December 13, 2008

Is the balance of power shifting?

Rupert Murdoch once said in private, I am told on good authority, that the reason he decided to subsidize the neocons (a decision with substantial historical ramifications) was not because of any particular devotion to the tenets of neoconservatism. Instead, funding The Weekly Standard was simply to insure against being defenseless against vendettas by the American media and politicians against his American businesses. As a foreigner of generally conservative political views, he felt he needed to protect his huge investments in America by having at least one set of Jews staunchly on his side.

I doubt if Murdoch cares much about, say, West Bank settlements, but he understands that the small number of people in America who do care about them tend to be passionate, powerful, and rich.

Hillary Clinton seems to have absorbed a similar lesson. In 1991, George H. W. Bush was on top of the world. His Secretary of State James Baker expressed displeasure with West Bank settlements. The next year, Hillary's husband beat Bush 41. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I suspect Hillary wouldn't bet her career on it just being a fluke.

Similarly, Barack Obama has acted quite Murdochian recently, making Hillary Secretary of State and giving crucial insider jobs to Rahm Emanuel (who patriotically rushed off during the Gulf War to serve at an Army base, an Israeli army base) and Larry Summers, greatly reassuring AIPAC.

But are all these political calculuses a little too 2007? Is the assumption that the kind of guy in New York or Las Vegas who cares about Israel in the same way that rich guys in Oklahoma care about the Oklahoma Sooner football team -- but are just so infinitely rich that they must be pandered to -- getting to be out of date? What if the Sheldon Adelsons and Bernie Madoffs lose even more money in this crash then everybody else? How does that rearrange the political landscape?

I don't have any data, but I'm sensing anecdotally that the kind of man who funds Israel hardliners is losing money faster than the average. Today, the New York Times writes in "Standing Accused - A Pillar of Finance and Charity" about Bernie Madoff, the money manager who just admitted to the FBI that he had been running a giant Ponzi scam and had lost maybe $50 billion (billion!) of his investors' money:

“There was a joke around that Bernie was actually the Jewish T-bill,” the executive went on, referring to the ultrasecure investment of treasury bills. “He was that safe.”

Mr. Madoff had traveled far from his roots in eastern Queens, where as a young man he cobbled together a $5,000 grubstake from his earnings as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer to start the famed investment firm that eventually bore his name, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

He had come to move easily in the clubby Jewish world that iterates between New York City and its suburbs and southern satellites like Palm Beach.

Indeed, in the world of Jewish New York, where Mr. Madoff, 70, was raised and found success, he is largely still considered as a macher: a big-hearted big shot for whom philanthropy and family always intertwined with — and were equally as important as — finance. ...

As Mr. Madoff’s success increased, so too did his interest in philanthropy, which was often handled, much like his business itself, as a family enterprise. He sits on the board of trustees for Yeshiva, whose officials issued a statement on Friday saying they were “shocked” at the news of Mr. Madoff’s arrest. And with his wife, Ruth, he runs the Madoff Family Foundation, a $19 million operation that last year gave money to Kav Lachayim, a volunteer group that works in Israeli schools and hospitals, and to the Public Theater in New York.

Another NYT article reports:

The news was equally devastating for the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation by sending teenagers to Israel and supporting other Jewish education efforts.

The foundation was forced on Friday to dismiss its small staff and shut down its programs to cope with its losses in the Madoff funds, according to Deborah Coltin, its executive director.

“We’ve canceled everything as of today, everything,” she said tearfully.

Very anecdotal, but I'm definitely wondering if the Obama-Clinton-Murdoch consensus about where the power rests is becoming obsolete. Certainly, finance and casinos will be greatly downsized for years to come. The more liberal (but still connected) media business is harder to forecast -- Hollywood did well in the last Depression because movies are cheap entertainment -- but newspapers are obviously in trouble. (Of course, Sam Zell, another fairly hardline donor, didn't put much of his own money in his now bankrupt purchase of the Chicago Tribune and LA Times.)

Could there be a pattern where the most ethnocentric Jewish rich guys get hit hardest by the crash? John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "Recessions catch what the auditors miss," which certainly proved true in Bernie Maddof's case.

Anyway, even if there is a major rebalancing of wealth, that doesn't mean that political influence will rebalance. It's not just that Jews have more money, it's that they give more of their wealth to influence politics.

The amount of wealth devoted to influencing politics in this country is remarkably small. For example, Murdoch is said to spend about $3 million per year on The Weekly Standard, which adds up to a lot over the decades, but hardly a crippling cost for a billionaire.

What about politicians? The Exile had a lot of fun when Rep. William Jefferson was arrested with $90,000 in cash in his freezer. An American politician has an icebox with $90,000 in it, while a Russian politician, despite having a much smaller economy to loot, winds up with a few blocks of Mayfair or a Premiere League football team.

The news of how little Blagojevich was thinking of getting for selling Obama's U.S. Senate seat to Jesse Jackson Jr. should open some eyes. Do you imagine anybody in China is saying right now: "It only costs $1 million for a U.S. Senator? Are you kidding? Buy me a dozen!"

With an increasing portion of the American economy nationalized, the price of political influence will be increasing. Do you think any former shareholders of Lehman Brothers are kicking themselves right now for not donating more to the last Bush campaign and instead let their old enemy from Goldman Sachs get to put them out of business while propping up Goldman's allies?

That may be the most lasting influence of the Bush Administration: by vastly increasing the power of government, the price of government will eventually go up, too.

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

89 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting, Steve. As they say, pride comes before the fall, and in the last decade or so the rich Zionists in America haven't even bothered to cover their tracks as they support the interests of a foreign country over their own.

On a related note, I'm in my early thirties. The "Jewish striver" stereotype is something that predates me. When I was in school, it was far more common to see the "Asian striver". Putting purported differences in verbal ability aside, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit.

Anonymous said...

Murdoch's mother is Jewish so maybe he has Jewish ethnocentric interests in Israel.

His son in law and father of two of his grandsons is a black African.

His current wife and mother of his youngest daughter is Chinese.

Anonymous said...

Could there be a pattern where the most ethnocentric Jewish rich guys get hit hardest by the crash?

Madoff may have lost other people's money, but I betcha he's lost little to none of his own. It's always easier to gamble with other people's money. :-/

Anonymous said...

I heard that Murdoch's view on Israel goes something like this: the creation of the state of Israel may have been a mistake, but now it's there, we have to defend it.

Anonymous said...

Gee, who should we root for? Jews on the Neo-Marxist Left or the Neo-conservative "Right"? The Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks?

As a non-Jewish citizen of the United States I'm going to be losing sleep worrying about which side of the Jewish political struggle is gaining the upper hand! Because it makes such a dramatic difference in my government's foreign and domestic policies.

Unknown said...

I'm wondering something similar -- about how the crash will affect the cultural world. Jews often make a lot of money, plus they're interested in culture, plus they give a lot more of their money away to cultural institutions than most other groups do. What kind of impact is the economic downturn going to have on *that* scene?

Anonymous said...

The fact that rich Jews are losing money hand over fist is a good thing for this country: They will have less money to buy politicians.

I guess there is a silver lining to this recession after all.

Anonymous said...

Unintentionally comical Left-Wing-Jewish-Guy-In-Finland blogging by Yglesias with lots of Steve Sailer references in the comments:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/blogitecture_in_helsinki.php

Kids — I’m off today for a week-long trip to Helsinki, Finland where I and some other DC-based policy thinkers and writers are going to be guests of the Finnish government to learn about their education system. Finland is a world leader in PISA scores and other measures of educational success, so as the United States tries to reverse the current disturbing trend toward declining educational attainment, it seems that perhaps we have something to learn not only from how Finnish schools function, but from the larger social and economic policy context in which children learn...In general, I think the United States has a lot to learn from the social models prevailing in northern Europeans countries such as Finland. Finland’s per capita GDP is roughly the same as America’s, but Finland’s gini coefficient is far lower, suggesting that typical Finns enjoy higher material living standards than do Americans. Add to that longer life expectancy, lower crime rates, and lots of modernist design and architecture and it seems like a nice place.

