Category Archives: View

View 703 Friday, December 02, 2011

I went to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) ** last night, and after the meeting I got into a conversation with an old friend. The conversation drifted to politics as such things do this year, and he denounced Newt Gingrich as flighty and impulsive. I asked for an example, expecting the immigration issue, and was told that he wanted to change the Child Labor laws to allow children to be janitors, and that was a terribly dangerous thing to do because of all the chemicals involved. I hadn’t heard anything about this, and there was nothing in this morning’s paper about it, but the radio is full of denunciations of Newt Gingrich. Al Sharpton charges racism, of course. Some web site that looks as if it were Tea Party but probably is not speaks of “disgusting rhetoric from eye of Newt”, and says:

Incredibly, Gingrich compared making kids work as janitors to a successful program that paid kids to read books. Of course, reading books is not hard labor and is directly relevant to education — cleaning bathrooms is not.

Well, it may be that cleaning bathrooms is hard labor and not relevant to education, but when I was a pupil at Capleville consolidated in Tennessee, the 7^th and 8^th graders were expected to mop floors (not with any chemicals I know of; just whatever you mopped floors with) and we didn’t even get paid for it. We also cleaned up after ourselves in the lunch room from 4^th grade on. But of course what Newt was driving at had nothing to do with janitorial work per se, and most of the examples he gave were for more clerical tasks; and his point was that there are generations growing up now who have no work habits, and little conception of the connection between showing up on time, doing a job, and getting rewarded for that. Today’s children are apparently entitled to two (or even three) meals a day from the school without even having to refrain from disrupting the classes, much less actually do some work for the meal.

I know precisely where this idea came from. I can recall when Newt was still Minority Whip a conversation with Newt and my son Richard, then a Congressional Committee staffer, in an Irish pub across the street from the Capitol. The conversation came around to laws that got in the way, and I brought up the Federal Minimum Wage and other regulations that ended the “board jobs” that enabled me to get through my first year at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. I worked at Reich’s Café; a “board job” was an hour of waiting on tables, in exchange for a meal off the Café menu. I also got to keep any tips I might earn, which in my case amounted to about thirty cents an hour, which wasn’t trivial in those days of 25 cent milkshakes. Those jobs are all gone now, ended by Federal labor laws.

We also discussed the loss of work habits. When I was young I wanted a .22 rifle (and it wasn’t unusual in Tennessee in those days for ten year olds to have and to carry .22 rifles). I was paid ten cents an hour for picking cotton, later raised to a quarter an hour after I learned to be more efficient (and I suspect my parents felt sorry for me). So there I was in the fields along with the sharecroppers, who thought it was amusing, but who kept my bags separate from the rest, I suspect so that they could go through them and be sure I hadn’t left hulls in there, which would lower the price Mr. Lamb’s gin in Mineral Wells, Mississippi would pay for the cotton. I learned a lot from doing that: to show up on time, to work steadily (I got docked for low productivity at first, on the testimony of the sharecropper), and to find some other way to make money because picking cotton sucked.

But the point was that I grew up knowing there is a connection between productive work and being paid. So did my son Richard, but Richard pointed out that there were still many laws in place that made it very difficult for youngsters to get work. Richard and his older brothers swept Studio City sidewalks for the merchants, but it had to be done in rather mysterious ways because of the various laws. Here were these boys who wanted the job, and merchants who wanted their sidewalks swept off after wind blew leaves all over, but it was illegal just to pay them for getting the sidewalks clear. This made no sense.

We went on to talk about the effects on a nation of having generations who grow up not really connecting work habits with life, and who felt entitled to anything they got without having to do anything in exchange.

Incidentally, in those days Newt Gingrich and Mr. Jones and some other of his supporters were establishing a program to pay kids to read books – it had to be a “reward” rather than “work” because of the various child labor laws. It’s all right to give a kid a dollar for reading a book, but giving him a job reading that book is illegal. This is, after all, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The conversation went on well into the night – we were all younger in those days – and I am sure Newt has been thinking about these matters ever since, and it’s no surprise at all that he brought it up in a Presidential campaign. It’s who he is. And all of you, and I, and Newt know that any changes in fundamentals like Child Labor are going to be thoroughly discussed, and hazards like disinfectants and cleaning chemicals will be thought about, but the fundamental principle remains:

Either kids grow up expecting to work for a living and developing elementary work habits, or they don’t; and if they don’t, they are going to be handicapped for the rest of their lives. That’s hardly a racist statement: it’s as true of Yuppie kids in the Valley as ghetto kids, and it shows in both cases. Kids who learn that you’re supposed to work for a living have a head start. It makes a lot of sense to look at such matters to see what results the current legal system have on that fundamental notion.

