Half Sigma

The estate tax and value transference

I wrote my original pro-estate tax argument before I developed my theory of value transference.

Those libertarian economists who argue against the estate tax will say it’s discouraging value creation. But the way I see it, anyone who is rich enough to have an estate big enough to be subject to the tax became that rich through value transference rather than value creation. Taxes on value transference are good taxes, because they tax a zero-sum or negative-sum activity and allow lower taxes on value creation activities. Taxes on value transference have the effect of encouraging value creation rather than discouraging it.

It’s not even clear if the estate tax is a tax on the decedent or a tax on the heirs. As a tax on the heirs, receiving money from a rich decedent is a classic example of value transference, and therefore merits a high tax. It's easy to see how inheritence results in less value creation: a lucky heir might quit his value-creating job because he got rich through inheritence. Taxing the value transference (the inheritance) encourages value creation activities (the heir keeps his job).

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I’d also like to point out that in the last presidential election, Obama carried the majority of the value transference class. I don't understand why Republicans are so much in favor of lowering the taxes of a group which no longer votes Republican.

2010, still a good year to die

In the summer of 2006, I wrote that 2010 would be a good year to die, if you’re really rich. Amazingly, Congress has allowed this to happen (see WSJ article), and people who die in 2010 will pay no estate tax at all (although the death will now create a realization event for capital gains purposes—I wish the accountants good luck trying to figure out the basis of those rich-people assets).

People are concerned about the ethics of heroic medical measures to keep rich people alive until 2010. I think we should be more worried about the ethics of killing rich people in December 2010 in order to double the value of estate.

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I've previously explained why I'm in favor of the estate tax.

Liberal education policy

From the a San Francisco area weekly newspaper (thanks to "areader" for the link):

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

It’s almost like it’s a parody from The Onion, but it’s not, it’s really happening.

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Commenter “blighter” gets what’s happening:

This is, of course, a perfectly logical next step in the battle to "close the gap". After decades & countless billions spent trying to narrow the racial gap by raising the lower side proved utterly futile, the obvious thing to try is lowering the top side.

True equality of outcome can only be achieved by lowering everyone's outcome to that possible for the least capable person. We'll get there eventually.

Well, not for the elite, they'll sit in their gated communities, surrounded by their private-school, Ivy-league educated friends and voice their enthusiastic support for destroying the above average in the name of creating equality for the mediocre.

Nursing will become a male profession

I tried to think of a good career track for people who aren’t able to commit to the six years of education required to become a pharmacist, and who aren't BIGLAW material. The answer is nursing. Nursing and related medical technician fields are the only guaranteed way for a person of average (but not below-average) intelligence to have a guaranteed middle class income, and not have to worry about being laid off and unemployable some time down the road.

The demand for nurses increases every year, but at the same time there’s declining demand for decent-paying traditionally male blue collar jobs. As a result, you see more men going into nursing today than you did ten or twenty years ago.

There is the perception that women are better nurses because they are more caring, but I believe that this reputation is falsely earned. Women care a lot about their own children, and to a lesser extent they care about children in general, but when it comes to caring for adult strangers, I believe than men are just as caring, if not more caring, than women. It goes back to the hunter-gatherer days, when men would go out hunting in large groups. If a man was injured on the hunt, the other men in the hunting party would take care of the wounded man. So you see, men have evolved to care for their fellow injured man.

Man’s greater physical strength makes him better suited for nursing, because men are better at lifting nonambulatory patients.

Currently, there is still a stigma attached to male nurses, and this scares away most men from nursing. But as the number of male nurses increases, there will eventually be a tipping point at which time the stigma will go away and men will flood into the field. After the tipping point, nursing will rapidly become a predominately male profession.

The Gospel of Matthew

To celebrate Christmas, I just read the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. This is so bogus. Herod killed all the babies in Bethlehem two years old or younger? It seems that Matthew was blatantly copying from Exodus in which Pharoah killed all the Jewish babies. He couldn't think of anything original.