Yes, Virginia, political correctness does make you stupid.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/tag/finland

Armed with inconvenient facts, Steve Sailer stalks the Yglesias comment threads (something he has done for years, I believe).

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of that time-honored phrase 'Jewish lightening' to describe an arson related insurance fraud.

Anonymous said...

Do "Israeli schools and hospitals," an AMERICAN Jewish university*, a bone marrow bank, and a non-sectarian theater really equal "Israeli hardliners?" I see plenty of evidence that Madoff is a very bad man who, like many such, covered up his badness with philanthropy, which in his case happened to often be ethnically oriented. I don't see any evidence that he was a Likudnik. Indeed, the Public Theater seems from your link to have recently put on an anti-Bush play (as well as quite a bit of Shakespeare).

* I thought you used to say (and even still do say elsewhere in this same post) that devotion to alma maters instead of Israel was a good thing.

Rupert Murdoch has been known to lean to the right since at least the 1980s. Whether we like or not, neocons are perceived by the general public to be on the right - indeed, to define it. And in fact, the Weekly Standard has actually published many good socially conservative articles by the likes of Maggie Gallagher and Leon Kass (and I would think it is those issues, not ones of war and peace, that Murdoch probably cares little about in reality). I need more than a friend-of-a-friend anecdote to believe he is a liberal or a paleocon faking it.

I also find it hard to believe the Bush I lost the 1992 election because of Palestine. If I recall correctly, all the neocons reluctantly backed him regardles, and the majority of Jews in general would have voted for the Democrat anyway, as they always do.

Anonymous said...

Sorry on one thing: I see on re-reading that you did concede that Murdoch has "generally conservative political views." That only makes the rest of the comment odder. Most people, even ones like Murdoch who are obviously intelligent, lack the inclination to seek out more authentic forms of the right and accept as true conservatives whomever the Republican Party and the conservative think tanks put forth. Even in the Deep South and the Mormon West, Buchanan (in 2000), Paul, and Baldwin did not do very well. The idea that Kristol et al. are not true conservatives has probably never even crossed Murdoch's mind.

Anonymous said...

This is so stupid it's painful. American Jews are cultural subversives. There's no doubt about that and that is a good thing to criticize them on and to expose their hypocrisy on. But American foreign policy is run by the Pentagon and other bureaucratic interests, which is why we're going to see a lot of continuity in foreign policy into the Obama years -- America's national interests do not change with the change of president. Israel is almost entirely an instrument of American foreign policy and the West Bank is a shit-hole irrelevance. Israel is the most reliable American ally in the region and provides the US with important intelligence, technology, etc. To write that Bush pere lost the White House due to Baker's comments on the West Bank or whatever is not even a half-baked conspiracy, it's completely idiotic. SS -- you do yourself no favour with such ignorance and fantasizing. You really do just come across as a fool. I suspect, given these comments, that you have no actual experience in government of any kind.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if this post will get a rise out of Larry Auster's sensibilities?


I also wonder how many of Madoff's suckers, er....business associates, are wondering how they can get in on the bailout action about now.


Just think, this guy fleeced approximately 50 billion from mainly wealthy socialites, but it would only cost 15 billion to save our three automanufacturers. Wall Street got almost a trillion. Has the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street been any larger than what it is right now.



Dont count on a Republican rebound in two years this time. We really are the "stupid" party.

Anonymous said...

"The economy in Vegas is so bad right now they just turned a casino into an Indian reservation." - Jay Leno last night.

The best way to test your thesis is examine Russia and the post-90's blues.

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8575&IBLOCK_ID=35&phrase_id=19353

Anonymous said...

Putting purported differences in verbal ability aside, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit.

Times are already a-changin'. In the "Dark Knight" the accountant for the Gotham mob is Chinese!

Anonymous said...

the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation

Lets try a thought experiment:

the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of White identity through intermarriage and assimilation

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit.

America as a vehicle where ethnic groups periodically grab the wheel and steer where they will.

Only one group not allowed to do that overtly of course. Yet once they are firmly out of the picture the vehicle will be seen at the side of the road minus wheels. cf South Africa.

Anonymous said...

"Putting purported differences in verbal ability aside, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit."

Judging by how apolitical Asians in this country seem with the exception of the Vietnamese, I don't see how the Chinese Americans will become politically influential.

Jim Bowery said...

The real measure of Jewish power is the degree to which it is off limits to discussion in polite company.

Is that decreasing?

Anonymous said...

yeah, or to put it differently, all the really rich american jews have moved their money, and what used to be yours, to china already.

Anonymous said...

We should not ignore one important factor of the 1992 USA presidential election: Ross Perot. He received between 18% and 20% of the popular vote. I suspect that most Perot voters would have gone for Bush 41 over Clinton.

This does not derail the main argument, but it's a minor nit worth picking.

Anonymous said...

Let's see...Rahm Emanuelle is a big backer of Israel so it is unlikely that Obama's administration will do anything to upset Israel or threaten it in any way.

That leaves two options for Obama to appease the international and domestic left: 1) He has to pull troops out of Iraq; and 2) he has to end any national security at home.

Hmmm...Arabs are always griping about Israel, but Israel is off the table. So national security is out...meaning terrorism will now operate freely in the United States.

I wonder if a nuclear bomb going off in New York will alter the pattern of finance even more?

mnuez said...

Antisemites of the world unite!
------------------------------------

Anyhow, it probably won't surprise you to hear that I'm about as joyous as you antisemites are about the vanishing 50 Billion. I think it's pretty damn awesome, all the I regret is that it isn't 50 TRILLION.

But that's a whole separate story, The fact that vanishing illusory wealth leads to deflation which is good for most people (for a host of reasons) is something that most of you tribalists aren't really interested in wrapping your heads around. Takes too much thinking.

On to identity politics then!

You goyim must suffer from some kind of like permanent psychic impotence. You're never at the head of the line. Even when it comes to being Antisemitic you have to take second place to a host of Jews.

The "neoconservatives" (whatever precisely that means) may fall but, by God, whoever the winning team happens to be, there are Jews there already running the place too!

The most effective anti-Israel organizations are primarily run and funded by Jews and the most effective socialist organizations (that oppose Jewish wealth in all its forms) are primarily run by Jews etc, etc.

So, yeah. While NOW you may be willing to get behind a few adams and yankels who run the side of the political equation that thusfar has been the losing team (and which you, therefore, didn't identify as "Jewishly Run" - ps, can we just say ZOG for short?), as soon as they become "the winning team", you'll notice that you're STILL taking a backseat to some fast-talking, mathematically adept, New York types - then it's back to supporting their opposers, ad infinitum. God, how tiring this must be!

Anyhow, I'm off to a secret meeting. Continue patchkeing around here, we find it cute.

mnuez

albertosaurus said...

I'm sensing some short range thinking here. If you want less Jewish influence in American politics you should support Israel and Israeli supporters, not oppose them.

What happens if Israel falls? Will the world stand by while muslims enact a new Holocaust? Will the Jews all commit suicide again like Masada?

Hardly.

The short answer is that they will move to Miami Beach. More seriously, there is likely to be another international exodus.

Jews are unlikely to want the France of Le Pen or the Germany that still has neo-nazi demonstrations. Putin is not likely to accept jewish refugees either.

If Israel falls the US is likely to have twice as many Jews as it has now. Personally I would welcome that outcome. I would like America to have more Jews, but I understand that some who post here wouldn't.

