 

If the War in the Pacific gave Americans more of a yen for the sun, the now largely forgotten War in Italy (1943-45) set off a craze for all things Italian—such as dining, movies, and singing—that improved postwar American nightlife.

Read the whole thing there. 

Charlotte Allen at the White Privilege Conference

I'm on the mailing list for the annual White Privilege Conference, so I'm always on the verge of getting around to writing about it at length. But I didn't want to make a big deal out of it if it weren't a big deal, and doing the research to determine whether it's a big deal or not sounded depressing.

Charlotte Allen, in contrast, actually attended this year's WPC at the hilariously sprawling Sea-Tac DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, and here's some of her report in the Weekly Standard, "Beyond the Pale:"

Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.

WPC drew only 175 attendees at its first session in 1999, on the campus of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where the conference’s founder, Eddie Moore Jr., had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1989 and was serving as an assistant dean while working on a doctorate in education from the University of Iowa (he received it in 2004). Moore is now director of diversity at the Brooklyn Friends School. A larger-than-life character (he’s at least six-foot-eight and a former college basketball player), Moore physically and psychically dominated the conference. The typical garb for WPC14 attendees ranged from hippie (old folks) to hipster (young ’uns), with common elements of rubber soles on every shoe and green-conscious water bottles dangling from every backpack. The shaven-headed Moore sartorially carved out for himself an impressive hieratic distance from his disheveled audience: meticulously tailored suits complemented with silk shirts, silk ties, and even socks in shimmering springtime colors. A gold elastic-band watch that looked like a Rolex gleamed on his wrist.

Quaker delegation to WPC

Back in 1999 the main focus of the White Privilege Conference had been on race. Recently, though, the categories of victims of white supremacy have grown to include such overwhelmingly white groups as feminists and the “LGBT community”​—​or “LGBTQ community,” “LGBTQQ community,” and “LGBTQQIA community”​—​all acronyms used by White Privilege participants at various times (the two “Q’s” stand for “queer” and “questioning,” the “I” for “intersex,” and the “A” for a conventionally heterosexual “ally” of all of the above). ...

Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.

By this year at SeaTac, the number of White Privilege attendees had swollen to 2,000, a substantial increase over the 1,500 or so at WPC13 last year in Albuquerque, where the theme was “Intersectionality”​—​WPC-speak for two-fer oppression, as in the case of a black female or a gay Latino. 

The bulging crowds at the SeaTac DoubleTree were a fire chief’s acid-reflux nightmare. By row-counting I calculated 1,500 chairs​—​all taken​—​in a ballroom whose wall proclaimed “Maximum Occupancy 505.” The smaller conference rooms that housed some 120 different workshops (a sample: “Talking Back to White Entitlement,” “Follow the White Supremacist Money,” “Engaging White People in the Fight for Racial & Economic Justice”) were typically as packed as mosh pits. ...

Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.

Who were those 2,000 people lounging on the lobby floor as they ate their WPC-supplied vegan-option box lunches or lined up to buy corporate lattes at the in-house Starbucks station? From my conversations with some of them, it seemed that they had one thing in common: Someone else, or something else, usually a public entity or a university or a nonprofit or a church, had paid their way (up to $435 in registration fees alone) for the four days and nights at the Seattle airport. The top representative professions at the conference were: college professor, student, campus diversity officer, and employee of an activist organization whose title typically included the words “equity,” “social justice,” or both.  

Not Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.
(possibly Ferris Bueller,
Diversity Consultant)

Indeed, one way to look at the conference was as a networking event for a diversity industry that is larger and more elaborate and competitive than one can imagine. The conference program bulged with ads for other White Privilege-style conferences (a Pedagogy of Privilege conference this coming August at the University of Denver, for example) and white-privilege reading material (sample book titles: Deconstructing Privilege; Cultivating Social Justice Teachers; White Women Getting Real About Race). It seemed that nearly everyone in attendance, including many of the college professors, was flogging a book or had a side gig as a “consultant”​—​that is, someone you might want to hire for your own campus or workplace exploration of the ins and outs of white oppression. Eddie Moore himself, when he is not at Brooklyn Friends, runs America & MOORE LLC, and his business card advertises “Diversity Education, Research & Consulting.”

Robert Downey Jr.: Short superstar shattering stereotypes

Robert Downey Jr. is currently the biggest box office star in the world, but he's definitely not the tallest. The good obsessives at CelebHeights peg him at 5'8". That sounds about right. Back when Downey was out of prison and out of work about a dozen years ago, I used to see him at our sons' baseball and soccer games at the local park, and he's not tall at all.* 

These days, Hollywood casts short leading men with leading ladies who are taller than them (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow with Downey, Nicole Kidman with Tom Cruise).

In general, leading men are not as disproportionately tall as during Golden Age Hollywood (John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant were all close to a half foot taller than the average American man of their time). Overall, I'd say that the decline in bias in Hollywood toward tall role models is a good thing. 

Height used to be a pretty good marker of having enjoyed good nurture (e.g, had plenty to eat as a child). The Tory cabinet of prime minister Lord Salisbury in 1895 averaged six feet at a time when that was about a half foot taller than the average British man. From a female husband-hunting perspective, evidence that a man's family provided well for him when he was a child is evidence of a lot of good things. There's no downside to growing up so that you attain close to your genetic maximum of height.

Over time though, the systematic nutritional and health deficits that prevent a youth from a lower class background of attaining the full height of which his genes are capable have diminished. The NBA is full of guys who grew up on welfare. (Although in Downey's case, the kind of heavy drug use from very early age might have knocked an inch off his height.)

So, height is increasingly a measure less of nurture and more of nature. And, as somebody who is 6'4", the genetic advantages and disadvantages of being unusually tall seem like a mixed bag. If people weren't somewhat subjectively biased in favor of tall men like myself, I'd probably say the objective tradeoffs (clumsiness, head-banging, etc.) aren't really worth it. The human body isn't optimized for my height.