I would never have advised Newt to bring something like that up in a campaign for nomination, but I sure understand where he’s coming from. So should you. It’s impossible to sustain an economy in which large segments of the population do not associate work with earning, and who think they are entitled to the goods of fortune at the expense of someone else. That’s not the way the world works, and any society not founded in productivity is doomed: as Lady Thatcher observed long ago, Socialism is great until you run out of other people’s money.

But we all knew that.

—-

** As you may guess the LASFS web site is maintained by science fiction fans who have volunteered to build and keep the site. Any resemblance to the cast of The Big Bang Theory is not entirely coincidental.

I keep repeating this. Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

But if you don’t care for freedom, you must look into the alternatives. We are back to the notion of a command economy, which is supposed to be more efficient and more stable than freedom. China is often held up as an example. What America needs is a Five Year Plan.

And we have “social science” classes at grade, high school, and college levels taught by teachers who do not know that this experiment has been run, many times, in many places, and the results have not been favorable. No matter what twists have been employed, and no matter how rational the arguments for a command economy appear to be, the experiments have always had the same result.

I can recall when “The Five Year Plan” was the punch line for a great many jokes. Now, apparently, in many “social science” classes it is the remedy to all our problems. Such is the state of education in these United States of America.

Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

The headlines are that unemployment is below 9%, magically down to 8.6%. This is because more people gave up looking for a job, not due to more people being employed. The real unemployment rate in the United States is above 15%. But of course it you don’t count someone who isn’t looking for a job because he simply gave up and is now looking to maximize entitlements, that brings the numbers down. Ah well.

I managed to pay the bills and get them off to the post office. They were high this month because of the water damage to my bathroom and the dining room ceiling. If you’re thinking of subscribing, this would be a good time to do it. I have caught up with the October subscriptions and the first part of November, and I’m plugging along on that; apologies if you subscribed and I haven’t answered. I’ll get there. Really and truly.

Steve Barnes has sent what he things is a publishable draft of Black Ship Island, a novella set in the interim between Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. It features an intriguing new alien and some more on the strange ecology of Avalon, and of course has a whacking good story involving the Starborn without the adults. Larry and I discussed this a bit at LASFS last night, and we’ll both take a pass through it, then merge our works. I expect magic from Niven and usually get it. We’re also discussing Anvil (working title; the publication title will almost certainly be something else) and how we might fix the United States if it just had to be done. Imagine that you had that power. What might you do? The devil is in the details…

So things do get done here, if a bit slowly.

NHK satellite CO2 data

no firm conclusions but a little more discussion.

the silence from the media is deafening

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/japanese-satellites-say-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Ron Mullane

Worth looking at, not sure what conclusions are supported. It does seem clear that the remedies involving CO2 production in the US and Europe are not working and will not work.

Of course not everyone seems to agree that this is a subject for rational debate.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/28/direct-action-at-harvard/#more-15067 

Sallie Baliunas is a long time friend and a very competent scientist; so of course Harvard students are invited to take direct action against her, rather than engage in rational argument. But then a lot of the students at Harvard don’t seem to have been required to learn much about rational debate.

And if you don’t know about Freefall, you probably should. Start here http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm and for the first few pieces it may seem frivolous or confusing; plug along. It is not only interesting, it invites thought about some very serious matters. It may help to know that Sam, the main character in the first few screens, is not really the main character; and that Sam is unique. He is an intelligent non-human on a planet of millions of Asimov 3-law robots. He isn’t mammalian, either.