Anonymous said...

Chief Seattle said...

Putting purported differences in verbal ability aside, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit.


If that happens my education might actually start to pay off.

Whatever the case, there is definitely a shift going on. Not only in financial assets, but moral assets (i.e. pubic opinion) as well. The young, liberal Obama fanatics are decidedly anti-Zionist, and openly hostile to Israel in many cases. This is from the perspective of someone living in a West Coast blue city.

Anonymous said...

America urgently needs a Ponzi Czar to oversee wast number of emerging Success Stories regardless of the players' ethnicity....
Rumors are, Ken Lay Award to switch to weekly schedule...

Chief Seattle, soon you'll be seeing a very influental 'Chinese-Chinese' hitting their stride...according to Solzhenitsyn it won't be pretty...

Anonymous said...

"I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some very influential Chinese-Americans start to hit their stride in respectable culture in the next decade or so, pushing the post WWII Jews out of the limelight a bit."

An interesting idea, however oversees chinese seem not to get too involved in the politics of the countries where they live. Although this could prove to be different in America as we encourage minorities to engage in ethnic identity politics.

If the scenario you outline comes to pass, it would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a prolonged period of animosity between China and Israel. What would thier proxies here in America do?

Anonymous said...

Man, I can't wait to see how many episodes of Law & Order they milk this for.

We're hearing that the smart money KNEW Bernie had to be cheating, because the returns he was generating were impossibly good. Many Wall Streeters suspected the wrong rigged game, though: They thought it was insider trading, not a Ponzi scheme. And here's the best part: That's why they invested with him.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/145115/I-Knew-Bernie-Madoff-Was-Cheating--That%27s-Why-I-Invested-with-Him?tickers=^dji,&gspc,^ixic

Anonymous said...

I heard a snippet from an interview with Bernie Madoff on NPR yesterday - this interview was done some time ago, long before Madoff fell under any suspicion of wrong-doing. He was saying that people wrongfully believed that the markets were crooked, and that they didn't understand just how well regulated and how transparent the markets actually are now.

Also, from the story, Madoff wasn't merely a hedge-fund manager. He at one time was head of NASDAQ.

I hope that the various foundations and endowments (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, etc.) were heavily invested in Madoff's fund and other such financial sinks. It'd be good if those sanctimonious nests of evil-doing do-gooders were to really take it on the chin.

Anonymous said...

From the the first paragraph of an article in the London Times on the Madoff affair:

"Some of America’s wealthiest socialites were facing ruin last night after the arrest of a Wall Street big hitter accused of the largest investor swindle perpetrated by one man."

Finally, some good news.

Anonymous said...

Steve --

You're all wet on almost everything here.

Hollywood? Anti-Recessionist? Please Steve look at the actual revenue streams Hollywood has.

Do you think paying $30-45 million to George Clooney or whoever for some anti-American screed, or 4 hour movies about Che, or gay movies starring Sean Penn are going to make money?

Yet that is what Hollywood does with the bulk of it's films, subsidized by "other people's money" mostly from foreigners and Wall Street, and a few big hits like "Dark Knight."

Hollywood is asking for a bailout just like Detroit and Wall Street. Already NBC is going to kill their 10 pm scripted show slot and go with Jay Leno next year at that time. They are not even trying to get audiences, just make stuff for ever cheaper amounts.

Please Steve, hardly any sector of the US economy is making money. Each sector is tremendously vulnerable to downswings in consumer spending and energy price increases.

Second, the amount of money shoveled in by the SAUDIS and other Gulf Oil interests is ... staggering. Ever hear of Bill Clinton? The Saudis paid for his library, and have him on what amounts to a retainer by paying several million a year for "speeches" he gives.

Obama of course was the recipient of the Saddam-Auichi-Rezko bagman connection, getting all sorts of sweetheart deals.

The Saudis and other Gulf oil and Islamist/Jihadist groups shovel money into America like crazy. Obama took money directly from Hamas and Hezbollah during the campaign.

You also fall to the frankly, dumb Paleocon fantasy that our troubles with Islam are the result of the "Jews" instead of Islam's total instability caused by it's Polygamy, which has been their society since it's founding about 1500 years ago. Bombay ought to have been your wake-up call Steve.

Neo-cons recognize that Islam and Muslims won't subscribe to a dose of Rodney King "can't we all get along?" because their polygamy gives them a huge amount of excess, surplus young men who can only find fulfillment by what amounts to constant, irregular warfare and raids. In other words human history did not end, and technology makes constant war more not less likely.

One either pushes back against Muslim cultural and Jihadist aggression in all it's forms (Mosques and Madrassas, demands for special treatment, "some" Sharia law in the West, Jihad and then demands, etc.) or you end up being ruled by them.

If you liked the Bombay Massacre, wait until Iran has a Nuclear Umbrella like Pakistan's, and can sponsor those with impunity against the US every six months. Just to give their young men something to do.

Anonymous said...

As a believer in HBD, the hardest thing i find is that i can't explain HBD in polite society. To some extent this is because the loudest proponents of HBD are flaming anti semites. When i extol HBD i am lumped in with that crowd. Some other proponents of HBD are the bizarre exteme racists, the kind that post on stormfront that Obama has very low IQ. Who wants to be seen in the same light as these jokers?

But the worst group of HBD fans are the "pick up artist" types. All over the web people like Roissy in DC use HBD to expound on the theory of "game" and "alpha vs beta males" and other nonsense. This certainly gives those of us who believe in HBD a bad name more than anything else.

Most grownups recognize the "pick up artist fans of HBD" as losers.


They are men that find themselves in a sub group where everyone considers them to be failures and cretins. Rather than change themselves they change their peer group.

So, if you are a man, you get out of college, all your best buds become very successful in their careers and make lots of money but you can’t make any money, you are considered to be a loser by all your former friends. Every time you socialize with them and their wives you feel like more of a loser.
Instead of continuing to socialize with a group that considers you to be a loser, you search for a different group with different standards.

Perhaps you join a “save the earth” type of group, a group where your worth is measured by how much you profess to be interested in helping mankind or helping the environment or some nonsense. you tell everyone there that you could have made lots of money but decided not to try and instead your real love is helping the earth. You can pretend among your new friends that you were not a failure at making money but rather that you never tried. Competitive altruism rules the roost among this group.

Or you can join a bunch of people who play world of warcraft or play second life and pretend that was always your aspiration in life.

Or you can join a bunch of men and boys who worship pick up artists and sort of pretend that being a pick up artist is all you ever aspired to. The fact that the people in your profession laugh at you, the people you grew up with laugh at you, your siblings and cousins laugh at you, your college buddies who are financially successful, married, and have kids are laughing at you, you pretend that none of that matters.

you are living every horny teenage boy’s dream - picking up a different damaged low self esteem female every night of the week at the local dive bar. You are a hero to your new group. Perhaps you deliberately surround yourself with people who have less “game” than you do since you get the benefit of being their hero - you have a group of even bigger losers surrounding you, praising you, asking you to teach them. what an ego boost!

I don’t criticize this behavior - it is perfectly rational and smart. If you fail to be respected in your career, you fail to be respected by your family, you fail to make lots of money, you fail to be able to have kids and support them, you fail in so many other things, the pick up artist lifestyle is always there as a safety net. And there are no shortage of losers who will look up to you and feed your ego.

The men that leave behind all their failures in order to surround themselves with even bigger losers who will worship them are smart and i give them credit for doing the right thing.

But why do they have to be so loud and proud in talking about HBD all the time ? It gives the rest of us that believe in HBD a bad name

TGGP said...

I hadn't heard of any connection between Summers and AIPAC. I think he critized the divestment movement though.

Anonymous said...

