Half Sigma

Self-esteem and self-confidence

In one of Ilkka Kokkarinen’s last posts before he shut down his blog, he wrote:

In the photocopier somebody else had forgotten his originals, apparently some kind of Psychology 101 course or something like that. By quickly browsing through these overhead transparencies I learned that success tends to increase a person's self esteem, whereas failure tends to decrease it. Try to learn something useful every day, as I always say, like a true renaissance man.

Ilkka is implying that the link between success and self-esteem is so obvious that it’s not even worthy of teaching. However, I think that much can be learned by pondering the matter.

Self-confidence is closely related to self-esteem. Self-esteem is one's overall belief in one’s value as an individual, while self-confidence is being certain and trusting about oneself in addressing certain tasks or all tasks. Success in certain tasks increases one’s task specific self-confidence, while overall success in life increases both general self-confidence as well as self-esteem.

People tend to perceive other people’s self-confidence on a subconscious level, and use that perception to make judgments. Because of the link between self-confidence and success, people assume that the self-confident person has a higher level of skill. And there is indeed a correlation between self-confidence and success, so this sort of stereotyping often works.

It’s also a socially acceptable type of stereotyping. If an employer hires a job applicant because he appears more self-confident than the competition, this is perfectly acceptable. But if he hires a white candidate over a black candidate because whites are more likely to be better at certain mental tasks (for example, the type of mental tasks required to get a high score on the SAT), this is evil racism and the employer can be sued.

The correlation between self-confidence and actual skill is far from perfect. Some fortunate people are adept at appearing self-confident even when they have no justification for being so. And then there are unfortunate people who lack self-confidence even though they are skilled. The people who appear self confident even when they aren’t skilled will do better in life, because they fool people around them into thinking they actually are skilled.

It’s common for women to say they like men who are self-confident. Because self-confidence is a marker for success, what they are really saying is that they like successful men. But it’s a more politically correct way of saying so. A woman who says that she likes men who are rich will be looked at more negatively than one who says she likes men who are self-confident. The female preference for self-confident men is yet another example of her biological programming to seek alpha males.

Online dating research

Tyler Cowen has a blog post about an online dating paper (found here), "Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating."

I learned the following form reading the paper:

(1) The ideal BMI for men is 27, which is higher than the average BMI of the online dating population and is considered to be "overweight." I previously found in the National Health Interview Survey that men who weigh 205 lbs earn the most money. The conclusion here is that men who weigh a little more than average have better social and economic outcomes.

(2) Women have three major criteria when looking for men: looks, height, and income. Women don't care as much about education (which is a proxy for intelligence). Women dislike men who have less education than themselves, but don't seem especially interested dating men with more education.

(3) Men primarily care about how women look. They don't care much about anything else. I previously wrote about how Maureen Dowd is wrong in her claim that men don't like smart women. Men like women who are good looking, they don't care about the other stuff.

(4) Everyone has observed that in white-Asian interracial couples, it is far more common that the man is white and the woman is Asian. This paper reveals the reason for this. White women aren't interested in Asian men. All races have a preference for their own race. The race preferences for white women, in declining order, are: white, Hispanic, black, Asian. Asian men are ranked at the very bottom of the average white woman's preferences. However when looking at preferences for Asian women, white men have only a very slight dispreference compared to Asian men.

(5) The best looking men benefit from a superstar effect. Men in the top 5% of looks get far more first contact emails from women than men in the top 10% but not the top 5%. This isn't the case for women. I suspect that men figure they have no chances with the hot women so they also send emails to a lot of average and even below average women. Women are more fussy when sending out first contact emails. They only want the cream of the crop. This is demonstrates the female preference for alpha males.

Low speed in the boondocks

Here's a good reason not to live in a rural area: no high speed internet access. I could live without Starbucks, but not without broadband.

I predict that smart people will flee areas without high speed internet, leaving only the dumb people in those areas, making it even less profitable than it already is to install high speed in those areas.

Better healthcare shouldn't cost more

In today's Economix column, David Leonhardt defends higher health spending. He says, sure the price of health insurance has doubled in only seven years, but Americans live longer than ever so it's worth the sacrifice.