So, the continuing prejudice in favor of the tall seems increasingly pointless because it's now mostly a nature difference masquerading as a nurture difference, and there's no terribly good reason to want genes for additional height to be favored. Thus, the fact that Hollywood role models currently come in all heights seems, on the whole, like a good thing.

-------------

* By the way, don't get the impression from this that Downey is some kind of regular guy. I said hello to him and he said hello back, very friendly, but the Charisma Gap was astounding. In a social setting that was blase about minor levels of celebrity -- e.g., the baseball team mom was an Emmy-nominated character actress -- Downey, in disgrace, was the cynosure of all eyes of team parents. Just lounging on the grass watching his kid take infield practice, he's magnetic.

You know those scenes in Iron Man where Tony Stark wakes up from a horrible dream? I suspect Downey's Method Acting technique for this is to tell himself: "Just imagine I had a nightmare that I had to move back to the Valley!"

Raj Rajaratnam: #236 on the Forbes 400

From the New York Times:

It was around this time, coincidentally, that Gupta started getting closer to Raj Rajaratnam. The son of a Singer Sewing Company executive, Rajaratnam, who is 55, did not have much in common with the “twice blessed” generation. He attended the same English boarding school as P. G. Wodehouse. At Wharton, he struck some students as rich and loudmouthed. But he inspired a group of loyal followers who, in 1997, after he had spent nearly 15 years on Wall Street, helped him cobble together about $350 million and set up shop in a cramped office on Lexington Avenue and 57th Street. Rajaratnam, whose most attractive feature was a wide, gaptoothed smile, seemed to relish his reputation as a player. In 1999, he invited about 300 clients and brokers to a blowout Christmas party headlined by Donna Summer. But he backed up the publicity stunts with phenomenal returns. That year, one of Galleon’s funds soared 93.2 percent. By 2001, investing in technology stocks like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, he had built Galleon into a $5 billion behemoth. 

All hedge-fund managers strive for an edge — an extra something that will help their funds beat the market average. For years, Rajaratnam had been dogged by the rumors that he owed his edge to insights from a circle of corporate insiders who were paid to divulge proprietary information. Indeed, Rajaratnam had assembled a stable of carefully curated industry moles. His favorite targets were South Asians like himself. Despite the stereotype of South Asians as hardworking grinds who eschew the sharp-elbowed politicking of their American peers, Rajaratnam knew they could be every bit as competitive as anyone else on Wall Street. Many Indians in finance had worked since grade school to gain entrance into the cutthroat I.I.T. system — which was far harder to penetrate than Harvard — before even landing in America. 

Even though he was from Sri Lanka, Rajaratnam made big gifts to Indian causes, and was a regular at exclusive Indian galas. He made his Indian informants feel so comfortable that they often sprinkled Hindi words like accha, or “O.K.,” into conversation. In India, where he would have been treated as an outsider, Rajaratnam’s approach would probably have fallen flat. But in the United States, such differences matter less. Rajaratnam made himself seem like one of them. “Raj sort of had a South Asian mafia,” recalled Gerald Fleming, a colleague from his pre-Galleon days. There were people he could call and “get, for a few companies, earnings to a penny.” Fleming recalled once sitting in Rajaratnam’s office when he logged a call to Advanced Micro Devices. After some time, Rajaratnam’s secretary came in and said that someone with an Indian-sounding name had returned the call. Rajaratnam picked up the phone, walked onto the trading floor and announced the profit figure. “And he was right,” Fleming said. 

Rajaratnam was also an expert at preying on his sources’ weaknesses. His first major target was an Intel marketing executive named Roomy Khan. He caught her attention by mentioning that his wife, Asha, was a Punjabi Indian, like her. Then he reeled her in by promising a well-paying job at Galleon in return for early readings of revenue indicators at Intel and, later, tips about acquisitions, like the Blackstone Group’s bid to buy Hilton Hotels. (She found out about the latter from a South Asian Moody’s analyst, a roommate of her cousin’s.) Rajaratnam also persuaded his old Wharton School classmate Rajiv Goel, a perennially frustrated executive at Intel’s treasury department, to feed him information in exchange for introductions to his high-powered friends. Rajaratnam’s most prized recruit, however, was Anil Kumar, a former classmate from Wharton and a graduate of the I.I.T. system who worked as a technology consultant at McKinsey. 

Kumar’s prickly manner had led to several career setbacks, including being passed over for the job of managing McKinsey’s India office. Rajaratnam shrewdly capitalized on his frustrations. When Kumar returned from India to McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, Rajaratnam flattered him, asking lofty questions that the consultant readily answered. “I have all the brains, and you have all the billions,” Kumar was overheard saying to Rajaratnam. Feigning humility, Rajaratnam laughed right back. Then, one evening in the fall of 2003, as the two men were leaving a charity dinner in Manhattan, Rajaratnam pulled Kumar aside and offered him $500,000 a year to consult for Galleon. “You have such good knowledge that it is worth a lot of money,” he told him. Kumar, feeling underappreciated by his bosses at McKinsey, soon accepted. Then they found a way to pay him without ever tipping off McKinsey. Rajaratnam was now one step closer to the ultimate source of information — Kumar’s mentor, Rajat Gupta. 

As he had with his other informants, Rajaratnam began the seduction of Gupta by playing on ethnic ties and indulging his new friend during a rare career lull.

The CEO of Advanced Micro Devices was Hector Ruiz, a rarity in Silicon Valley because he's Mexican-American. Ruiz's name came up in amusing circumstances during Rajaratnam's trial.

Ray Manzarek, RIP

The keyboard player of The Doors has died of cancer at 74. I saw him perform in January 1981 as the producer / fifth member of X. I can recall thinking during Manzarek's organ solo in X's walk-off song "The World's a Mess (It's in My Kiss), "You know, for an old guy, he's really good."

Proof Jason Richwine is wrong!

From Slate:

The Children of Pahiatua 

They were orphaned, lost, and alone. Yet a generation of World War II Polish child refugees found a new life and happiness in distant New Zealand. 