I believe Rupert Murdoch's mother was of Jewish origin.

Anonymous said...

How long before Madoff escapes to Israel?

Anonymous said...

A lot of ethnic Chinese in this country are overseas Chinese or Taiwanese. If they gain political power, it would be to what end? Taiwan already has a more explicit defense guarantee from the U.S. than Israel does.

More interesting will be the role of Indian-Americans. Frankly, I think it would be a good thing if they become more influential in American foreign policy. The Israel-Palestinian dispute is absolute chicken feed in importance to the India-Pakistan dispute, given its spillover into the war in Afghanistan, the terrorist petri dish that is Northwestern Pakistan, etc.

- Fred

Anonymous said...

"He had come to move easily in the clubby Jewish world that iterates between New York City and its suburbs and southern satellites like Palm Beach."

Iterates. What the hell kinda use of the word iterates is that. Don't they have editors?

Anonymous said...

They just got 700 billion of our money, so they aren't exactly going to be flying economy class any time soon.

Anonymous said...

Steve writes: "imagine anybody in China is saying right now: "It only costs $1 million for a U.S. Senator? Are you kidding? Buy me a dozen!"

Why would the Chinese be interested in dime-a-dozen Senators?

They have already bought themselves a United States President for much less in the 90's.....

Anonymous said...

Despite the examples cited, my understanding is that Jews generally tend to be more liberal and support Dems.

-Frank

Steve Sailer said...

I don't believe Rupert Murdoch's mother was Jewish. I had a discussion with a veteran Australian insider, long time member of parliament down there, who is the same age as Murdoch. He says that as far as he can tell, the theory is based on two very American assumptions -- "Green" (his mother's maiden name) is a Jewish name and only Jews can make a lot of money in the newspaper business. In the rest of the Anglosphere, however, there are plenty of gentile Greens and plenty of gentile newspaper tycoons.

Anonymous said...

Or you can join a bunch of men and boys who worship pick up artists and sort of pretend that being a pick up artist is all you ever aspired to. The fact that the people in your profession laugh at you, the people you grew up with laugh at you, your siblings and cousins laugh at you, your college buddies who are financially successful, married, and have kids are laughing at you, you pretend that none of that matters.

That seems to describe most pick-up artists quite well, but possibly not Roissy himself. No one knows what he does for a living. He might be quite successful.

Anonymous said...

Asian verbal IQ:

As for verbal abilities, we have the following 2006 PISA results: OECD reading avg is about 490; France 488, Germany 495, UK 495, Italy 469, Spain 461. NE Asian scores: Japan 498 Korea 556 HK 536 Taiwan 496. Again, slightly higher scores for NE Asians. Some interesting US data here shows that on 1995 SATs, low-income Asians have lower verbal scores than whites, but by family income of $60k have caught up and Asians with family income of >$70k outscore white families of similar affluence. This strikes me as an immigrant / bilingual family effect. Children raised in immigrant families, where the parents do not speak English at home, tend to score lower on the verbal part of the SAT.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm#APPENDIX%20B

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html

Anonymous said...

"[Murdoch's] mother is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch (née Elisabeth Joy Greene), the daughter of a wealthy Irish family." From Wikipedia.

As for use of the word 'iterate', Doesn't 'iterate' sound sexier than 'travel'? I mean it rhymes with 'gyrate'd

Anonymous said...

That seems to describe most pick-up artists quite well, but possibly not Roissy himself. No one knows what he does for a living. He might be quite successful.

Yeah, and he 'might' be just another angry IT nerd with a blog.

Anonymous said...

The Law School Admission Council commissioned a study of bar passage rates in 1989. According to the study's findings, Asians born in the U.S. passed the bar at a lower rate than whites. This gap was approximately 0.53 standards deviation. At the time, virtually all U.S. Asians of that age group were Japanese or Chinese.

Other studies indicate that North Asians have verbal IQs about 0.25 SDs below the white mean.

More interestingly, even third and fourth generation Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans tend to have per capita incomes about on par with whites despite far superior educational qualifications. So another data point that seems to point towards La Griffe's hypothesis: white verbal IQ> Asian verbal IQ => no Asian economic advantage.

Anonymous said...

"But why do they have to be so loud and proud in talking about HBD all the time ? It gives the rest of us that believe in HBD a bad name. "

Any connection between Mystery Method and race/IQ research really doesn't extend beyond a couple fringe blogs. No one is going to hear your opinion on why blacks fail at school or low time orientation for Mexicans and then lump you in with the show on VH1. You're paranoid about this.

In fact, the majority of humanity doesn't know HBD exists, doesn't know that pick-up exists and unless they read Roissy wouldn't put the two together.

Anonymous said...

"His son in law and father of two of his grandsons is a black African.
"

Really? That's VERY rare for super upperclass types. Got any details on the happy couple?

Anonymous said...

The more liberal (but still connected) media business is harder to forecast


Print, radio, and TV advertising is hurting.

Anonymous said...

Roissy complains about being harassed by fat older women at work. Therefore he is not successful.

Anonymous said...

Anon said

The fact that the people in your profession laugh at you, the people you grew up with laugh at you, your siblings and cousins laugh at you, your college buddies who are financially successful, married, and have kids are laughing at you, you pretend that none of that matters.[...]

I don’t criticize this behavior - it is perfectly rational and smart. If you fail to be respected in your career, you fail to be respected by your family, you fail to make lots of money, you fail to be able to have kids and support them, you fail in so many other things, the pick up artist lifestyle is always there as a safety net.


Make a lot of money or you are a loser and people are laughing, laughing, laughing at you and you're a scumbag.

Intellectual? Artist? Scientist? Loser, ya mean!

That's a typical noveau riche attitude prevalent among American biz pigs and lower management. If his kind has any attraction to HBD, it is much worse than the attraction some filthy pick-up artist has; it is a means to rationalize emptiness. For this type, it's all about the kind of vehicles they own, or the size of their penis.

Hey, Anon. What will you have when the money's all gone?

Hopefully you did succeed at reproducing, and your children are good and love you.

But this conversation isn't about new cars and isn't making you a nickel, and I'm a loser. So it's best that you broom it now.

Anonymous said...

Mnuez, why do you put "neoconservatives" in quotes?

Do you think that will convince us goyim that they aren't real?

Anonymous said...

The Chinese-Chinese will be one of the dominant groups in the world but I doubt Chinese-Americans will be very important:

1. Ashkenazim are unrivaled in ability. (Parsees are the only ethnic group that are perhaps equal)
2. Chinese Americans are 1% of the country. Their numbers in the under 5 age category are dramatically lower.
3. They are not involved in politics.
4. They have shown no particular aptitude in finance.
5. They will assimilate faster.


I predict Chinese Americans will become more prominent in cultural output. Expect the likes of I.M. Pei, Yo-yo Ma, Vera Wang to multiple. There will also be more Chinese contributions to the American Nobel prizes in sciences count.

Basically nothing earth shaking.

Anonymous said...

Iterates. What the hell kinda use of the word iterates is that. Don't they have editors?

Hah! Yes, "vacillates," "oscillates," or even "sways between" would have been more appropriate.

Anonymous said...

Steve, until I read your comment, I always assumed Murdoch was Jewish! I guess I'd assumed this, because why else would you fund a magazine like the Weekly Standard?

Anonymous said...

"The real measure of Jewish power is the degree to which it is off limits to discussion in polite company."

I guess Mnuez answered that question. Don't confront him directly or he'll insult your intelligence - though perhaps not in the way he thinks.

Anonymous said...

A. Lets see now:

Bush I lost in '92 because of

1/ the Jews
2/ He broke his 'read my lips' pledge
3/ He had to expend resources in the primaries fighting off Buchanan
4/ Perot took proportionally more votes from him.
5/ He did lousy in the debates (don't look at a watch)
6/ There was a recession during most of the second half of his term.
7/ Except for the FDR era no party has had a 16 year stay in the Presidency in the last 100 years.
8/ He had a 'natural' in his Dem opponent.

