The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 22-A Place for everyone

How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault, and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well they do in life? The answer in the twentieth century was that government should create the condition of equality that society has neglected, or been unable to produce on its own. The assumption that egalitarianism is the proper ideal, however difficult to achieve in practice, changed contemporary political theory. Socialism, communism, social democracy and America's welfare state have been ways liberal thought has attempted to move toward the egalitarian ideal. During these attempts to level the playing field, the phrase social justice has become virtually synonymous with economic and social equality. Until now, the political movements have focused on the societal evils that are thought to produce inequality. Human beings, as the egalitarian theory teaches, are potentially pretty much the same except, of course, for the inequalities induced by society. These same theoreticians have rejected, out of hand, voluminous amounts of evidence showing that individual differences, most importantly, in cognitive ability, are to blame for the inequality in outcome that have plagued American life for the last 100 or more years. If we accept the fact that all people are not born equal, what can be done to make the best of the cards that we, as a nation, have been dealt? All of the great religious traditions define a place for everyone, if not on earth then in heaven. Unfortunately, with the passing of time, the have-nots and their political advocates have become increasingly unwilling to wait for their promised rewards in heaven; they want them now and will settle for nothing less than full equality of outcome regardless of their mental limitations or, for that matter, anything else! For Confucius, society was like a family with a ruling father, obedient sons, devoted husbands and faithful wives, benign masters and loyal servants. People were defined by their place, whether in the family or the community (The reader can see where the authors are going here, a place for everybody). So too for the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers: place was everything. The ancients accepted the basic premise that people differ fundamentally and searched for ways they could contently serve the community, the monarch, the tyrant or the gods, rather than themselves. In our era, political philosophers have argued instead about rights. In the 1600s Thomas Hobbes wrote about a principle whereby all people, not just the rich and well born, might have equal rights to liberty. Hobbes acknowledged that people differ, but not so much that they may justifiably be deprived of liberty in differing amounts. In the modern view that Hobbes helped shape, individuals accept constraints on their own behavior in exchange for ridding themselves of the dangers associated with living in total freedom, hence perfect anarchy. These constraints on personal freedom constitute lawful government. Later, John Locke conceived of people in a state of equality in which no one had no more power and jurisdiction than another and thought to preserve that condition in actual societies through a strictly limited government a theory that the American Founders brought into reality. For modern Americans, if aware of Locke at all, he is identified with the idea of man as tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience writes or, as most liberals believe, a blank slate to be written upon by the environment. Most contemporary libertarians are hostile to the possibility of genetic differences in intelligence because of their conviction that equal rights can only apply if, in fact, people at birth are tabulae rasae, blank slates. Liberals who follow this train of thought conveniently forget that Locke also maintained that that there was a greater distance between some men than there was between men and some beasts. Locke went on to argue that men were equal in rights though they be unequal in everything else. By human rights Locke meant that all human beings had the right not to have certain things done to them by the state or other human beings, not the right to anything, except freedom of action. Today, the original concept of equal rights is said to be meaningless cant, outmoded as the horse and buggy; to take equal rights seriously, it is thought, requires enforcing equal outcomes. This is not what the framers had in mind when they wrote the constitution. Jefferson saw the consequences of inequalities of ability radiating throughout the institutions of society. The main purpose of education, he believed, was to prepare the natural aristocracy to govern. The "best geniuses", he said should be "raked from the rubbish annually" by competitive grading and examinations, sent on to the next educational stage, and finally called to public life. For Madison, the "great republican principle" was that common people would have the good sense and information necessary to choose "men of virtue and wisdom" to govern them. For Jefferson and Madison, political equality was both right and workable. They would have been amazed by the modern notion that humans are equal in any other sense. (As am I) Indeed we live in an upside down world. The idea of forbidding people to discriminate by race mutated into the idea of compelling everyone to produce, at any cost, equal outcomes based on race. In personal life the idea of forbidding people from interfering with members of other groups as they go about their lives has been extended to the idea of compelling people "to treat them the same". It is an indication of how far things have gone that many people cannot see the distinction between "not interfering" and "treating the same." The authors now discuss the policy implications of the material covered in the first 535 pages of The Bell Curve. The broadest goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find and feel that they have found a "valued place" for themselves. You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact that you would be missed means that you were valued. The authors suggest that policy decisions should be based, at least in part, on whether they aid or obstruct the goal of creating valued places for all members of society. In this respect, they emphasize the point that most people have sufficient intelligence to get on with life and make a valued place for themselves in American society. The problem is to make it possible for those that aren't very smart to find a valued place in an environment that values, with a few obvious exceptions, intelligence over everything else. Fromits high point in 1973, the medium income of non-farm labor had fallen 36 percent by 1990, a strong back wasn't worth near as much as it had been in the past. But wages and economic factors are not the only reason persons with low cognitive ability are finding it increasingly difficult to find a valued place in society. Communities are rich and vital places to the extent that they engage their members in the stuff of life- birth, death, raising children making a living, playing of the soft ball team etc. As communities enlarged functions like the local volunteer fire department, which provided a place of value for many men, were replaced by paid members of large professional fire departments. With the passage of time, Congress and presidents have removed more and more functions from the neighborhoods deeming them too difficult for voluntary organizations to perform. As a result, we have neighborhoods that are merely localities, not groups of people tending to their communal affairs and providing valued places while doing so. Places where you would be missed if you were gone. So, the first policy change the authors suggest is to restore, whenever possible, a wide range of social functions that are now performed by the federal and state governments to the neighborhoods where people work and live. The idea being to make people feel better about themselves by working to improve the community. Next, they would simplify the rules. The authors contend that the United States is run by rules that only the cognitive elite can understand and make life more difficult for everyone else. The income tax code is one example of the unnecessary complexity that makes life more difficult than it need be. Credentialing is a closely related problem. Now days, you must have a license to do just about anything. For practical purposes, this means jumping through bureaucratic hoops that have little to do with one's ability to do the job. The authors would like to simplify life for everyone, especially those with low cognitive ability, by stripping away the nonsense. For example, by replacing the present multi-page income tax form with a simple one or two page document that can be completed by almost anyone in a few minutes. The authors go on to argue that we should make it easier for everyone to live a virtuous life. With respect to crime, they believe that the rules for criminality should be simple and the consequences of breaking the rules should be equally simple. Punishment should follow arrest quickly, within a few days or weeks. At present, at every level, it has become fashionable to point out the complexities of moral decisions, and all the ways things that might seem "wrong" at first glance, are really "right," or at least excusable, when properly analyzed. The authors argue that it is much easier for people with limited intelligence to lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of " Thou shall not steal" than it is to them to be law abiding citizens in a society that is run on the basis of "Thou shalt not steel unless there is a really good reason to do so." Moving on to marriage, the authors argue that it has become increasingly difficult for a person with low IQ to figure out why marriage is a good thing, and once in a marriage even more difficult to figure out why one should stick with it through bad times. The sexual revolution is the most obvious culprit. One no longer has to marry a lady to sleep with her. This is particularly important because marriage constituted one of the richest of all "valued places." Once the law said, " Well, in a legal sense, living together is the same as being married" we as a society were in deep trouble. The authors policy position is to return marriage to its formally unique status. In particular, they urge that marriage once again becomes the sole legal institution through which rights and responsibilities regarding children are exercised. Finally, the authors deal with income. Ever since most people quit believing that a person's income on earth reflected God's judgment of his worth, it has been argued that income distributions were inherently unfair. Today, many believe that most wealthy people do not deserve their wealth nor the poor their poverty. That being the case, it is deemed appropriate for societies to take from the rich and give to the poor. The data in this book support the argument for supplementing the incomes of the poor, without giving any new guidance for how to do it. The authors believe that people working full time should not be so poor that they cannot have a decent standard of living, even if the kinds of work they do are not highly valued in the marketplace. This is not a realistic goal for many poor countries- but it is appropriate for rich countries (is America still rich?) to try to do so. How is this to be done? Any government supplement of wages produces negative effects of many kinds. Such defects are not the result of bad policy but are inherent. The lease damaging strategies are the simplest ones, which do not oversee the labor market or the behavior of low income people. Rather, they should be designed to augment the income of low skilled workers to a minimum floor. The earned income tax credit seems to be a generally good way to accomplish this goal, albeit with the unavoidable drawbacks of any income supplement. Irrespective of the methodology, some form income redistribution is here to stay. The question is how to redistribute the nation's wealth in ways that increase the chances for people at the bottom of society to take control of their lives, to be engaged meaningful in their communities and to find a "valued place" the themselves in an increasingly complex world. The authors end this final chapter of The Bell Curve by addressing the most pressing problem facing twenty-first century America, Americans, on average are becoming dumber with each passing day. (Finally, after 549 pages, they acknowledge the obvious), the most efficient way to raise the nation's IQ, and lessen its social problems, is for smarter women to have higher birth rates than duller women. The authors maintain that we already have policies that socially engineer who has babies, unfortunately they are encouraging the wrong women. They urge that policies which encourage welfare moms to have babies be ended! They recommend that we make better use of the variety of birth control options that are safe, increasingly flexible and inexpensive. Finally, they recommend that immigration laws be rewritten to reflect America's interests. There should be a shift from nepotistic rules which encourage reunification of families to policies that encourage and facilitate the immigration of bright educated people from foreign countries who have the tools to prosper in America and, in the long run, increase the IQ of its gene pool. Comment: I began this book review in January of 2015, almost a year ago. Was it worth the effort? Probably not, but as I sat here at the computer last January, with the nation crumbling around me, I felt compelled to do something to, perhaps, stem the tide. What better than to make an admittedly feeble attempt to revitalize one of the most important books every written. If even a handful of young people are informed and enlighten by the material reviewed, it will have been worth the effort. If they just realize that we are not all born equal, it will be enough. This last chapter of The Bell Curve is by far, the weakest in the book. I am not convinced that the solutions suggested by Herrnstein and Murray, such as simplifying the rules we live by; encouraging low IQ women to take birth control pills; or tweaking the immigration laws will be sufficient to change the self-destructive course our nation is on. Maybe nothing can, but in my first blog of the New Year, I will suggest a few simple steps we can take to right our floundering ship of state. In the mean time, I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