Is there any independent confirmation of this atrocity outside of the Gospel of Matthew? Of course not. How do people believe this crap? This is even dumber than believing that the Angel Moroni gave Joseph Smith a bunch of golden tablets. At least Joseph Smith didn't make up a bunch of unbelievable contemporary events.

The benefits of private school

A nerdy white kid at a mixed-race middle school accidentally hits a girl (of unknown race) with a basketball during gym. The girl has a gang of her male friends (of unknown race) beat up the nerdy white kid as he walks home from school, causing severe injuries.

That’s as much as I want to speculate about what happened. At Larry Auster’s blog, there is more detail along with some comments which I would consider unnecessarily mean-spirited.

This is why you should send your kids to private school.

Maybe there's also a lesson here about unathletic kids and gym class.

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It has been brought to my attention that Muneton is a Spanish surname.

From the picture, the kid looks caucasian. He has a typical American first name. He's reported to be an "honor student" (although everytime I see a kid reported as an "honor student" I think of the book Bonfire of the Vanities).

A commenter thinks the kid is “Hispanic,” but he may not be any more Hispanic than Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo (in other words, having a single distant ancestor from the Iberian Peninsula).

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Even if the kid is Hispanic, as a white-looking Hispanic with a white first name who gets decent grades in school and is not good with controlling a basketball, he was probably looked down upon by the black kids as being too white.

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Commenters say I should leave black-on-white crime to more mean-spirited blogs, and I generally agree, but I also see this story as being about why the tri-state area sucks, because you can't just send your kid to any school. You have to move to a very expensive neighborhood to get away from NAMs, or send your kids to private school.

I'm surprised that there's a middle school in Englewood that's only 2% white, because I thought Englewood was an expensive place to live. It's right across the George Washington Bridge from New York City, and I've seen houses there which are extremely expensive and populated by rich white people. Apparently, all the rich white people who live there know to send their kids to private school. The people I know who lived in Englewood did send their kid to private school: the Dwight Englewood School which Brooke Shields and Mira Sorvino attended.

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Test Test writes:

Not everything is about race. A pudgy kid who hits the popular girl with a basketball is likely to get beat up in any school. The thing that makes this incident stand out is that he was severely beaten. But similar incidents have happen in all-white communities; last year, some white teenagers were arrested for posting a youtube video of themselves beating a female classmate.

Everyone's going to think we're racist if we start saying things like "those **** NAM's haven't evolved one bit since they got that monkey-like slave DNA" every time a white-looking Hispanic boy gets beat up. There's the truth--that affirmative action is detrimental to society--and then there's racial epithets that make us all look bad.

Global cooling kills 79 in Poland

79 dead in Poland from winter freeze.

Maybe Time Magazine had it right.

Ross Douthat writes about Gaiaism

In the NY Times, Ross Douthat writes about Gaiaism, except that he doesn’t know to call it that. He comes close to pointing out that the truth that smart people find the fantastic stories of the Old and New Testaments unbelievable and silly, but he’s unable to make that final leap and state the truth bluntly.

As usual, I feel that Ross is on the cusp of getting it, but doesn't quite get there. He does correctly point out that Gaian beliefs infuse many of those who call themselves "Christian." He also correctly points out that Hollywood is helping to spread Gaiaism. As we know, Gaiaism is the new religion of the elites, and the elites control Hollywood and use its power to spread whatever message the elites want the rest of us to believe.

New York ranks last place in happiness

As featured in a NY Times article, New York ranks last place in happiness, with the neighboring states of New Jersey and Connecticut filling out the other bottom three spots.

The question is, why do so many people live here if it sucks so bad? And no, I’m not questioning the fact that it sucks; I’m wondering why people don’t move someplace else.

Weird science, indeed

Experiment participants got drunk on either vodka and caffeine-free cola, or bourbon and caffeine-free cola. The next morning, “overall, bourbon drinkers reported feeling worse than vodka drinkers.”

Bourbon is aged in wooden barrels and picks up weird chemicals from the wood, while vodka is more of a pure alcohol. But do those weird chemicals really cause a worse hangover, or is it just the nocebo effect? (In other words, because the bourbon and cola drink tasted worse* going down, the drinkers imagined feeling worse in the morning.)