Of course Steve and everyone here assumes it must be because of '1'

B. The Weekly Standard argument assumes Murdoch cares what people think of him. Given that he is regularly mocked on the Simpsons which is run on Fox this is doubtful.

C. Yes I'm sure Jews are doing worse these days. As opposed to...

Anonymous said...

"More interestingly, even third and fourth generation Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans tend to have per capita incomes about on par with whites despite far superior educational qualifications. So another data point that seems to point towards La Griffe's hypothesis: white verbal IQ> Asian verbal IQ => no Asian economic advantage."


It's highly doubtful that third generation Asians earn less than whites. Here is a study from Canada that indicates the contrary: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081006.wcensus0610/BNStory/National/home


"The 2006 census data show that first-generation white immigrants with university degrees, aged 25-44, earned $68,036 a year on average – just above the Canadian-born baseline of $65,000. Those from Japan earned $58,294 and those from China $55,270, while black immigrants earned $51,317 a year."


"The balance shifts, however, with the second and third generation.

The Chinese catapulted ahead, with the grandchildren of immigrants earning an average of $79,022 a year."

$79k. That is a huge difference. And they are third generation meaning before the rush of Hong Kong people leaving before the handover.

There may be a verbal intelligence gap but I an earning gap is highly dubious.

Anonymous said...

The data cited below is *from* LaGriffe's site. It clearly shows that, when matched for incomes, affluent Asians outscore whites on the verbal part of the SAT. This result *includes* immigrants in the averages.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm#APPENDIX%20B

"Some interesting US data here shows that on 1995 SATs, low-income Asians have lower verbal scores than whites, but by family income of $60k have caught up and Asians with family income of >$70k outscore white families of similar affluence."

The PISA data is from nationally representative samples on tests that have been carefully translated into the relevant language. If you have actual data on asian verbal IQs, please post a link, and note whether the tested populations include recent immigrants or those raised in non-English speaking households.

Bar exam passage rates are subject to a large number of confounding variables, so I would hardly compare that data to PISA or SAT scores.

Anonymous said...

Roissy seems genuine to me. Of course I'm a nerd, so I'm really the wrong person to judge this, but most of what he says seems to be true. And such stuff is rarely said as articulately as he says it. I would go as far as saying that I've never read anything on the topic of gender relations that seemed as true and was as educational as Roissy's blog.

It gets repetitive after a while though. There's less to his topic than there is to politics, I guess. It's easier to exhaust it. But other than that, thank you, Roissy.

m said...

I probably shouldn't say this because it will bum a lot of people out but Roissy is actually Gary Brecher aka the War Nerd....weird how things come full circle.

Anonymous said...

As a foreigner of generally conservative political views...

On the "national question", Murdoch is hardly a "conservative" by any measure. Rather, he is a typical one-world globalist who views national borders and immigration controls as irritating obstacles to achieving his vision of “the global economy” i.e. the unrestricted flow of cheap labor from the Third World into Western countries.

Incidentially, this fits perfectly with the open-borders neocons and their view of the United States as a propositional nation.

Anonymous said...

The fact that the people in your profession laugh at you, the people you grew up with laugh at you, your siblings and cousins laugh at you, your college buddies who are financially successful, married, and have kids are laughing at you, you pretend that none of that matters.

-anon


Wow. You are a serious a**hole.

It used to be that people who measured men only by their wealth were considered scum. I hope that day returns.

Anonymous said...

"mnuez said...

Antisemites of the world unite!

Anyhow, I'm off to a secret meeting. Continue patchkeing around here, we find it cute."

One does not have to have a dog-eared copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on his nightstand, or be the kind of person who when passing a jewish cemetary, simply can't suppress the urge to get out his spray paint can and his set of swastika stencils, to realize that jews, as a group, are influential in this country, and disproportionately so relative to their share of the population.

For example (source: Wikipedia)

* International Church of the Foursquare Gospel are represented by 1% of the Senate for 0.1% of the population (10.00x)

* Jews are represented by 14% of the Senate for 1.4% of the population. (10.00x)

* Episcopalians are represented by 7% of the Senate for 1.8% of the population. (5.55x)

* Latter-Day Saints are represented by 6% of the Senate for 1.4% of the population. (4.29x)

* Presbyterians are represented by 14% of the Senate for 2.8% of the population. (2.50x)

* Methodists are represented by 9% of the Senate for 7.2% of the population. (1.25x)

* Catholics are represented by 25% of the Senate for 25.9% of the population. (0.97x)

* Lutherans are represented by 3% of the Senate for 4.6% of the population. (0.65x)

* Baptists are represented by 7% of the Senate for 17.2% of the population. (0.40x)

To summarize, catholics and mainline protestant denominations account for about 60% of the population and about 65% of US senators. However, the fraction of the population that is christian is actually substantially larger, as many christians are unaffiliated with any mainline church.

Mormons (which I am not counting as christians - I know, Mormons would disagree, but every other christian would not) punch above their weight: 6 US senators, but only 1.4% of the population.

Jews punch far above their demographic weight: 14 Senators, but only 1.4% of population.

I don't know if this refers to observant jews - I suspect it does. Jewish is as much an ethnic affiliation as a religions one (perhaps even more so), so their share of the population on that score may be more nearly 2 or 3%.

Still it is noteworthy, is it not? Add to that the heavy representation of jews in entertainment, publishing, law, and finance, and that makes for a lot of influence.

Testing99 is correct that there are other groups which wield a great deal of influence in this country - the Saudis for example, who do so with money, and lately the Mexicans who do so both through government channels and activist groups. I am opposed to the actions of these groups - they have no business influencing the domestic politics of my country.

But he ignores the power exercised by jews in this country. You may say that this is to be expected. As a group, jews are smart, ambitious, and energetic. I would agree. They are. But is that supposed to be a matter of indifference to me? When I was in high-school, there were any number of guys - the football captain, the class president, etc. - who were more popular and better liked than me. That doesn't mean I that I would have been cool with them stealing my lunch money or convincing my parents to give my college fund to them.

Am I simply to shut my eyes to the fact that a single domestic ethnic group wields a large amount of power? Not all of them certainly, but a vocal, dedicated, wealthy, and well-connected subset of this particular group. And it increasingly seems to me that it does so in the furtherance of interests that are at odds with my interests. The hostility of certain predominantly jewish groups to traditional, christian european and american society is getting pretty hard to ignore. That's why, increasingly, people aren't ignoring it.

If you lump all of us who have these concerns into one bin - the bin labeled anti-semite - you may find that you have created a good deal of anti-semitism, where it previously did not exist.

Anonymous said...

"Danindc said...

I probably shouldn't say this because it will bum a lot of people out but Roissy is actually Gary Brecher aka the War Nerd....weird how things come full circle."

Really? That's great news. It means that there is one less loathesome nihlist in the world than I had thought.

Anonymous said...

If you look up per capita incomes for Hawaii, 3rd and 4th generation Chinese and Japanese are about on par with whites (Filipinos are much lower). Similarly, third generation HK Chinese in the UK are about on par with whites economically.

Furthermore, according to Canada's statistics bureau, 2nd generation Chinese-Canadian men also earn about on par with whites.

Nationwide stats show that Taiwan is about on par with the more developed European countries.

It is true that 3rd gen Chinese-Canadian families outearn white families, but that doesn't adjust for the higher cost of living or the family size. It's better to look at per capita income results for Hawaii (controls for geography and family size), which show no gap.

So I wouldn't say Chinese earn less, but I don't think they neccessarily earn more either.