I have some very big problems with this logic. First of all, the benefits of new technology usually have nothing to do with costs. The new computer I ordered last week cost the same as the computer I bought five years ago, but I expect it to be several times better than the old computer.

Similarly, new advanced drugs cost the same to manfucture as the old drugs, new medical tests shouldn't necessarily be more expensive than the old tests they replaced. There is absolutely no reason why Americans shouldn't enjoy longer life expectancy without healthcare costs spiraling out of control.

Secondly, young people don't need much healthcare. Better healthare primarily benefits the old and the middle aged. The young workers in their twenties and early thirties are paying much higher health insurance costs and higher medicare taxes to pay for benefits that older people are enjoying. Given that young people have been left out of the economic progress of the last twenty years, and now can no longer afford to start a family, the costs of higher healthcare should be born by older people, the ones who actually benefit from it.

Sunny Bates and grandparents who pay for their grandchildren's private school tuition

I continue to be fascinated by the Sunny Bates quote found in the NY Times article about grandparents giving financial support to their grandchildren.

Once again, here is the quote:

"My father pays tuition for the girls, and I'm just grateful beyond belief," said Sunny Bates, who has one daughter at the Dalton School in Manhattan and another joining her there this year. "I think that's incredibly common. You have all these people who grew up in New York when it wasn't so ridiculously expensive, and are now in careers in the arts, or the nonprofits, that don't pay very much, and they couldn't possibly give their children the kind of life they had without some help."

How many Sunny Bates live in New York City? Exactly one, so she can be none other than the Sunny Bates who graduated from Cornell University in 1978, founded the firm Sunny Bates Associates, and wrote the book How to Earn What You're Worth: Leveraging Your Goals and Talents to Land Your Dream Job. A bio of Sunny Bates the author says that she has two daughters, further confirming that they are the same person.

Now isn't it ironic that someone who wrote a book about how to earn what you're worth doesn't, herself, earn enough to give her children "the kind of life" they're entitled to without her own father paying their private school tuition?

How are regular people who don't earn what they're worth supposed to make ends meet?

Ilkka Kokkarinen archive

A blogger is posting an archive of Ilkka Kokkarinen's writings at the following url:

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~chc007/ilkka.html

I doubt it will be read as often as the Washingtonienne Archive (which seems to have moved since the last time I looked at it). For a summary, I recommend my blog post analyzing the Washingtonienne.

Danimal Archive is gone

When Ilkka Kokkarinen took down his blog, he also took down the Danimal Archive. You can still read some of it in the Google cache.

Wasteful therapy

Here's a story in the New York Times about a man who saw a therapist for six years, and she only made his problem worse.

The most profitable therapy for the therapist is when the patient becomes addicted to therapy which doesn't actually cure him. A large percentage of therapists just transfer money from other people to themselves without actually adding any value to the economy.

How much is education worth?

Here's a hypothetical example. A family has two children. The older child is starting kindergarten this year. The younger child is starting kindergarten in three years.

Suppose that a decent private school costs $20,000 per year, and that the appropriate real discount rate is 4%. (Considering that tuition can be expected to continue to rise faster than inflation, that discount rate may be too high.) Tuition is paid at the beginning of the year.

We calculate that the value of education for those two children is $388,000.

That's how much extra rational parents might pay for a house in a neighborhood with good public schools instead of living in a neighborhood with bad public schools (no doubt full of minorities) which would force the parents to pay for private schools.

I'm told that private schools cost more like $30,000 in New York City, so make that a $582,000 premium for the suburbs of New York City. (However a growing percentage of private school students have their grandparents paying the bills.)

UPDATE

I love this quote from the NY Times article:

"My father pays tuition for the girls, and I'm just grateful beyond belief," said Sunny Bates, who has one daughter at the Dalton School in Manhattan and another joining her there this year. "I think that's incredibly common. You have all these people who grew up in New York when it wasn't so ridiculously expensive, and are now in careers in the arts, or the nonprofits, that don't pay very much, and they couldn't possibly give their children the kind of life they had without some help."

Half Sigma apologizes

I'm sorry for writing the truth in my blog.