I am not a fan of Snopes, but it happens I ran across this the other day. Snopes labels it false or fraudulent or something. I think the story is worth paying some attention to. It is probably made up by someone determined to be anonymous, but there are points made that need making.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/freezing.asp

View 703 Thursday, December 01, 2011

I was involved in a discussion in another conference, and was reminded of my Megamissions Essay. I had to search to find it, and was astonished to find that I last worked on it in 1994. It needs some work. We did not develop THOR, nor did we built Thoth missiles, but we did develop Hellfire and drones.

In searching for my megamisions essay I found an exchange of mail with a reader on USAF and US Army missions that is still relevant today.

Meanwhile the power is out in many places in Los Angeles. We had a minor flicker last night, but the neighborhood seems to be intact. All’s well, but I am again far behind in other stuff.

I am curious about the Herman Cain affair. Apparently the first barrage against him with Gloria Allred leading the charge came to nothing, and the stories told of his ‘sexual harassment’ seem to have fallen apart. Comes now Ginger Smith. I don’t know if she has any connection with Axelrod, and of course her story of a decade and more long affair with Mr. Cain may be true: but so far we haven’t seen the evidence. There are claims that Cain paid her, but there’s no specification: how much, and how? Cash? Check? Credit card? As to the telephone communications, we don’t know who called whom, now long they talked if at all, who texted whom, were any answered? Cain may well have had a long time mistress whom he met infrequently; she herself describes all this as ‘a casual affair’; but one would think that if she is going to come forward with this story – and why is she doing that? – she would add corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. So far we have not seen much in the way of corroborative details.

So we now have Newt as the latest “I’m not Romney” and the big guns will be laid using different aiming stakes. We may expect a large TOT barrage shortly.

And I really have stuff I have to do. I can recommend the old but still relevant stuff linked to above:

Megamissions

On USAF and Army doctrines

And I am off to lunch.

The latest polls show that Newt beats Obama, 45% to 43%. Incidentally, I know of no political figure in any contested political office who has been reelected with 43% or lower approval rating.

Immigration Absolutism    Jerry, I can understand absolutism on rejecting amnesty for illegal immigrants for the same reason I can understand absolutism on rejecting tax increases. Both make huge sense – as tactical positions.

In both cases, we have a fundamental political conflict not practically solvable by compromise: Open borders (with US citizenship meaningless) versus secure borders, and exponential growth in government’s share of the economy (with as endpoint the government becoming the economy) versus limited government.

In both cases, the other side has repeatedly made "compromise" deals (offering reduced spending for higher taxes, offering more secure borders for amnesty) then flagrantly violated them. Spending wasn’t reduced, the borders weren’t secured.

Tactically speaking, any position other than insisting on reduced spending (or secured borders) before even discussing any tax increase (or amnesty) is suicidal – the other side cannot be trusted, period.

Newt’s partial amnesty position was as I recall explicitly hypothetical – given the borders secured, then what? Gingrich is either foolish or brave to discuss longer term complexities in the simplistic heat of a primary campaign, but you’re not the only one who thinks that he may be looking past the primaries to the general election, where he’ll need to appeal to the center.

Note in that regard today’s Gallup poll that for the first time has the former Speaker leading the current President, 45-43. Newt’s signal to the center was received, apparently.

sign me

Porkypine

I agree regarding tax increases: no tax increase without irrevocable spending cuts in the same bill. Under those conditions I might be amenable to selective tax increases, particularly the largely symbolic taxes on “the rich” (they are symbolic because they are easily avoided; and they do give the appearance and sometimes even the reality of being more fair). But any tax increase not accompanied by not the promise, but the actual cut, in spending should be rejected. I don’t really mind taxes that reduce the gap between top and bottom, but I would rather have that gap than have the government get more money to use to increase spending, and we know that is what will happen if government gets more money. It always happens.

Interesting speculation on why Newt brought this up. May well be. I wouldn’t have advised it, but it seems to have been successful.

From your daybook last Wednesday:

"As Governor Perry put it, there ought to be a visa stapled to the degree certificate. I can’t think anyone would object to that."

Sigh. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I said as much on a CSPAN segment a couple of months ago, then posted my speaking notes to my blog. Read the comments thread. An amazing amount of vitriol, hatred, and ignorance. And these people get to vote.

http://academicvc.com/2011/09/28/immigration-and-competitiveness/

Despair is a sin. Keep up the good work.