By Anne Applebaum|Posted Friday, May 17, 2013, at 5:49 PM 

... But in another sense there was a happy ending—one that we might usefully contemplate. In recent years, the gap in educational attainments of rich and poor Americans has grown wider, largely because of the enormous resources many of us pour into our children. Success, we have come to believe, depends on excellent schools, carefully organized leisure and, above all, on high-concentration, high-focus parenting. 

The orphans of Pahiatua did not have any of these things. On the contrary, they had witnessed the deaths of parents and siblings, experienced terrible deprivation, and lost years of education before finding themselves in an alien country on the far side of the world. And yet they learned the language, they assimilated, they became doctors, lawyers, farmers, factory workers, teachers, and businessmen. Krystyna Tomaszyk—a Pahiatua child who became a pioneering social worker—told me over lunch that she was proud of their success. "We all had difficult childhoods. But none of us became criminals or vagabonds. We fit in." 

There were reasons for that success. New Zealand boomed after the war: Logging and mining expanded, and work was easy to find. The Polish children had an unusually warm reception here at an unusual moment: Knowing where they had come from, people went out of their way to be kind. 

But more than 70 years later, the now-elderly children of Pahiatua have an additional explanation. Zdzislaw Lepionka now believes that "the fact that we weree kept together, that we sang Polish songs and did scouting drills together— that was a kind of therapy."

Really?

From the New York Times:

Obama Urges Black Graduates to Set ExampleBy MARK LANDLER 7:46 PM ETThe president told Morehouse graduates that “laws, hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks like you can serve as president.”

Ya think?

Harvard students denounce academic freedom

From the Boston Globe:

Harvard students erupt at scholar’s claim in thesis
Thesis asserted Latino immigrants have lower IQs 

By Meghan E. Irons |  GLOBE STAFF     MAY 18, 2013

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority. 

The students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood.

Hey, it worked for Dr. Faust back during the Larry Summers imbroglio ...

HuffPost: "10 Awesome Latino Inventions"

From the Huffington Post:

A fury erupted when the Washington Post reported last week that Former Heritage Foundation researcher Jason Richwine argued in his Harvard doctoral dissertation that Hispanics are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs. 

Richwine’s dissertation parts from a fallacy. Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence. 

So instead of getting bogged down in Harvard-hosted debates over which race is the smartest and most deserving of U.S. citizenship, let’s take a moment to thank all these awesome Latino inventors who gave the world a bunch of great things!
Take a look at some of the great Latino inventors in the slideshow.

Prepare to be awed.

Seriously, I could come up with a more impressive list off the top of my head. If you are going to count Spaniards as Latinos, like the list does, about how "Cervantes, inventor of the novel?"

Heck, Joan Baez's Mexican-born physicist dad Albert Baez helped invent the x-ray microscope. (An interesting family -- more evidence for my theory that there were at least as many interesting Mexican-Americans in 1972 as today).

Wikipedia has a long list of prominent Mexican-Americans. It makes for interesting but underwhelming reading. I tried to find Wikipedia's list of prominent Italian-Americans, but it's so long that it's split up into numerous sub-lists in different spots.

Reason: "Are Hispanics Too Stupid to Become Americans?"

From Reason:

Are Hispanics Too Stupid to Become Americans?
No. And here's why. 

By Ronald Bailey

... Hispanic educational achievements and incomes do lag behind those of white Americans. And certainly there is a substantial genetic component to intelligence; genes are, after all, the recipes that build bodies and brains in response to environmental cues. Yet as Unz’s analysis of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data shows, the average IQ of a population can change in a generation whereas its genetic makeup cannot.  So what else might account for relatively lower Hispanic achievement so far in the U.S.?

The University of Texas economist Stephen Trejo suggests a number of possibilities. For example, Mexican immigration has lasted longer than immigration from any other country, promoting the growth and stability of culturally comfortable ethnic enclaves and slowing the process of assimilation. 

Sounds plausible to me. And what are the implications of that for immigration policy?

Trejo also proposes that earlier generations of unskilled immigrants faced a far less steep learning curve for moving up in a modern economy. In his 2005 book Italians Then, Mexicans Now, the Bard College sociologist Joel Perlman bolsters this point: “The crucial difference between the immigrant experience a hundred years ago and today is that relatively well-paid jobs were plentiful for workers with little education a hundred years ago, while today's immigrants arrive in an increasingly unequal America.”

Sounds plausible to me. And what are the implications of that for immigration policy?

Trejo also wonders if some fairly significant proportion of Mexican-Americans have simply already melded into the white population and so are not counted in the sorts of IQ, income, and education statistics cited by Richwine and other researchers. 

I'm sure that was true to some extent several generations ago, but it has been in the self-interest of marginally Hispanic individuals to assert their Hispanic identity for over 40 years. For example, way back in 1975 my friend with the Spanish surname whose father dropped out of Yale on December 8, 1941 to enlist and whose mother is the closest living version of Katharine Hepburn was besieged by colleges recruiting the Spanish-surnamed to bestow affirmative action upon.

Perlman concludes that “Mexican economic assimilation may take more time—four or five generations rather than three or four.”

In the meantime, pay no attention whatsoever to the state of New Mexico unto the Seventh Generation of Hispanic-Americans.

Comrades! The Great Leaders' Five Generation Plan has not failed. It cannot fail! The Five Generation Plan just hasn't been tried long enough. It just needs another Five Generations (and maybe another Five Generations after that -- when it's time for your distant descendants, if any, to know how many Five Generations it will take, they will be informed through the proper channels, probably by then via a sub-quarkian cognitive implant).

But, even under this best case scenario, isn't "four or five generations" a mite long to wait to break even? What's the national ROI on this four or five generation project, anyway?

In short, we are being told to Bet the Country on hopes and fumes.

Possibly so. But ultimately, modern Hispanic immigrants seem to be no stupider than the immigrant ancestors of other Americans.