The Last Days OF Saint Nicholas

"I 'm definitely getting to old for this," Nicholas said to his best friend and lead reindeer Rudolf. "How long have we been playing Santa Claus do you think?" "I don't know that I can rightly recall," replied Rudolf, "but it must be close to 300 years, give or take a decade or two." Nicholas' sainted father, the first Santa Claus, had learned to communicate with reindeer years before Nicholas was born. His father had taught Nicholas the reindeer language shortly before he was killed by an errant meteorite that hit his sleigh while he and his reindeer were making their rounds on that fateful Christmas eve night in the year 1842. Nicholas had inherited his father's job and, with the help of his faithful reindeer, had been navigating through the cold Christmas Eve nights ever since. With the exception of a few times when the weather was so bad that mail could not be delivered to the north pole, Nicholas and his reindeer had never failed to deliver the books, toys and dolls that the good little boys and girls of the world had asked for. Nicholas also made sure that never ran out of lumps of coal for the children who had not been so good. But Nicholas was getting old and Rudolph was also beginning to feel the ravishes of age."You know Rudolph," Nicholas said, " my eye sight isn't what it used to be and I'm having a fair amount of difficulty navigating by the stars anymore." "I'm a little afraid that we might not be able to find our way home this year." "I'm not feeling so great myself," replied Rudolph, "My poor old nose isn't near a bright as it used to be and the arthritis in my right rear hoof won't let me fly nearly as fast as I could when you first recruited me to lead your sleigh." "In truth, I just don't know how much longer I can go on." "I know Vixen and Prancer aren't in all that great shape either." " Vixen was saying just the other day, when the elves were packing the toys in the back of the sleigh, that his arthritis was so bad that he could barely walk." "Our Prancer can't exercise anymore and has gained so much weight during the off season that it will be difficult for him to get in his harness, let alone fly any great distance." "Obviously, it's time to call it quits," Nicholas said, "in fact, it's long past time that we retired." "Rudolph looked sadly into his old friends eyes, placed both a front hoofs on his shoulder and began to cry as he shook his stately antlered head in agreement." It was only a month before Christmas and that left Nicholas very little time. He had to make certain that those presents were delivered on Christmas Eve night, just as they had been for almost three centuries. Nicholas called his friend billionaire Bill Gates and asked for help. "Bill," he said, "we're in big trouble up here at the North Pole." "My reindeer and I are too old and infirm to make the Christmas run this year." "An awful lot of children are going to be very disappointed if we don't deliver their Christmas presents on time. "I've made a tentative deal with UPS." "They have agreed to deliver the presents on Christmas Eve night as has always been the case." "Our friend Scott Davis of UPS has even agreed to dress their drivers up in Santa Clause suits if we are willing to pay a little extra for the deliveries." "Unfortunately, Mrs. Nicholas and I do not have the resources to finance an operation of this size, could you help?" "Of course, I can," Mr. Gates Replied without hesitation. "Look Nicholas, I'm a little tied up right at the moment." "Just have Scott send me the bill, If he wants to he can call me." So it came to be. The Christmas presents were delivered on time and no one was the wiser. Knowing the end was near, Nicholas sold his toy factory at the North Pole, as well as his other possessions including the sleigh, and moved with Mrs. Claus to their secret island in the Caribbean. He and his beloved reindeer spent their last days swimming in the warm ocean water and building sand castles with their new monkey friends on the beautiful black sand beaches of the island's idyllic shore.

The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 21-The way We Are Headed

In this penultimate chapter the authors speculate about the impact of cognitive stratification on American life and government. They predict that the cognitive elite will be increasingly isolated; that the mentally gifted will be increasingly affluent; and that the quality of life for the people at the bottom of the cognitive ability distribution will continue to deteriorate. Unchecked, they predict, these trends will lead America towards something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite more firmly anchored at the top with the rules of society structured so that it is harder and harder for the haves to lose and the have-nots to succeed. American civil society will also continue to deteriorate as this scenario plays out, more crime, more illegitimacy and more poverty. Like any apocalyptic vision, this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so. On the other hand, there is a great deal to be pessimistic about. To recapitulate, at the beginning of the last century, the great majority of really smart people were not college educated, often they had not even gone to high school. In fact, about 50 percent of them kept house, reared children and were often leaders in their religious and social communities. The really smart people lived next door to those who were not as bright. This is not to say that communities were not stratified by wealth, religion, class or ethnic background but they were not stratified by cognitive ability as is the case now. The upshot is that the scattered brightness of the early twentieth century has congregated, forming a new class that lives together, plays together and, most importantly, marries each other. Cognitive ability is the predominate deciding factor in our twenty-first century world; neither social background, ethnicity or money will bar the way, but low IQ will. Billions, if not trillions, have been spent trying to move the cognitive challenged people of the ghettos to the affluent communities of the intellectually elite in the suburbs, all to no avail. The invisible intellectual migration of the last 125 years has done more than allow the intellectually able succeed if every facet of life, it has also segregated and socialized them. Members of the cognitive elite are likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools, lived in similar neighborhoods, gone to the same kinds of theaters and restaurants, read the same magazines and newspapers and even drove the same makes of cars. All of these changes has resulted in Americans being more divided than ever before. The intellectual have-nots of society are finding it more difficult to survive in today's America with each passing day. The changing politics in our country has made the struggles of the millions of unemployed, homeless and impoverished even more difficult. For most of the twentieth century, intellectuals and the affluent were antagonists. Traditionally, intellectuals have been identified with the economic left, while the affluent have been identified with big business and cultural conservatism. These diverse categories have become muddled in recent years, as faculties at top universities put together higher salaries, lucrative consulting fees and royalties that garner them six-figure incomes. As the very bright who populate academia have become more uniformly affluent the interests of the affluent and the cognitive elite have begun to blend, and at this At this point, there is not a dimes worth of difference between them. At first glance, the high-IQ Stanford professor with a bestselling book may have little in common to the person who makes a similar income from his chain of shoe stores; however, when considering future alliances and social trends it seems likely that their increasing commonalities, including the political policies they support, are becoming increasingly similar as the intellectually elite become more affluent. The Stanford professor's best-selling book may be a diatribe against the unjust criminal justice system, but that doesn't mean that he will vote with his feet and leave his safe neighborhood in Palo Alto and move his family to Oakland, Richmond, or even San Jose. Meanwhile, the man with the chain of shoe stores may be politically to the right of the Stanford professor, but he also is looking for the same safe neighborhood and the same good schools for his children. Irrespective of their diverse occupations, the shoe store owner and the professor are likely to be quite comfortable with the idea that government is there to be used to serve their joint interests. The constitutional restraints on how a faction may use government to further its ends has loosened and an unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich are taking advantage of this new latitude to the determent of the less well off and the mentally challenged. The authors fear for the underclass in the new America which is dominated by intellectual elite and the rich and famous. They worry that we are developing a new type of conservatism along Latin American lines where to be conservative means doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of those living in the slums below. They wrote, in the mid 1900s, that the new coalition was already afraid of the underclass and was going to have a lot more to fear in the near future. The near continual demonstrations (riots) in our inner cities, such as the black lives matter demonstrations, attest to the accuracy of their predictions. They go on to discuss the implications of cognitive stratification for the underclass, beginning with the fate of children. The greatest problems afflict children unlucky enough to be born and reared by unmarried mothers who are below average in intelligence, about 20 percent of children currently being born. They tend to have low cognitive ability themselves and suffer disproportionately from behavioral problems and are more likely to end up in prison. T