Stephen

View 703 Wednesday, November 30, 2011

If you haven’t been following Fred, he has a neat satire: http://fredoneverything.net/LLA.shtml

It will also lead you to a description of the toughest undergrad math class in the country. Fred’s piece is satire, but it’s true enough that Math 55 classes do not look like America.

I really don’t want to spend a lot of time on the election, but I weary of the nonsense being said about the immigration issue. The immigration hawks always bring up the gang members and their molls, and the specter of amnesty as a magnet to draw people in, Amnesty certainly is a magnet, but given the flow into the US just now it’s clear we don’t need a magnet to have a steady flow of illegal immigrants seeking work.

The first thing, then, is to close the border. Build fences. Build moats. If you’re really serious build a mine field. Go look at der Grenze, the border control system of the USSR in Europe: it was intended to keep people in, but it worked to keep them out, too; and as to magnets, the lure of free Austria and West Germany was quite strong. Yes, some got across those borders, but it wasn’t that many. If we’re serious about closing a border we can do it, just as if we are serious about controlling employment of illegal immigrants that can be done too.

But I do wonder: what proportion of those insisting that all eleven million – 1.1 x 10^7 – illegal immigrants have got to be deported have an undocumented nanny, or really know the immigration status of all the members of their gardening crew? But assume that they are all serious, what do we do with, say, a 70 year old man who has been the janitor in a church for 25 years, has two citizen daughters who are members of that parish and four grandchildren, also all citizens. It is now his retirement party. He’s going to go live with one of his children. Do we send a federal agent to his retirement party to handcuff and deport him?

Eleven million people is a lot of people. We can probably get about a million to self-deport by offering rewards for voluntary deportation. Start with $1,000, and when that is done raise the stakes to $2,000. When those cherries are picked you look at the immigration status of everyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, and act accordingly. That will probably get another million burglars, at probably about $2,000 each, plus a few expensive law suits to establish that we’re not interested in whether or not they are guilty of the felony that got them arrested, they are clearly guilty of being illegally in the US, and yes, we really did check the immigration or citizenship status of everyone arrested for burglary (or whatever) in that jurisdiction for the past few weeks, etc. If we’re really lucky the self-deportations and automatic deportations for felony arrests will get us down to, say, 7 million illegal immigrants in the US. That’s still a lot. Now what? Expand the program to check status of everyone arrested for anything? Think of the law suits when someone gets deported for jumping a turnstile. And of course there’s driving without a license as an automatic deportation for illegals. Now we go after anyone using someone else’s social security number, and after that anyone who uses a fake SS #.

And when you have done all that you will still have 4 to 5 million illegal aliens present in these United States. Some of them are likely to be solid citizens. Others may well be ne’er-do-wells. Shall we go examine the documents of every ne’er-do-well in the country? But don’t people who haven’t committed any crime but are generally just not considered desirable have some kind of rights? Do we go back to vagrancy laws? When I was young “No visible means of support” was a valid reason for someone to be arrested, and it was often used to shake down young people hitchhiking across country. Happened to me, once. Easier to pay the ten bucks than stay in the Podunk cooler while they verified my student status and that I had a place of residence in Iowa City. Of course no one hitchhikes any more. Worse, the courts have hammered away at the vagrancy laws, but we could perhaps find a way around that?

My point is that a few minutes’ thought will show that dealing with the eleven million illegal immigrants already here is not as simple as “Send out enough agents, round them up, and throw them out!” We all know that. Perhaps Newt Gingrich brought it up precisely to set the boundary at “road to legality but not citizenship” as opposed to full amnesty. He may be looking past the primary to the general election.

Brian Hall’s Perfect Climate Irony

Jerry,

You should know that the article that Brian Hall references did not look at the complete data set published to date by JAXA (which can be found here: http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/eng/result/download/GOSAT_L4_Release_en.pdf), but focuses on one graph for July 2009. Not much can be gleaned just from the full set of graphs alone — just that there are months when various regions are net sinks for CO2 and other months when those same regions are net sources. Net sourcing over land seems to predominate over time, but that does not mean that that the few months of net sink do not out weigh the many months of net sourcing.