Robert Oppenheimer's immigrant father? Seriously?

How much of the media momentum to crush Jason Richwine isn't just a Pavlovian response to the felt need for a triple bankshot strategy to prevent peasants with pitchforks from finally noticing that one Ellis Island immigrant group really is higher in IQ on average?

Perhaps the single most beneficial contribution to improving the quality of intellectual discourse in the United States would be if the gentiles of America could somehow convince Jewish-Americans that the gentiles already know that Jews are smarter than they are on average; moreover, that this knowledge -- rather than making the gentiles want to come after the Jews with their torches and crude farm implements -- inclines the gentiles of America to like Jewish-Americans for being smart and witty and good with money.

Ed West out at The Telegraph

Ed West, one of the most intellectually sophisticated pundits in the English-speaking world, is out of work after four years at The Telegraph in the U.K.

It's my job as a conservative to depress you, so I'm sad to say that, as this will be my last blogpost here, you'll have to find  some other way to get yourself down from now on; maybe stick yourself in a room with some Radiohead CDs and a bottle of gin and put Requiem for a Dream on a loop.... 

Conservatism may sound miserable, even misanthropic, but it only recognises that within the communities we live in, which are from an evolutionary point of view unnaturally large, there need to be firm rules to minimalise free-riding, violent conflict and economic disaster.  

The idea of evolutionary conservatism is to build a society that is as just, progressive, wealthy and happy as is possible within the boundaries of human nature. 

Evolution explains why people are unwilling to pool their resources with people unlike them, why men who are not expected to be providers will become hyper-masculine, why poor people are more hostile to welfare claimants than the rich are, why we’re more scared of terrorists and paedophiles than car drivers, and why things like the gender gap will never be eliminated (though social forces can reduce it). 

Evolution even explains why so much of political debate still revolves too much around Marx and Freud, and too little around Darwin; people just find it difficult to embrace controversial ideas, and are unwilling to accept that they’re wrong. We’re all guilty of this, because we’ve evolved that way, and that’s why political debate is always dominated by irrationality, prejudice, wilful ignorance and tribalism. 

It’s why opinions can inspire very strong feelings, hatred even. We all must occasionally see the face of a know-it-all columnist whose views we disagree with and want to punch them in the face. (Sometimes I look at my own byline picture and want to punch it. I’m sure it must be impossible, after writing comment pieces for a while, not to hate yourself to a certain extent; in fact there’s probably something wrong with you if you don’t. Maybe you’re a psychopath.) 

But then we haven’t evolved to live with such confrontational views being shoved in our faces; humans have a deep-seated desire to be in communion, which explains both the appeal of religion and the moral cowardice of those who hold an unpopular opinion or inconvenient truth when faced with a mob. 

That’s ultimately what political commentators are for, to say something different when faced with the collective madness that passes for current opinion. 

I hope that over the last four years I’ve occasionally succeeded; I’ve regretted some articles, although the Telegraph weren’t keen on a piece called “My five worst blogposts”, which could have had a Ratner effect. But don’t hold it against me. 

So thank you for reading and commenting; I like many of the commenters, and often find them interesting and informative. So thank you, and I will continue somewhere the struggle against cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Lib-Lab-Con, Common Purpose, Gramscian hegemony and reality in general. And remember, if you think things are bad, they can always get worse, and probably will.

Ed's book The Diversity Illusion is available from Amazon.co.uk.

"La Banda de los Ocho"

"Oh, no, Senator Schumer, you put what in the bill? Little Marco will be in big trouble!"

Jason Collins on IQ and Immigration

A continuing iSteve theme is that the modern world runs to a large extent on "selectionism" (e.g., college admissions or Goldman Sachs hiring or military recruiting or the NFL draft), and that everybody knows that in their own lives, but we're not supposed to analogize from how the world works in our daily lives to public policy. And people turn out to be really, really bad at doing rationally what they are warned not to do. 

For example, here's a professional journalist trying to think about the Richwine Affair in The Atlantic:

Forget the dubious constructs of race and IQ for a moment. 

Suppose there really was a genetically distinct race of white-skinned people inhabiting a large, hypothetical island in the Pacific Ocean; that IQ really could be reliably measured; and that we knew, for a fact, that while the measured IQs of Caucasians, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Native Americans, and all other identity groups in the United States had converged to an identical average, members of this one hypothetical race had IQ scores that measured 5 points lower on average. Additionally, suppose that the average IQ of nations as a whole had been indisputably linked to educational attainment and GDP. Would it be legitimate to bar that lower IQ group from immigrating? 

To me, doing so would be wrongheaded.  

Even setting aside my strong preference for policies rooted in individualism and the dangerous, inherently problematic nature of singling out a specific racial group for disparate treatment, barring the hypothetical low IQ people would imply that intelligence determines worth, and that our project as a nation is intimately tied to constantly maximizing material wealth. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that recruiting human beings with impressive skills is illegitimate. In fact, I think it is prudent, and I'm glad that lots of talented scientists, athletes, artists, and programmers want to come here. More, please. I'm glad that lots of farm workers and janitors want to immigrate too. I recognize that the economic contributions of the two groups are different, but I don't conclude that the low skill immigrants are less worthy of citizenship or less valuable citizens. Are they kind? Honest? Wise? Fun? 

In contrast, here is obscure blogger Jason Collins (I recommend going to Evolving Economics so you can follow his links to documenting evidence) on the same topic:

The debate (or to be more accurate, the lack thereof) triggered a couple of tangential thoughts. The first is that existing immigration policy in many developed countries already has an IQ filter. Australia and Canada’s skilled immigration systems are often pointed to as being among the most successful; so successful in fact that they are the two OECD countries where second generation immigrants outperform students with native parents in the PISA tests -  see here, here and here. A large part of improvements in Swiss PISA test scores was attributed to immigration changes in the 1990s. 