hey are less likely to marry and will produce large proportions of illegitimate children of low intelligence. Increasing numbers of children are born into the deplorable conditions discussed in chapter 15 that the government is almost helpless to influence. What happens to the child of low intelligence who survives childhood and reaches adulthood trying his best to be a productive citizen? There will be jobs for low skill labor but the wage for these jobs will be low. Attempts to artificially increase the wage for low skill labor, by raising the minimal wage for example, may backfire by making alternatives to human labor more affordable and, in some cases by making low skill jobs disappear altogether as has been the case for machines that lay track for railroads. All the fine rhetoric about "investing in human capital" to "make America competitive in the twenty-first century" is unlikely to overturn this reality: because most low IQ people are incapable of learning the skills that will make them competitive in today's high tech world. The dry tender for the formation of an underclass is a large number of births to single women of low intelligence in a concentrated spatial area. There is nothing about being white that will keep them from joining the emerging underclass of the twenty-first century. The proportion of white illegitimate births (including Latinos) reached 22 percent in 1991. In Britain, where the illegitimacy rate has historically been lower than in the United States, 32 percent of all births in 1992 were illegitimate, with no signs of slowing down. The proportion in low income communities is perhaps twice that of the general population. In America, 43 percent of all births to impoverished women were illegitimate. White illegitimacy is overwhelmingly a lower-class phenomenon and it is largely responsible for the emergence of our burgeoning underclass. An underclass needs a critical mass, At what point is that critical mass reached? How much illegitimacy can a community tolerate? At this point no one knows, but historical fact is that the trend lines on black crime, black dropout from the labor force and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward when the overall black illegitimacy ratio passed 25 percent and the rate in low-income black communities moved above 50 percent. But we need not rely on the black analogy to understand the emergence of a white underclass. Seventy-five percent of all white illegitimate births are to women with below average IQs and 45 percent are to women with IQS under 90. These women are poorly equipped for the labor market, often poorly equipped to be mothers and there is no reason to thinks that the outcomes of their intellectually challenged children will fare any better than has been the case for black children raised under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, as the illegitimacy rate continues to grow, the dynamics in the public housing market (where they will continue to be welcome) and the private housing market ( where they will not) will foster increasing concentrations of whites with high unemployment, high crime, high illegitimacy and low cognitive ability, creating communities that look very much like the inner-city neighborhoods that people now tend to associate with minorities. The authors now discuss the coming custodial state. When a society reaches a certain overall level of affluence, the haves begin to feel guilty about the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state, the attempt to raise the poor and needy out of their plight. What happens when those that are willing to spend their money to end poverty lose faith that their remedial social programs will work? The authors believe that the affluent cognitive elite will then implement an even more expansive welfare state for the underclass that will provide for their basis needs but also keep them out from underfoot. In other words, the economic and intellectual segregation we are now experiencing will become even more pronounced. Ultimately the affluent cognitive elite will conclude that the underclass are in that position, through no fault of their own, but because of inherent short coming about which little or nothing can be done. At that point, the ruling class will become more accepting of the dysfunctional behavior of the underclass and more willing to overlook their self destructive behavior (drug addiction, criminality, unavailability for work, child abuse and family disorganization including, most importantly, their propensity for illegitimacy. Ultimately, it will be agreed that the underclass cannot be trusted with money so public policy will be in the form of greater benefits in the form of services rather than cash. These benefits and services will come with new restrictions which will have the following consequences. Child rearing in the inner cities will become solely the responsibility of the state. Inner city day care centers and elementary schools will provide not only education, medical care and nutrition but training in hygiene, sexual socialization, work training and the other functions that their parents are deemed incapable of providing. The homeless will vanish. The cognitive elite will join the broad public sentiment and reassert control over public places. People with mental problems, that now constitute a high proportion of the homeless will be required to reside in shelters, more elaborately equipped and staffed than the shelters of today, but nonetheless institutions from which it will be difficult for them to escape. The underclass will become even more concentrated spatially than they are today. The expanded network of day care centers, homeless shelters, public housing and other services will always be located in the poorest parts of the inner cities, which means that anyone who wants access to them will have to live there. Political support for such measures as relocation of people from the inner cities to the suburbs, which has never been strong to begin with, will wither altogether. The underclass will continue to grow. During the 1980s, scholars found evidence that the size of the underclass was no longer expanding. But even as they wrote, the welfare rolls, which had moved within a narrow range since the late 1970s, began to surge again. the authors predict that the government will try yet another round of the customary social programs, sex education, job training, parental training, and the like, and they will be as ineffective this round as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, many low-income parents who try to do all that is possible to assure that their children will escape poverty will find it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to do so. They will find it impossible to propagate their norms when surrounded by a local culture in which illegitimacy, welfare, crime and drugs are common place and the norm rather than the exception. In each succeeding generation a higher proportion of the working class will become members of the underclass, and fewer of their children will be able to escape their impoverished surroundings. Social budgets and measures of social control will become increasingly more centralize. The costs for the mandated social programs to "fix the problem" will be enormous. As the states become overwhelmed the costs will be shifted to the federal budget. The mounting costs, and increasing national debt, also will generate intense political pressure on Washington to do something. Unable to bring itself to do away with the welfare edifice, for by that time it will be assumed that social chaos will follow any significant cutback in the numerous welfare programs, the government will be left with no choice but to engineer behavior through new programs and regulations. These policies are likely to become even more authoritarian than they are now and rely increasingly on custodial care. Finally, the authors predict that racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it actually is thinking about race will reach something close to a breaking point. When this break comes, there most likely will be an overreaction in the opposite direction and racism will become more pronounced than it was before the civil rights movement. The authors do not know how likely this is to happen, but they believe it is a distinct possibility. If it were to happen, all of the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant and more vicious than anyone can now imagine. In short, the custodial state Herrnstein and Murray have in mind is a high-tech and more lavish version of an Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business as usual. However, "going about its business as usual" in the old sense will not be possible. It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its founding principles once it is accepted that a significant part of the population become wards of the state. The authors close this chapter with this admonishment. If we wish to avoid the possibility of a nation run by the haves with little or nothing left over for the have-nots, we cannot count on the natural course of events to make things come out right. Now is the time (mid 1990s, when this book was written) to think long and hard on how we can make good on the American' promise of an equal opportunity for everyone to live a satisfying life, in a society in which the cognitive elite dominate and those of low cognitive ability are increasingly handicapped. Is this even possible? ( My though, not the authors). Comment: In this disquieting chapter, Herrnstein and Murray speculate on what is likely to be the outcome in a society that is increasingly segregated by intellectual factors that are beyond human control. They are correct in their assertion that little can be done to increase the IQ of a person once he is born. In this respect, the failures of school busing, affirmative action and, most recently, head start attest to the futility of our attempts to alter the effects of the genetic code we are all born with. Yes, unfair as it may be, intelligence is an inherited trait, similar to body size and skin color, and there is little that can be done to alter it by manipulating environmental factors after birth. It has been twenty years since The Bell Curve was published. During these two decades not much has changed. The social engineers have not given up on their attempts to equalize outcomes by altering the environment of the underclass, whether it be white , black or Latino. Until such time as our political leaders wake up to the fact that little can be done to change outcomes simply by throwing money at the problems facing the emerging underclass, nothing is likely to change. At this point, the liberal elite have not yet "thrown in the towel" on their ineffective attempts to equalize outcomes by redistributing the wealth of the haves to the have-nots. Until they do, we will not know if Herrnstein and Murray's version of an custodial state (where the intellectually affluent elite provide for every need of an increasingly feeble and dependent underclass) will materialize.

Killing Yellow Jackets (Muslims)

Killing Yellow Jackets (Muslims) When I was growing up in rural Southern Humboldt County in the late 1930s and 1940s, yellow Jackets were a problem in the summer. Fortunately, my father knew how to get rid of them. I can't recall him ever trying to kill a yellow jacket white it was in flight and I'm quite sure he never considered buying some kind of yellow jacket trap. No Dad's method of killing yellow jackets was simple, inexpensive and fool proof. Not a single one in the hive ever escaped to plague our family again.