My advice is for everyone to read the full article at the link I have provided. This debate over AGW will not get settled by ignoring or misconstruing data.

Keegan

Kevin L. Keegan

I agree. This probably ought to be paired with the original mail comment. What we are trying to do here is conduct a rational discussion of a topic that has become anything but rational. I am convinced that CO2 has been steadily rising since 1850 or so; the question is what effect does that have, and whether the rise is great compared to the frequent injections of CO2 by volcanic events, ocean current circulations bringing up warmer/colder water, and such. The evidence seems to be clear that there have been wide CO2 swings in the past.

Arrhenius did some back of the envelope calculations on CO2 effects back around 1900. They seem to be as good a model as the billion dollar computer simulations we now rely on.

In another conference we got to wondering what the difference between courts martial and military tribunals might be, and I wondered what rules, if any, the 1942 tribunal that President Roosevelt set up to deal with the 8 Nazi saboteurs landed by submarine in Long Island and in Florida operated under. They found all eight guilty and six were summarily executed. I have been unable to find anything about the composition of this tribunal or what rules it followed. It sentenved all eight to death, including two who had cooperated with the FBI and made their capture possible. What evidence it heard (did it know that two of them were in fact turned and worked for the FBI to help catch the other six?), what the ranks of the tribunal members or indeed how many there were, and what instructions it operated under seem to have been suppressed successfully. It’s all mysterious even though the US Supreme Court QUINN decision, which affirmed the President’s right to act in this case, is now used to support the argument for the use of tribunals in the War on Terror.

We do know how the Tribunals operate now. Comparison of Rights in Military Commission Trials and Trials in Federal Criminal Court, by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, January 26, 2010 discusses this in detail. It is published by Congress.

I still don’t know anything about the 1942 Tribunal.

Subject: USDA fines Ringling Bros. Circus over treatment of animals

Looks like the bunny inspectors have moved on to bigger targets. Based on the explanations, this sure looks like a spurious lawsuit by animal protection activists who couldn’t get their agenda supported through their normal methods.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/29/us/ringling-bros-fine/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Tracy

Thanks. We may add that to bunny inspectors as jobs that probably don’t need doing, and certainly are not so vital that we must borrow the money to do them. The US is simply not serious about cutting spending or reducing the deficit, and few of the candidates are either. Why?

View 703 Tuesday, November 29, 2011

· The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

· The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

Teach your child to read

The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

For about a week I have been running this as a teaser:

I will give you one fact to ponder over the weekend.

Some Teachers Unions have pointed out that the average grade and high school performances in Wisconsin, which has teachers unions, are higher than the corresponding averages in Texas, which is a right to work state. This is true. The average student performance in Wisconsin is higher than the average student performance in Texas.

It is also true that the average black student performance in Texas is higher than black student performance in Wisconsin. The average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than the average Hispanic student performance in Wisconsin. The average white (non-Latino) student performance in Texas is higher than the average white (non-Latino) student performance in Wisconsin. The three classes are collectively exhaustive.

These facts are true, and they are not contradictory although they may appear to be. We’ll talk more about this next week, but if you are moved to comment I’m listening.

It’s time and past time to resolve this. It’s not really a paradox, and there are no contradictions. The resolution is simple but politically incorrect, and if one brings up this subject one ought also to discuss some of the implications.

The correct conclusion here is that Texas does a better job at grade through high school education than Wisconsin, but there are inequalities in the performances of the three groups; one of the groups scores higher than the other two; and there are more of the high-scoring group in Wisconsin than in Texas, and fewer of the low scoring groups in Wisconsin than in Texas. Thus, no matter your group, you will (on average) get a better education in Texas than in Wisconsin, and the hypothesis that the unionization in Wisconsin improves the performance of the schools is falsified. You will, on average, be better off in Texas when it comes to education of yourself or your children. We can infer all that without knowing the actual numbers of either group performance or group numbers; we need one set of those numbers only if we want to identify which group has the better performance. Given the locations of Texas and Wisconsin we probably have a reasonable hypothesis as to which states have the highest numbers of each group, and thus an inference as to which group has the highest average scores.