*I think that bourbon tastes great, but it's an acquired taste--it doesn't taste good the first time you try it.

Did Brittany Murphy die from not eating enough?

I don’t know who “Brittany Murphy” is (I suppose I should remember her from the movie Clueless if I had been paying more attention to such things), but 32-year-old women don’t normally die from heart attacks. She looks very skinny in the photo taken three weeks ago, and irregular heartbeat and heart attack are known complications of anorexia.

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Eric Stratton, Rush Chairman writes:

So much for the "reduce your calorie intake, live longer" school of thought.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

I don't see deadbeats, just sensible borrowers and stupid banks

Megan McArdle has some ridiculous moral outrage over what she calls a “new breed of deadbeats”: people who walk away from their mortgage in order to save money, even though they can afford to keep paying it.

The person she spotlights in her post did nothing illegal. Nor do I think the person did anything immoral. When corporations deal with individuals, such as their employees, corporate profits comes above any moral obligation such as not laying people off during a recession when the employees wouldn’t be able to find a new job. Since corporations have no problem screwing over individuals, why shouldn’t individuals screw over the corporation when the law is on their side?

I blame the bank for making a no-money-down mortgage loan on an over-appreciated property in a state with non-recourse mortgage laws. In a non-recourse mortgage state, prudent banks would never make a mortgage loan without a significant down payment. If 10% down is a prudent requirement in states where the bank can go after the borrower’s other assets, 15% would be prudent in a non-recourse mortgage state, and after a period of unprecedented price appreciation, prudent banks would increase the down payment requirement to 25%.

If all banks had been prudent in increasing the down payment amount in response to increases in the housing prices, there wouldn’t have been such a severe housing bubble because the credit wouldn’t have been available to buy the houses at the higher prices. So in this case, not only is the bank guilty of stupidity in making the loan with no down payment in the first place, it’s also guilty of participating in feeding the housing bubble which then led to the housing collapse. The bank is getting its just deserts when homeowners walk away from their mortgages.

The blizzard wasn’t hype

On Friday, Peter A wrote:

Also, on a side note, I'll believe "monster blizzard" when I see it - the media hypes every storm to death these days and it always ends in an anti-climax. I bet 7" in NYC max.

I predicted the blizzard on Friday with the benefit of reading the actual weather models, so I was pretty confident it was really coming.

We only had about 10” in Manhattan, but that’s not because it wasn’t cold enough for snow, but because the storm skirted to the south and west. Large areas of the Middle Atlantic and Northeast had 18+ inches of snow, including the areas around Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Delaware, southern New Jersey, Long Island, Rhode Island and southeast Massachusetts. In fact, various locations in eastern Long Island reported more than two feet of snow. In many places it ranks among the top ten snow accumulations since they’ve been keeping records.

Normally, Long Island has less snow than New York City because Long Island is a degree or two warmer, which can make a big difference when it comes to snow accumulations. It's noteworthy that it was so cold in eastern Long Island that this was an all snow event with high snow ratios. And it's not even winter yet!

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I predict a wet Christmas for the northeast. A storm will move in on Christmas Day bringing warmer air and lots of rain.

Super Saturday blizzard of 2009

So some people didn’t like my last post. They said “Half Sigma, you be stupid for thinking that a random weather event says anything about the long term trends.”

Well, first of all, I was having a little fun.

Second of all, the global warming alarmists do this all the time. We have an unusually active hurricane season, and they shout “LOOK, THE GLOBAL WARMING BE CAUSING THE HURRICANES!!!” The hurricane season was really quiet this year, but of course there’s no apology from the alarmists for hyping a single hurricane season.

Thirdly, the reason why big December snowstorms are so rare in the northeast is because it’s usually too warm in December for a big snow. December storms are usually rain. According to the famous “hockey stick” diagram, it’s supposed to be crazily warmer now than it was just a few years ago, yet somehow it’s cold enough for Washington DC to have the biggest December snowfall in recorded history, and the biggest December snowstorm across the I-95 corridor from Washington to Boston since 1962. (The winter of 1962-1963 was unusually cold on both sides of the Atlantic, and was known as the The Big Freeze in the United Kingdom.)

