WaPo: 58% of Iraqi marriages are between relatives

Here's a very good article I'd never seen before by Howard Schnieder from 2000 in the Washington Post: "Saudi Intermarriages Have Genetic Costs." Now that infectious diseases have declined radically in Saudi Arabia, the burden of genetic diseases is more visible, and Saudi leaders are worrying about what to do about it. However, cousin marriage is tied into the roots of the society, so it's a difficult problem.

(I am mildly sympathetic to the extreme reactionary cautiousness of the Saudi government. Since the oil price hike of 1973, their country is a like some high school dropout that hit it hugely rich by fluke, as in a lottery. The odds are pretty high that he'll end up dead in the john at age 42, like Elvis (and Elvis was a nice guy). The Saudis have been ridiculously rich for 33 years and yet they have avoided much in the way of heroin addictions, alcoholism, HIV, and other obvious traps for lottery winners. They haven't accomplished anything, of course, but not collapsing in a heap is some kind of accomplishment, I guess.)

Here's a table from the article on how common are "marriages between relatives" (no definition given, I'm guessing it means first or second cousins -- uncle-niece marriages are uncommon outside of Southern India).

JORDAN: 50.2%
IRAQ: 57.9%
KUWAIT: 54.3%
BAHRAIN: 39.4%
U.A.E.: 61.6%
EGYPT: 28.9%
SAUDI ARABIA
Northern Province: 52.1%
North Western Province: 67.7%
South Western Province: 54.2%
Central Province: 60.8%
Eastern Province: 59.1%

Rub Al-Khali

The Saudi government study involved a survey of 3,212 families in five Saudi provinces in 1995.

SOURCE: Saudi Arabian government agencies

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

David Warsh on the NYT-Steven D. Levitt conflict of interest

Via Greg Mankiw, veteran economics reporter David Warsh reflects on why Freakonomics was such a huge bestseller. In passing, he notes the conflict of interest inherent in Levitt being both a public figure covered by the New York Times and a prized contributor to the NYT:

But the column that he and Dubner write regularly for the [NYT] magazine gives the duo a disproportionate voice. It probably also insulates them to some extent from the kind of arms-length coverage of economics itself to which the Times aspires.

Levitt's landmark study (with Yale's John J. Donohue III) of the link between abortion and crime-prevention has generated considerable criticism since it was first published in 2001 -- including bitter quarrels with colleagues and peers. In a balanced and ahead-of-the-curve story in the Times' now-defunct Arts and Idea section in April 2001, Columbia University journalism professor Alexander Stille described what was then the state of play. ("... [A]s other experts have had their first chance to scrutinize the research in detail, almost every aspect of the theory has been attacked, from its assumptions to its conclusion that abortion and crime are connected, not separate trends that happened to surface at the same time. Indeed, given all the influences on the crime rate -- including the economy, the availability of guns and drugs, and policing strategies -- some critics doubt whether it is ever possible to figure out the precise relationship between the two, let alone to assert that abortion might be responsible for a 50 percent drop in crime. 'My instinct was nothing in the social sciences accounts for 50 percent of anything,' said Ted Joyce, an economist who has examined Mr. Donohue and Mr. Levitt's data and is now about to publish his own counterstudy.") Since then, the controversy has only escalated. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist have reported on the most recent aspects of it, but in the eighteen months since Freakonomics appeared, the contretemps has yet to be covered in the Times. "Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world less so," assert Dubner and Levitt in their book. So who was right? Stille and core news report? Or the Sunday Magazine, which simply ignored the misgivings?

Because I've been complaining about these obvious conflicts of interest (Levitt and Dubner are also under contract to ABC as well, with similar results) for some time, with no response from the NYT Public Editor who is supposed to watch out for things like this, it's nice to see that a respected disinterested observer like Warsh doesn't think they are crazy.

As for why Freakonomics is so popular, keep in mind that I gave the rest of the book (other than the repeated abortion-cut-crime references) a fairly positive review in VDARE.com. It is, overall, a pretty good book.

Of course, lots of pretty good books get published every month, so why was this particular one on the NYT bestseller list for a year and a half (other than the frequent hyping in the NYT)? Warsh is probably right in his article titled "CSI: Economics." People like detective stories and they like catching cheaters, so a bunch of quick stories about crime and cheating has a good chance of being popular.

Further, the detective story has a natural dynamic of adding new types of detectives using new types of tools ever since Sherlock Holmes proved the economic viability of the genre. For example, a century ago, G.K. Chesterton introduced his detective, Father Brown, who solved crime mysteries using Catholic theology. So, why not an economist-detective?

Beyond that, I think a great advantage Freakonomics enjoys is the attention-deficit-disorder randomness of its component stories. Levitt and Dubner try to contend that they are tied together by certain general principles, but they are so general that you can pick up the book on the airplane and put it down whenever you like without worrying that your are losing the thread of a cohesive overall argument, because there is really one.

It's a lot like Malcolm Gladwell's similar huge bestseller Blink, which has an overall theme -- snap judgments -- but is utterly incoherent in what it says about them. Judge Posner and I felt that the blatant contradictions within Blink were a detriment, yet, obviously, lots of readers disagreed. They don't want a cohesive true theory. They just want a bunch of anecdotes suitable for all occasions with which to impress their friends and win arguments. Because Blink contains stories about how it's right to follow your snap judgments, you can quote Gladwell when trying to talk other people into following your poorly thought out decisions. And because Blink also contains contradictory anecdotes as well about disasters caused by judging a book by its cover (but no theory for how to distinguish between good "thin-slicing" and bad), it's also useful as ammunition for arguing against other people's hasty decisions.

I suspect that I would be more popular if my writing was more random, disconnected and logically inconsistent That there is a general theory behind much of what I write -- roughly, that who your relatives are matters -- is disturbing to a lot of people. People want to make use of writing a la carte to support whatever they want to argue at the moment. That I'm trying to offer a more general approach that they use themselves to discover all sorts of connections in the human world is not what the market is looking for.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Economists Gone Wild!

In Slate, libertarian economist Steven E. Landsburg trumpets a popular new study called "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet" by Clemson economist Todd Kendall:

How the Web Prevents Rape
All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.
By Steven E. Landsburg

Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

If not Wikipedia, then what? Maybe rape is down because former rapists have found their true loves on Match.com. But professor Kendall points out that the effects are strongest among 15-year-old to 19-year-old perpetrators—the group least likely to use such dating services.

Moreover, professor Kendall argues that those teenagers are precisely the group that (presumably) relies most heavily on the Internet for access to porn. When you're living with your parents, it's a lot easier to close your browser in a hurry than to hide a stash of magazines. So, the auxiliary evidence is all consistent with the hypothesis that Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn.

I strongly suspect that teenage rapists mostly come from the sizable segment of the population that still didn't have Internet access in 2003.

Yet, there is a much larger issue here.

You'll recognize this theory as Son-of-Abortion-Cuts-Crime: take an old theory that a lot of people, for personal reasons, wish is true, mine through a ton of state-level data, and voila!

What bothers me is that economists don't seem to remember anything when it's time to do simple reality checks on their prize theory.. When Steven D. Levitt and John J. Donohue came up with their famous abortion-crime theory by comparing crime rates in 1985 and 1997, they totally forgot the crack wars that happened in between. When David Card showed that the Mariel Boatlift of Cuban refugees to Miami in 1980 did not cause Miami to have lower wages over the next half decade relative to four other cities, he totally forgot that the Miami economy during his study (1980-1985) was notoriously being chemically stimulated by billions in cocaine smuggling profits.