Apology for blogging

Ilkka Kokkarinen, the author of the blog Sixteen Volts, has removed all of his old posts and has apologized for blogging. (Steve Sailer seems to have some additional info.)

I wonder if I should also remove all my posts and apologize for having opinions.

Class in China

From yesterday's NY Times we learn that the newly rich Chinese are working to ensure that their children remain part of the new Chinese upper class elite by giving them golf lessons and English language lesssons.

I don't know how valuable of a skill golf is in China, but surely being able to speak English with a Western accent will become a distinguishing mark of the Chinese upper class. As you know, once you reach a certain age it is nearly impossible to learn to speak a foreign language without an accent. If you're not taught when you're young you can never catch up.

School desegregation and the standard of living

What is the value, to white people, of sending their kids to a white school? The politically correct answer is that this has a negative value, because "diversity" benefits us. But look at how people actually behave, and you will observe that white people go through a huge amount of expense and effort in order to ensure that their children attend a a white school.

In New York City, college educated white people see themselves as having only two options: (1) move to a white suburb; or (2) pay for expensive private school tuition. The default option, sending their white kid to a school full of blacks and hispanics is not considered an acceptable option.

Today, only 57% of public school children are white. That number will soon drop to less than 50%. Having less than the median income probably means (depending on the state they live in) that parents cannot afford to live in a neighborhood with white schools. This is surely having a big impact on "affordable family formation" (a Steve Sailer term). Middle class whites don't want to have children if they can't afford to send them to a white school where they will be safe. White parents assume (whether correct or not) that sending their kid to a predominately minority school means the kid will get beat up by the black and hispanic kids.

Before schools were desegregated, this is a problem which didn't exist for white people. White people could live in a below median income neighborhood and still be assured that their children would attend a white school. It was almost like the Eddie Murphy skit from Saturday Night Live, where he dresses up as a white person and discovers that other white people give him stuff for free. In the days of segregated schools, white people got this free gift of having their kids go to a white school. Today, white people must struggle to raise their income so they can afford this privilege. No wonder why it's so much more common today for both parents to work. It's the only way they can afford to live in a white neighborhood.

When it comes to assessing the standard of living for white Americans today compared to the standard of living fifty years ago, school desegregation (along with increased crime) has led to a decline in the standard of living.

Has school desegregation led to an increase in the standard of living for black and other minorities? The answer is a qualified no. A small number of middle class blacks who live in mostly white neighborhoods have benefited, but the majority of black public school children still attend schools that are predominately non-white, and the schools are still as bad as they were in the 1950s. De facto segregation by income produces the same result as legally enforced segregation by race, except under the new scenario whites have to struggle to afford the white neighborhood or move to a "family friendly" region of the country (meaning a region where there are still not too many minorities).

Crime and the standard of living

There has been continued talk in the blogosphere about whether life is better or worse today. For example, Dean Baker's take.

But there are lots of things that affect quality of life that have no direct price so they will never show up in inflation statistics.

What's the value of living in a safe neighborhood? Take a look at this chart I found on the internet:

http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s219/gif/s219fig1.gif

Before 1960, America was a much safer place to live. Before 1960, people could live in a less expensive neighborhood and still feel safe. But today, because of the huge increase in the rate of serious crimes, the middle class live in desperate fear of not being able to afford a safe neighborhood.

(Crime rates declined more since the above chart ends [see this table], but they are still more twice what they were in the 1950s.)

Females have it easier in online games

In massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), many men are playing female characters. Is it because they are closet homosexuals? Nope, most do it get an advantage in the game. To quote a Reuters article:

When men appear as buxom, scantily clad females in video games like "World of Warcraft," it is more about winning than finding an outlet for a real-world affinity for gender bending.

. . .

Gamers, both male and female, say female avatars confirm what they already knew: Being a pretty girl has its perks. Female avatars are often the center of attention and showered with gifts such as swords or armor by other characters.

Just as women have it easier on YouTube and in the blogosphere, the same applies to online games.

Do women also have it easier in the real world?

Is life better today?

The Economix column in today's NY Times argues that Americans are far better off than we were in the past because of technological innovations such as cell phones, snow blowers, more affordable cross country plane tickets, and better care for premature babies.