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Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, who correctly predicted this storm when other meteorologists said it wouldn't be that big, has some interesting things to say about global warming. See him talking to Bill O'Reilly about it. He mentions how the "global warming is causing the hurricanes" meme was completely bogus, and he shows evidence of global cooling during the last decade. Global cooling makes it more likely that it would be cold enough in December for a big snow in the northeast.

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How will this blizzard on the busiest shopping weekend of the year, the weekend before Christmas, affect retail profits?

Monster blizzard headed for east coast!

Looks like the biggest December snowstorm of my lifetime (based on the 18Z NAM). Global warming, not happening.

HBD investing

If you have any HBD investing advice, please comment. Be specific. “Invest in China” is not specific. Specific is “Buy The China Fund, a closed end fund which trades on the NYSE, ticker symbol CHN.” (I am not saying that’s the best way to invest in China, it’s just an example.)

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Maybe not a good time to invest in China. From a recent CNBC Halftime Report:

In a recent report, Chanos' firm has been very pessimistic about China, and his firm has even gone as far as to speculate that China could be "Dubai times 1000, or worse."

Chanos points out a stark irony that investors who decry government involvement in US companies are bullish on the Chinese markets, despite the fact that the country's government can "fine tune" the economy to their liking. He is also skeptical of the country's GDP numbers, calling them "massively inflated by under-depreciating a very, very, very shaky capital asset base."

He points out that "bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuations... there is no bigger credit excess right now than China." But how do you play this?

Chanos says that although you can't short China, the short plays are in the first derivative industries: companies which support the raw and imported materials for growth (such as copper, cement and iron ore producers). He also suggests looking into short possibilities in the Hong Kong exchange.

Chanos himself is actively shorting this area, and is "looking for plays on the China investment pool, which we think will burst at some point... Demand in China is over-inflated, that is clear."

In the long run of decades, I know that the Chinese economy is going to grow faster than the United States, but that doesn't mean that there's any practical way to invest in China, especially if there's a bubble and you can't trust Chinese financial statements.

Global warming and the herding instinct

A reader brought to my attention an editorial which points out that nearly all climate change skeptics are men.

The author of the editorial is with the Gaians, so his take is that people who are climate change skeptics are somehow mentally defective. This is an example of an ad hominen argument. To quote the Wikipedia definition, “An ad hominem argument . . . is an argument which links the validity of a premise to an irrelevant characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.”

I’ve pointed out before in this blog that people who actively participate in non-mainstream movements are disproportionately physically unattractive men. As Jay Fink wrote:

If you are attractive and have a good social life you will generally not be interested in out of the mainstream groups or ideas. Why buck the status quo when it's working in your interests?

Humans have a pretty powerful herding instinct. The Gaians know this, which is why they are trying so hard to promote the idea that there’s a “consensus,” because they know that the perception of consensus will sway people to their side. After all, 99% of the people who believe in global warming believe because of social reasons and not because they’ve done their own independent assessment of the facts. For women, the herding instinct is even more powerful than it is for men. Men can be loners, but women are never loners.

The reason why ad hominen arguments are used is because they are effective at swaying opinions, and their effectiveness lies in the herding instinct. People want to believe what the in-group believes, and not what the weirdos or the evil people believe.

Without brave men like Galileo Galilei or Martin Luther or Charles Darwin to challenge the status quo when they know that the status quo is wrong, there would be no advancement of society. We’d still be in the dark ages with all thought controlled by the Catholic Church.

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Wilbur writes:

I wear my physical unattractiveness and shunned loner status as badges of honor. Despite being ugly and socially inept, I am still here, still providing jobs and paying taxes to support the parasites who hate me but can't get by without me.

Big problems in Washington DC schools

There’s an achievement gap between black and white students, and it’s not getting any narrower:

The picture across a six-year stretch isn't more encouraging. The gap separating white and black fourth-graders in 2003, when the first NAEP in the District was given, was 60 scale points (262 to 202). Although the scores achieved by children in both groups have increased during this period, the difference has barely narrowed to 58.