Current Asian-American immigrants include a lot of doctors, engineers, scientists, phds etc. - people selected for math/verbal IQ. So not really a fair comparison between their kids and white kids. The law passage exam data mainly include the descendants of earlier, non-select waves of Japanese and Chinese (Cantonese) immigrants. So the white-Asian verbal gap for law passage rates are a better comparison than recent SAT scores. Though I would acknowledge there likely is no verbal gap between whites and the children of the current highly select AA immigrants.

Flynn analyzed IQ data for the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrants that arrived in the early 20th century. He found no overall IQ difference between Asians and whites, but found Asians were higher on the math IQ and lower on verbal. PISA results are interesting, but don't take into account that the Asian educational system is far more intense than the U.S. educational system and don't control for environment. For example, did you know that Asians educated in Asia outscore Asian-Americans substantially on the SAT?

That's why I'd rather take a verbal metric (law passage rates in the 1980s) that compare whites and the children of non-select Asian immigrants that all grew up under the same educational system.

Also, you might be interested to know that that there was no relationship between immigrant generation and law passage rate. So I don't think AA verbal IQs are depressed; and I would guess that high-scoring, high-income AA kids are probably the children of phds and tech/medical guys (especially Indian-American guys).

I think it might be fair to assume no overall Asian-white economic disparity, but slight differences in verbal and math IQ. That would be consistent with Flynn's earlier findings of overall Asian-white IQ parity, but differences in verbal and math ability.

Anonymous said...

I think the conclusion here is that US Jewish businessmen will have less money, but still have more than enough to influence US politics in ways to which the US population is basically amenable, eg supporting Israel vs the Arabs. Since the EU leadership are pro-Arab and anti-Israel, their love affair with Obama may not last long.

Anonymous said...

IQ testing is a crude science: "g factor" stands for "we don't know how to measure all aspects of intelligence."

There is obviously some unmeasurable aspect of IQ that whites have in abundance. Whatever it is, white IQ does not need to be defended when compared to any other race's IQ. White IQ is self-evident in the achievements of the white civilizations throughout history, whether that civilization is local, regional or continental. White IQ is evidenced in the small everyday actions and the great epochal actions.

The achievements of white civilization are stupendous on both an individual and group level. And yet lately it is commonly suggested that whites just don't have the brains to keep up with the real leaders of the human race, Asians and Jews.

The constant drumbeat of Asian and Jewish mental superiority compared to whites is ethno-war propaganda. I use the term "war" because the amount of raw intellectual dishonesty involved in that exercise points to an extreme level of malice.

On the other hand, Asians in Asia, and Jews in Israel, secure and comfortable in their national identity, are a lot more likely to scoff at the absurd notion that whites are intellectually inferior.

But here in "melting pot" America, at ground zero in the ethnic struggle for control of the most powerful country on earth, the obvious truths are being twisted and flushed down the memory hole. After all, truth is the first casualty of war.

mnuez said...

Mr. Anon!

Funny, I actually logged on here just now to comment on your comment regarding Roissy and it looks like you're the same fella who left the long comment on my comment!

Anyhow, i don't really have much to say to that comment (sorry) because I don't recall denying that Jews were inordinately represented among the movers and shakers of the world (or the country, or whatever). Precisely what that means and whether they actually tend to row in the same direction or whether they mostly cancel each other out by rowing in different directions...whatever. doesn't interest me very much. No one offered me an oar and no one's sharing the crop of fish with me so I don;t really care. I just think that the monomaniacal folk here who have pretty limited amount of harddrive space in their brains AND CHOOSE TO USE UP THAT SPACE on tribalistic data, end up with skewed perceptions of reality along with a number of mental and emotional diseases such as antisemitism, but whatever.

Like i said, I actually logged on to comment on this comment of yours (assuming there's just one Mr. Anon here):

"Danindc said...

I probably shouldn't say this because it will bum a lot of people out but Roissy is actually Gary Brecher aka the War Nerd....weird how things come full circle."

Really? That's great news. It means that there is one less loathesome nihlist in the world than I had thought.


I smiled! Really! That was clever and I thank you for it.

Regardless of my thoughts on the war nerd, Brecher, Roissy or Nihilists, I thought that was a clever response to danindc's (accurate or not) comment. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing I ever heard or anything, but I was pleased enough to log in (and to go through a long explanation of why I don't really have a comment on your post regarding my post ;-)

As for the anonymous of the "quotes". Yup, you figured me out, I was trying to make you believe that neoconservatives are a figment of your imagination. Look ma, no Jews! You're very clever. Nothing gets by you.

As to the second Anonymous who referenced me - your comment made me smile too, I liked the double meaning and in the event that you're the anonymous of the "quotes", I actually just did that! Insulting his intelligence, but for all I know... other than in the way I believed I was doing it. I hope you're not him though because I thought that his comment was stupid while yours was smart. Anyway, it's been fun guys. G'night.

mnuez

Anonymous said...

"mnuez said...

Precisely what that means and whether they actually tend to row in the same direction or whether they mostly cancel each other out by rowing in different directions...whatever."

My point about "what that means" is that it does mean something, and I have a right to have an opinion about it. The actions of a small number of people have a large impact on the country I call home. You may not care. That's your right. I do. That's mine.

"No one offered me an oar and no one's sharing the crop of fish with me so I don;t really care."

When I said that jews, as a group, wield inordinate influence, I did not mean all, or even most of them. This is of a kind with simple observations like: "Most men are not criminals, but most criminals are men." I don't believe that every son of Israel gets his marching orders from hebrew-central every morning. And you are right that anti-semitism has a heavily distorting and mind-bending effect, as does any obsessive bigotry. Anti-semitism seems to be the end-state of any form of bigotry. An Eskimo who deeply hates hottentots, will eventually come to believe that the hottentots are but tools of the international zionist conspiracy.

On other hand, there is such a thing as class interest and class conscienceness (as a marxist, I'm sure you're familiar with these). And I don't have to believe in ZOG to recognize that jews are a distinct group, and may have some common group interests, and that those interests are not mine.

Anonymous said...

You aren't the only one to think about this, Steve. There was a neat article in Jewcy not too long back about the effect that the collapse of the housing/complicated financial instruments that depend on housing bubble is going to have on the ultra-Orthodox in Israel.

Planetary Archon Mouse

Anonymous said...

Re: Flynn, Asian IQ, etc.

1) it's clearly a disadvantage on verbal tests to be tested in something other than your native language. That is why I am dubious of results from earlier studies -- unless they were very careful about this they would tend to find a depressed verbal IQ for any recent immigrant population. Please tell us *exactly* how Flynn did his study?

The advantage of PISA is that the tests are done in the takers' native languages. It gives the most systematic international comparisons of verbal ability. Your response to the fact that Asians score higher on the verbal is that it's all due to their educational system and not an innate effect. But you would take the +.5 SD math result and claim it *does* reflect a difference in innate ability. The PISA math gap corresponds very closely to what was reported in the past for math or spatial IQ. Why is the education effect not evident here?

The parsimonious answer is that early studies of Asian verbal IQ were affected by language issues that are no longer present in the PISA data. You, on the other hand, seem to be clinging to your prior beliefs.


2) when SAT verbal data (from LaGriffe, no less) show that modestly affluent Asians (>$70k in family income) outscore equally affluent whites, you say those Asians are selected. But affluent whites also have higher IQs than average whites (they are selected too)! And, the SAT does have a strong component of non-native Asians, which should depress the average score. It's very plausible that the *relative* Asian-White gap, which depends on family income, is partially reflecting the immigrant-native born language issue (more immigrants in the low-income population than in the modestly affluent one).