The problem is that the article confuses inflation with technological progress. Most of the technological progress doesn't truly increase happiness. People enjoyed watching 13" black and white TVs as much as they now enjoy their 50" plasma screen TVs. Maybe high speed internet access and DVD players have turned us into an unhappy society of recluses?

Better healthcare only benefits the sick and not the healthy. The healthy are worse off as long as they remain healthy, because they are paying a lot more for their healthcare than did previous generations.

Today the medical profession can do amazing things like enable women in their forties to have babies. In the past, women avoided the problem by having babies in their early twenties.

What good is a cell phone and a DVD player if a young person can't afford to live on his own because housing is so expensive and he has to live with his parents? That's how people really judge how they are doing. How much money they have compared to their parents. In the 1950s, young people could afford to leave the nest and start a family. Today they can't, but they have a lot of cool techological toys. That's illusory progress and not real progress.

Why are Harvard and Princeton ending early admissions?

Harvard and Princeton have abandoned their early admissions programs.

Normally I have an opinion about everything that happens at elite universities, but I really don't know what to say. Allegedly, the purpose for ending the programs is because they hurt the "low income" applicants at the expense of the upper middle class who are more savvy about applying to colleges and whose parents don't have to worry about how they are going to pay the tuition. "Low income" students, on the other hand, want to get accepted to multiple schools so they can compare financial aid offers.

I just have a hard time believing that the people in charge of admissions at these schools really have the best interests of the less affluent students at heart.

Maybe they somehow think this will help minorities get into the colleges, because although the people making decisions at Harvard don't have much regard for middle class whites, they seem to be wracked with guilt that not enough black people are attending.

Young people have slackerhood thrust upon them

Dana's comment to my post about parents paying for their adult children's health insurance says, to summarize things, that children today are lazy bums and aren't hard working like previous generations.

These types of sentiments are not at all uncommon, although they usually don't appear on my blog because most of my readers get it.

Fred sums up my opinions exactly in his responding comment:

I wonder how much of the directionless, self-absorbed buffonery of 30 somethings trying, with desperately increasing pathos, to get off on the "Friends" lifestyle is in reality an expression of the frustration and diminishing self-respect of those perceptive enough to realize that they are well past childhood but who are not yet, and perhaps never will be, in a position to take up the responsibilities of adulthood

Yes, people behave in a manner expected by their environment. I'd like to point out that my parents bought a new four bedroom house in the New York City area when my mother was a full time mother and my father just had an associate's degree. Yes it's a small four bedroom house compared to the McMansions of today, but that same house, now nearly forty years old, is completely out of reach of someone who just has an associate's degree, no matter how hard he wants to bust his butt working.

One of the reasons why the upper middle class work harder than the middle class is because of the natural inclination of people to work harder at things they are good at. Few people have the willpower to work hard at an activity at which they suck. So someone who is good at making money will work hard at it. But someone who sees that, no matter how hard he works he will never rise above the median income, has no motivation to even participate in this game, he just wants to put in the minimum effort to get his paycheck.

Today, most people around the age of thirty aren't good at making money compared to the older generation, so they are less motivated to work hard compared to previous generations. (I should point out that they aren't as good at earning money not because they are inherently worthless people, but because the economy no longer values people with lesser work experience, possibly because there are billions of people in India and China with minimal work experience they are competing with.)

Rich people who go broke

This quote from a NY Times article about rich people who go broke is right on the money:

David W. Latko . . . says there are five basic ways people become rich: they inherit, marry, steal, win or earn their fortunes. Only those who earn fortunes, says Mr. Latko, tend to preserve their wealth. Inhabitants of the other four categories are more prone to be wastrels.

“The first thing you’ve got to look at, always, is where is the money coming from,” he says. “People who’ve made money themselves protect it. People who’ve inherited it spend it.”

Parents pay for adult children's health insurance

From the NY Times:

Not only are children moving back home after college and asking Mom and Dad for monthly subsidies, but in a growing number of states children can now stay on their parents’ health insurance plans well into their 20’s.

Call it another example of adultescence. With 18- to 34-year-olds the fastest growing group of uninsured, states are extending the time that children can be a dependent for insurance purposes.