The problem is that it’s fairly obvious which group has the highest average, but if anyone admits knowing it that person is subject to an automatic charge of racism; indeed the charge is likely to be certain and there will be a very high probability that the person making the charge will be unable to understand the argument, and will insist that the whole outcome is racist. Worse, that person will very likely be a public figure featured as a leader of one or another of the ethnic groups. Of course what I just said will be called racist. This is a subject that one opens at peril. I confess I have been avoiding it because it will probably open a firestorm. It usually does.

Note that the teachers unions are not ashamed to take advantage of the situation. They’re the ones who brought up the better average performances in unionized Wisconsin over right to work Texas. They made a true statement; they just avoided alternate hypotheses over the superiority of unionized schools.

To remove any lingering ambiguity: if you rank order the states by grade and high school performance you will have one list. If you rank order them by percentage of non-Latino White and all the others you will get another list. Compare lists and they will be nearly identical. If you want to refine it more, put in Asians. If you want to refine it even more, segregate the Asians, and segregate the Whites by extracting the Ashkenazy Jews into a separate category. Now compute averages for all the racial groups.

When you finish fiddling with this you will find in general there is a rank order of averages more or less predictable by race. The best average will be Ashkenazy Jews; then Asians; then White; then Latino; then Black. Note we are talking about averages. We can also look at grade averages by IQ ignoring race, and that will turn out to do an even better job of predicting grades. The highest IQ’s will get the highest grades, and the correlations will be about as good as you are going to get in dealing with the social sciences. Moreover, if you use IQ, this will be fairly stable over many years: that is, if you have the IQ at age 6, you have a reasonable prediction of high school grade average and a very good prediction of IQ at the time of high school graduation. Of course it won’t be perfect. There are a lot of ways to lower one’s IQ and a lot of ways to make ones grades go down. There are also social factors: lower IQ working hard will often out-perform high IQ taking it easy. I doubt any of this is new to anyone.

The problem here has plagued education planners for a very long time. At onset it would seem to be obvious that education in abstract thinking is costly, and largely wasted on those who aren’t going to learn it in the first place. This used to be accepted knowledge: for those school districts that could afford it, there was a college prep track, a technical education track, and a general education track. In Memphis where I grew up the bright young public school pupils went to Central High and all took the college prep program; those not interested in a college education but fairly good at technical skills went to Memphis Tech, which taught draughtsmanship, technical math, and a whole host of shop skills. Everyone else went to a neighborhood high school where they had a general curriculum that included college prep courses, but they didn’t have to take the college prep courses and most didn’t. Meanwhile the University of Tennessee was set up to admit all the actual graduates of the college prep programs. Those included at least 2 years of a foreign language, algebra and analytical geometry if not calculus, plane and spherical geometry, 4 years of English, chemistry, physics, and biology. Get through all that and you were automatically admitted to either the University of Tennessee or one of the State Colleges. Tuition was nominal. I have friends who went to Memphis State right out of Central High; they lived at home and it essentially cost them nothing. By that time most of the Tennessee State Teachers Colleges and Normal Schools had been upgraded to State College level. Now, of course, they are all various State Universities, the faculties are paid a lot more, and even though there are a lot more of them it’s too expensive to take in all the qualified high school graduates without charging huge tuitions and fees. That’s a good deal for the faculty and administrators. Not so much for the students.

Now in my time the system was legally segregated, and the only debates on racism involved whether there ought to be quotas on Jews getting admission to the University of Tennessee; that is, no one questioned that they were welcome to the state college system, but there needed to be a quota at UT. I left the state while that debate was going on, and I haven’t been back (except for brief visits and conventions) since desegregation. Of course the system was unfair and the “separate but equal” argument was a sham (although Boss Ed Crump of Memphis did make a sincere effort to upgrade Booker T. Washington High School to “equal” Central High in facilities and faculty pay; he said it was just fair, others said it was to avoid Federal desegregation). The point here, though, is that charges of “racism” didn’t enter the picture of this rather neat system of differentiation between college prep, technical, and general high school education. It was manifestly racial so there wasn’t anything to debate.