3) your point that Asians educated in Asia score higher on the SAT than Asians born here is again not very useful, since it is a highly selected minority of Asians from Asia that would ever take the SAT. A random sample of Asians educated in Asia would score horribly on the verbal SAT, since they are nowhere near fluent in English. But then a random sampling of white Americans tested in Japanese would appear to be morons. Japanese social scientists testing white people in Japan would obtain very misleading results if they weren't extremely careful.

That should caution us about interpreting early IQ studies. For example, in The G Factor (IIRC) Jensen describes studies done in San Francisco Chinatown, but there was little effort to control for language issues. One should remember that "IQ science" is poorly funded and studies are typically small. PISA, TIMMS etc. have far greater resources and are much more systematic.

4) re: bar passage rates, there are quite a lot of confounding factors. Were the Asians concentrated in states with more difficult bar exams? (e.g., CA?) Were the Asians concentrated in fields like patent law? (Former engineers switching fields?) etc., etc.

5) there is also adoptee data: Korean infants adopted into Belgian families score higher than the Belgian average on verbal IQ. Many of these infants suffered malnutrition (i.e., during the Korean war) before being adopted. How do you explain that?

I've yet to see any good data showing a white-Asian verbal ability gap. Yet I see it cited constantly by so called "HBD realists" who can't actually analyze social science data in a sophisticated way.

Anonymous said...

"[Murdoch's] son in law and father of two of his grandsons is a black African."

Really? That's VERY rare for super upperclass types. Got any details on the happy couple?


Here's one "detail": they're no longer married, and Murdoch's daughter subsequently married Sigmund Freud's great-grandson, Matthew Freud, founder and CEO of Freud Communications. They had a daughter named Charlotte, born in 2000, nine months before the weding.

http://www.wargs.com/other/murdoch.html

Anonymous said...

Due to the internet, it is now possible to raise money directly from small contributors in a way that was not possible 10 years ago. Just look at Obama. For the first time in a generation the environmentalists, Unions, and others actually matter.

There is also a qualitative difference. By being able to bypass large donors, or at least being able to diversify, politicians can now have a greater modicum of control.

I think this could be the missing link for Republicans on issues such as immigration where the Ag lobby and Chamber of Commerce types always hold sway. It will also allow the Democrats seperate from the neocons and DLC types that have disproportionate influence within the left.

Anonymous said...

From the comment thread here:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/06/east-asian-psychometric-variance.php

Note some people misunderstand "relatively weaker verbal abilities" to mean relative to whites, but in this study it mean relative to even higher spatial scores. Lynn is one of the HBD heroes around here.

The intelligence of Korean children adopted in Belgium

Marcel Frydman and Richard Lynn

Several studies have found that Oriental populations tend to have high mean IQs, strong visuo-spatial abilities but relatively weaker verbal abilities, as compared with Caucasian populations in the United States and Europe. The present paper reports data on these claims for 19 Korean infants adopted by families in Belgium. The children were tested with the WISC at a mean age of 10 yr. Their mean IQ was 118.7, the verbal IQ was 110.6 and the performance IQ 123.5. The results are interpreted as confirming those obtained from other Oriental populations.

This was actually discussed previously on GNXP:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/07...ites- and_17.php

Is there a Flynn correction that needs to be applied to these (rather high) numbers? The GNXP post has a remark to this effect and says it corrects the overall IQ to Belgian AVG+10 (110 or so?). So I would guess the adopted Koreans are about average in verbal and strongly superior in math relative to ethnic Belgians.

Anonymous said...

"the kind of guy in New York or Las Vegas who cares about Israel in the same way that rich guys in Oklahoma care about the Oklahoma Sooner football team"

Funniest line I read all weak.

I'll also second Anonymous' comments about the absurd NYT description of the "Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation"

AmericanGoy said...

"I don't have any data, but I'm sensing anecdotally that the kind of man who funds Israel hardliners is losing money faster than the average. Today, the New York Times writes in "Standing Accused - A Pillar of Finance and Charity" about Bernie Madoff, the money manager who just admitted to the FBI that he had been running a giant Ponzi scam and had lost maybe $50 billion (billion!) of his investors' money:

“There was a joke around that Bernie was actually the Jewish T-bill,” the executive went on, referring to the ultrasecure investment of treasury bills. “He was that safe.”"

Yes, you got it

My own personal hero, Mr. Weiss, has said the same thing.

Now, there will one ramification of all this:

Simply put, the American taxpayer will pick up the slack, while the media WILL keep silent on any foreign "humanitarian" aid to Israel.

Anonymous said...

I think we are severely discounting an important factor. American Zionists, however pro-Israel they may be, are still very liberal. This means that their support of Israel is not based on any kind of Jewish nationalism, but is rather based on the same multicultural/diversity model that plagues the USA.

In other words, Zionist supporters are some of Israel's worst enemies.

Look at the result of their influence since the Oslo Accords. Israel's security situation has become worse. Israel is less secure today then it was even 15 or 20 years ago. If trends continue, Israel will not survive the next 10 years.

What went wrong?

Contrary to what people think, America is not an ally of Israel. America is an ally of the Arab-Israeli Peace Process. America does not care about the Jewishness of the Jewish state. They care about Israel as the "shining example" of being the only democratic and prosperous country in the region. That is what the Zionists are building.

This is why, despite the rhetoric of Zionists, no effort is being made to remove the Palestinians and Arabs from Israeli territory. This is why there are no bases in Israel. It's why the percentage of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel is declining (currently at 37% and falling.)

With friends like these, Israel doe not need enemies.

Anonymous said...

1.) Flynn's earlier studies, cited in his book Beyond Achivement, looked at Asian-American children born and raised in America. So their native language would be English. I just don't see how language issues would matter for them. Nor do I see how language issues would matter for 3rd gen Japanese kids taking the law exams.

PISA does have that advantage of being a uniform test, but it has the disadvantage of being applied to populations with different educational systems. For example, the Finns seem to be about average on g (compared to other Euros), when you look at per capita and overseas immigrant performance, but are as strong as Asians on PISA. Are Finns then really that much smarter than the other whites because of high PISA scores? Probably not; they just have a more advantageous educational system.

The Koreans score around 0.5 SDs above the Japanese on the reading section in 2006. Are they that much better on verbal IQ? I doubt it.

Here are the average Asian scores for 2006 -

For PISA math: 538
For PISA reading: 515.6

More interesting to note is the variance between Asian nations on the math and verbal.

For PISA math: 26 (1/4 SD)
For PISA reading: 64 (2/3 SD)

Why so much more variance on reading? My guess is that PISA's reading section is probably quite a bit less g-loaded and that's why the highest and lowest north Asian countries are IQ 10 points apart. On math, it is g-loaded enough that the difference is ~4 points. So PISA may not be the best measure of raw verbal ability.


2) Asian immigration is highly selected. If you don't believe me, just look at Census bureau stats. Asian immigrants come from highly educated backgrounds (mainly technical/scientific) and got their degrees in nations with extremely competitive university systems. Those that come here with engineering or medical degrees are going to be higher income; those with no degrees and poor English skills will likely be in the working classes.

It is true that high income whites are likely selected too, but Asians are much more likely to come from technically employed, high IQ, families than whites. For example, the son of an engineering professor is likely going to be a lot smarter than the son of a mid level manager. Yet their family incomes might be roughly equivalent. Similarly, even when Asians and whites earn the same income, Asians are much more likely to be doing intellectually rigorous technical work.


3) I would assume that the Asians taking the SATs are Asians with U.S. passports. Those that come over as foreign students aren't subjected to the SAT, to my knowledge. So your typical Asian SAT taker might be a kid whose parents want him to go to school in Cali, but have the benefits of Seoul's educational system.