Another example of how changes in the economy have left behind young adults. Will the young adults earning less money ever catch up, or will the generation be permanently less well off for their entire lives?

And of course, with it becoming the norm for young adults to receive financial assistance from parents, this is especially hard on young adults whose parents don't have much money.

Colleges where the students don't graduate

According to the NY Times, there are about fifty colleges across the country where the six-year graduation rate is less than 20%.

These institutions are making the average student worse off than if he had never attended at all. In previous blog posts, I wrote about how students who attend college but don't graduate don't earn much more than those who never attended at all (it's the degree that matters). So students attending these bogus schools wind up with student loan debt but no higher salary.

Should the nanny state outlaw salt?

According to the NY Times, a doctor's group wants the FDA to classify salt as a "food additive" instead of a substance "generally recognized as safe," thus making it illegal to add too much of it to food.

People should be outraged at this latest attempt to regulate our lives. Mankind managed to survive thousands of years without a government telling us how much salt we're allowed to eat. Furthermore, there's a good chance that the whole "salt is bad for you mantra" is really a big lie.

The Lonelygirl15 hoax

The first time I watched Lonelygirl15 on YouTube, right away I thought she looked like she was in her twenties and not like the high school age girl she alleged herself to be.

Turns out I was right. The New York Times describes her as "20-ish."

At least she's really a female. Or is she? The brains behind the project are two men. They just needed a pretty woman to front the project because no one wants to watch a video blog starring a man.

Part of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.

On learning that Ms. Rose was an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, ran to parties and posing

Yeah, the chance of a hot girl really being interested in that stuff is as high as the chance of a hot girl writing a blog about libertarian politics. The rule of blogs, now including video blogs, is that if something seems too good to be true then it's probably not true.

Medicare premiums increasing for the affluent

The government is raising Medicare premiums for individuals with more than $80,000 in income.

Sounds like a move in the right direction. How is it fair that young poor people are taxed so that rich old people get practically free healthcare?

If anything, this doesn't go far enough. If an old person has $40,000 of income, I don't see why he should pay only one quarter of what a young person has to pay for healthcare.

Religiosity, economic views, and children

There has been lots of blog chatter recently about the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals.

In order to better understand this, I ran two regression analyses. The first analysis predicts the respondent's political views as measured on a seven point scale from liberal to conservative. The second analysis predicts how many children the respondent has.

In both cases, the independent variables are (1) EQWLTH, a seven point scale asking the respondent whether he believes the government should reduce income differences between the rich and poor; and (2) BIBLE, which asks if the respondent thinks the Bible is the direct word of God, the inspired word of God, or just a book of fables.

EQWLTH is a measure of economic libertarianism.

BIBLE is a measure of religiosity.

Let's examine the results:

Variables
Role	Name	Label	Range	MD	Dataset
Dependent	POLVIEWS	THINK OF SELF AS LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	EQWLTH	SHOULD GOVT REDUCE INCOME DIFFERENCES	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	BIBLE(1-3)	FEELINGS ABOUT THE BIBLE	1-4	0,8,9	1
Weight	WT2004NR	WEIGHT	.35-5.92		1
Filter	YEAR(1998-2004)	GSS YEAR FOR THIS RESPONDENT	1972-2004		1

Regression Coefficients					Test That Each Coefficient = 0
	B	SE(B)	Beta	SE(Beta)	T-statistic	Probability
EQWLTH	.180	.010	.252	.015	17.191	.000
BIBLE(1-3)	-.404	.030	-.197	.015	-13.430	.000
Constant	4.219	.070			59.843	.000

Variables
Role	Name	Label	Range	MD	Dataset
Dependent	CHILDS	NUMBER OF CHILDREN	0-8	9	1
Independent	EQWLTH	SHOULD GOVT REDUCE INCOME DIFFERENCES	1-7	0,8,9	1
Independent	BIBLE(1-3)	FEELINGS ABOUT THE BIBLE	1-4	0,8,9	1
Weight	WT2004NR	WEIGHT	.35-5.92		1
Filter	YEAR(1998-2004)	GSS YEAR FOR THIS RESPONDENT	1972-2004		1

Regression Coefficients					Test That Each Coefficient = 0
	B	SE(B)	Beta	SE(Beta)	T-statistic	Probability
EQWLTH	.002	.013	.002	.015	.144	.885
BIBLE(1-3)	-.400	.036	-.166	.015	-11.109	.000
Constant	2.522	.084			30.166	.000

DISCUSSION

We see that whether or not a person considers himself liberal or conservative is an equal mix of religion (more religious corresponds with more conservative), and libertarian economic views (more libertarian corresponds with more conservative).