Worse, all the other economists who read and reviewed these famous studies never noticed what happened during their own lifetimes. I can't find any evidence on Google that anybody mentioned the impact of cocaine in Miami on Card's 1989 study until my VDARE article last summer.

On the other hand, maybe nobody remembers anything and I'm just picking on economists.

Kendall doesn't seem to recall that we ran a massive "natural experiment" in the increased availability of pornography from roughly 1965 to 1975, with the opposite results: the rape rate shot upwards. I was only a kid, but I remember the debate: A study from Sweden or Denmark or somewhere "proved" that legalizing pornography reduced rape. Unfortunately, when this was tried in America (by about 1973, every commercial street corner in suburban Los Angles featured a dozen newsracks for pornographic newspapers), once again Americans didn't behave like Scandinavians.

America's greatest social observer, Tom Wolfe, pointed out in an important mid-1970s article "The Boiler Room and the Computer" (collected in his amazing anthology Mauve Gloves & Madmen) that this more-pornography-equals-less-rape theory is based on a dubious 19th Century Freudian analogy between the libido and that symbol of the age, a steam engine. Without frequent release, pressure builds up and "Look out! She's gonna blow!"

A little introspection among male readers about their own teen years should induce skepticism. Only on the shortest time frame is the boiler room analogy true. On a day-to-day basis, it's more like a feedback loop.

Similarly, why are the sports pages filled with police blotter items about professional athletes, who are presumably not lacking in outlets, being arrested on sexual assault charges?

This doesn't mean that pornography causes rape either. I'm just saying that a better memory would induce more humility and skepticism among freakonomists.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Car-burnings are worse in France this year than last:

Audacious Epigone points out:

Media coverage of the French riots that 'erupted' last November dissipated as the number of vehicles set on fire fell from upwards of 1,400 per night. Prior to this conflagration, dozens of cars were being set ablaze on a nightly basis, and French police faced daily assault from Muslims in-country. So after the spike almost a year ago, the level of chaos fell back to the forty or so burning cars, right? Hardly:

The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

Western media sources are good at sensationalizing 'freak' occurences but not so good at putting less sensational happenings into proper perspective. Though last year's riots got the headlines, this year is on pace to be 16% more destructive than last, in spite of the high-profile chaos that transpired last year. But since there hasn't been an abrupt, sensational surge this year, a more violent year is getting less coverage regarding violence than a less violent year did.

We still don't even know what to call these punks. Are these Muslim riots or, among the many black Africans involved, are there substantial numbers of Christians or animists? In opinion polls, French Muslims appear much more French than British Muslims appear British. Streetfighting is an honored tradition in France, so are these just immigrants assimilating toward the most destructive French traditions? Or what?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Stay the course!

Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly responds to the Education Department finally allowing single sex public schools:

It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: ... What if [single sex schooling] works? Does that mean we just give up on the whole idea of figuring out how to make co-ed education work? I can't be the only one who thinks that would be a bad idea, can I?

There are all sorts of problems of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth that can seemingly be ameliorated by simple segregation. But that just caves in to the problem, essentially declaring it unsolvable, rather than acknowledging it and continuing to search for solutions. I have a hard time believing that this does anybody any good in the long term.

In other words, Stay the course!

Social policy should never bow down to reality. If other people's lives have to be damaged for decade after decade so we can feel morally superior, so be it. It's a small price to pay for white liberal self-esteem.

For example, although black inmates are routinely raping white inmates in high security prisons, which causes whites to form racist prison gangs for self-defense, well, as the Supreme Court proclaimed in early 2005 before its recent upgrading with non-senile Justices, we still can't allow any compromise with the sacred cause of prison integration just because of little side effects like AIDS, the Aryan Brotherhood, and black vs. Mexican jail riots.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

An important literary-historiographical event: the first publication in English of parts of Solzhenitsyn's "Two Hundred Years Together"

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute just sent me a copy of their handsome new book, The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, which was edited by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, with the active cooperation of Solzhenitsyn and his family.

It's a greatest hits collection, but the big news is that over a quarter of its 635 pages is never-before-translated writings, most notably the 20-page excerpt from Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995, Solzhenitsyn's two-volume history of the world-changing interactions of Russians and Jews. The first volume, released in Russia in 2001, was published in a French translation in France in February 2002, and the second volume a year later. Yet these two books by the world's most famous living author just can't seem to get published in an English translation here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I wonder why? And why has almost nobody publicly discussed why these books haven't been published in English?

Here are some brief excerpts from the excerpts of Two Hundred Years Together:

Through a half-century of work on the history of the Russian Revolution, I repeatedly came face to face with the question of Russian-Jewish interrelations. Time and again it would enter as a sharp wedge into events, into people's psychology, and arouse blistering passions.

I never lost hope that there would come, before me, a writer who might illumine for us all this searing wedge, generously and equitably.

I wonder if Solzhenitsyn has since read UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's subsequent 2004 book The Jewish Century? (Does Solzhenitsyn speak English? He gave his famous Harvard address of 1978 in Russian.)

More often, alas, we meet one-sided rebukes, either pertaining to Russians' culpability toward Jews, and even the primordial depravity of of the Russian people (there is quite a profusion of such views) -- or, from those Russians who did write about this mutual dilemma, mostly agitated tendentious accounts that refuse to see any merit on the other side...

I would be glad not to test my strength in such a thorny thicket, but I believe that this history, and attempts to study it, must not remain "forbidden." ...

Yet what leads me through this narrative of the two-hundred-year-long cohabitation of the Russian and Jewish peoples is the quest for all points of common understanding and all possible paths into the future, cleansed from the acrimony of the past.

The Jewish people -- like all other people and like all persons -- is both an active subject of history and its anguished object. Furthermore, Jews often carried out, perhaps unconsciously, major tasks allotted them by History.

There cannot be a question upon earth that is unsuited for contemplative discourse among people. To converse broadly and openly is more honest -- and in our case it is also indispensable. Alas, mutual grievances have accumulated in both our people's memories, but if we repress the past, how can we heal them? Until the collective psyche of a people finds its clear outlet in the written word, it can rumble indistinctly or, worse, menacingly...

For many years I postponed this work and would still now be pleased to avert the burden of writing it. But my years are nearing their end, and I feel I must take up this task.

I have never conceded to anyone the right to conceal that which was. Equally, I cannot call for an understanding based on an unjust portrayal of the past. Instead, I call both sides -- the Russian and the Jewish -- to patient mutual comprehension, to the avowal of their own share of the blame...

I conceived of my ultimate aim as discerning, to the best of my ability, mutually agreeable and fruitful pathways for the future development of Russian-Jewish relations.

-- 1995

*

Despite the growing significance of the Jewish presence in the US, at the beginning of the twentieth century Jews in Russia constituted roughly one half of the world's Jewish population -- a crucial circumstance for subsequent Jewish history...

This spiritual awakening among Russian Jews [in the late 1800s] gave rise to very divergent tendencies that had little in common with one another. Some of them would later play a role in determining the fate of the entire world in the twentieth century.

The Russian Jews of the period envisioned at least six different kinds of futures, many of which were mutually exclusive:

-- retaining their religious identity by self-isolation, as had been the case for centuries (but this option was rapidly losing appeal);

-- assimilation;

-- struggling for cultural and national autonomy of the Jews in Russia, with the goal of an active but separate existence in the country;

-- emigration;

-- enlisting in the Zionist movement;

-- joining the revolutionary cause. ...