Some education advocates in the District expressed concern last week that the gains celebrated by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) were propelled largely by white students who are already high achievers.

"It would suggest that we've raised the aggregate by treating those at the higher end of the scale, which is problematic and troublesome," said Jeff Smith, executive director of D.C. Voice, a nonprofit group that advocates for educational equality in the District.

The result of improving the schools had the unfortunate result of lifting scores for all students instead of narrowing the gap. Apparently, people would have been happier if scores by white students declined, because that would have been progress towards the real goal of public eduction, which is to narrow the gap.

It's not written in the article, but I believe that Washington DC has had demographic change during the last decade in which more white people with children are living in the city causing an increased percentage of the public school students to be white, which results in higher average test scores when the test results of all races are commingled. This has created the illusion of much greater educational progress than has really happened.

It's even possible that educational quality for white students didn't increase at all, but that ratio of white students from white collar families compared to white students from blue collar families has increased during the time period in question, creating the illusion of better education for whites when all that has really happened was that the average genetic quality of the white students has increased.

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Jack writes in a comment:

A lot of people would absolutely be happier if white students' scores declined. I hate this stuff about education - it is the easiest example of the no-common-sense establishment. I just want to scream at them "Do you really expect the kids of crack whores scoring as high as the kids of lawyers?"

If you believe, as they do, that lawyers' kids have the same genetic potential as crack whores' kids, why not? It's just a matter of the state stepping in and giving the crack whores' kids the same advantages the lawyers give to their kids.

Only by establishing the truth of HBD can this nonsense thinking be stopped.

Send the teachers to jail

Detroit parents want teachers and school administrators sent to prison:

Impassioned parents demanded jail time for educators and district officials Saturday following the release of test scores that showed fourth- and eighth-graders had the worst math scores in the nation.

City students took the National Assessment of Educational Progress test this year, and 69 percent of fourth-graders scored below the basic level in math and 77 percent of eighth-graders scored below basic.

The Detroit scores on the progress test were the lowest in its 40-year history. The sample of students included 900 of Detroit's 6,000 fourth-graders and 1,000 of the district's 6,000 eighth-graders.

Sharlonda Buckman, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, called for jailing and civil lawsuits against anyone in the city's educational system that is not doing his or her share to help properly educate children.

"Somebody needs to go to jail," she said in a tearful address to 500 parents gathered Saturday for the organization's annual breakfast forum. "Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, and it shouldn't be the kids."

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb told the crowd the test scores weren't the result of children who were incompetent or parents who didn't care. He blamed the scores on the district not doing its job.

This is an excellent idea. There are only two possibilities:

1. Black children are, on average, less intelligent than white children and thus unable to score well on tests when compared to white children, no matter how hard you try to educate them; or

2. Black children are just as capable as whites, so these abysmal test scores can only be explained by criminal neglect

So let’s put some people in prison.

Leftist mistreatment of gifted students

From an article in a British news source:

As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.

Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.

Does it work this way in the United States? If so, here is a good reason why you should send your children of above average intelligence to private schools.

The leftist mistreatment of gifted students, ironically, benefits the wealthy who can afford to pay for private school, and hurts the middle class whose children won’t be able to compete for good jobs against the better educated children of the rich.

It's unusually cold in Greenland compared to the past few thousand years

A reader wanted me to point out this blog post which graphically demonstrates that, despite some recent warming, Greenland is still colder than it has been throughout much of the past few thousand years.

A decent Hanukkah song, written by WHOM?

It takes a Mormon Senator from Utah to write a decent Hanukkah song.