The T-statistic is higher for the EQWLTH question, possibly because the EQWLTH question is a seven point scale while the BIBLE question is only a three point scale. It would be fair to say that religion and economic views are given approximately equal weight when people consider their liberal-conservative orientation.

When we look at how many children the respondent has, the respondent's answer to the EQWLTH question has no correlation with the number of children. But the BIBLE question has about as strong a correlation with number of children as it did with political views.

This means that when people like Steve Sailer make a big deal about the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals, they are not accurately understanding the real correlation.

Being conservative is correlated with more children only because religiosity is correlated with more children. It has nothing to do with "conservative" economic views.

Thus it's misleading to talk about how conservatives have more children than liberals. The true story is that religious people have more children than secular people, and that economic conservatives have no more and no less children than economic liberals.

Muslim invasion

"In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades." NY Times.

The richest rich

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw says:

there has been "a sharp change in the composition of top incomes away from capital income and toward labor income." The percent of this elite group's income that comes in the form of dividends, interest, and rent has fallen from 56 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2004. Increasingly, the top income group is not the idle rich but the working rich.

I believe that this change is because of the increasing importance of winner takes all economics.

It's not all that special that these people work. I work, you work, everyone works, but we don't get paid millions of dollars per year.

Who knew that Drew Barrymore made $22 million in 2005? How much money would she have made were it not for the fact that her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all actors? Obviously her inside connections got her into the profession (at the age of 11 months).

The fact that a lot of the richest rich (from an income perspective and not an asset perspective) work doesn't negate the fact that the best way to become rich is to be born to the right parents.

Brooks on inequality and social skills

SFG, who frequently comments here, mentioned David Brooks' latest op-ed piece (which I can't read because I don't subscribe to Times Select--not worth the money just to read David Brooks).

Dean Baker rips apart Brooks' column.

Kathy, who rips into David Brooks from a less fact based and more emotional standpoint quotes him:

Members of the second and much more persuasive school of thought on inequality say the key issue is skills. Lawrence Katz, formerly of the Clinton administration, now of Harvard, puts it this way: Across many nations, the market increasingly rewards people with high social and customer-service skills. A contractor who can work with customers, design kitchens and organize jobs may earn five times as much as one of his workers who has identical cabinetry skills.

Kathy responds:

Did you read this sentence carefully? Brooks just said that the boss (the contractor) might make five times what one of his workers does. Could that be because...he's the boss??

I do agree with Brooks that social skills are rewarded more now than they were thirty years ago. Rewarding of social skills tends to make the United States a less class-mobile society, because social skills are intiminately tied up with class. People born to upper middle class parents will learn upper middle class social skills and be able to earn more money because of their lucky accident of birth than smarter middle class people lacking in the finer points of upper middle class culture.

The increasing emphasis on social skills demonstrates that the winners of the new economy are not the ones who add value to the economy, but rather the ones who are able to transfer value created by others.

Xanga review

Xanga is a blogging tool, not unlike Typepad which I use for my Half Sigma blog, yet very different in it's orientation.

THE GOOD OF XANGA

I really like the software behind Xanga. It's a slick tool, and easier to use than either Blogger or Typepad. Xanga's pages are loaded dynamically from the database, which means that changes to your blog happen instantaneously. There isn't a long publishing delay like you would experience with other blogging tools.

Xanaga gives you a limited ability to customer your blog's layout with an easy to use web page. You can change colors and fonts, set a background image (a feature I wish people didn't take advantage of) and also set a url to load music onto your web page (another feature I wish peopld didn't take advantage of). If you upgrade to the premium version, then you can have complete control over your blog's template using custom layouts and "skins." I doubt that many Xangans know enough HTML to do that themselves, so they are using skins that other people created.