*

The topic is only too familiar: Jews amid the Bolsheviks. It has been written about innumerable times. Those who wish to prove that the Revolution was un-Russian and "of alien stock" point to Jewish names and pseudonyms in an effort to clear Russians of blame for the revolution of 1917. Jewish authors, on the other hand, ... are unanimously of the opinion that these were not Jews in spirit. They were renegades...

Yes, these people were renegades. But neither were the leading Russian Bolsheviks Russian in spirit. ...

Let us pose the question differently: How many random renegades does it take to create a tendency that is no longer accidental? What proportion of one's people needs to be involved? About Russian renegades we know that there was a depressingly, unforgivably large number among the Bolsheviks. But what about Jews? How actively did Jewish renegades take part in setting up the Bolshevik regime? ...

And so, can nations disavow their renegades? Would such a disavowal have meaning? Should a people remember its renegades or not; should it preserve a memory of the fiends and demons that it engendered? The answer to that last question should surely not be in doubt: We must remember. Every people must remember them as its own; there is simply no other way.

There is probably no more striking example of a renegade than Lenin, but it is impossible not to acknowledge him as Russian. ... But it was we Russians who brought into being the social environment in which Lenin grew and filled with hate. ...

And what about Jewish renegades? As we have seen, there was no specifically Jewish gravitation toward the Bolsheviks over the course of 1917. But energetic Jewish activism did manifest itself in the revolutionary maneuvers of the period. ... And at the April conference in 1917 (where Lenin's explosive "April Theses" were announced), among the nine members of the newly chosen central committee we see Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Yakov Sverdlov. At the summer VI Congress of the newly named Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks, eleven members were elected to the central committee, including Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, Trotsky, and Uritsky. Next came the so-called "historic meeting" of October 10, 1917, on Karpovka Street, in Himmer and Flakserman's flat, where the decision to undertake the coup was taken. Among the twelve participants were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Uritsky, and Sokolnikov. At the same occasion the first "Politburo" (an appellation with a brilliant future) was organized, and of the seven members we see the same Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov. ...

Of course all this relates to the upper echelons of Bolshevism and is in no sense indicative of any mass Jewish movement. Moreover, the Jews in the Politburo did not act in any coordinated manner.

... Lenin did not anticipate the degree to which educated and semi-educated Jews (who were scattered throughout Russia because of the war [as migrants away from the fighting with Germany and Austria in the Pale of Settlement]) would come to the rescue of his government in critical months and years, beginning with the episode when they replaced the Russian civil servants who were on a mass strike against the Bolsheviks. ...

Try putting yourself in the shoes of the small body of Bolsheviks who had seized power and were barely holding on to it. Whom could they trust? To whom should they turn for help? Semyon (Shimon) Dimanshtein, a Bolshevik from way back, and since January 1918 head of the Jewish Commissariat ..., gives this account of the remarks Lenin had made to him:

"Of great benefit to the revolution was the fact that due to the war, a significant portion of the Jewish middle intelligentsia happened to be in Russian cities. They foiled the widespread sabotage which we encountered immediately after the October Revolution and which was extremely dangerous for us. Jews, though far from all of them, sabotaged this sabotage, thereby rescuing the Revolution in a difficult moment."

... As we see, the Bolsheviks invited Jews starting with the very first days after assuming power, offering both leadership positions and administrative work with Soviet governmental structures. The result? Many, very many, responded positively, doing so without delay. What the Bolshevik regime needed above all were functionaries who would be absolutely loyal, and it found many such individuals among young secularized Jews along with their Slavic and international confreres. These people were not at all necessarily "renegades," since some were not members of the party, had no particular revolutionary sympathies, and seemed apolitical prior to this point. ... The fact remains, though, that it was a mass phenomenon.

"Thousands of Jews thronged to the bolsheviks, seeing in them the most determined champions of the revolution, and the most reliable internationalists ... Jews abounded at the lower levels of the party machinery. A Jew, as an individual who was clearly not a member of the nobility, of the clergy, or of the old civil service, automatically became part of a promising subset in the new clan." [M. Kheifets, Tel Aviv, 1980]

... Latvians, Hungarians, and Chinese were utilized in similar ways -- no sentimental hang-ups could be expected from them.

The attitude of the Jewish population at large toward the Bolsheviks was guarded, if not hostile. But having finally attained full freedom thanks to the revolution, and together with it, as we have seen, a true flowering of Jewish activity in the social, political, and cultural realms, all superbly organized, Jews did not stand in the way of the rapid advancement of other Jews who were Bolsheviks and who then exercised their newly acquired power to cruel excess.

Starting with the late 1940s, when the Communist regime had a serious falling out with the world's Jews, the vigorous Jewish participation in the Communist revolution began to be soft-pedaled or entirely concealed by Communists and Jews alike. It was an annoying and troubling reminder, and attempts to recall this phenomenon or to refer to it were classified as egregious anti-Semitism by the Jewish side...

Indeed, there are many explanations as to why Jews joined the Bolsheviks (and the Civil War produced yet more weighty reasons [e.g., the mass pogroms detailed in Volume II, Chapter 16]. Nevertheless, if Russian Jews' memory of this period continues seeking primarily to justify this involvement, then the level of Jewish self-awareness will be lowered, even lost.

Using this line of reasoning, Germans could just as easily find excuses for the Hitler period: "Those were not real Germans, but scum"; "they never asked us." Yet every people must answer morally for all of its past -- including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is our error? And could it happen again?

It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer -- for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors. ...

To answer, just as we would answer for members of our family.

For if we release ourselves from any responsibility for the actions of our national kin, the very concept of a people loses any real meaning.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

So, who is the ex-LaRouchie foreign policy pundit?

I won't explain the persuasive evidence for his long-ago Lyndon LaRouche connection, since that would necessitate revealing his real name, which might hurt him in his day job. But I'm 95% persuaded of a reader's suggestion that many years ago the individual who is now the extremely self-confident columnist "Spengler" of the Asia Times was a close colleague of the crackpot perennial Presidential candidate.

That reminds me that adventuring in the Middle East seems to appeal most to two sets of people:

- The not very bright sorts who get Iraq and Iran and Saddam and Osama confused.

- And the extremely bright but not quite stable sorts who can convince themselves of anything.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Status competition

Libertarians David Friedman and Will Wilkinson are explaining that it doesn't matter how much objective inequality there is, because we can all be high status at something. Friedman writes:

Status is not, in fact, a zero sum game. This point was originally made clear to me when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and realized that Harvard had, in at least one interesting way, the perfect social system: Everyone at the top of his own ladder. The small minority of students passionately interested in drama knew perfectly well that they were the most important people at the university; everyone else was there to provide them with an audience. The small minority passionately interested in politics knew that they were the most important ones...

Okay, but this might be more persuasive if Friedman didn't seem compelled to mention "Harvard" twice in one sentence. He could just as well have written "when I was an undergraduate and realized that my college had ..." But, no, he wrote "when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and realized that Harvard had ..."

The academics at Crooked Timber are trying to explain what's wrong with this theory:

Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass!

But they don't get very far in their criticism because reductionism is a dirty word to them.

So, while this theory's glass is half full, it's half empty, too, and here's my reductionist explanation why:

Men can invent all the status hierarchies they want, like World of Warcraft (as noted by Half Sigma), but women don't have to be impressed by them. Ultimately, some status hierarchies (e.g., the Forbes 400) are higher status than others (e.g., nerd competitions like World of Warcraft) because the highest status male hierarchies in America are whichever ones attractive women are most impressed by.