Singapore and HBD

This quote is from a paper on “smart fraction” theory, which Steve Sailer mentioned today:

One remark on Singapore: Its long-term Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has in our data set only as highest degree “university degree”, no doctorate or an additional scientific degree. But he has studied at London School of Economics and in Cambridge and finished his studies with exceptional “Double Starred First Class Honours”. Our assessment procedure seems to underestimate his cognitive ability level. Furthermore, Singapore has reached the highest rank in the smart fraction ability (IQ 127) in our list and the second highest rank in average ability (IQ 105), but “only” the 14th rank in the lower non-smart fraction ability ranking (IQ 79). In patents (1991-2007) Singapore has the first place. And, that is especially remarkable, Singapore has reached the first place in government effectiveness. Singapore seems to have the best government in the world. Lee Kuan Yew’s ability – indicated by his success – seems to be underestimated again by the solely use of formal education. Of course, Singapore was and still is no standard-bearer of liberty and democracy and Lee Kuan Yew has attracted criticism because of this. But, he stands apart from other leaders in terms of his exceptional success for Singapore in growth, modernization, technology and since several years also in science (up to now only STEM including biotechnology). Lee is also apparently the only politician who has read and used the results of intelligence research in his politics. In speeches he has cited Thomas Bouchard and Richard Lynn (Chan & Chee, 1984), and he is the only statesman, who has seen that intelligence enhancement not only needs an improvement in the environment (like in educational policy) but also in demographic policies, because parents transfer cognitive ability to their children by creating a stimulating environment (especially by education and modeling) and by transmission of their genes.

Apparently, Singapore is the only nation pursuing HBD-aware policies, and the results have been pretty good.

Also, the praise heaped upon the leader of Singapore for being smart stands in stark contrast to Sarah Palin apologists in the HBD-blogosphere who claim that having a smart leader isn’t important.

From the archives

In the comments to a pretty old post,

Spungen writes:

I always liked "compact" men, unless they were bitter, insecure and cruel. Which, unfortunately, many are.

David Alexander responds:

Compact men are bitter, insecure, and cruel because they've seen other taller, bigger men sponge up the majority of the females, and they've allowed themselves to be affected by it.

Prostate cancer junk science

This crap news story from Reuters demonstrates everything that’s wrong with “science” and journalism today:

The findings stem from 2,686 men with prostate cancer whose physical activity was assessed repeatedly both before and after diagnosis. The subjects were followed between 1986 and 2008.

Regular physical activity -- both vigorous and non-vigorous -- was associated with a lower risk of death from any cause, the researchers found, whereas regular vigorous activity was associated with a lower, but nonsignificant, risk of death due to prostate cancer.

At least the article was honest enough to use the words “was associated with” rather than “caused.” Nevertheless, the rest of the article clearly trumpets that you need to exercise to lower your risk of death:

We recommend that men with prostate cancer do some type of physical activity for their overall health, even if it is a small amount, such as 15 minutes of activity per day of walking, jogging, biking, or mild gardening. Vigorous activity may be especially beneficial for prostate cancer, as well as overall health.

It should be incredibly obvious that people in bad health would exercise less because they are less able to. There is also the usual confounding factors problem in all medical studies; all activities which are generally considered to be “healthy” by SWPLs correlate with each other and with factors like better education, higher IQ, higher income, and access to better medical care.

If you can’t even trust “scientists” and journalists to report about something like this in a true scientific manner, how can you trust them on global warming? Obviously you can’t. You should distrust any “science” that agrees with what’s politically correct.

Another statement about IQ and income

This is an issue I’ve written about repeatedly, but it keeps coming up in comments. A commenter calling himself or herself “Linda” especially writes a lot of comments with misleading citations and bad conclusions.

The simplest explanation of the relationship between IQ and income/wealth is that low IQ predicts poverty a lot better than high IQ predicts wealth.

Someone recently sent me a link to a student paper which includes a regression done on NLSY data (that’s the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth). The reason I’ve never analyzed this dataset myself is because it requires a program called SPSS, and I’ve been too cheap to buy myself a copy.

The student paper in question does show a correlation between IQ and income when IQ is specified as a percentile score. That’s an interesting way of looking at the data, because it’s placing the most importance on variations in IQ between around 85 to 115 (which is approximately 68% of the population).

The problem with this data analysis is that it lumps everyone together. If the guy had divided the data into two subsets, people with IQ in the bottom half of the population, and people with IQ in the top half, he most likely would have found that IQ is a more important determinant of income in the bottom half.