My job was to find the yellow jackets' nest. This was relatively easy to do, I simply placed a piece of meat on the ground and waited for the insects to find it, which they did in 30 minutes or so. At this point, it was simply a matter following the winged creatures back to their nest. I would run after one of them until I lost sight of it, then wait for another one to fly by and follow it as far as possible. The yellow Jackets always took the same flight path to their nest so it was easy to follow them. At that point my job was done. Dad would wait until it was dark because all of the yellow jackets return to their nest at dusk. I led Dad to the entrance of the nest, invariably a hole in the ground. He pored some gasoline into the hole and lit a match, that was it. Our yellow jacket problems for that summer were over. I believe we should be using Dad's yellow jacket abatement program to kill the radical Muslims who are slaughtering innocent Christians, and other non-Muslims, throughout the Western world. I'm sure there are some good Muslims sprinkled in with the terrorists, maybe even more good than bad, but no matter how much money we spend on projects aimed at distinguishing between the two we come up short and more innocents are slaughtered. The yellow jacket extermination policies employed by my Dad cannot be used to eliminate home grown Muslim Terrorism in the United States, at least until we learn how to distinguish between the good and the bad Muslim. However, we are shown nightly on the evening news exactly where and how much land ISIS and their related Muslim cohorts control in places like Syria and Iraq. At present our feckless president, and the group of moronic females who advise him (Susan Rice comes immediately to mind), seem willing to fight terrorism with both hands tied behind our backs. A drone strike here and there, bombing raids that return 60 percent of the time without dropping a single boom, and endless useless meetings with weak European leaders who are as clueless as our hopeless Obama. The message is loud and clear we can't accomplish anything of significance by killing yellow jacks or Muslim terrorists one at a time. Rather, we have to wipe out their nests and we should be doing this from 40,000 feet without a single boot on the ground. Yes, women and children will be among the casualties, that's the way it is in times of war, always has been and always will be! As to the home front, the president should be doing whatever is necessary to infiltrate every single Mosque in America with agents whose sole purpose is to keep track of what is going on in these so called religious centers. This is the only way we will be able to stop the slaughter of innocents by deranged mad men, and women, of the third world.

The mysteries Of Worm Castings Revealed

At first glance, earthworm casting would seem to be no big deal, after all the castings of worms have a NPK value, at most, of only 1-1-1. Hardly earthshaking, when you consider that most chemical fertilizers have NPK values of 8-8-8 or higher.

But there is much more to the story than at first meets the eye. It just so happens that fertilizers that have low NPK values are ideal for most vegetables and other types of plant life. What plants require is a constant source of nutrients, not intermittent high doses of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that may burn them. Worm castings are so effective an organic fertilizer because they release slowly, over a long period of time, the small amounts of the nutrients so essential for optimal plant growth. Indeed, earthworm castings are the ideal slow release organic fertilizer. Here's how it happens? The microorganisms that live in the earthworms gut, and are secreted in their castings, are the key to this incomparable organic food source for plant life. For example, ammonium is a common ingredient of most soils but it cannot be absorbed by plants until it is broken down to nitrates by the bacteria. These microorganisms, for the most part, originate in the gut of the composting earthworm and were secreted in their castings. Thus, as long as the soil contains the beneficial bacteria which originated in the worm's gut, the plants and vegetables in your garden will have a constant source of nitrogen for many months. This process will go on indefinitely if the soil contains a sufficient number of earthworms since they will continually be adding fresh castings to the soil. In this respect, a single teaspoon of worm castings will feed a plant in a six inch pot for two months, but if a sufficient number of earthworms are also present in the pot the plant will be fed indefinitely. This assumes, of course, that there also are enough organic material in the pot to feed the earthworms. But that's only part of the story. Earthworm casting contain all of the minerals essential for plant growth including potassium, copper, zinc, phosphate, manganese, magnesium and several others that I can't think of at the moment. In any case, earthworm castings contain all of the trace elements required for healthy plant growth. Chemical fertilizers are, for the most part, devoid of these essential trace elements. Worm castings also contain powerful growth hormones including, most importantly, the humic acids (not to be confused with the humus found in regular compost which is not a growth hormone). These hormones are essential for optimal plant growth. However, it is important to realize that an excess of worm castings can actually stunt plant growth. This does not pose a problem in the garden but the percentage of castings in potting soils should not exceed 25 percent since higher concentrations of castings will impede plant growth. Earthworm castings also stimulate the germination of seeds. The next time you are starting plants from seeds try this simple experiment. Divide your seed trays (plastic cells) in two. In one section plant the seeds in a standard organic mixture like peat moss and vermiculite. In the second add 20 to 30 percent earthworm castings to the mixture. I think you will be amazed at how much better the seedlings grow in the mixture containing worm castings. Finally, worm castings inhibit plant diseases like root rot and if the castings are used to make worm tea, which is sprayed on the plants leaves, it inhibits the infestations of pests like powdery mildew and aphids. This is so, because the microorganisms in worm tea attach to the binding sights on the plant's leaves leaving no place for the pests to affix to them. Yep, earthworm castings are the answer to the maiden's prayer, especially if she is a gardener. Happy gardening!

Next Question, What Can Earthworms Eat?

The short answer is anything that was once alive. However, earthworms do not have teeth; thus, their food must be reasonably soft, or fine like sand, so that they can suck it into their mouths to ingest it. For example, earthworms cannot consume a fresh carrot but will readily devoured a rotten one. I should point out that composting earthworm have no interest in the carrot itself; rather, they are actually eating the microorganisms (bacteria and fungi) that cover the food they eat. These tiny organisms thrive and multiply in the worms intestinal tract and are excreted in their castings.

Having said this, there are a few, a very few, organic materials that should not be fed to composting earthworms. Red Wigglers do not like scented words like cedar, eucalyptus or redwood, or their sawdust. They cannot tolerate animal fat or the oil from a frying pan and these substances should be separated from the kitchen scraps you feed to your composting earthworms. Almost anything else from your kitchen table may be deposited in the wormery without fear of harming the worms. You may have heard or read that meat products should not be fed to earthworms. To the contrary, my composting earthworms love meat of any kind, the rottener the better! However, if meat products are fed to Red Wigglers, it should be buried deeply in the worm's bedding so that flies cannot get to it. Otherwise, the worms bedding will quickly become infested with maggots. While maggots are part of the chain of organisms that devour our organic waste, they are unsightly and, thus, unwelcome in the worm's bedding. I feed my Red Wigglers a diet which primarily consisting of aged horse manure, shredded newspaper, cardboard, coffee grounds and, of course, kitchen scraps. The cardboard is placed over the worm's bedding to conserve heat during the cold winter months and to conserve water and lower the temperature in the worms bedding during the summer. Composting earthworms love to burrow their way through cardboard consuming it as they go. Kitchen scraps represent less than five percent of my Red Wiggler's diet because of the size of my wormeries and the scarcity of the kitchen waste I have to feed them. Coffee grounds make up about 25 percent of the organic material fed to the worms. The mixture of aged horse manure, readily available for free almost anywhere in Northern California, coffee grounds and shredded paper products (primarily newspaper) produce excellent worm castings. There is nothing better for your garden, nothing even close. You will not be able to generate a significant amount of coffee grounds from your kitchen; however, Americans are addicted to their coffee and there is a Starbucks in nearly every supermarket in the country and on most street corners. The enterprises generate enormous amounts of coffee ground waste and are more than happy to give it to you, all you have to do is smile and ask for it! Happy gardening!

Raising Earthworms on the Cheap

Many people know that earthworm castings are a valuable organic fertilizer that will make anything in the garden grow like crazy. Most home owners have a source of kitchen scraps and newspaper that could be turned into these valuable castings if they just had the composting earthworms and something to keep them in. Unfortunately, a little research reveals that composting earthworms are expensive, at least $30.00 a pound, and stackable worm bins are very costly, around $130.00 for a stackable three bin set. In this blog I will tell you how to do it for free! Nope, you don't have to spend a small fortune to have your own wormery, not even a dime!

First, where do you get those free composting earthworms? Not a chance you probably are thinking! Do you have a horse stable nearby? I'll bet you do. If so, you have a ready supply of horse manure and the owners of these operations are more than willing to give it to you for free, just to get rid of it. If you can take a truck load, many of they will even deliver it to you at no cost. Now here's the good part. Every horse manure pile in the world is full of live red wiggler composting earthworms and their cocoons. Every single one! You don't even have to make a bedding for your worms because the manure is the worm's bedding. All you have to do is house your new worms and begin feeding them table scraps and other organic material that you are now throwing in the garbage can, like kitchen scraps, shredded newspaper, cardboard and dried leaves. So far so good, but how do you house them? Surprise, surprise, you simply place the worm's bedding (the manure they came in) and the organic material you feed them on the ground or a asphalt or concrete slab. Cover the new wormery with an old tarp to conserve water (slow down evaporation ) and keep the birds out and you have the most efficient wormery ever designed by man! You are probably wondering why your composting red wigglers will not escape. After all this wormery has no sides, no top and, if placed on the ground, no bottom. The answer is simple. Red Wiggler earthworms, the kind you want for composting, are surface dwellers and live in the top three inches or so of their bedding. They never attempt to dig their way to freedom or crawl away unless the environment they live in becomes uninhabitable (too dry, to wet or for some other reason toxic to them). All you have to do to manage your new wormery is add additional feeding of organic material to the top of the pile and keep it moist. As the worms eat the organic material you feed them they will move upward and leave their castings behind, at the bottom of the pile where they can be easily harvested and placed in your garden. Happy gardening!

The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 20-Affirmative Action in the Workplace

Since affirmative action began in the 1960s, and especially since a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 1971, employers have been tightly constrained in the way they can use tests to select employees. Basically, the court ruled that tests that measured cognitive ability could not be used to select employees. Rather, if a perspective employees were to be given a test it could only measure a specific job skill and not the persons intellectual capacity. Furthermore, it was up to the employer to prove that any test given complied to these rules.