The immigration reforms that triggered the Heritage Foundation’s report also contain a skills-based component, including a points systems like that used in Australia and Canada. The United States is effectively implementing some of Richwine’s recommendations. (Since I first drafted this post, I see that Ed Realist has pointed out how some of Richwine’s ideas were doing just fine until the storm around the Heritage report.) 

Another thought is that IQ-barriers are pervasive within countries. Tests for entry into college or university (such as the SAT) are highly correlated with IQ scores. IQ test results predict success in universities and awarding of scholarships. Many jobs have IQ-testing as part of the application process, particularly in police and fire departments (which often makes them the subject of litigation about exclusion of minorities). Intelligence is also a filter for who we are friends with and who we marry. Being of low intelligence has significant costs. 

We can have a high level of confidence that the difference in IQ scores within developed countries has a genetic component. Estimates of the heritability of IQ from twin and adoption studies are robust. This means that within many countries we already actively exercise discrimination based on genetic factors, on both an institutional and personal level.

Boehner's Boner

Own goal for Team Red:

Bipartisan House Group Reaches Preliminary Immigration Deal 

By ASHLEY PARKER 

A bipartisan group in the House working on an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws reached a deal in principle Thursday evening, aides said. The group plans to introduce its bill in June. 

Details of the compromise were not released, but, much like a bill introduced in the Senate, the House legislation will include a path to legalization for the 11 million undocumented workers already in the country, as well as increased border security measures. ... 

The two-hour meeting Thursday evening, a last-ditch effort to save the legislation, finally produced the agreement in principle. 

Speaker John A. Boehner had talked to the Republican members of the group last week and urged them to produce a bill. ...

One final issue that was resolved Thursday night, aides said, was how immigrants, who are not initially eligible for federal benefits, would pay for their health insurance costs — something Democrats and Republicans agreed would be a requirement for legal status. Exactly how the compromise resolved this issue was unclear. 

Uh, uh, yeah, health care costs ... but Jason Richwine says Hispanics average lower in IQ!

So, there.

“If the takeaway is that you’ve got a bipartisan process in the House of Representatives that legalizes 11 million people, that’s a huge momentum-giver,” said Angela Kelley, the vice president of immigration policy at the [Democrat] Center for American Progress. “It adds more than it takes away. That’s what people will remember.” 

Kaus: Obama scandals helping The Eight Banditos

The bipartisan Gang of Eight

Mickey Kaus explains at the Daily Caller an idea that Dave Weigel at Slate suggested a few days ago:

An idea so crazy it just might … Opponents and supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e. amnesty) agree it doesn’t do well on the front burner of public debate. Excessive attention exposes flaws and contradictions in the legislation and focuses the anger of opponents. Back in March, I didn’t see how the Obama team, however brilliant, was going to protect its amnesty bill from this threat of publicity, given that the mainstream press was “commmitted to overcovering this issue.” 

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)

Now we know the answer! In its most fiendish strategem yet, Team Obama has launched a series of not-quite-devastating but press-obsessing scandals against itself! The confluence of the Internal Revenue Service, Benghazi and AP stories means that dreadful details of the Schumer-Rubio bill will get pushed off the front pages. Reporters who might otherwise cover it  will be temporarily sent to Cincinatti to interview IRS whistleblowers. Meanhwile, the scandals give Sen. Rubio and other Republicans a chance to bash Obama about something new, giving them the anti-Obama cred that might allow them to quietly sell out on amnesty and hand Obama his greatest second-term triumph! 

Senators Rubio, Schumer, Graham & McCain negotiate immigration reform

Similarly, the scandals give conservative activists an alternative, substitute target for their outrage, all the more so because the anger is legitimate. As Greg Sargent put it, the scandals could “distract right wing base for long enough for Graham and Rubio to slip immigration reform past them.” (Dem strategist Joe Trippi tweeted in response: “Shhhhh …”)

Mark Zuckerberg's probably feeling relieved, too.

Irony alert: $48.8 mil for a Basquiat painting

$48.8 million "Dustheads" - Does Ralph Steadman get a cut?

From Huffington Post:

NEW YORK — A Jean-Michel Basquiat (zhahn mee-SHEHL' BAH'-skee-aht) painting has set a new auction record for the graffiti artist at a sale of postwar and contemporary art in New York. 

Christie's says "Dustheads" sold for $48.8 million on Wednesday.

Mandelbrot Set hairdo

From Wikipedia:

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist.[1] He began as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s. 

Throughout his career Basquiat focused on "suggestive dichotomies," such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.[2] Basquiat's art utilized a synergy of appropriation, poetry, drawing and painting, which married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.[3] 

Utilizing social commentary as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual",[2] Basquiat's paintings also attacked power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.[3] ...

Considering that some plutocrat has $48.8 million to spend on what looks like a colorized drawing from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I'd say the class struggle has been won. As Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder sang:

Plutocracy and Diversity
Live together in perfect harmony

P.S. One under-reported aspect of art fame is the advantage of being gay for pay, like the bisexual Basquiat, who had been a teenage hustler. For example, Paul Johnson's description of how the heterosexually oriented Picasso had boosted his career by obliging gay critics, collectors, and dealers is eye-opening.

It's a who-you-know business. I remember going to see a spectacular exhibit of Rene Magritte surrealist paintings in 1976 in a Quonset hut in the parking lot of the Rice football stadium. Nobody was there. Magritte was a Belgian commercial illustrator in Brussels who was beloved by commercial artists in the advertising industry. For example, in 1973, Sports Illustrated's preview of the U.S. Open golf tournament at Oakmont consisted of Donald Moss's paintings of Oakmont's famous sand traps in the style of Magritte:

But the provincial Magritte didn't fit into the Narrative of high art history easily, so he had this curious kind of non-museum fame in the 1970s.

Two decades later, though, I paid to hear a packed lecture on Magritte at the Art Institute of Chicago before seeing a sold out exhibit of pretty much the same Magritte paintings. I asked the art historian after her lecture, if, considering how lightly regarded Magritte was back as recently as the 1970s, someday the Art Institute would host a giant M.C. Escher exhibit? She was taken aback, then replied that recent scholarship established that Magritte had spent 1927-1930 in Paris hanging out with famous painters who influenced him. Then she stopped. Finally, she said, "I don't want to make it sound like art history is all about who you know ..." Then she stopped again with an alarmed look on her face.