I don't know if these kids are elite or not. I suppose you might be right that not everybody in Korea or China can afford to send their kid to a English prep school. However, Korean-American and Chinese-American immigrants are mainly from the degreed ranks of society. So I don't know if it's neccessarily unfair to make the comparison.

I will note that some Asian-American parents like to send their kids to Asian cram schools ("juku") to improve their scholastic ability. I don't think this would be happening unless there was a feeling that Asian schools do produce superior students.

You're right that white immigrants in Japan would score really low on verbal IQ tests. However, they might catch up with 1-2 generations of living in Japan. If they didn't, then it might reflect something g-related.

You're right on PISA being more widespread and systematic, but how g-loaded is it? Especially on verbal?


4) I will study these factors and get back to you.

Here is a directory of patent lawyers in SF and California that may be of interest:

http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/firm/Patents/San-Francisco/California

5) Good point here. Can't argue. N=19 though.

I think in his article SFT 2, La Griffe claims to have found a 4-point white-Asian verbal IQ gap. He found that the 8-point verbal IQ gap in law passage results might be on the high side.

Anonymous said...

mnuez is always great for a laugh, with his predictable hostility, his stereotype personality and unclever sarcasm. when the original zionists were analyzing their tribe and finding out just how cramped and corrupt they'd become, they stared the facts in the face and determined to remedy them. not so with galut guys like this character.

o, the indignity to be a member of the second rate people the jews have craved to live among for millennia.

Anonymous said...

Re: PISA and all that

I agree that the PISA data do seem to reflect schooling. You get some big jumps as you cross national borders (e.g., Norway vs Sweden or Belgium vs France). But I think that would show up as much or more on the math side as on the reading side. In Seoul if you turn on the TV at 10 pm you can watch a teacher solve calculus problems on the educational channel!

It's very tough to say how selected US Asians are, in toto. In addition to the highly educated engineer type there are restaurant workers and such with little education (many of the latter type enter the country illegally, as you may have read). The latter type tend to live in Chinatowns or similar ethnic enclaves in LA, NYC, etc. If you test a small N sample of Asians the variance could be quite large.

Even Asians born here are likely to suffer a slight environmental handicap if their parents don't speak English and they tend to hang around with other non-English speaking kids (i.e., in Chinatown or other ethnic enclaves). It's the same story as with Hispanics.

The best way to answer this question would be adoption studies like the one by Lynn I cited. Given the limited number of these I don't see how anyone could claim with high confidence that they know what the gap is. Estimating it at 4 points exhibits a false sense of precision. What do you think the honest error estimate would be?

BTW, LaGriffe's larger argument is nutty since only 500 years ago Asia was much more advanced than Europe. Does he think that the "smart fraction" was very different 500 years ago? And, since the *actual* ability of workers in Asia is reflected in the PISA scores (i.e., is determined by both genes and education), the smart fraction gap he discusses is *exactly* backwards -- PISA reading scores are actually higher in Asia. Finally, LaGriffe should learn some economics -- institutions, culture and history all impact GDP per capita.

I shouldn't say this here, but LaGriffe only impresses distinctly middlebrow readers -- people who only vaguely grasp the normal distribution and think his high school-level math is impressive. I'm not surprised to hear he's an academic in a field in which people are not very smart.

Anonymous said...

The main point of Flynn's study was that even when Asians (Japanese and Chinese) scored about even with whites on overall IQ, they massively outdid them on academic metrics. So evidently there's a non-g mental trait that Asians seem to be very strong on.

You're right that a 1/4 of a SD gap on verbal is probably small enough that we might just be talking statistical noise. It's possible that Asians, for whatever reason, culturally tend to emphasize math over verbal and yet verbally are just as strong. If it came out that there is no verbal or math gap, it wouldn't surprise me. With high Asian reading PISA scores and adoption studies showing no verbal gap, it seems that a theoretical verbal gap may erasable given sufficient environmental conditions. In that case, any Asian verbal gap is purely environmental.

If you look at the Asian per capita GDPs and the Euro GDPs, there's about equal parity. So whatever cognitive differences that exist between whites and Asians, I don't see as terribly important. I don't doubt that Asian populations can produce enough high-verbal folks to sustain an advanced economy. My bigger concern would be with Latin America, Middle East, Central Asia, India, rural China, SE Asia, Pacific islands, etc.

I think the point of La Griffe's SFT 2 was to explain why Asians outdo whites on IQ, but perform about on par economically. La Griffe looked to the lower reported verbal IQs and gave us his theory. As Razib from GNXP said though, maybe La Griffe is overplaying his hand a bit. If it turns out math and verbal IQs are about on par when you control for environment and culture, then we might have our answer there. No math gap, no verbal gap, no IQ gap, no economic gap. Just differences in culture, interest, and education.

You know, you should e-mail La Griffe your objections and see if you can get his response posted on GNXP or iSteve. I think you make some good points, especially on PISA scores being quite high in some of Asia. I think he might respond too. I'd be interested to see what he says.

Anonymous said...

Steve -

You are doing excellent work covering the "third rail" in America's financial meltdown. No one is "blaming the Jews" 100% for what has happened. But it is clear that any such successful, high IQ group so naturally talented in finance is going to play a role.

America desperately needs a journalist to connect the dots.

Steve and readers, please consider these 4 ancedotes..

1) How is it possible that Larry Summers is being REAPPOINTED by Obama to play a government role in economic oversight? When Summers himself played a role in policies to give blacks and Hispanics easier mortgages - a key cause of the domino ripple effect that caused the meltdown?

Am I missing something here?

2) In the Fall of 2008, as the Baby Boomers turn 60, and look to cash out of the 401K's they dutifully plowed their earnings into for years, the stock market collapses.

Indeed, the Boomers became known, until 10/08, as the "wealthiest generation in history." Further, their 401K bonanza would be the "biggest wealth transfer in history" to their own children, mainly Generation Y.

Along came October 2008. The 401K turned out to be quite a gamble at the roulette wheel. A generation was reduced, supine, financially, rather quickly and efficiently. As were their children, the wealth transferees.

Quite interesting timing.

3) What is accomplished by weakening millions of citizens financially, and nationalizing vast new areas of American business? Does this serve anyone's interests? Whom?


4) Is it possible there are men in America who are smart enough to be conversant and sympathetic with Leo Strauss' lofty ideas about democracy vs. "what is good for the Jews" AND know the grand strategy as to how to accomplish this on the ground in reality - what dominos need to fall to cause X... which causes Y... which will result in Z down the road...

Like, oh, I don't know, Larry Summers..

Steve Sailer said...

Larry ain't that smart, as his Harvard career shows.

Nobody's that smart. Everybody drank their own Kool-Aid.

When it's all added up, I suspect (based on admittedly flimsy anecdotal evidence) that the more ethnocentric Jews will, on average, be among the bigger losers in the crash. My vague impression is that they tend to be more aggressive risk-takers, which is great for the net worth during a bull market and ungreat during a bear market.

Anonymous said...

Anon said: Israel is the most reliable American ally in the region and provides the US with important intelligence, technology, etc.

Testing99 is that you?

Israel is America's strongest ally against countries that are only America's enemies because America is Israel's ally.

There's a Gordion knot for you - fancy cutting it?

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...

Anon said: Israel is the most reliable American ally in the region and provides the US with important intelligence, technology, etc."

Israel has on occasion also provided our adversaries with intelligence and technology. They've also spied on us (i.e., Jonathan Pollard).

Anonymous said...

Interestingly there is a similar divide in Vietnam. The south is known for producing good businessmen while the north is a bit hopeless in trade.

Anonymous said...

South Vietnam was settled by Cantonese-speaking traders. The commercial capital Saigon was primarily a Cantonese-dominated city.

Anonymous said...

Comment from one Madoff investor: "We thought he was cheating. We just didn't think he was cheating us."