Affirmative action in the work place began at the same time that it did in the universities but with several important differences. First, in the workplace the government and the courts, not the university administrators, have been the main activists. A second important difference is that almost everyone has a personal stake and can see what is going on, unlike the college campus where a relative few are involved. In college an applicant that is not accepted because he was displaced by an affirmative action admission never exactly knows why he was rejected. In the workplace everyone knows what is going on. If a rejected applicant or an unprompted employee brings a complaint, an employer must be able to prove that the hiring and promotion practices meet the legal definitions of fairness. How do the employers comply with the requirements for fairness in the workplace? First, they can decline to use tests. Second they can attempt to design a test that only measures the skills necessary to perform the job, making sure that the test does not test for general ability or IQ. Most often, the employer will attempt to meet the 80 percent rule which says in effect that people in protected groups have to be hired or promoted at 80 percent or more of the rate realized by the group with the highest rate of success in being hired or promoted. For practical matters this means that if 225 white males apply for a job and 90 are hired, this 40 percent hiring rate is the benchmark against which the hiring of other groups is measured. Thus, if 100 blacks apply, 32 must be hired ( 100 X 40% = 40. 40 X 80% = 32). As time went on, proponents of affirmative action became more forthright about what they were really promoting- not just equal opportunity but equal employment outcomes despite unequal job performance. The question is, has affirmative action worked? As one would expect, affirmative action policies have had the biggest positive effect in public bureaucracies, the most obvious example being the increases in the number of black police and firefighters. At the federal level, the strongest effects are at the clerical level and below. In cities with large minority populations, the effects are spread across a broader range of government positions, with defacto quotas up to the highest levels. Among private companies, affirmative action has had some significant effects, particularly in the south and among companies doing business with the federal government. The behavior of employers has certainly been effected by the various job discrimination laws. Every large company must maintain a bureaucracy to monitor compliance with federal regulations and to defend against (or more commonly settle out of court) lawsuits alleging discrimination. The amounts of time, money and resources devoted to compliance are substantial and increases the cost of almost everything we purchase. The authors now address a question that has not been asked in the literature. How would the observed occupational and wage differences between blacks and whites change if cognitive ability were taken into account? As of 1990, in all job categories, from highest to lowest is skill, employers hire blacks with IQs one standard deviation lower than whites. The black-white differences in IQ are more pronounced in the professions (1.3 standard deviations) than it is for low-skill labors (1.1 standard deviations) showing that affirmative action has been more successful in colleges and professional schools than it has been in the work place. There is only one plausible explanation for statistical anomalies in the workplace. Employers are using dual hiring standards in because someone or something (the government or aversion to harmful publicity) is making them do so. In practical terms, this data shows that a black is 1.5 times as likely to be hired for a professional or technical job than a white. For clerical jobs, a black is 1.9 times (almost twice as likely) more likely to get employed than a white of equal IQ. Thus, one could argue, that affirmative action, if anything, has worked to well. As recently as 1959, the employment of blacks in all job categories was only half the proportion that would have been if based on IQ alone. The under-representation of blacks in the workplace was even more severe in the 1940s and 1950s. But the under-representation of blacks was largely gone by 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. This statistic argues that something besides anti-discrimination legislation was already afoot in America resulting in the job market being less stacked against blacks even before the first piece of anti-discrimination legislation was passed by congress. In the decades after the 1960s, blacks became over-represented, with respect to IQ, and this shift in the job market was a direct result of anti-discrimination legislation. The cost of affirmative action, of course, was job performance. In so much as cognitive ability is related to job performance and as minority workers are entering professions with lower ability than whites, is there evidence of lower average performance for minority workers than for whites? Well, yes there is. Teacher competency testing was common in the 1980s. The competency tests were seldom job performance tests as such; rather, they were designed to test basic knowledge of reading, writing and mathematics. Nonetheless, if we assume that more knowledgeable people make better teachers, we can conclude that people with a better grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic are better at their teaching jobs than people who are less qualified. In California between 1983 and 1991 the pass rates for white and black teachers was 80 percent and 35 percent respectively, the implied difference in IQ was 1.2 standard deviations. Similar disparities in the abilities of black and white teachers was found in every state which performed such testing. It is important to note that these tests were not used to select people for further teacher training; rather, they were tests of people who either were already in or headed to the classroom. The justification for hiring less qualified blacks over better qualified whites in the teaching profession is called the compensating skills fallacy, it goes something like this. There are many skills and qualities that go into making a good teacher other than test scores. This statement, of course, is correct. The fallacy in its application to the teaching profession is that prospective teachers are not evaluated in any way to determine if they might have the ability to inspire students or create an eagerness for them to learn. Rather, it seems that if they have low test scores it is simply assumed that they have compensating skill that will make them more effective teachers than those with higher cognitive ability. When, in reality, there is no reason to believe that prospective teachers with low test scores have untested qualities that are any higher than average. Sense affirmative action has been practiced most aggressively in public employment- police, firemen, social agencies, departments of motor vehicles and the like- they are logical places to determine if job performance has been compromised by affirmative action. Journalist Tucker Carlson did such a study of the Washington, D.C. police department. In the 1970s Washington D.Cs white population was concentrated among white-collar and professional groups and there were no significant white collar working-class neighborhoods. As a result of residency requirements the pool of potential white applicants was severely limited. By 1982, 40 percent of the candidates who took the police academy admissions test failed it. A new test, designed to favor minorities was introduced in 1983. Standards for the police academy were lowered to the point that not one student flunked out of the training course in 1985. In 1988 the academy abolished its final examination because 40 percent of the graduating recruits could not pass it. The incompetence of the academies' graduates was soon felt in the workplace. By 1990 one third of the murder cases brought in the district were dismissed because the prosecutors were unable to make sense of the unintelligible arrest reports. It was common knowledge at the time that some people at the academy graduates could not read or write, others were completely illiterate and a significant number were borderline retarded. The same was true in Miami where almost 90 percent of the officers who were dismissed or suspended a few years after the initiation of aggressive affirmative action policies were officers with marginal qualifications, hired because of these policies. No one can reasonably argue that black affirmative action hires are less productive than the average white worker. The authors now address two questions related to affirmative action. What is the nation trying to accomplish with affirmative action and how much degradation in job performance is acceptable in pursuit of the goals of affirmative action? The argument for affirmative action goes like this. A properly constructed affirmative action policy may be temporarily less efficient but more efficient in the long run. If it achieves long-run efficiency by breaking the cycle of past discrimination, it is arguably fair. And even if the long run is far off, we should be willing to pay the price in lost productivity for a large enough gain in group equity. But, affirmative action does not just mean wanting good things to happen. It means specific and often substantial restraints on the employer's ability to make use of the most qualified and productive people available. Advocates of affirmative action policies argue that it makes no difference if a disadvantage group performs at a lower level since it is self-evidently societies fault that they under-perform and the government must take whatever steps are necessary to bring the disadvantaged group up to the level of other groups, ensuring equal employment and income while doing so. Sometimes this argument is couched specifically in terms of the black experience and sometimes as part of a broader egalitarian agenda. The authors reject equality of outcome as an appropriate goal and argue that equality of opportunity is the test most consistent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Referring to the bill, Hubert Humphrey declared that it " does not limit the employer's freedom to hire, fire, or demote for any reason-- or for no reason-- so long as his action is not based on race," and volunteered to eat the bill if he were wrong about what the bill would do. The appropriate goal of affirmative action should be to achieve a job market in which people are not favored or held back because of their race. Nothing in the human experience says that all groups should be equally successful in all walks of life. This may be "unfair" in the sense that life is unfair, but it does not mean that human beings are treating one another unfairly. By the standard of proportional equality there are " too many" black players in the National Basketball Association. Interestingly, no one thinks this unjust or in any way unfair. Similarly, when professional tennis equalized the purses for male and female champions, it did not require men and women to play against each other because everyone realized that all top men would beat all of the top women every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Obviously, in the two examples given, making things proportional would produce unfairness along with equal representation. When a police department hires people who become less effective police officers than those it passed up because of affirmative action, the department loses some of its capability to provide law enforcement. Just as would be the case if the NBA restricted the numbers of black on their basketball teams. The question remains, how do we achieve fairness in the workplace without affirmative action? The authors discuss the pros and cons of four alternatives. In theory, employers could construct job-specific tests that meet the Supreme Courts definition of fairness. It would be expensive and the tests would seldom, if ever, be more predictive than a general test of cognitive ability. The problem is that the predictiveness of such tests comes from their measure g (general intelligence) and they would be thrown out because of their disparate impact. Remember also that, for the past 50 years, ethnic bias in a job test need not be proved, it need only to be alleged. A second alternative would be to use educational achievements to screen prospective candidates for a job. However, affirmative action at the university level prevents this solution because, as discussed above, the same degree does not have the same meaning for minorities who have been on the affirmative action track for their entire lives, as it does for whites and Orientals. Remember that the black-white differences for every educational level, from high school diploma to Ph.D, are huge, with the smallest being a difference of 1.2 standard deviations. The reality facing employers today is that, given the aggressive affirmative action that universities have employed over the past 60 years, educational credentials can no longer be used to compare the intellectual qualifications of black, Latino and white job applicants. By the 1980s race norming had become a common solution to the employers dilemma. Most used the popular Wonderlic Personnel Test, a highly g-loaded paper and pencil test that takes only twelve minutes. The Wonderlic company gave precise instructions for what it called "percentile selection" its term for race norming along with an "Ethnic Conversion Table." Here's how it worked. Suppose that five candidates (white, black, Latino, Asian and American Indian) all got a mean score of 22 prior to any adjustment for group distributions. The personnel office would then assign those five candidates, all of whom got the same scores, to the 45 percentile for the white candidate, 80th percentile for the black candidate, 75 percentile for the Latino candidate, 55th percentile for the Asian candidate and 60th percentile for the American Indian candidate, and these scores thereafter would be treated as the candidate's "real scores." An employer could then hire from the top down using these adjusted scores and expect to end up with ratios of employees that would avoid triggering the Uniform Hiring Guidelines. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 banded the practice even though race norming was efficient from a productive standpoint and the most "fair" insofar as the highest scorers in each group were hired. Obviously, all of the attempts to eliminate the unfairness in affirmative action hiring practices have failed to improve the situation. The authors conclude that, if tomorrow, all job discrimination regulations based on group proportions were rescinded, the United States would have a job market that is ethically fair, more conductive to racial harmony and economically more productive, than the one we have now. There are two reasons for thinking that the elimination of affirmative action hiring practices would be a good thing. First, there has never been widespread public support for affirmative action hiring policies. In fact, one could argue that such policies have made race relations worse, not better, in the United States than they were in 1964 when the Congress passed and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill. The authors believe that illuminating unfair hiring practices would improve race relations in our country. Certainly, a return to policies based on evenhandedness for individuals rather than groups would attract broad public support outside of minority communities. The second reason to abandon affirmative action hiring practices is the potential for building "good faith." We should be casting a wider net and leaning over backwards to make sure that all minority applicants have a fair shot at the apple and a fair chance for promotion. To the extent that the government has a role to play, it is to assure equality of opportunity, not equal outcome. The main abjection to the elimination of our unseemly affirmative action policies is that to do so will take us back to "the bad old days." The authors believe we have come a long ways sense the 1960s and today's Americans are better than that. So do I! Comment: This chapter may be summarized in one short sentence. Since the 1960s whites, and especially white males, have been screwed royally by a political system that refuses to recognize the disparity in cognitive ability between blacks, whites and the other ethnic groups.