Incidentally, in those days I was considered a hopeless radical because I thought the law ought to be color blind. I didn’t have any close friends who were black, but then I didn’t have a lot of close friends at all, being as nerdy stuck up an intellectual as you were likely to find. (That’s why I went out for boxing in high school. I read in a Leslie Charteris Saint story about the effectiveness of “scientific boxing”, there being no “martial arts” in those days. Boxing actually worked pretty well, although what I learned was probably less effective than the training to get into shape…) In any event I didn’t hang out much the way high schoolers do now, but when I did I was happy enough to find anyone smart enough to talk to, and that sometimes included black kids. Of course it was illegal for us to sit together in drug stores, thus the origin of my “law ought to be color blind”; it was all purely personal. But that too is another story.

The point of all this ramble is that from my experience it’s always a very good idea to structure a school system on the theory that this isn’t Lake Wobegon. Half the children will be below average, and of those above average a lot of them will neither want nor need a college prep education. Some will do well with what they called a technical school education, and a great number of them will do well with a general high school education that includes home economics, hygiene, enough math to do your income tax, and practice in reading and writing. Those who want more can try for more. There are junior colleges – that’s what we used to call “Community Colleges” for those who want skills. The University and College system is for those trying to enter the professions.

All very idyllic, but it worked pretty well in those times, and would probably work now – except that no matter what means you use to sort students into the groups “college prep”, “technical”, and “the rest”, you will find a disproportionate high number of Whites in the college prep group, and a disproportionate high number of Blacks in “the rest”. And that will happen even if you sort the groups at random and weed out the failures, so long as your college prep group is actually getting a quality prep education. About the only socially acceptable remedy is some form of affirmative action coupled with changing the standards of success.

Does this mean that I think blacks are stupid? No. I do think that the proportion of blacks who want and need a university prep education is lower than the proportion of whites, and that it is no favor to any pupils, black, white, striped, or purple, to put them in classes that are routinely too hard for them and in which they see no relevance to their future lives. No favor is a euphemism. Meanwhile, putting the bright kids in groups where what is being taught is obvious from the first words (or often from last night’s homework) is to build a living hell for them. I was spared that, but I have many friends who were not, and a novelist has to have  empathy for such things.

It isn’t as if this is new information. They were debating these points when I was an undergraduate in the 1950’s. Indeed, the State of Illinois tried to prohibit the publication of any scientific journal that “degraded the intelligence” of any race, whatever the heck that means; it was applied to some of the early stories correlating race and IQ. Yet for over 50 years study after study has shown the same effective correlations of race and IQ. There have been frantic and very expensive attempts to make “culture free” IQ tests, and “eliminate racial bias” from IQ tests, and though they were sincerely intended they all failed. The one-sigma difference between black and white IQ remains pretty steady.

The next attempt, and one I very much approved of, was Head Start which was intended to take children from inner city schools and give them an educational head start so that when they got to Kindergarten or First Grade they would be culturally and educationally even with their classmates. I don’t know of anyone who disapproves of Head Start (indeed I tried to get it expanded to teach the beginnings of phonics reading in the Head Start program although the NEA insists that they children are not “ready” to learn reading at that age and continue to forbid it; but that’s another story). Head Start funding is seldom debated. Everyone I know desperately hopes it will succeed, because, among other things, it will make it a lot easier to reform the general school system and start giving appropriate education to students according to their abilities. Everyone I know would cheer mightily if by magic the average IQ of blacks suddenly rose to equal that of whites.

The problem is that increasingly frantic attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Head Start have been unable to find any meaningful distinction between Head Start and non Head Start children three or more years after they leave Head Start. The program is costly; but if it worked, if it could produce larger numbers of blacks who wanted and needed college prep education, it would arguably be one of the most cost/effective programs in history. I don’t know anyone who would not cheer.

But that never happened.

The result is that we continue to have the silliness we have in the public school system, which is rapidly creating a rigid class system: those wealthy enough to send their children to good schools, and the rest who have no choice but to turn their children over to the tender mercies of a disastrous public school system, which operates chiefly to the benefit of the teacher unions. And note that the Teachers Unions are the ones who started this fight.