The problem from an economics policy point of view is that there isn't all that much that can be done about the pain that accompanies competing for women. In Ayn Rand's utopia or in Pol Pot's, there will still be winners and losers. (From a social point of view, a society can help by resisting both formal polygamy and the serial polygamy of accumulating trophy wives. America used to do a fairly good job of the latter -- e.g., Nelson Rockefeller lost the decisive 1964 GOP primary in California because he'd just traded in his old wife for a new one -- but that has broken down since then.)

Similarly, the reason it stinks to be poor in America in 2006 is not because you don't own enough stuff, but because you have to hang around with other poor people, with their socially dysfunctional tendencies.

Once again, economic policy is not terribly useful, although it would be helpful if the supply of unskilled labor was kept tight enough to keep the wages for honest work high enough to attract more of the underclass into the disciplining bonds of paying work. A rational immigration policy would have another benefit by only letting in people with enough human capital so that they, their children, and their grandchildren are unlikely to sink to the underclass.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ira Hayes, Indians, and Alcohol

One of the three major characters in Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" about the Iwo Jim flag raisers is Ira Hayes (played by Adam Beach, an Ojibwa from Manitoba), the Pima Indian whose sad postwar life has often been told before, with Tony Curtis playing him in "The Outsider" and Johnny Cash writing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes:"

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin' thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died

Some reviewers have fretted that retelling his tale will just revive the "stereotype" of the alcoholic Indian. Of course, like most stereotypes, it is more or less true: alcoholism is a severe problem for American Indians. A better approach than denouncing anyone who mentions this problem is trying to figure out a solution for it. To do that, though, we'd first have to find its cause. I've poked around a lot on the Internet looking for research on the subject, but there is frustratingly little.

I tend to favor the evolutionary explanation -- the more your ancestors have had time to remove themselves from the gene pool by succumbing to alcoholism, the safer you are from it -- because it explains a lot of evidence, such as why Jews and Italians, whose ancestors drank wine for many thousands of years, have so little trouble with alcoholism; why normally level-headed Scandinavians are prone to binge-drinking disasters; and why indigenous peoples all over the world are hit hard by alcoholism. On the other hand, for once, I don't think the cultural explanation -- that aboriginal alcoholism stems from the psychic dislocation and male economic obsolescence caused by their collision with modernity -- can be dismissed out of hand.

On the Blue Corn Comics website, two American Indians readers offer casual but insightful versions of the two sides of the debate:

Gee, now they are going to study what we have known for sometime. I'm going to interject some of what I got told (by Yale and Harvard researchers, our own folks, etc.) and have passed on to my kids?see if it fits with what you all have known, been told, read, learned???

And, my comments are OVER-simplified, short, for the sake of time (mine and yours) and space (ditto).

We didn't use alcohol in any form for 40 thousand years, consequently had no enzyme to break it down. Once in the mouth (for some, even on the skin -- like in shaving smell goods?) it passes thru the soft tissue immediately, and, as it progresses thru the digestive tract/system, it passes, undiluted, into, thru every organ/part in the body.

If, in the crossing of the gene pool, racial crossover relationships, you don't GET that enzyme -- then bingo -- you are an alcoholic at conception, so all labels need to be read and heeded. So, yes, it's passed on -- as is diabetes. You get a pancreas that can produce enough insulin, you don't get diabetes; you get an Indian system, diabetes looms on the horizon.

The red flush is well known in the native population. I can walk into any bar/restaurant late, and point with fair certainty to those who, when asked, you have Indian ancestors? ("Yes.") They are beet red, admit to feeling warm all over when they drink -- like a hot flash. I was told, "Why do you think they called it 'fire water'?" Made sense to me.

Because with many of us this is an allergy, and we may not have the proper breakdown system, it's also why (I was told) Indians are often binge drinkers -- none for a few weeks, months, then, one is too many, 300 is not enough. And often why 12-step programs, etc., don't work -- there's nothing wrong with our morals, ethics, or backbones.

Considering how stressed our communities are, our families, and if this is true, that [alcohol] triggers a rise in the already faulty system we are born with, no wonder the alcoholism and suicide rate is so high. Anyway, too bad all these scientists just don't come around and chat with us, hear our stories, could get a lot of info for a McDonald's lunch, probably!! I'd talk their ears off for some substantial carry-out Chinese. ~{}:-)

Firehair

Hi Rob,

Two things I wanted to bring up: One of the links in that article is about alcoholism among Natives. It brings up the claim among some scientists that we are alleged to be genetically predisposed to alcoholism.

I'm always pretty uncomfortable with these types of claims that biology=destiny. First of all, it's not true that we were never exposed to alcohol before Columbus. My own people, the Apache, have long brewed alcohol from corn. It's called tiswin. Not being able to brew it was one of the reasons Goyathlay (Geronimo) left confinement on the rez and went to war. Some still drink it today, and I've never heard of anyone abusing it.

The Aztecs and many other Indians in Mesoamerica also drank alcohol made from cactus called pulque. Not only that, drinking was done ritually in Nahua and other Mexican Indian villages, and still is to this day. A good source for reading about the change in drinking that Europeans brought in Wm Taylor's Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexico.

There's another book called Lies, Misconceptions, and Cherished Myths in American History that also talked about this subject for part of a chapter. The first Europeans to come here often wrote in their journals about how Natives drank in *moderation* while they (the Europeans) drank until they passed out.

So I don't think we can give much credence to these images of "give an Injun a bottle and he's helpless."

Plus some Native groups have long had used other mind altering substances like peyote, jimsonweed, and ayahuasca. There were and are strict standards for when and how they could be used, and they weren't for recrational use. They just stuck to using them in a ritual fashion though, or in certain proscribed social outlets, like the village wide drinking bouts allowed a few times a year in Mexican Indian villages.

I really think the difference in Native drinking habits from the general population is based on *how much we are allowed to make our own choices* in lifestyle, religion, and so on. So many times when I hear about how bad drinking is on a rez, it seems to me to be related to that. A friend of mine and colleague here at ASU, Patty Harms, grew up on a reserve in Manitoba. She tells me she never saw drinking there growing up. It was a fairly self sufficient community, still living mostly by hunting and harvesting wild rice. Now that commercial enterprises have made it impossible for that to continue, they have to live on government aid and have just an incredibly bad epidemic of alcoholism.

Put *any* people, Native, white, black, in that same situation and you'll have similar results, no matter what the geneticists uncover.

Just my thoughts, and hope you'll think about working this in somewhere on your site.

Al Carroll

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

John Tierney on the real problem in Iraq

Before becoming a NYT op-ed columnist and disappearing behind the Subscription Curtain, John Tierney spent some time in Occupied Baghdad. He particularly liked my article on the prevalence of cousin marriage, and quoted it in a 2003 NYT article.

Here's an excerpt from his latest op-ed:

Rampant individualism is not the problem in Iraq.

The problem is that they have so many social obligations more important to them than national unity. Iraqis bravely went to the polls and waved their purple fingers, but they voted along sectarian lines. Appeals to their religion trumped appeals to the national interest. And as the beleaguered police in Amara saw last week, religion gets trumped by the most important obligation of all: the clan.