The student’s table C, for 2003 earnings data (when the respondents are middle aged) shows what seems like a high coefficient for IQ percentile, but when you consider that going from 50% IQ to 99% IQ only increases earnings by $14,818, but going from a Bachelor’s degree to a graduate degree increases earnings by $24,145, and that going from no degree to a Bachelor’s degree increases earnings by $19,389, this affirms my basic point, that educational credentials are more important for income than being smart.

IQ advocates also misleadingly mention research which shows that, for higher income fields, IQ is a stronger predictor of job performance than it is for lower income fields (which are less cognitively demanding). But job performance has little to do with income. Average job performance on a high paying career track leads to much better income than above-average job performance on a low paying career track. Furthermore, even within a career track, the correlation between job performance and income is lower than you think. When people hire job applicants, they don’t give them IQ tests, therefore higher IQ doesn’t directly help one find better jobs. Furthermore, the relationship between promotions and job performance is also probably weaker than you think. Influenced by the idea of a “Peter Principle,” corporations now promote people based less on job performance and more on the perception that the employee possesses management attributes.

My opinion is that IQ is underused and credentials are overused as a means for hiring and promoting people, and companies would get better employees if they paid more attention to IQ, but the fact is that they don’t (because of the general belief among HR people and business managers that IQ doesn’t measure anything important), so IQ doesn’t help people very much in the job market.

I want to state again that IQ advocates wrongly assume that businesses are more IQ-aware then they really are. They often state that businesses knowingly use education as a proxy for IQ. Not true. The same political correctness that infests government and academia also infests corporations. Al Gore is a director of Apple. Michelle Obama is a director of a corporation traded on the NYSE. Big corporations are run by the same politically correct elite who run everything else.

A letter from Israel

Received via email:

I'm an Israeli high-tech guy who's been reading your blog for a while now.

There's an additional factor here that hasn't been mentioned, which I believe is relevant in the context of your blog - the BABE FACTOR. One can find a not-insignificant number of highly attractive women in Israeli CS & Engineering departments, and in the high-tech companies they subsequently work for.

I understand that this not quite the case in the USA, to put it bluntly.

To be fair, many (but not all) of these girls are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Also common are "social climbers", smart girls from "upper prole" Sephardi/Mizrahi backgrounds who go into these fields to get money easily and quickly. Girls from the old-school native Ashkenazi elite are less common. So, overall I'd say that Israel has in its culture some elements of the dynamic in USA Computer Science education that you've described in some of your old posts, but they've been heavily mitigated by other factors.

Correct, in the United States, IT is the wrong place to meet women. University computer science departments are predominantly male and non-white.

In the United States, there are actually quite a number of Russian immigrants in the IT field. If you bump into a white guy doing computer programming in Manhattan, there’s a pretty good chance that he’s from Eastern Europe. But Indians are more common. There are a lot of Indian women doing support roles in IT like QA.

It’s interesting that, even in Israel, IT is a turn-off to the elite.

Al Jazeera on the side of the global warming skeptics

I am not surprised to find out that Al Jazeera I on the side of the global warming skeptics.

(1) Many Islamic nations are oil exporters, and oil exporting nations will be economically hurt if AGW alarmists are successful in lowering the global demand for oil.

Some people think that the United States will benefit from not having to buy oil from oil exporting nations, but that’s ridiculous. The purchase of oil is a win-win situation for both parties. The purchasing nation gets a valuable fuel needed to drive the economy, and the selling nation gets money for excess resources which aren’t needed.

(2) Global warming is a religion and not a science. The Muslims believe in Allah, so they don’t need global warming to give them something to believe in. I’m sure the average Muslim thinks that the Jews are a much bigger problem than global warming.

Coming global warming data analysis

In the near future, I promise to use the historical UK temperature data do a regression analysis compared with atmospheric CO2 levels. (If anyone knows of the best online source for atmpospheric CO2, please send it to me.)

I will also try to analyze the data for the urban heat island effect.

What real climate data reveals

137 years of raw uncorrected temperature data from a particular weather station in the UK shows no discernible trend up or down.

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The other Times reports that the UK Met Office “plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.”

Sounds like a reasonable idea? Not to everyone. “The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.”

The real good news is that raw data will be made available online, so anyone can do their own analyses.