The point is that discovery of Magritte's Paris interlude made it easier for critics to plug Magritte into the Narrative. I can understand the appeal of that. I like narratives of cause and effect, of who influenced whom.

Basquiat plugs in very easily: Andy Warhol was infatuated with Basquiat.

That doesn't mean Basquiat was talentless. He was no doubt far better at painting Ralph Steadman-style pictures than anybody else plugged into Warhold World, and maybe better than Steadman. Almost everybody who becomes famous is quite good at what they do. But, there's a lot of talent in this world.

Rick Sanchez is against Richwine

The man's got teeth

Longtime iSteve reference Rick Sanchez finally has a paying gig, apparently. His contribution to the Great Richwine Debate: 

Rick Sanchez: Remove The Bias And Let Latinos Get In The Conversation 

By Rick Sanchez 

Fox News Latino 

... The immigration debate is already emotionally charged and colored enough by political rhetoric on each side. We don’t need groups like the Heritage Foundation throwing gasoline on the fire. We don’t need studies grounded in racist and wrong philosophies. ... 

I suppose Hispanics should be grateful that somebody (heck, anybody) took the time to ask their opinion on immigration because it rarely happens. If you watch most news shows, you’ll see that Latinos are rarely invited as guests to discuss or weigh in on the immigration debate. 

(While Latinos make up roughly 17 percent of the U.S. population, a review of guests on 13 evening cable news shows on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC last month by Media Matters reveals that these networks overwhelmingly host male and non-Hispanic white guests, with Fox News scoring the highest at 3 percent, while CNN and MSNBC followed with only 2 percent.) 

... Ask any economist worth his pedigree and he will tell you that to remain vibrant, our country needs a young and motivated labor force. 

Unfortunately, economists, like Latinos, are also too often left out of the immigration debate in favor of politicians pundits. Not only would economists make the immigration discussion more interesting, they would also make it smarter — unless of course they’re employed by the Heritage Foundation.

Welcome back, Rick! One suggestion: in all your immigration pieces, work in references to Emma Lazarus's poem. Just sayin' ...

The weasels are winning: Software pay falls 2% in 2012

Happy weasel

From Computerworld, an IT trade publication:

Software developer wages fall 2% as workforce expands 

Less costly young, and long unemployed older developers may be expanding the workforce at less cost to employers 

By Patrick Thibodeau 

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- The U.S. tech industry added nearly 64,000 software related jobs last year, but as the workforce expanded, the average size of workers' pay checks declined by nearly 2%. 

There are multiple theories for the decline in pay, but a common one cited by analysts is simply that the new people being hired are paid less than those already on the job. 

The average annual wage of all workers in the software services sector was $99,000 in 2012, about $2,000 less than the prior year, reported TechAmerica Foundation in its annual Cyberstates report. 

The foundation is an affiliate of the industry trade group TechAmerca. It uses Labor Dept. data to assemble its report. ...

The Cyberstates report puts the tech labor force at 5.95 million in 2012, an increase of 1.1% from the prior year. Of that, 1.87 million workers are in software services jobs. 

Software services, which includes government defined labor categories software publishers, custom programmers, computer facilities management and other computer related services, are the best paid and the largest segment of the tech work force. 

The next largest, engineering and tech services, employs 1.62 million. Wages for workers in this segment increased by $1,500 to $92,500. But unlike software services, job growth was modest, increasing by only 11,300 last year. 

David Foote, the CEO of Foote Associates, which analyzes IT hiring trends and wages, said the supply of workers in the software services segment "is plentiful. Of course, there are many unemployed workers who want to get back to work."
Employers, consequently, did not need to offer generous wage packages to fill many of their jobs. "In fact, [employers] could get workers pretty cheap," said Foote. 

Foote said the IT industry-specific Cyberstates study doesn't include all tech workers. Working against the wage decline is high demand for certain software skill sets, which puts upward pay pressure on certain jobs that are harder to fill, he said. 

Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, a research firm that also analyzes IT wage and employment trends, cited a number of reason for the decline in wages for software professionals. First, technology is becoming easier to implement without having an IT professional, he said. Also, the option of turning to outsourcing creates less pressure to increase wages. 

But, as Mark Zuckerberg tells us, this is just a start: the United States government must help him drive down wages even farther. Zuck getting even richer at the expense of his workers is Good for the Economy.

Barone: In defense of Richwine and Murray

The Richwine Affair is turning into a 21st Century version of the Dreyfus Affair, with intellectuals weighing in on their chosen sides. There's a vague sense growing that which side you choose matters. From the Washington Examiner:

In defense of Jason Richwine and Charles Murray
May 16, 2013 | 4:32 pm

Michael Barone

My American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray came to the defense of our former colleague Jason Richwine ...  Charles was entirely accurate in stating that Richwine’s conclusion that Hispanics have lower than average IQs is accurate and, among specialists in this area, non-controversial. Richwine was careful to say that the average Hispanic IQ might rise over time, as has been observed of other groups’ average IQs. And the Heritage Foundation paper co-authored by Richwine estimating the fiscal cost of legalizing current illegal immigrants (of which the Hoover Institution’s Keith Hennessey has written a sharp critique on other grounds) did not advocate screening immigrants by IQ. He does seem to favor shifting our system toward admitting more high-skill applicants, as do I and many others, and as do the immigration systems of our Anglosphere cousins Canada and Australia. This is not racist; it has resulted in rapidly growing Asian populations in those two countries. It is discrimination based on skills. No nation has an obligation to admit every foreigner who wants to move there.