For those interesting in following any of this up, or in data sources, I call your attention to one of my favorite public intellectuals: Why I Love the Internet and Am Proud to Be from Iowa, by Charles Murray. Murray will lead you to two articles that discuss the Texas/Wisconsin paradox in more detail. I’ll also include some of the mail I have received on this in my next mailbag.

The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

And, by sheer coincidence, today’s Wall Street Journal has an article “Ways to Inflate Your IQ” (link) which offers what may be a ray of hope, and suggests ways of restructuring Head Start (although the article doesn’t mention that).

All those who study race and IQ are, or really should be, aware of the Flynn Effect. There’s a decent introduction to it (at least the opening sections are decent; I didn’t read it all) on Wikipedia. The Flynn effect was named by Charles Murray and his collaborator in The Bell Curve, but I’d heard of it well before that book was published. In a nutshell it says that everyone in the world is getting smarter, and that the lower IQ racial IQ averages are going up faster than the higher. It’s important to note that these are averages; the proportion of true geniuses to the rest of the population doesn’t seem to be any higher. There is also debate about the magnitude of the effect, and just what it is doing. This excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on “race and IQ” should illustrate the controversy:

A 2006 study by Dickens and Flynn estimated that the black-white gap closed by about 5 or 6 IQ points between 1972 and 2002,^[66] which would be a reduction by about one-third. However this was challenged by Rushton & Jensen who claim the gap remains stable.^[67] Murray in a 2006 study agree with Dickens and Flynn that there has been a narrowing of the gap, "Dickens’ and Flynn’s estimate of 3–6 IQ points from a base of about 16–18 points is a useful, though provisional, starting point". But he argues that this has stalled and that there has been no further narrowing for people born after the late 1970s.^[68] He found similar results in a 2007 study.^[69]

How this folds in with the physiological results reported in this Wall Street Journal article isn’t clear, but they certainly are related.

On the other hand, waiting for the Flynn effect or improved Head Start before we improve – actually drastically restructure – our failed public school system is not a viable option for a real civilization. If we let political correctness rob us of another generation – if we waste the bright students by forcing them into a watered down curriculum just so that every child gets the “world class university prep education” that Bill Gates says everyone deserves; if we condemn the normal and dull normal students to the confusion of a real university prep education they don’t need and can’t fathom; if we confine real university prep education to private schools and a few fortunate oases in the public school wastelands; we will pay for it with much more unemployment and many wasted minds.

I rejoice that there may be ways to raise IQ and I certainly hope there is decent but not lavish funding for converting these observations into practical education programs. I am also certain that it’s going to take a while for that to happen; and just now the world is in a crisis. We can’t afford to waste smart people because of political correctness – and we aren’t doing anything to help achieve equality by condemning a lot of kids to an “education” they can’t use.

We have let political correctness and good intentions get us crosswise to reality; and it is costing us. It has already cost a significant fraction of a generation. How many more will we feed into this maw?

Teach Your Child To Read

Probably the best preparation you can give kids for the current education system is to make sure they can read – and by read I mean read, not just controlled vocabulary books, but “big words” like Constantinople and Timbuktu, and polyethylene and oxygendihydride – before the school system gets hold of them. My wife long ago developed a program, originally for DOS, that does that in 70 1/2 hour lessons. It works. If you’re interested go to http://www.readingtlc.com/ and see. Of course good readers do not “sound out” words once they have learned them; but they need the ability when they encounter words they have never seen before, particularly if they have already had the word read to them in stories. But you knew that.

My thanks to all who have subscribed or renewed in the past several weeks. I have a large number of those I haven’t processed; I’m dancing as fast as I can and I clean up a pile of them each day. It’s work I do when I run out of creative energy. Apologies, and again, thanks: your subscriptions not only make this place possible, but let me work on important matters.

Lynn Margulis, RIP   http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/lynn-margulis/ 

I did not know her well, and I doubt she would remember me, but I did a few reports on her lectures back when I did general science reporting and was science editor of Galaxy. She was an absolutely first class lecturer, and it was always a pleasure to interview her. I once signed a book for her, which I was greatly flattered to do. By the time I met her she was no longer married to Carl Sagan. I haven’t seen her for twenty years. May she rest in peace. She sure could do lectures!