The deadly battle in Amara wasn’t between Sunnis and Shiites, but between two Shiite clans that have feuded for generations. After one clan’s militia destroyed police stations and took over half the city, the Iraqi Army did not ride to the rescue. Authorities regained control only after the clan leaders negotiated a truce.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, American optimists invoked Germany and Japan as models for their democratization project, but Iraq didn’t have the cultural cohesion or national identity of those countries. The shrewdest forecasts I heard came not from foreign policy experts but from anthropologists and sociologists who noted a crucial statistic: nearly half of Iraqis were married to their first or second cousins.

Unlike General Thurman and other Westerners, members of these tightly knit Iraqi clans don’t look on society as a collection of individuals working for the common good of the nation. “In a modern state a citizen’s allegiance is to the state, but theirs is to their clan and their tribe,” Ihsan M. al-Hassan, a sociologist at the University of Baghdad, warned three years ago. “If one person in your clan does something wrong, you favor him anyway, and you expect others to treat their relatives the same way.”

These allegiances explain why Iraqis don’t want to give up their local militias. They know it’s unrealistic to expect protection from a national force of soldiers or police officers from other clans, other regions, other religions. When the Iraqi Army ordered reinforcements to go help Americans keep peace in Baghdad, several Iraqi battalions deserted rather than risk their lives defending strangers.

Instead of trying to transform Iraqis into patriots and build up national security forces, the U.S. should be urging decentralization. The national government should concentrate on defending the borders and equitably distributing oil revenue, ideally by distributing shares of the oil wealth directly to citizens.

Has anybody put forward a practical plan on how to distribute oil profits equally to individual Iraqis?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Bow Begat the Bushmen"

Greg Cochran explains how cultural change speeds up genetic change in the comments section of GNXP.

There are 47 ways in which culture accelerates rather than retards evolution. I keep thinking that this is all obvious, but clearly the word 'obvious' has no meaning.

More exactly, the capacity for innovation in behaviorally modern humans materially speeded up evolution, because it led to frequent innovation, and every significant innovation created a mismatch with the environment and, therefore, new selective pressures. Look at the Bushmen: they're 4' 8" and hunt big game. They couldn't do it without poisoned arrows and, back before missile weapons, no one did: early humans were bigger and built like linebackers. The bow begat the Bushmen.

Take agriculture: the switch to reliance upon cereals cut protein intake almost threefold while reducing protein quality and greatly increasing the percentage of high-glycemic carbohydrates in the diet (along with other changes) That put huge areas of metabolism under selective pressure - towards more robust glucose regulation, towards changes that conserve protein, especially essential/scarce amino acids. Check out the distribution of diabetes - it's not 'thrifty genes', it's pre- and post agricultural adaptations. Agriculture allowed closer spacing of births and so selection increased the frequency of (probably ancient) r-strategy alleles of LH and FSH (along with new variants, natch). Female-farming systems [found mostly in the tropics] would seem likely to select for reduced paternal investment and increased inter-male competition and display: the selected myostatin mutations, along with the regional differences in the androgen receptor may fit into this picture.

Sedentism, changes in workloads, and reduced dietary calcium apparently selected for more gracile skeletons (intensifying an ongoing trend originated by the development of missile weapons). A more complex and hierarchical society (with far greater reproductive skew) must have selected for different cognitive and personality profiles - not just among the Ashkenazi or the Chinese, but in all civilized populations. Look, all those personality and cognitive traits have substantial heritability, so selection happened, probably more in the direction of pointy-haired bosses [a la Dilbert] than big heads and six fingers. For that matter, different kinds of hunter-gatherer ecology selected for different traits; Eskimos are not Bushmen are not Negritos.

The increased disease load associated the high-density agricultural societies (and the domestication of animals) put selection into high gear: without modern medical care, Amerindian and other long-isolated peoples are incredibly vulnerable to Old World infectious diseases, enormously more so than Eurasians and Africans. The domestication of cows turned Northern Europeans into mampires that live off the milk of another species. Sewing, the atlatl [a spear-throwing enhancer], pottery, writing - all changed peoples.

Change has been so rapid, some 300 times the supposed Haldane limit, that it has far outpaced gene flow. The recent adaptations to agriculture are of course not even found in hunter-gatherers, but agriculturalists in different parts of the world have mostly experienced different genetic changes even when phenotypic changes are convergent. For example, the genetic basis of skeletal gracilization in Europe/Middle East appears to be fundamentally different than that in China, lactose tolerance in the Masai is caused by a different allele than in Europe, while the genetic basis of light skin color is entirely different in China and Europe. Which implies that the causal mechanism, the nuts and bolts of >100 IQ, likely a consequence of post-agricultural adaptation, probably differ significantly between East and West, just as the details of skin color do. The psychometric substructure sure looks different.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Nice North Central's Not So Nice Black Communities

One of the regional oddities is that Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, three states with a deserved reputation for civic cooperativeness, good government, and general niceness, have some of the most dysfunctional black communities in the country. As I wrote in VDARE.com in "Mapping the Unmentionable," the state with the highest ratio of black to white imprisonment rates in 1997 was Minnesota, at 31 to 1, compared to about 9 to 1 nationally (The national ratio has since dropped into the 7.2 to 1 range). Iowa and Wisconsin were way up there too. And black crime there looks bad not just relative to the low crime rates among the white locals: Iowa had the worst black imprisonment rate in the country in absolute terms. Wisconsin has the highest black illegitimacy rate in the U.S. at 81.9% vs. 69.3% nationally in 2004.

These three states are more liberal than most in the heartland. They've gone Democratic five out of six times in the last two Presidential elections.

A reader offers his take on this question:

As a Milwaukee native originally, I knew the city like the back of my hand in the sixties, when I used to drive cabs for Yellow during my summer breaks from the U. of Mich. I was even caught in Milwaukee's smaller version of Detroit's race riot and narrowly escaped with my car getting stoned pretty badly. They missed me.

Milwaukee used to have one of the best public school systems in Wisconsin, which has good public schools. But back in the sixties, the advent of welfare and Milwaukee's old German Social Democratic mindset combined to make Milwaukee and Wisconsin's welfare the most generous in the Middle West. This obviously drew the most enterprising grifters among the black population in the Mississippi Valley, which traditionally was a bit less clever than the East Coast blacks, who worked tobacco rather than cotton and were less humiliated and downtrodden. Or so I was told by sociologists when I worked at St. Louis U. among the black population of Pruitt-Igoe, before they dynamited that vertical plantation...

With better than average public schools and blacks eager to get the Midwest's most generous welfare subventions, I just don't understand why Milwaukee blacks would be lower. But my family and friends back there tell me that catering to blacks with the sort of compassionate condescension that Wisconsinites have toward the less fortunate has not improved the attitude of the black community. Au contraire.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What chemists think of economists

Stephen Colbert interviews 2003 Nobel Laureate in chemistry Peter Agre:

Colbert: "You said 'anyone who grew up on a farm knows that evolution exists'. Ok, are you saying a monkey can milk a cow?"

Agre: "Well, if I can milk a cow I suspect a monkey as smart as I am can milk a cow."

Colbert: "Are there monkeys as smart as you?"

Agre: "I'm sure there are quite a few, quite a few.

Colbert: "Oh really? mmhum. Do they give a Nobel prize for thowing your own faeces?"