The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 19-Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Affirmative action should be discussed as it is actually practiced, not as rhetoric portrays it. The author's efforts to assemble data on this secretive process, in the early 1990s, led them to predict that it could not survive public scrutiny and of course, it did not. The edge given to minority applicants to college and graduate school was not a slight nod in their favor in the case of a close call but an extremely large advantage that put blacks and Latino candidates in separate admissions competitions. On elite campuses, the average black freshman was in the 10 to 15th percentile of the IQ distribution of white freshmen. Nationwide, the gap was larger and larger yet in graduate school.

Asians, on the other hand were a conspicuously unprotected minority. At the elite schools, they suffered a modest penalty, with the average Asian freshman being in about the 60th percentile of the white cognitive ability distribution. The advantage given to minority candidates could more easily be defended if the competition was between disadvantaged minority groups and privileged white students, but that as not the case. Rather, nearly as large a cognitive difference separated disadvantaged black freshmen from disadvantaged white freshmen. Still more difficult to defend, blacks from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds were given a substantial edge over disadvantaged whites. Affirmative action has "worked" in the sense that it has put more blacks and Latinos on college campuses but it also has stimulated racism. When white students look around them, they see that blacks and Latinos constitute small proportions of the student population but high proportions of the students doing poorly in school. As a result, affirmative action has fostered racial animosity and, in part, explains the ill will towards blacks and the high black dropout rates for minority students that has plagued American campuses for decades. We now have national policies that treat people differently under the law. In the 1960s affirmative action began to be woven into American employment and educational practices as universities and employers intensified their recruitment of blacks, initially on their own and then in compliance with a widening body of court decisions and laws. By the early 1970s affirmative action had been extended beyond blacks o include women, Latinos and the disabled. Affirmative action is a part of The Bell Curve because it has been based on the explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilities that contribute to success in school and the workplace or, at any rate, there are no differences that cannot be made up by a few remedial courses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been given over to the many ways this assumption is wrong. In this chapter the topic is the college campus. In the next chapter the authors deal with affirmative action in the work place. The authors provide data on Asians and Latinos, but the analysis centers on blacks, as has most of the debate over affirmative action. To understand the "edge" that affirmative action gives to blacks and Latinos it will help to have some data about how colleges and universities have translated the universal desire for greater fairness in university education into affirmative action programs. Universities and employers have been keeping detailed records on their admission and hiring practices for decades but, for the most part, the magnitude of the inherent injustices of affirmative action was hidden from the public until 1991 when a law student at Georgetown University blew the whistle on the practice in the school's student newspaper. Timothy Maguire was hired to file student records, but he surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics for applicants to Georgetown's law school. He revealed that the mean scores on the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) differed markedly for accepted black and white students, a fact that had been hidden from the public previously. In the storm that ensued officials of the law school condemned his article and black student groups called for Maguire's expulsion. In an op-ed article in the Washington Post the author wrote "Incomplete and distorted information about minority qualifications for admission in to the Law Center renew the long-standing and intellectually dishonest myth that blacks are less qualified than their white counterparts to compete in school, perform on the job or receive a promotion." The magnitude of the edge given to members of certain groups- the value assigned to the state of being black, Latino, female or physically disabled- was not considered relevant by the educational elite. The Post, supported by a vast majority of liberal academics were "OK" with admission policies that assigned a premium, an edge if you will, to certain groups in addition to other individual measurements when making final determinations on college admission or hiring practices. Whether, such policies were fair or just was irrelevant. What then, is the magnitude of the edge given to minorities that apply to undergraduate schools? The authors obtained the SAT test results for 1991 1nd 1992 from 16 of the twenty top-rated private universities and 5 of the top 10 private colleges. In addition the study included data from the University of Virginia and the University of California Berkeley. The differences between black and white scores was less than 100 in only one school, Harvard and it exceeded 200 in nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288). Overall, the difference between the white mean and black mean scores on the SAT was 180 points or about 1.3 standard deviations. In all but four schools Asians were within 6 points of the white mean or above it. Overall, the average Asian was at the 60 percentile of the white distribution. This means that the average edge given blacks was 180 SAT points while the average Asian faced a mean penalty of 30 points. The average black was at the 5th to 7th percentile of the Asian distribution. The Latinos were between the blacks and whites having a mean SAT score 129 points below the white mean or about 0.9 standard deviations below the white mean. The puts the average Latino at about the 20th percentile of the white distribution. The authors would have preferred to have a sample of non-elite state universities, but these numbers are closely guarded and unavailable for scrutiny. They were able to obtain similar data from the University of California Davis for 1979. The black-white difference was 271 SAT points and the Latino-white difference was 211 points. The Asian mean at Davis was, atypically 54 points below the white mean, the largest difference the authors found. Of note, was the fact that, nationwide, in 1993, only 129 blacks and 234 Latinos had SAT-verbal scores in the 700s compared to 7,114 whites. What is the magnitude of the minority edge in graduate schools? Again, the data is scanty because most law schools hit the LSAT scores of their freshmen class from the public. Only 10 law schools reported in 1977. Of these schools the smallest black-white difference was 2.4 standard deviations, the largest was 3.6 standard deviations and the average for the ten schools was 2.9 standard deviations, meaning that the average black law student was in the bottom one percent of the white distribution. For medical schools, the black-white gap was about the same as it was for law schools, with the average black first year medical student in the 8th to 10 percentile of the white distribution. Latino first year medical students scores slightly better than blacks standing in the 20th to 23rd percentile of the white distribution. Asian scores were slightly better, on average, than whites scoring in the 56th percentile of the white distribution. Applicants to graduate schools other than law and medicine typically take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).The ethnic differences in the most recent year available, 1988, put blacks at the 10th to 12th percentile of the white distribution. Latinos scored somewhat better than blacks being in the 20th to 24th percentile of the white distribution and, as is the usual case, Asians were higher than whites on the quantitative and lower on the verbal GRE. What are the reasons for affirmative action as touted by the liberals who favor these programs? First, considerations of social utility argue that it is desirable to have more minority students getting good college educations so that society may alter the effect of past discrimination and provide a basis for an eventual color blind society To achieve this goal, a relatively large deficit in the minority applicants test scores may properly be overlooked. Second, no matter how personally harmful it is the white applicant who is being unjustly denied a position in a college freshman class, it is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things (achieving a color- blind society). After all, a privileged white with strong credentials and wealthy parents, will get into a good college someplace, although it may not be the college of his choice. So, no real harm is done in the long run. However, these goals do not drive the admission committees at most colleges; rather, the goal is simply to have "enough" blacks and minorities in the incoming class, it's really as simple as that, and they will move heaven and earth to achieve this goal. Meanwhile, white applicants are judged in competition with other white candidates and, with the exception of athletes and those gifted in music and the arts, IQ will most often be the deciding factor. What are the costs of affirmative action? Here is the real question. How much harm is done to minority self-esteem, to whites perceptions on minorities and ultimately to ethnic relations by a system that places academically less able minorities side by side with students who are more capable? Two types of students standout in college, those that seem to be especially out of place and those who stand out because these seem to be especially smart. The fact that 52 percent of black students are in the bottom 10 percent of IQ is obvious to and all serves to strengthen the white students inherent belief that blacks are an inferior race, at least intellectually. This cannot be good for racism in America (my conclusion not the authors). Comment: The Bell Curve was first published in 1995 the pinnacle of affirmative action in American education. Since then it has been in decline at least as it was practiced in the period between 1965 and 1995; but, have no doubt, this unseemly system of reverse discrimination is still with us, although cleverly disguised as something else. For example, preference is now given to those who participate in community service while in high school, a dubious indicator of later success in college. No matter how you slice it, affirmative action runs counter to everything America is supposed to stand for, in particular, equal opportunity for all its citizens. Everyone seems to agree that no one should be discriminated against because of his skin color unless, of course, they are Asian or a white male. If white or Asian these simple tenets of a free and open society simply do not apply in today's America. Finally, the authors of The Bell Curve do not address one of the most important aspects of affirmative action, the production of incompetent professionals who harm the unsuspecting public every minute of every day. This is particularly true in the medical profession where medical schools have been turning out low IQ minority graduates who prey on the unsuspecting public for the past 50 years. I wrote about the negative effects of affirmative action in medicine in my blog Low Pass.