On the Economist blog a writer identified as W.W. defends the stigmatization of Richwine. He states blandly that “racism has always been predicated on falsification hypotheses about racial inferiority.” I think this is just plain wrong factually: many people have hated Jews and Asians on the grounds that they tend to be unfairly superior in certain respects, including intelligence. But there’s something more wrong with this line of thinking. It assumes that if ordinary people get the idea that one group on average scores worse on intelligence tests then they will conclude that it’s justified to discriminate against all members of the group. Ordinary people—or at least ordinary Americans—know better than that. They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, that there is wider variation with each measured group than between measured groups. Some members of a racially or ethnically defined group that on average scores low on IQ tests score far above average. And some members of a group that on average scores high will score far below average. Ordinary people understand that it is irrational to discriminate according to race or religion or ethnic group, and that it is rational to judge individuals on their own merits. 

So the fact that there are differences in average IQ scores between members of different groups does not undercut the case against group discrimination. But it does undercut the case for racial quotas and preferences and for the “disparate impact” legal doctrine which amounts to the same thing. Those cases depend on the assumption that in a fair society we would find the same racial mix in every school, every occupation and every neighborhood. Ordinary people know that isn’t true, but the elites who cherish “affirmative action” want people to believe it is. This is why there was such a furiously negative reaction to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve,  which patiently explained that intelligence is partly the result of genetics and partly the result of environment: both nature and nurture play a role. I made points very similar to those here when I wrote this for National Review in December 1994.

Sorry about quoting almost the whole thing, but I couldn't see what to cut. It's good.

Scientific American: Ban Race and IQ Science in America

Scientific American columnist John Horgan writes:

Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned? 

By John Horgan | May 16, 2013 |  25 

So there it is, a neo-eugenics program, proposed by a Harvard-minted scholar employed by a prominent think tank. The Heritage Foundation quickly distanced itself from Richwine, stating that the claims of his Harvard thesis “in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation.” Richwine resigned from the foundation last week. 

Some pundits applauded Richwine’s downfall and attacked his Harvard research. I especially like how The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates compiled historical evidence that race is more a social than biological phenomenon.

As Jonathan Swift and Ignatius J. Reilly liked to say, "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Others defended the premise of Richwine’s thesis—that genes account for at least some of the differences in IQ scores between different ethnic groups—and deplored attacks on him as threats to freedom of speech and scientific inquiry. Journalist Andrew Sullivan says that the “effective firing” of Richwine “should immediately send up red flags about intellectual freedom.” 

These are the same sorts of things said in 1994 when Harvard researchers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued in The Bell Curve that programs to boost black academic performance might be futile because blacks are innately less intelligent than whites; and in 2007 when geneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson ascribed Africa’s social problems to Africans’ genetic inferiority. (Watson is also a former Harvard professor. What is it with Harvard? Could there be something in the drinking water?) 

I’m torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture. 

But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere–should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value. 

Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. 

Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies. ...

Scientists and pundits who insist on recycling racial theories of intelligence portray themselves as courageous defenders of scientific truth. I see them not as heroes but as bullies, picking on those who are already getting a raw deal in our society.

Jason Richwine, unemployed father of two young children, is The Real Bully.

It’s time to put these destructive theories to rest once and for all. 

Irony Alert: It just occurred to me that two recent films, The Great Gatsby and Django Unchained, feature villains who spout pseudo-scientific theories of white superiority. The films imply that these theories are ludicrous relics of our racist past and that no modern person could possibly believe them. If only. 

A classic example of the increasingly popular Argumentum ad Tarantino. (Tarantino claims to be a dyslexic with a 160 IQ.)

Self-plagiarism alert: Some of the material above is recycled from my 1999 book The Undiscovered Mind.

A poem about the future of America using anagrams of "Ta-Nehesi Coates"

Found in the comments::

just a nobody said...

here is a short poem about the future of america using anagrams of ta-nehisi coates for 9 lines. it was fun.

* * *

america!

hi-octane? siesta?

oh, cease titans!

and

associate thine

atheistic aeons

with

nacho satieties.

america!

his taco is eaten!

incite hate so as

to chains, tease i.

see: I toast china

John McWhorter on Richwine

From the New York Daily News:

Start with this: Race is real. There are those who insist it is a fiction, that there are no group differences between human beings whatsoever. That’s absurd. 

Sure, there are hybrids and fuzzy cases, but people of African descent generally have darker skin and curlier hair. People of Caucasian descent generally have lighter skin and thinner hair. Asians have the epicanthic fold in their eyes 

Why is it utterly impossible that there be differences along the same lines, however slight, in the human brain? 

Okay, some people say. Even if we accept that race is real, and that there might be some differences, it’s “racist” to broach the topic of race and IQ. Wrong. That’s like being accused of infidelity and objecting “How mean!” instead of grappling with the substance of the accusation. 

Or, how about the idea that there’s no such thing as IQ? It’s fake to stick up for this one. We all casually describe one person as smarter than another. We know exactly what we mean when we call someone intelligent. 

Many of us love Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s argument about “multiple intelligences,” where some people are “musically” intelligent, some “emotionally,” and so on. 

Well, Gardner himself also stipulates “logical-mathematical” intelligence — basically what we otherwise refer to as IQ — and no one argues for pulling that one from the list. 

So: IQ, or smarts, is real. Like all genetic traits, it will vary more among individuals within a group than it does among groups. However, this doesn’t rule out the possibility of overall statistical differences between the groups. Science will ultimately resolve the issue, not P.C. dismissal. 

That’s not pretty. But smart people shouldn’t limit their discussion to what’s pretty. 

Yet here’s the equally important point: None of this means that IQ should play a part in our discussion of immigration policies. 

We should definitely make our country more inviting to high-skilled immigrants, many of which will be PhDs coming from India or China. But we cannot allow this to morph into a larger idea that humbler applicants without advanced degrees aren’t welcome, aren’t “smart enough for America.” 

The Founders of the republic, after all, broached no such topic. They had their xenophobias: Benjamin Franklin got itchy about how many Germans were here in his day. But no one of Franklin’s ilk is recorded as worrying that newcomers should be systematically measured for smartness.