Agre: "........That's the Economics prize, I think."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Flags of Our Fathers"

From my upcoming review of Clint Eastwood's new WWII movie in The American Conservative:

With planning underway for aerial attacks on Iran's dug-in nuclear facilities, it's worth recalling Iwo Jima, which "underwent the most prolonged and also the most disappointing air bombing and naval bombardment of any Pacific Island," according to Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. The Japanese commander hollowed out the soft lava of that volcanic island, allowing his 22,000 troops to survive seven months of almost daily American air raids. Hoping to show Washington that an invasion of Japan would be too bloody, they killed nearly 7,000 American attackers and wounded 21,000 more in a five week-long battle in which all but 216 defenders died.

American commanders in the Pacific normally expended their men's lives economically, preferring to use instead our advantage in maneuver and materiel. When out-thought at Iwo Jima by General Kuribayashi, however, they were rescued by the extraordinary morale of their Marines.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on Music:

Was John Stuart Mill right that we would run out of melodies someday? A reader writes:

You forgot the quote from Diderot regarding mathematicians. "I almost dare to assert," he stated in 1754, "that in less than a century we shall not have three great geometers left in Europe. This science will very soon come to a great standstill where Bernoullis, Eulers, Maupertuis, Clairauts, Fontaines, d'Alemberts, and La Granges will have left it. They will have erected the columns of Hercules. We shall not go beyond that point."

Well, as my high school geometry teacher made clear to me at report card time, I sure didn't go beyond that point.

Regarding your article "Where Did All the Catchy Tunes Go?" I'm not buying your reason for why the # of catchy tunes have declined. You state, "No, I suspect contemporary songwriters have simply run into diminishing returns. Their predecessors have just used up most of the melodies that are easy to find." "Instead, they were like the first miners to get to California gold fields in 1849. They just got there first"

This would imply that current songwriters are aware of all the great melodies that have been written in the past. This is certainly not true. If a songwriter born in 1980 was not aware of any music composed before he was born(no Bach, Stephen Foster, Beatles) and he grew up on a steady diet of Rap and Heavy Metal do you think this songwriter would be better at writing melodies than one who was aware of all the great melodies in the past? Would he re-compose Jesu, Beautiful Dreamer or Yesterday? No way.

You write, "If each note of a melody can be selected from, say, eight notes on average, there are 64 pairs of notes, 512 motifs of three notes, 4,096 phrases of four notes, and so on, multiplying out to trillions and trillions of musical pieces."

This greatly underestimates the # of combinations. First, each note can have a separate time value, a whole-note, a half-note, a quarter-note, an eighth-note etc. Also music can be played legato, staccato, swing rhythm, slow,fast etc. As well, the chords being played under the melody greatly change how the music sounds. If you add all this up you certainly have many more musical combinations than combinations involving letters, in which there are only 26 to choose from. Are we running out of poems? Today's poets certainly aren't comparable to Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats. Is this due to lack of combinations involving letters, or the fact the poets no longer care about structure, metre, and rhyme? I would say the latter. So why are songs not as catchy as they used to be? I'm not quite sure. It might be Bob Dylan's influence. Serious writers are suppose emphasize lyrics rather than melody. Only teeny bopper girls care about melody. However, Max Martin is laughing all the way to the bank.

p.s. I have found from composing music myself that almost any combination of notes can be made to sound "catchy", you just have to find the right tempo, time value for each note, and chord structure.

Another writes:

I'll just say this: there are still many intriguing melodies to be written. Trouble is when people use the description "pleasing" (like one of your readers did), what they have in mind is more or less a small (middle-of-the-road) subset of the possibilities. And unfortunately people are very, very conservative regarding their tastes on what a good melody is.

Popular musical styles generally play with instrumentation, recording techniques, dress code, singing/playing mannerisms etc. to create the impression of originality, although most of these are, strictly speaking, "external" to music. Strip them away, there's barely any genuine musical difference between an Irish tune of the 18th century and an Irish popular song of the 20th century.

To give you an idea what possibilities are left unexplored, let me give an example from 20th century classical (serious? art?) music: please listen to the first 2 movements of Bela Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra." (Yes, that's the name, no typos there.) You'll hear a music both pretty modern and eerie, and yet surprisingly melodic which doesn't fit your usual, run-o-the-mill patterns.

That's because Bartok managed to extract unthought-of musical materials from the folk musics of the Balkans and some Slavic countries. Most Western music is based on the folk stuff of Germanic or Celtic groups, with the French and Spanish providing "exoticism." And that's where the trouble is. Again, to get a flavor of the "human musico-diversity," listen to Bartok's "Dance Suite."

You'll get an audio glimpse of some of the sources untapped.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Not too surprising

From the AP:

Immigrants flocking to GOP districts

Republican congressional districts are becoming magnets for immigrants — legal and illegal — but GOP lawmakers are not exactly embracing their new constituents.

Of the 50 House districts nationwide with the fastest-growing immigrant communities, 45 are represented by Republicans. All but three of those lawmakers voted for a bill that would make illegal immigrants felons.

Overall, GOP districts added about 3 million immigrants from 2000 to 2005, nearly twice the number that settled in districts represented by Democrats, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data.

The numbers help explain why illegal immigration is such a big issue in rural Georgia, eastern Pennsylvania and in suburbs throughout the United States...

For generations, most immigrants settled in big cities, attracted by fellow countrymen and by social service networks that catered to them. But immigrants increasingly are chasing jobs to fast-growing suburban and rural communities in Middle America — areas that have elected a lot of Republicans to Congress.

It's one of those natural processes, like the locust. Illegal immigrants go to prosperous places, raise the cost of living, lower wages, drive out the Republicans, increase the number of government jobs needed to take care of their social traumas, and then, when the place is Democratic voting, crowded, unattractive, and electing lots of corrupt anti-business Democrats so jobs are scares, they move on to new Republican districts. Rinse and repeat.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

India vs. China again

The differences between the Chinese and the Indians are going to determine much of what the world of the 21st Century will be like, but we aren't supposed to talk about human differences, so this vast topic is seldom addressed fully. A reader writes:

I have been involved with Indian engineers for several decades. I was until my recentl retirement an executive in a software firm with an Indian outsourcing division and have spent time in India. I’ve always been impressed by their talent, but can confirm your observation that they tend to come from the upper castes.

Like you I’ve also wondered when the India ‘brain’ supply would run out. While the IQ=81 that you reference seems a bit too low to me, I think it likely that India’s billion is not a match for China’s.

(1) Unlike China, India has spent 50 years struggling with public education for the masses. This is not mere upper-caste disdain. Government school failure in Bombay looks a lot like what we see in our own inner-cities. The upper class and professionals from all castes avoid these schools and send their kids to private schools. (The concept of posh high price suburbs has not yet come to them). Lower IQ’s must play some role in this process even if the real gap is 10-12 points rather than 20.

(2) India lags China very badly in manufacturing. This aggravates (1) since manufacturing throws off tax revenues for schools and can provide decent jobs for people with 8-10 years of mediocre schooling.

IQ plays a bigger role in manufacturing than most people realize. As a consultant and software provider to American manufacturing, I saw the negative consequences in the 1975-1990 period. The hyper-aggressive expansion of U.S. college education siphoned off high IQ individuals from the blue-collar class. Having a few bright people on the shop floor makes a real difference. By 1985 the performance of the Japanese shop floor was well above the U.S.

Our glory days were during WW2 when we built, from scratch, a giant combat aircraft industry in 4 years and the incredible Manhattan project in 2 1/2. China performs such feats today filling the shelves of Wal-Mart

I predict that India’s failure to match China in (1) and (2) will hurt them badly in the next generation.