Analysis of the Third Republican Debate

First the losers. By far and away, the biggest losers were the liberal numskulls who moderated the debate for CNBC. These three liberals, Becky Slow, John Hardhead and Carl What's His Name began the debate and ended the farcical performance by asking a series of, what they considered gotcha questions designed to embarrass the candidates. These infantile attempts at journalism backfired big time and Ted Cruz and the audience let them have it with both barrels! For me, the audience's response was the highlight of the night. As for the winners, once again a candidate on the JV team stole the show. That would be Lindsey Graham, who woke from a career long slumber to slam the democrat candidates and Obama's defense policies. By far and away, the best one liner of the evening was his quip, referring to Obama's bungling policies dealing with Iran and Iraq " Make me commander in chief and this crap stops!" The crowd went wild. Other winners on this night were Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. None of the other candidates hurt themselves, but they didn't do much to improve their chances of winning the nomination either. When all is said and done, the republicans have an extremely strong field. I believe most conservatives could vote for any one of them. Consider for a moment the democratic opposition, a congenital liar who is a bit long in the tooth: an avowed socialist who spent his honeymoon in Russia and never really returned; and a third liberal moron whose name I can't recall.

Another Veterans administration Medical Center scandal

Surprise , surprise another scandal at a VA Medical Center. This time in Phoenix where several vets were allowed to die before they received treatment for their bladder and kidney cancers. There are 152 VA hospitals and medical centers and 1,700 VA hospitals and clinics in the United States. Around 9 million veterans use the VA medical system. The VA budget is around 132 billion. The VA medical system began in 1924. I expect the politicians wanted to do something special for the men and women who served our country so they gave them their very own medical system. To prove the point once again, the road to heaven is paved with good intentions that somehow go amiss. What we have 84 years later is a gigantic government bureaucracy corrupt and incompetent from top to bottom. What can be done to right this floundering ship of state. As with most of the social ills in this country, the inherent flaws in the VA can be corrected relatively easily and cost effectively just by applying a little common sense. We should not try to "fix" the broken medical system that is the VA; rather we should just abolish the VA Hospitals and clinics, every last one of them! In the first place, it makes no sense whatsoever to have a separate system of medical care for veterans, none at all. This is especially true, if the medical care provided our vets is inferior to the standard medical care provided to all other members of our society. Veterans who serve our country should be provided, free of charge, Medicare A and Medicare B. It's as simple as that! This is a win-win solution for everyone. The vets get the same medical as everyone else, at no cost, and the tax payers save billions of dollars each year, probably tens of billions. There, what was so hard about that?

The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 17-Raising Cognitive Ability

Do we favor training programs for chronically unemployed men? These programs will fail, as they have in the past, unless they are targeted for a population half of which have IQs below 80. Do we wish to reduce income inequality? If so, we must understand how the market for cognitive ability drives the process. Do we aspire to have a "world class" educational system for America? Before changing the present system, we had better think hard about how cognitive ability and education are linked. Part 1V explores some of these important relationships.