In 1754, Franklin wanted immigration restriction because he wanted his Anglo-Americans to enjoy high wages and low land prices in their limited terrain along the Eastern Seaboard. From the beginning of the French and Indian War in 1756, however, he focused upon military conquest so his people could enjoy high wages and low land prices in the Mississippi River Valley. Personally, I'm not in to military conquest, so Franklin's 1754 logic seems pretty reasonable to me: I want my people, the citizens of the United States, to enjoy high wages and low land prices through immigration restriction.

Coates: "Race Is a Social Construct"

From the Atlantic

What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct'

In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check "black" on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn't hold up.

TA-NEHISI COATES MAY 15 2013, 12:55 PM ET

Walter White. Chairman of the NAACP. Black dude.

Most of the honest writing I've seen on "race and intelligence" focuses on critiquing the idea of "intelligence." So there's lot of good literature on whether it can be measured, its relevance in modern society, whether intelligence changes across generations, whether it changes with environment, and what we mean when we say IQ. As Freddie mentions here, I had a mathematician stop past to tell me I needed to stop studying French, and immediately start studying statistics -- otherwise I can't possibly understand this debate. 

It's a fair critique. My response is that he should stop studying math and start studying history. 

I am not being flip or coy. If you tell me that you plan to study "race and intelligence" then it is only fair that I ask you, "What do you mean by race?" It's true I don't always do math so well, but I understand the need to define the terms of your study. If you're a math guy, perhaps your instinct is to point out the problems in the interpretation of the data. My instinct is to point out that your entire experiment proceeds from a basic flaw -- no coherent, fixed definition of race actually exists.

I constantly hear this line of argument. Millions of people must find it incredibly persuasive, but it doesn't make any sense on two levels. 

Consider, as an example of the complexities of racial classification, the President of the United States, Barack Obama. In philosophy debates, the current President of the United States is a stock example, so I'll use him too. The President seems like a reasonable example, right? I don't know what the President's IQ is, but it's obviously above average. Imagine that Obama were part of a study of IQ by race. I'll answer the questions in this FAQ:

Q. What race would Obama be classified under?

A. Black.

Q. Why?

A. Because he says so. (The White House announced that on the 2010 Census, the President checked only the "black" box.) The standard methodology in studies of race and intelligence is exactly the same as in the studies of race and discrimination cited by liberals: self-identification. People check whatever box or boxes they feel like, and that's what the researchers use.

Q. Why rely upon "self-identification?"

A. Because it's easier bureaucratically, for one thing. This isn't apartheid South Africa where bureaucrats told people they are different races from what they claim to be. Here, they just go with the flow.

Q. How accurate is this?

A. It's good enough for government work, evidently.

Q. But what if we gave genetic tests to all subjects in studies?

A. These days, that would be increasingly affordable.

Q. So wouldn't that change the results?

A. Yes. It would likely make the white-black IQ gap slightly worse than under self-identification.

Q. Huh?

A. Consider Obama, who had an sub-Saharan African father and >99% white mother. Currently, because the President chooses to self-identify as black and only black, his above average IQ would be credited wholly to blacks. But, genealogically, he's half white and half-black. So, if his IQ were split among the white category and the black category, the white average would go up slightly and the black average would go down slightly. 

Q. Is this true on average that genetically whiter self-identifying blacks average higher IQs?

A. Probably:

The quants at Human Varieties have been kicking this around and it appears to be modestly true, although the correlation isn't enormous. I could imagine that this might change. If Jason Richwine were put in charge of immigration policy and he only let in high IQ immigrants, over time the average IQ of people who are 100% sub-Saharan African might get pretty high.

Q. La-la-la-la, I have my fingers in my ears, I can't hear a word you are saying.

A. Let's put it another way: leaving out recent African grad school immigrants, nobody, white or black, has ever argued that blacker African-Americans are smarter than lighter ones on average. But let's just assume they are absolutely equal. Then what would be the effect of divvying up subjects in an IQ study by genetic background? C'mon, it's simple arithmetic.

Q. I'm a history guy, not a math guy.

A. Zero. You'd get the same results as now. So, even under the most favorable of assumptions, this entire discussion is a red herring.

Q. Red herring? Is that racist?

A. Or consider your photographic example, Walter White (presumably the ironic namesake of the anti-hero of "Breaking Bad," but that's a whole different story). Walter White was 27/32nd white, the direct descendant of two Presidents. Or consider former NAACP head Julian Bond in the SNL video from the 1970s above. Or consider the current NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, who looks like Mark Ruffalo. (There'a reason the dark-skinned masses called mixed-race elites of the NAACP the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.")

Presumably, these are guys with IQs > 100. How in the world would moving them from the black to the white category narrow the IQ gap?

Take your time and think about it. Get back to me when you've done the arithmetic.
------
To drop out of the FAQ format, I'm fascinated by the terrible statistical sense displayed by pundits in the race-IQ debate. Evolutionary psychology suggests that human beings ought to be pretty decent at statistics. And, indeed, we see that intelligent people are pretty good at figuring out which are low crime neighborhoods to buy a home in and which are low violence schools to send their kids to, even if they aren't particularly good at math.

Yet, when they try to talk about the statistics of race and IQ, they seem completely inept. Why?

It's a little like conspiracy theorizing, where the most popular conspiracy theories are almost always wrong, even though conspiracies really do play a massive role in history.

For example, there's a new major history of World War One out that traces the origin of the Great War to one man's conspiracy: Dragutin Dimitrijevic, called Apis, the head of Serbian military intelligence, who arranged the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But I was unaware of that name until Greg Cochran told me it when I was about 45. Nobody is interested in Dragutin Dimitrijevic  even though he organized the most catastrophic conspiracy since the assassination of Julius Caesar. Conspiracy theorists would rather pull out their toenails than discuss how Dimitrijevic's conspiracy blew up the world.

Same with race and IQ: pundits seem to have an instinct, a magnetic attraction, for being wrong.