P.S. Your comment on the Parsees of Bombay is quite accurate. In fact the close parallel with the Ashkenazi of Europe is striking. How does a small isolated group raise (and maintain!!) its IQ high above the surrounding population? If you visit the best colleges in Bombay you will see among the paintings of “our founders” one or more Parsees.

I found the Parsees to be excellent as company and in conversation, full of intelligence and quite dignity. But if you want to spoil the evening bring up the subject of Muslims. The Muslims destroyed Zoroastrian civilization. Parsees discuss Muslims the way Armenians talk about Turks. Enough said.

Another reader writes:

Jeffrey Sachs is a famous economist (noted for his early tenure at Harvard and now leading the fight to poor more aid into Africa). His latest essay ( here) in Scientific American on the viability of social welfare states is a great example of what happens when one ignores human biodiversity.

As someone who thinks higher taxes and more welfare is not a good thing for the US, I'm struck by the straightjacket that the Axiom of Equality puts on the debate. If you assume that people in the Nordic countries have the same distribution of human capital as in the US, he has an argument that's hard to refute--unfortunately, we aren't allowed to assume otherwise in educated discussions.

Similarly, Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen are mystified by the inability of NAFTA to pull Mexico up to US/Canadian standards (here for DeLong and here for Cowen). They both list many reasons why it didn't work as planned, but no one mentions the elephant in the room because, well, elephants don't exist. This also shows up in discussion of alleviating poverty in Africa, or pulling up reading scores in inner-cities.

The distribution of human capital is not the same between many groupings. Economists and journalists either don't believe it, or know it's political suicide to mention it, making these debates sterile

But you can mention it, and do, which is a public service in the true sense of the phrase. So I Amazoned you $50 today.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on young rock stars:

As I said last night, my impression is that they ain't making new rock stars as young as they used to. With the help of readers, I'm going to ramble on that general theme, since there seems to be a lot that can be learned, although I'm not sure exactly what.

First, is that true? It's kind of hard to say. British invasion stars were typically 19-23 when they first hit it big. Here are the ages of famous 1950s rockers when they made their breakthroughs:

Elvis Presley recorded his first rockabilly tracks at 19 and became the biggest star in the history of the world in 1956 at 21.

Little Richard started recording at 18 and had a hit with "Tutti-Frutti" at 22.

Jerry Lee Lewis was 21 or 22 when "Whole Lotta Shaking Going On" became a hit.

Johnny Cash (more country than rock) had his first hits at 23.

Chuck Berry, however, was 28 or 29 at the time of "Maybellene."

A reader writes:

Just reading over the "young rockstar" post, and I thought how far back this goes, if true. I looked up the ages of various grunge and pop-punk stars when they became famous:

Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day) = 22 ('72, '94)
Zack de la Rocha (Rage Against the Machine) = 22 ('70, '92)
Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) = 24 ('70, '94)
Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) = 24 ('67, '91)
Scott Weiland (Stone Temple Pilots) = 25 ('67, '92)
Billy Corgan (The Smashing Pumpkins) = 26 ('67, '93)
Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains) = 26 ('66, '92)
Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) = 28 ('63, '91)
Dexter Holland (The Offspring) = 29 ('65, '94)
Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) = 30 ('64, '94)

Recently: Brandon Flowers (The Killers) = 23 ('81, '04)
Julian Casablancas (The Strokes) = 23 ('78, '01)
Pete Doherty (The Libertines) = 23 or 25 ('79, '02 or '04), since first album was success but second made them superfamous
Kele Okereke (Bloc Party) = 24 ('81, '05)
Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) = 32 ('72, '04)

Also, most of these people started playing and/or already had record label deals by their late teens or early 20s, but didn't achieve stardom until the dates above. Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, for example.

A reader writes:

As to UK rockstars who came up in the '60's, you may want to consider that in the good old days most kids over there left school at 15, except for the small percentage that was being groomed to go on to university. Someone might make it as a rockstar (at least in the sense of no longer needing a day job) at 19 after already spending a couple of years full time in the work force. Roger Daltrey was a sheetmetal worker, Ozzy Osborne worked (I think) in a slaughterhouse, Van Morrison was a window washer (see his nostalgic song "Cleaning Windows"). I think a lot of the kids in that cohort who went off to art school started that at 15 or so, since it was not the same track as proper university so you didn't need the last couple years of academic preparation.

Yes, it could be that the British Invasion skewed particularly young because so many kids were thrown out of school -- Tom Wolfe went to Carnaby Street in the mid-1960s and wrote an article specifically about that: how so many working class English kids could afford to be in The Life (the whole Austin Powers Swinging London scene) at age 16 or 17.

So, maybe what's going on is largely the decline of British (and Irish) rock bands in American music from their extraordinary peak of 1964 into the 1980s. The huge role played by British bands over the Beatles to U2 era (when I first saw them in 1981, Bono was 21 and Edge 20) may have skewed the sample younger due to British policies that kicked lots of kids out of school at 16.

There's also the British emphasis on "mateship" that means most of their big artists, with the exception of David Bowie, are bands rather than solo artists. In contrast, a higher percentage of big American acts (Dylan, Hendrix, Springsteen, Prince, etc.) have been solo artists or star plus subordinated band. This could skew British artists younger in that it might be easier to start off as part of a band than as a solo star. You can start young as a solo star if you're being packaged by a music industry svengali, but that's more of a pop than a rock approach.

In contrast, the CBGB punk-new wave scene of the 1970s in New York wasn't that young. Johnny Ramone was at least 25 before the Ramones started playing at CBGB in 1974, with Joey and and Dee-Dee being a little younger. Deborah Harry of Blondie was in her early 30s before their first album came out in 1976. The Talking Heads members (probably the most famous American art schoolers) were in their mid-to late 20s when they got their first album in 1977. Before then in NYC, Lou Reed was in his mid-20s when the Velvet Underground first had an impact.

I guess the explanation is that the world in general was ready for Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964, but wasn't ready for the Ramones until about 20 years later, when "Blitzkrieg Bop" became a standard in TV commercials.

I'm a bit surprised that you have extrapolated a trend from so few data points. You might be right, but it's not hard to find counterexamples from earlier generations. As you acknowledge, Chuck Berry was almost 29 when Maybelline came out, and if you go back into the blues Muddy Waters was well into his 30's and Howlin' Wolf was past 40 before they got records out. Patti Smith was 29 when Horses came out. Billy Zoom of X was 31 or 32 when Los Angeles came out, although Steve McDonald was 12 or 13 when the first Redd Kross album came out around the same time -- punk had a pretty broad range that way. I also assume there's lots of youngsters putting out debut LPs (or whatever the heck the kids call them -- debut downloads?) today.

So, while the earlier stars tended to be younger, the real difference is that when the earlier stars became famous they became vastly more famous. After Elvis was 21, American culture was never the same again. On the post-1990 list, only Kurt Cobain could be considered in the same breath as the sub-Elvis and sub-Beatles icons of the 1950s and 1960s in cultural impact. It's hard to invent rock and roll all over again, although for a couple of decades they often almost managed to.

A reader writes:

I can't prove it, but I suspect that home video games have also delayed the maturation of musicians. Many future rock stars are dexterous and sociable but prefer indoor activities to outdoor (think guitar vs. skateboard). I think a lot of them nowadays put in plenty of hours playing video games that might previously gone to experimenting and jamming.

A reader writes:

My wife and I have often discussed why rockers today trend older. We went to see ZZ Top a few months ago and the place was full of kids with their parents. That's the problem. Teenagers today lead pre-programmed lives. They have no time to sit around picking guitars, experimenting with the piano or putting together a garage band, they are too busy with music lessons and other organized activities. They don't get freedom from parental programming until university, so they start later, albeit with better formal preparation.