Chapter 18 reviews the American educational experience in the last decades of the twentieth-century. In Chapters 19 and 20 the focus shifts to affirmative action policies in education and the workplace. In the recent past, our country has dedicated itself to coping with particular types of inequalities, trying, unsuccessfully, to equalize outcomes for various groups. During this period of time the country has retreated from previous principles of individual equality before the law and has adopted policies that treat people as members of groups. The authors will attempt to make the costs and benefits of policies associated with affirmative action clearer than they usually are. In the final two chapters of The Bell Curve the authors attempt to predict the future. But first, Herrnstein and Murray discus the ramifications of policies designed to raise the nations mean IQ. Raising intelligence significantly would circumvent many of the social problems our country faces in the twenty-first century. In recent times we have concentrated on needed environmental improvements- better nutrition, stimulating environments for preschool children, good schools thereafter, etc. Nothing that has been tried has raised the intelligence of the people in our nation. There is ample evidence that improved nutrition has raised the mean IQ in several nations but this approach remains unproven in America. Special programs, such as Head Start, have had minor, and at best temporary, effects on school performance but have proven not to improve intelligence. The one intervention that has worked consistently is adoption at birth from a bad family environment to a good one. The average gains in childhood IQ associated with adoption are in the region of six points. Taken together, the story of past costly attempts to raise intelligence is one of high hopes, flamboyant claims, and disappointing results. It seems abundantly clear that the problems associated with low cognitive ability are not going to be solved by outside interventions, no matter how well intended, to make children smarter. We may be deeply and properly dissatisfied with the nurturing of American intelligence, but finding solutions that are affordable, politically tolerable, and have not been already tried, is another matter altogether. In this chapter the authors review the results of several social interventions that have employed to raise childhood intelligence. They close with their thoughts on what the results of these attempts to increase the intelligence should mean for policy in the future. They begin with a review of the programs to increase intelligence by improving nutrition. Historically, it is a fact that people in affluent countries are larger than their ancestors, presumably because they were eating better. IQ scores also have been rising in the well-fed segments of the population. This does not mean, however, that better eating makes smarter people. Recent studies on the subject have given, at best, mixed results. The most damaging blow to the proposition that nutrition effects IQ came from a study of over 100,000 Dutch men who were born during a time of intense famine at the end of the second World War. Nineteen years later the men took intelligence tests to qualify for national military service. These men scored no lower than men born to mothers who had no exposure to famine. A small sample of Welsh school children were given vitamins and mineral supplements for eight months. Their test scores were compared with an equal number of their schoolmates who received non-nutritive placebos. Those getting the supplements gained eight points in their nonverbal test scores but there was no improvement in their verbal scores. A study of 600 California eighth graders produced similar results. The vitamin and mineral supplements raised scores on most of the nonverbal tests of intelligence but failed to improve the scores designed to measure verbal intelligence. Other studies failed to show that vitamin and mineral supplements had any effect on IQ. It should be noted that most, if not all, of these studies were flawed in one way or another. As a result, as of 1995, when The Bell Curve was published, the effect of diet in the development of IQ remained unclear. Can IQ be raised by improving educational opportunities? Most people assume that below-average test scores from children from the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution results from the fact that they have received poor educations. Improve the schools, it is assumed, and the test scores will rise. Differences in schools do matter but not nearly as much as most people think. In a massive study of 645,000 underprivileged children mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, failed to find any benefit to cognitive ability that could be attributed to better school quality. The attempts schools made to improve their effectiveness did not reduce the cognitive differences among different children or those between ethnic groups. The Coleman report concluded that parochial schools generally do a better job of developing the cognitive abilities of their students than public schools. Yet the basic conclusions of the report have stood the test of time and criticism: Variations in teacher credentials, per pupil expenditures, class room size and other objective factors in public schools do not account for much of the difference in the cognitive abilities of American School children. The Coleman report told us that the cognitive differences among individuals and groups cannot be reduced significantly by further attempts to equalize the kinds of bricks-and-mortar factors and teacher qualifications that school boards and taxpayers most often concern themselves with. The failure of programs like school busing, Head Start and affirmative action make this point abundantly clear (my conclusion, not the authors). Can education improve IQ? A Swedish study performed 70 years ago was designed to determine the effect of education on IQ. Several hundred ten year old boys were tested for IQ and retested again ten years later. By far the most important determiner of IQ at age 20 was their IQ at age 10. In fact, the students IQ at age ten was five times more important than years of schooling. Other studies have shown that the more uniform a countries schooling is, the more correlated adult IQ is with childhood IQ. The conclusion the authors draw from these studies is that equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America will have little or no effect on the nations mean IQ. Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, thereby initiating a massive and continuing effort to improve the education of disadvantaged students that continues to this day. Billions of dollars have been spent on this effort to level the educational playing field each year. In 1992 expenditures on ESEA were at an all time high of $5.6 billion. Hundreds of studies have been performed over the years to determine the effectiveness of ESEA funding. The data showed that students in compensatory programs still tended to fall behind students who were not in government subsidized programs, but not as fast as they would have if the schools they were in had received no compensation, an outcome that the institute treated as evidence of success. There was no evidence whatsoever to support a conclusion that compensatory education narrowed the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged school children. In recent years the focus has been on teaching specific academic skills and problem solving, not expecting improvements in overall academic achievement or general intelligence. Most often the large test score increases in local schools routinely reported by the drive-by media over the years have been plagued by fraud and teacher led institutional wide cheating on the standardized tests. The authors go on to surmise two studies that suggest that that educational improvements can increase the mean IQ of a nation. In 1979 the incoming president of Venezuela appointed to his cabinet a Minister of State for the Development of Human Intelligence. The new minister was convinced that the nation's average intelligence level was fundamental to its well-being and set out to determine what could be done to raise the IQ of Venezuelan school children. Nine hundred seventh graders in a poor district of the Venezuelan school system received sixty, forty-five minutes lessons of special instruction in addition to regular curriculum, the controls did not. At the end of one year the students who had received special instruction were between 1.6 and 6.5 IQ points smarter that those who received a normal education. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up to determine if these gains faded with time or how much a second or third year of special tutoring would have accomplished. A second source of data that suggests that education can raise an individual's IQ has been gleamed from SAT scores taking advantage of the fact that innumerable commercial coaching services are designed to raise SAT scores through a variety of educational pursuits. The question is not whether these preparatory courses raise a student's SAT score; rather, the question the authors address is whether or not taking these educational courses also raises a person's IQ. The data shows that the coaching services that successfully raise SAT scores consist of many hours of training, compatible to going to school fulltime. In this respect, 100 hours of study, on average, will increase the verbal SAT score 24 points and add 39 points to the math SAT score. There is no significant additional improvement in either score after 150 hours of study. The results of these studies show that prepping for a SAT test can, at least temporarily, raise a student's IQ between 0.1 and 0.4 standard deviations. It also is clear that these modest gains in IQ, brought on by intensive study, are short-term and fade with time. During the 1970s, when scholars were getting used to the disappointing results of programs designed to level the playing field for school-aged children, they were also coming to the consensus that IQ could not be changed after age six or at the age that most children enter school. If we start our educational processes sooner the results will improve, the academics predicted. Enter front and center, Head Start. One of the oldest, largest and most enduring program designed to foster intellectual development came about as a result of the Economic Opportunity act of 1964, the opening salvo of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Project Head START was designed to break the cycle of poverty by targeting preschool children in poor families. Before long thousands of Head Start centers were employing tens of thousands of workers and annually spending hundreds of millions of dollars at first, then billions, on hundreds of thousands of children and their families. The earliest returns on Head Start were nothing short of amazing. A few months spent by preschoolers in the first summer programs were said to increase IQ scores by as much as ten points and the summer programs were made year around projects. By 1966, however, the experts were noticing the dreaded "fade-out," the gradual convergence in test scores of children who participated in the program with comparable children who had not. Cognitive benefits that were picked up in the first grade usually were gone by the third grade. Bt the sixth grade they had vanished entirely. No lasting improvements in intelligence have ever been statistically validated with any Head Start Program. As with most of Johnson's social programs, Head Start proved to be total waste of time and money, a lot of money! (My conclusion, not the author's). Contemporary advocates of Head Start maintain it has reduced long-term school failure, crime and illegitimacy while improving employability. These supposed delayed benefits are called sleeper effects and have led some to claim "every dollar spent on Head Start earns three dollars in the future." Such claims do not survive scrutiny. The evidence for sleeper effects never comes from Head Start Programs themselves but from more intensive and expensive preschool interventions such as Perry School. One hundred twenty three black children from the inner city of Ypsilanti Michigan were enrolled the study in 1960. The IQs of these children varied between 70 and 85 at age three. Fifty eight received intensive cognitive instruction five half-days a week in a highly enriched preschool setting for one or two years and their homes were visited by teachers weekly for further instruction of parents and their children. The teacher-to-child ratio was about one to five and the teachers had master degrees in child development and other social work fields. Perry Preschool resembled the average Head Start program as a Ferrari resembles the family sedan. At the end of the two year program the children in the Perry program were scoring eleven IQ points higher than children in the control group. Again, as with all other Head Start programs, by the end of the fourth grade, no significant difference in the IQ of the two groups remained. Yet another example of "fade-out" and the futility of programs designed to alter IQ by preschool interventions. At best, the effect of such programs is small and cannot justify the investment of billions of dollars in run-of-the-mill Head Start programs. But, what would be the outcome if you started these interventions earlier in a child's life? The Abecedarian Project did just that, concentrating on babies that were at high risk for retardation because of their mothers' low IQs and low socioeconomic status. The programs started when the babies were a month old and provided care for eight hours a day, five days a week and fifty weeks each year. The programs emphasized cognitive enrichment activities with teacher-to-child ratios of one to three for infants and one to four until the children reached age five. At the end of the fifth year, the children in the day care groups outscored the controls by half a standard deviation on the various IQ tests performed. At last report, the children were 12 years old and were still doing better than the controls. This would be unequivocal good news were it not for charges that the subjects of the programs and their controls were not comparable in their intellectual prospects at birth. In fact, the experimental children were outscoring the controls by age one or two years and some were doing so by six months. This means that either the interventions had achieved all of their positive effects in the first 6 to 12 months of the project or the experimental and control groups were different to begin with. To complicate the issue further, it is well known that tests of intelligence in children younger than three are poor predictors of later intelligence and tests for infants under 6 months are extremely unreliable. The Abecedarian Project also suffered from its small sample size, the experimental and control groups being no larger than 15 and some as small as 9. The debate over the results was ongoing and unresolved when The Bell Curve was published in 1995. When all is said and done, there is only one way to completely transform a child's environment beneficently: adoption out of a bad environment into a good one. So, how many points does being raised in a good adoptive home add to an IQ score? As a group, adoptive children do not score as high as the biological children of their adoptive parents. The deficit is roughly seven to ten points. It is not completely clear what his deficit means. One hypothesis, and the most likely, is that the adopted children's genes hold them back or the negative effect of not being adopted immediately after birth (as only a few of them are) loses the benefits their adopting parents would have provided earlier on. None the less, researchers believe that adopted children have higher scores than they would have had if they had been raised by their biological parents. This difference is about six points. How does all this effect the policy agenda? Nothing is more predictable than that researchers will conclude that what is needed is more research. But certain kinds of research is not needed. Nothing will be learned by more evaluations of programs like Head Start. We already know it is difficult, and probably impossible, to alter the environment enough to positively affect the development of IQ by anything short of adoption at birth. The authors predict that the most promising leads will come from research designed to determine the psychological basis of intelligence rather than more studies to determine the cultural and educational variables that effect the development of intelligence. The authors close this depressing chapter by suggesting that we accept a good dose of realism. An inexpensive reliable method of raising IQ is not available. The wish that it were is understandable, but to think that the available repertoire of social interventions can do the job, if only the country spends more money on them, is illusory. No one has the slightest idea how to raise IQ substantially on a national level. We need to look elsewhere for solutions to the social problems described in the earlier chapters of The Bell Curve. Comment: The message of this depressing chapter is clear. Nations cannot raise the IQs of their children by preschool interventions that are practical from a financial point of view. Programs that have raised the cognitive ability of children are simply too costly to implement nationwide. Routine Head Start programs are nothing more than expensive "make-work" programs for those in the teaching profession and have no long term beneficial effects on the impoverished low IQ children of the underclass. Our efforts should be directed towards decreasing the numbers of these children by stricter immigration policies and by reducing the numbers of children born to welfare mothers. Both of these goals could easily be archived if there was the political will to do so.