The goal of perhaps a majority of Xanga users seem to be to make their blog as annoying and hard to read as possible. There's a background image such that you can barely read the text, the "skin" totally screws around with the default positioning of the common blog elements, and there's horrible music blasting.

Xanga has recently added photo features. You can upload photos, create albums, and each user also has a "photo blog," which just means that users can look at the photos and leave comments on them. The "photo blog" is less featured than Flickr, a site I'd recommend over Xanga if you just want to post photos that others can comment on, and your're not interested in writing any non-photo posts.

Xanga lets you automatically add a photo to your regular non-photo blog post, and this is a pretty useful feature, although it downsizes each photo so that it's longest dimension is 400 pixels. If you want a bigger photo on your blog post, you can grab the HTML of a larger version of the photo (much like Flickr), and paste it into your post. But I suspect that most Xanga users don't have the HTML sophistication required to do that.

Xanga has also recently added a new footprints feature. Footprints function like a Sitemeter, giving you a breakdown of every single hit to your blog pages. The footprints also display the Xanga user ID of each visitor. This lets you know exactly who's reading your blog.

THE BAD OF XANGA

Xanga allows you to subscribe to other Xanga blogs, and the subscription process is pretty painless. You just click a subscribe link on the other person's blog, and that's it. Your subscriptions automatically appear on the left sidebar of your blog, and you also have a page where you can read all of the subscriptions (generally a better way to read posts than visiting the blog because you don't have to deal with blog author's horrible layout).

What Xanga does not allow you to do is link to non-Xanga blogs. (Well, if you upgraded to the premium version, you have a custom module where you can add links using HTML tags, but hardly anyone is going to go to the trouble.) Xanga also does not allow comment except from other registered Xanga users. The good thing, at least, is that there are no spam comments, but the bad part is that Xanga is a closed system. Although non-member websurfers are around to read your blog, because they can't leave comments, and because you can't exchange links with non-Xanga bloggers, Xanga essentially limits your audience to other Xanga bloggers.

Who are the other Xanga bloggers? Traditionally teenage girls made up the biggest share of Xanga users, but the the demographic seems to have changed in the past two years. MySpace has pulled away a lot of the teenage users. Because Xanga and Myspace are both closed systems, teenagers want to be where their friends are, and for most teenagers that now means MySpace. The popularity of MySpace is due to the fact that it offers comments, photos and profiles, much like Xanga, but it removes the annoying necessity for people to write blog posts.

One strange oddity of Xanga is that most of the users are now Asian. Xanga doesn't seem to market to Asians, and there are no indications anywhere that this is an Asian blogging tool, but nevertheless if you go through any of the blogrings, most of the blogs you find have Asian authors (usually female).

I think this is a case of white flight. When the young white users realized that Xanga was becoming an Asian hangout, they fled to LiveJournal, a blogging tool similar in scope to Xanga but which mostly has white users. And of course they fled to MySpace, the social networking tool where you don't have to write blog posts.

I suspect a higher percentage of Asians blog compared to other races. My guess is that only people with above average IQs are interested in blogging (because people with below average IQs don't enjoy reading or writing), and because Asians, on average, have higher IQs than other races, a higher percentage of Asians would be interested in maintaining a blog.

Unfortunately, young Asian girls have adopted the anti-intellectual writing style of their non-Asian peers. Here is a sample blog post from Xanga:

1ST DAii OF SKEWL WAS MAD FUN YOOO!! ii GOT 2 C EVERY1 && ii HAD VERii NiiCE TEACHERS!! BUT U KNO BEiiN AN 8TH GRADER THEY TOLD US SOO MANY iiNFO THAT WE WERE SOPOSE 2 DO OR SHiiT'S LiiKE DAT!! BUT U KNO JUST DA NORMAL STUFF!!AHHHHH EVEY1 WAS LOOKiiN MAD CUTEEE!! OFCOURSE ii WAS WEARIN MY SHORT SKiiRT, NEW KiiCKS, && MY SWEATER DAT LOOK GREAT!! LOL PPL WERE SAYiiN ii LOOK MAD HOTTT!! BUT PPL ALWAYS SAY LiiKE ALWAYS!! LMAOO MY WORSE ENEMY iiS iiN MY CLASS WERE KiiNDA TALKiiN BUT ii DONT WANNA TALK 2 HER ii WiiSH SHE WOULD JUST DiiE!! BUT U KNO WE SAY Hiii BYE!! W.E JUST DONT WANNA TALK 2 DA HOE!! 2ND DAY OF SKEWL WAS AiiGHT BUT iiT WAS MAD HOTTT!! FREAKiiN GiiRL iiN MY CLASS R MAD RACiiS YOOO!! ii FREAKiiN HATE DAT SHiiTT!! BUT W.E US ASiiAN WOULD B RiiCH THEY WOULD B WORKiiN 4 US!! MUAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAH!!

EVERY1 GOT HW ALREDY!! BUT MiiNE iiSNT DAT BAD ii GUES!! JUST DOiiN ESSAY 4 MS.BRUNO!! BUT iiTS REALLii EASY! ii WENT 2 EAT PiiZZA WiiT MY BESTFRiiENDS HAiiVY DA FREAKO, JESSiiCA DA HOE!! LMAOOOO ii LUV THEM BOTH 2 DEATH!! ANYWZY ii GUESS DATS iiT 3 DA DAii YOO!!

If you can put in the effort to actually read the above post, it contains some interesting sociological insights. The author of the post, an Asian girl in the 8th grade, complains that the blacks in her school don't like Asians, but consoles herself with the knowledge that Asians are more successful in life than blacks, and when they are all adults the blacks will be working for the Asians.

It's these kinds of raw sociological observations of American youth that make it worthwhile to visit teen sites.

Some articles from the NY Times

(1) To Give Children an Edge, Au Pairs From China. Parents want to hire Chinese au pairs who can teach their little children how to speak Chinese, the global language of the future. This makes a lot of sense; the best time for people to learn a foreign language is when they are toddlers. By the time the educational system begins this instruction (it was grade 6 for me), you're already too old.

Yet another example of how the rich can give their children advantages the poor will never have.

(2) Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe. Seven million subscribers pay a monthly fee to play the game World of Warcraft. There's huge money to be made in massively multiplayer online games. I played a similar game, Final Fantasy XI, when I was between jobs and it was thorougly addictive. I think the addictiveness is because you make slow but steady progress towards becoming more powerful. Unlike in the real world where your hard work usually isn't rewarded, and certainly not in a way where you can see it happening on a daily basis.

(3) Op-Ed Contributor: A Little Learning Is an Expensive Thing. A former college president explains that tuition and student debt both are rising faster than inflation, and that college presidents are also overpaid.

(4) The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters? How real estate agents are trying hard to prevent competition from low commission web based agencies. Real estate agents' profits are based on their anti-competitive cartel. Yet another example of how people make money by transferring it from other people to themselves and not by actually adding value to the economy.

(5) For New Lawyers, the Going Rate Has Gone Up. The starting salary for new associates at BIGLAW is now $145,000. The problem with articles like this is that people will read it and then want to go to law school, not realizing that only graduates of top 14 law schools have a reasonable chance of getting these jobs, and most law school graduates wind up making less than nurses.

(6) At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready. At two year colleges, students take remedial reading and math, learning what student at regular colleges already learned in high school. I suspect that even after two years of remedial education they still don't have the math and reading skills of four-year college bound high school graduates.

(7) Many Entry-Level Workers Find a Rough Market. This article has all the themes from my blog! I wonder if the author is a reader? Life sucks today for entry level workers. Real wages are declining. And at the same time, the costs of housing are at an all time high. Increasing wages have only benefited the older workers.

“People are getting married later, they’re having children later, and they’re buying houses later,” said Cecilia E. Rouse, an economist at Princeton University and a co-editor of a forthcoming book on the economics of early adulthood. “There’s been a lengthening of the transition to adulthood, and it is very possible that what has happened in the economy is leading to some of these changes.”

Yes, I already explained this in my post on resource insecurity and childlessness.