A reader writes:

If there are fewer young rock stars right now, I think it is generally because rock music right now is kinda in the doldrums with not many dynamic new ideas. That's just my opinion, though, so whatever.

Here are some youngish rock stars for ya, though:

Brandon Flowers, lead singer for The Killers, was 23 when their first hit album was released in 2004.

The band members of Jet ranged between 22 and 24 when their first album was released in 2003.

Brandon Boyd (Incubus) was 23 when their first hit album was released in 1999.

Chester Bennington (Linkin Park) was the oldest band member, at 24, when their album Hybrid Theory was released in 2000.

Jacoby Shaddix (Papa Roach, ugh) was 24 when their hit album was released in 2000.

A reader writes:

On a related note, is it just me, or do rock bands produce work at a much slower rate nowadays? A quick internet discography search shows that in the first eight years of their recording careers, the Beatles put out 13 original albums (not including greatest hits, live albums, or, in the case of the Beates, Yellow Submarine), the Stones 10, the Beach boys 14, Dylan 9. Even the notoriously fussy Who put out 6, in addition to a whole slew of singles. Nobody matches that output anymore.

Similarly, the Clash released 120 tracks from 1977-1982, the equivalent of about ten albums worth, most of it good, then burned out completely. Joe Strummer said later that they should have just decided to take a year off, but it never really occurred to them at the time, so they tore each other to pieces in their exhaustion. I believe it's more common to take "sabbaticals" today as a way to maintain a longer career.

It might be that rock music has jumped the pop-shark somewhat. This may sound strange to you but relative to other contemporary pop music, rock requires a certain degree of effort on the part of the listener, sometimes it has to be listened to more than once to be 'gotten'. Rap on the other hand is a more natural choice, combining the danceibility and the immediately pleasing sounds of that were formerly found only soul and disco with the hard edge that teens used to look to rock to provide. Rock is becoming the choice of the semi-alienated intellectual teen rather than the anthem of the masses. Currently, the most important online music review site is this pitchforkmedia.com; it looks as if it is written by and for the pretentious future humanities professors of america, rock seems to have started attracting a better educated crowd, and that's a sure sign that it is losing the pop war.

Another reader brings up John Stuart Mill's notorious worry:

People often say that music is infinite in combinations, but that's nonsense. Only a few combinations are pleasing, and there are a much more limited number of rhythms that one can employ.

Rock forms and conventions allow an extremely limited number of chord progressions so we have to use the same ones over and over. Given that repetition, the number of good melodies that you can generate from a simple chord progression is, again, limited.

The problem for the modern rock artist is that everything has pretty much been done by the time he picks up his instrument.

There are a few strategies a good composer can employ to try and break up this logjam such as using offbeat rhythms like 5/4, 7/4, or combinations of different time signatures but one has to be very clever to make such things swing and produce catchy tunes or pleasant "hooks".

Also, having great chord vocabularies would help, but most guitar musicians I see hardly know their fretboards or how to use dominant seventh chords which helps change obvious tonalities.

Also, few groups have any idea of vocal harmony and how absolutely atractive that is to the human ear.

The recent spate of boy bands used harmony but their tones were ugly, whiney and nasal; yet in spite of that, they had huge success.

There simply is nowhere for pop music to go except continuous recycling with the occasional tune that catches your ear and fancy.

Serious concert music has a similar problem.

I put forward a similar theory in a 2001 article "Where Did All the Catchy Tunes Go?" I just don't know if it's true. I don't have anywhere close to enough musical talent to justify my theorizing on this topic.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is India starting to scrape the bottom of its high-IQ barrel?

For a number of years, I've been largely alone in raising the question of just how deep are the supplies of high IQ people in India. There are a billion people in India, but how many of them are smart enough to become, say, American-quality systems analysts? Are they evenly distributed throughout the vast population or are they concentrated in certain castes and regions that have already been well-exploited?

India is way too complicated for me to provide an answer to these questions, but there is a certain amount of evidence that suggests that India has a much more divergent IQ distribution than China, so that the widespread American assumption of an unlimited supply of high IQ workers in India may be faulty.

Now the NY Times reports that smart workers are in short supply in India:

Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India

As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.

India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.

A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.

Is this temporary or is it the beginning of a permanent problem for India. I don't know, but it's an important question. As I wrote in 2002 in my review of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations:

The IQ structures of the two giga-countries, China and India, demand more intense study, in part because the future history of the world will hinge in no small part on their endowments of human capital. The demography of India is especially complex due to its caste system, which resembles Jim Crow on steroids and acid. By discouraging intermarriage, caste has subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. In India, according to the dean of population genetics, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, "The total number of endogamous communities today is around 43,000…" We know that some of those communities - such as the Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay - are exceptionally intelligent.

But we can't say with any confidence what is the long run IQ potential of Indians overall. Their current IQ score (81) is low, especially compared to China (100), the other country with hundreds of millions of poor peasants. Yet, keep in mind just how narrow life in rural India was for so long.

As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2004 in "Interesting India, Competitive China:"

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the variance in IQ is greater in India than in China. There may be more geniuses in India than in China but the average level of competence seems lower.

However, putting together a nationally-representative sample is harder in India than anywhere else on Earth. The caste system, by discouraging intermarriage, has in effect subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races...

So I would keep an open mind on just what the IQ of India is. And, of course, better nutrition, health care, education, and more outbreeding could all work to raise it.

China focuses on giving the masses a solid basic education that prepares them for manufacturing jobs. The Chinese are building superb infrastructure to support their manufacturing economy. Indeed, the Chinese are building factories so fast, that more than a few observers have joked and/or warned that the Chinese intend in the future to manufacture everything in the world. They won't ever quite get there, but the trend is remarkable … and alarming.

This could have dire consequences for America's current political and military hegemony. But the cult of free trade, combined with the fact that nobody in the American media cares about factory work, means that the long-term Chinese challenge is seldom discussed. You might think that if America had to shed manufacturing jobs, we would prefer they go to Mexico to keep down the illegal immigration rate rather than to China, America's strategic competitor. But no one seems to care enough to discuss this either.

If the Mexican political elite wasn't so inveterately anti-American, they would have proposed a grand bargain to Washington: America would raise tariffs on Chinese goods, sending Wal-Mart to NAFTA-partner Mexico for its endless appetite for cheap stuff, in return for Mexico whole-heartedly supporting American's foreign policy. If Tony Blair is President Bush's poodle, then Vicente Fox should have become President Bush's Chihuahua in return for lots of manufacturing jobs.

India, outside of cyberspace, remains chaotic and impoverished. India focuses more on giving outstanding university educations to the meritocratic elite. The top Indian colleges are by now probably the most selective in the world.

And because they teach in English, their graduates are more of a competitive threat to American journalists and their spouses and friends than are the Chinese, who are merely hammering blue collar Americans. And who cares about them?

Accordingly, over the last year, the press has devoted far more coverage to outsourcing white collar jobs to India than the loss of blue collar jobs to China—or, of course, the insourcing of jobs in America to immigrants, legal and illegal.

Apparently, reporters instinctively sense that Indians in Bombay could do their jobs of rewriting press releases into news articles.

This is exactly the kind of issue that business magazine should be covering for their executive readers, but the ban on the dread letters "IQ" makes that unthinkable.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer