Half Sigma

Carlos Slim and value transference

People who read Steve Sailer’s blog know that Carlos Slim is the world’s richest man. Steve writes about him a lot.

Carlos Slim has gotten rich by applying Porter’s Five Forces to his business. By owning 90% of the Mexican telephone market, his company can charge very high prices and keep the profits. Barriers to entry (whatever they may be) prevent competitors from undercutting his prices.

Does anyone really think that Carlos Slim has created $60 billion of value? I think that he transferred the value from others to himself.

In the recent debate about taxes, conservative types insisted that it is necessary to allow the rich to keep their money so that jobs can be created. This theory has obviously not worked in Mexico—otherwise millions of Mexicans wouldn’t have immigrated to the United States.

Only rich kids can afford to not go to college

According to a Wall Street Journal article, gap years, that is taking a year off before starting college, are becoming more common. Reasons cited for this include “burnout from the competitive pressure of high school” and “[finding] out more about themselves.”

Students who don't make their own plans often sign up for organized programs. Positions may pay wages or provide scholarships, while others charge fees, some as high as $35,000.

People complain about the high cost of college, but we see that it’s even more expensive to do nothing.

Stagehands vs. investment bankers

There was a blog post on a certain popular libertarian economics blog about how stagehands make a really good salary. “At Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, the average stagehand salary and benefits package is $290,000 a year.”

The stagehands are making good use of Porter’s Five Forces. Especially force number five, which is to have better bargaining power than your customers. The stagehand’s customer is the theater who hires him. Because the stagehands are all members of a union, they bargain as a single entity, while there are many theaters.

If there were a true free market, people would see how much money stagehands are making, and would compete against them bringing their salaries down. But this doesn’t happen because the stagehands are also using force number one which is about being in an industry with barriers to entry. (How do they prevent competition? Force employers to sign agreements to only hire union employees? Not allow new people to work as stagehands unless they have inside connections? Beat up competitors?) Unions have been using Porter’s Five Forces before he wrote the book.

Instead of lauding the stagehands for using Harvard-MBA-level business strategy to increase their profit, the readers of the libertarian blog are outraged that they are making money.

The same readers don’t seem to have a problem when investment bankers use the same strategies to make tens of millions of dollars per year instead of a mere $290,000. Like the stagehands, the investment bankers control their market through a small oligopoly of firms which have a gentleman's agreement to not to compete on price, which gives them much greater bargaining power than the much more numerous businesses and government entities seeking capital. Instead of beating up competitors, they buy off congressmen; and they have lawyers to help them “donate” money so that their dishonesty is technically legal.

As important as it is to do something about those stagehands making $290,000/year, it’s a hundred times more important to do something about those investment bankers and other Wall Street types because they are transferring tens of billions of dollars per year from the rightful stakeholders to themselves. The government could do this easily enough by creating an alternative electronic auction market for new securities, and this would be much beneficial to our economy because it would lower the cost of capital and encourage investment.

Free markets

I want to say something about “free market competition,” but I’ve already written about this before.

First I wrote the following comment:

[B]usinesses profit from asymmetry of information. Businesses have a whole staff of people who devote their lives to knowing how to rip off their customers. There's no way you can compete against that.

When the buyer has the same bargaining power and knowledge as the seller, the seller doesn't make a profit.

There are only two ways to make money: (1) asymmetry of information; (2) have a monopoly, or at least a cooperative oligopoly.

Then I clarified this in my post on Porter’s Five Forces. (This is a short but must-read post.)

And then I wrote about the meaning of the term free market.

Upon thinking on this further, the term “free market” is meaningless unless there’s real competition. Otherwise, we just have the meaningless difference between privately run-monopolies and government-run monopolies.

So someone becoming a billionaire is an example of there not being a free market. In a free market, competition would prevent people from becoming billionaires, because when people saw someone making huge money doing something, they would compete against him and drive down his profits.

Acting and race

I received negative comments for mentioning Haliee Steinfeld’s racial backround in my previous post about the movie True Grit.

1. Primarily, I mentioned it because race is a topic that some of my blog readers like me to write about. There wasn’t really any ulterior motive.

2. Traditionally, it’s not racist to consider an actress’ appearance when casting a movie. It’s pretty much the only area left where it’s considered acceptable to discriminate for such reasons.

3. I definitely did notice Hailee’s mixed-race heritage when I first saw her. Maybe I’m sensitive to such things because I’ve read so many comments on HBD blogs. I would guess that most people who watched the movie didn’t pick up on it, because she was presented as white.

4. The people who did the casting for the movie surely noticed her slight mixed-race appearance. It’s part of their job to be very sensitive to how people look. Casting a three-quarters white person to play someone who would have, historically, been 100% white is a conscious decision that they made. As I wrote previously, I guess being 75% white is now considered white enough for playing white people.

5. Once upon a time, it would have been considered an insult to point out someone’s non-white ancestry. But nowadays, it’s a huge compliment. Mixed-race people are considered the coolest people Everyone wants to be like Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Vin Diesel or Mariah Carey. Pure white people are boring and lacking in vibrancy.

6. None of the above points has anything to do with my continuing opinion that Hailee’s performance was key to making the movie as good as it is. It’s an interesting HBD question regarding whether mixed-race people are, statistically, better performers.

The ice age is coming

There’s massive amounts of snow on the ground this morning in the northeast.

There’s an op-ed in the NY Times to remind us that the unusually cold winter weather is caused by global warming. (Even though a few years ago, the warmists said that snow was a thing of the past.)

Hey, I have a new theory. The unusually warm summer was caused by global cooling.

True Grit

I didn’t see the original movie with John Wayne, and I didn’t read the novel. But this remake is the best Western I’ve ever seen. Although that isn’t saying that much—until this movie came along, I’ve never seen a Western that I actually liked. Unless that movie with Kevin Costner counts as a Western?

The movie doesn’t have much of a plot or a story—yeah, theoretically there’s a story about a girl wanting revenge for her father’s murder, but it’s not a plot where I was on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next.

Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin are billed as the leading actors. This is wrong. Damon is a supporting actor and Brolin is only on-screen for two or three minutes. The main character in the movie is the girl played by actress Hailee Steinfeld, who just turned 14 this month, so she was 13 when the movie was filmed. As you know, one of my pet peeves is that Hollywood routinely casts actors and actresses who are far older than the characters they play. This was true of the original movie with John Wayne, in which the Mattie Ross role was played by an actress in her twenties. A movie has an entirely different feel to it when a 14-year-old girl is played by a 13-year-old girl instead of an adult. Hailee’s youngness comes through and makes the movie special.

When I first saw Hailee on the screen, I thought she looked both slightly black and slightly Asian. I looked her up afterwards on Wikipedia, and it turns out that I was right about that. In the real Arkansas of the 1870s, there wouldn’t be any people around who are part white, part Filipino, and part black. I guess the new rule of Hollywood is that mixed-race people can play white roles in historical films.

I’ve also written before that regular unconnected people don’t usually get big breaks in Hollywood. Hailee is no exception to the general rule. Her uncle is actor/bodybuilder/fitness trainer Jake Steinfeld. This is another example of how the system transfers value from ordinary people to those born to into families with connections.

After Hailee, the second most important factor to the movie are the sets and the cinematography. The recreation of an Arkansas town in the 1870s was incredible. I believed I was there. None of those older Westerns ever gave me the sense of actually being there. Once the story moves away from the down, the winter wilderness was also filmed beautifully. It makes you want to go out hiking in the Arkansas woods in the winter.

Will True Grid mark the return of Westerns? I doubt it. None of these Western movies ever have an interesting plot. The recreation of the nineteenth century is something which can only be done once or twice before it gets boring and pointless. Today, science fiction fills the role which the Western once filled.

C's comment on what it takes to become rich

Below is a comment left by "C."

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I'm a successful businessperson who has been through the trenches, who has written a book in his specific niche (real estate development), and I want to comment on the quote by sociomath:

"As Sigma has pointed out elsewhere, High IQ people tend toward conformity in ideology, morality, etc. My sense is that extreme financial success is almost always the result of some level of immoral behavior, whether an isolated moment or two on your way to the top or a continuing practice of ruthless behavior. To reach the top, you have to be deceitful and screw people over. At the very least, you have to warp and break accepted rules. Bill Gates for example stole the original idea for Windows and then built and defended what amounted to an illegal monopoly. Many high IQ people are extra sensitive to moral issues, and thus don't really have the stomach to make the mega bucks."

This is 110% true. Theoretically, other than someone who owns intellectual property rights (I say theoretically because there are institutionalized mechanisms in place to cheat these people as well) or established brand rights, the competitive environment assures the thinnest of possible profit margins. Smart people are the ones who innovate yet rarely estimate correctly the degree of ruthlessness in the market. Ruthless people 'compete' outside of the rules to achieve greater profit margins and ultimately market dominance, usually on the backs of and at the expense of innovators. it happens in every industry, all the time. Big business prefers to achieve this through political influence, but isn't above outright criminality if they can get away with it. Unless you are in a high volume location dependent business like generic food service, you will be competing honestly with dishonest people. Their profit margins and willingness to do whatever it takes will allow them to beat you every time. The chances of an honest businessperson becoming like Bill Gates is the same chance as a school teacher becoming Bill Gates. The margins are too thin to allow successful positive expectation risk adjusted leveraging of capital. Of course, you will always have hustlers who do okay by busting their ass. But they plateau, and its not the same thing as market dominance.

The other x factor is just having so much more money than everyone else that you can take heavy losses upfront until you outlast established competition and put them out of business. Or you hammer the market upfront in an innovative business with so much capital that you can establish yourself quickly as the sole player.

Linda sounds like she is writing from a place of naivete, no offense. Its just not how it is in the real world.

Whiteness, Turkey, and Christianity

So in comments to my previous post, some people said that Turks aren't white because Turkey isn't a Christian nation.

Hello. Christianity was basically created in Turkey.

Merry Christmas.

Are Turks white?

(1) Turkey is part of Europe.

(2) Turkey borders the Caucasus, and people from the Caucasus are, by definition, Caucasian.

(3) Turks look whiter, to me, then the typical Italian-American. See photos of Ataturk; he looks pretty white.

Christmas tree stylists

You know you’re a prole when you decorate your own Christmas tree instead of hiring a Christmas tree stylist.

What college students major in

This link shows what college students are majoring in.

There seems to be the false perception among some readers of this blog that most college students are majoring in stuff that’s stupid. But from looking at the linked-to chart, it looks like two-thirds of college degrees are conferred in subjects that are practical or vocational. “Business” is the most common major, representing 335,254 of 1,563,069 Bachelor’s degrees granted in 2007-2008.

The much derided women’s studies major is very rare. Only 8,454 degrees were granted in “area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies.”

“Social sciences and history,” the second most common major, may sound useless at first glance, but it includes “economics” which is a very popular major because it sounds businessy.

In conclusion, the majority of college students major in something that is training them for some sort of career.

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Fred Smith writes:

This illustrates just how stupid it is to get a worthless degree. You have to compete against the 2/3 who do have practical degrees, putting yourself at a major disadvantage.

Not necessarily.

1. Maybe the students majoring in “worthless” degrees have rich parents so they don’t have to worry about getting a cubicle job.

2. Students graduating elite schools such as Harvard with “worthless” degrees have better career outcomes than students majoring in vocational subjects at regular schools.

3. “Business” sound practical, but it’s not as practical as it sounds. A lot of these students would be better off majoring in nursing or some other healthcare-related major.

A better PISA chart

Steve Sailer’s PISA chart by race is the best reading today in the blogosphere. Teaching to the test has really juiced the scores of American black students, causing them to outperform the smarter races inhabiting countries such as Bulgaria, Mexico, and Thailand. And our white test takers are second only to Finland.

Gays and lesbians in the military

Larry Auster has a lot of posts on his blog worrying about gay men in the military.

It’s my suspicion that gay men aren’t interested in joining the military, so allowing them to serve and openly be gay isn’t going to change much because there are so few gay men in the military in the first place, and most of the gay men will be afraid to come out of the closet anyway, even though they can now legally do so.

What will change is that all of the lesbian women in the military will come out of the closet. The lesbianism of military women is a very poorly kept secret, so not much will change here. The straight women in the military already know that half of their fellow women are lesbians. And straight women don't fear lesbians the way that straight men fear gays.

Education: not a bubble and not going to pop

There has been some renewed interest, this month, in discussing the alleged “education bubble.” There’s an article in Forbes and a soon-to-air CNBC special.

What they always say about real bubbles is that they can go on a lot longer than anyone could imagine before they finally burst. And I don’t even think the education bubble is a real bubble, because it’s only something that recent high school graduates can buy into and it’s not something you can sell to a greater fool after you buy it. College is more of a rite of passage than it is a bubble.

I don’t see any big changes, with respect to college education and its role in society, coming in the near future. For every article about the so-called-bubble, there are ten articles about how a college degree is absolutely necessary and how people who don’t have one are screwed.

Among readers of HBD blogs, there are those who believe that IQ is everything and trumps a college education. They believe that someone who scores in the 99th percentile on the SAT would do just fine in life if they forwent the college degree. The people who believe this are dead-wrong. The job market has no interest in hiring people with high IQ but no track record capital. (Forgot what track record capital is? Reread my blog post on four types of human capital. And don’t forget about the fifth form of human capital which is state-of-mind capital.) The credential of a college degree is necessary for entrance to the overwhelmingly vast majority of decent career tracks. (You may want to reread my blog post on the tracks theory of labor market outcomes.)

As I’ve written a zillion times before, the correlation between IQ and income primarily is about the correlation between IQ and education credentials. A higher IQ allows one to obtain better educational credentials, which increase the likelihood of landing in a better career track. If IQ isn’t used to obtain quality education credentials, then it’s wasted IQ of no value in the job market.

These blog readers like to point out that plumbers make a good salary and don’t have college degrees. This is true, but it would stop being true if large numbers of young people, following this advice, flooded the field—that’s basic supply and demand at work. Furthermore, if plumbers make such good money, the field must have some secret barriers to entry which I don’t know about; it’s probably a lot easier to get a degree in nursing and make even more money than plumbers make, even after the cost of education is factored in.

There may have once been a time when a high school graduate faced a choice between going to college and taking a high paying factory job. That time is long past. There are no jobs available to people without any track record capital besides crap service jobs like fast food or working at Walmart. People with great sales skills could probably get themselves a job selling cars or real estate (you only need to pass a test), but (1) few people have great sales skills; and (2) with a college degree and great sales skills you could make a lot more money selling computer software or professional services. And pharmaceutical sales is always a career option open to attractive female cheerleaders with college degrees.

A college degree may cost a lot more than it used to, but it’s also worth a lot more than it used to be worth because there are so few decent career tracks open to non-college graduates.

The only way to break the education bubble is to fundamentally change the job market in a manner that opens up more career tracks to people without college degrees, but I don’t forsee that happening. HBD-denialism is at work here. Changing the social structure of who gets into which career tracks opens up uncomfortable doors to the truth about HBD. Liberals don’t like to believe in hereditary intelligence, even within races. Liberals prefer to believe that education makes you smart, and the better the quality of education, the smarter it makes you. If only we could give every young person a Harvard-quality education, everyone would be just as smart as the average Harvard graduate. This is the liberal dream. Liberals want to equalize society. Liberals believe that it’s not fair that such a small number of people graduate from Harvard each year. At the very least, they think everyone should graduate from college. Liberals would like the government to pay for free college education for everyone. The student loan program is a compromise with evil cheapskate Republicans.

People who complain about the education bubble like to imagine a glorious popping of the bubble which causes all those overpaid liberal college professors to be laid off. They forget that we have two liberal parties. The Democratic party is hardcore liberal and the Republican party is moderate liberal. The more likely “solution” to the education bubble is that government will spend more money to fund education so that students don’t have to borrow so much money. The Republicans will probably agree to this in exchange for more tax cuts. (Even though I wrote the previous sentence, I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or a reasonable prediction of the future.)

Chinese aircraft carriers

China will soon have three aircraft carriers. China is building two herself, and remodeling a carrier purchased from the Soviet Union. And for the following decade, China plans on building nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

This story seems very significant to me. China is planning to become the next superpower.

Landscape painting proleness chart

This chart will help explain things:

Most prole	Landscape with unicorns
	Thomas Kinkade landscape with fake colors and Disney characters
	Thomas Kinkade landscape with fake colors
	Landscape with realistic natural colors
Least prole	Some blobs of paint which don’t look like anything in particular, but which the “artist” alleges expresses his feelings about landscapes

* * *

It’s worth pointing out that even the most prole landscape, the one with unicorns in it, requires skill to create. Proles, to their credit, appreciate artistic skill, but have poor taste in subject matter.

The least prole landscape, the one with some blobs of paint, requires no artistic skill at all, but it takes remarkable sales and marketing skill on the part of the “artist” to convince people that the painting is worth anything.

Landscape paintings and Christianity

In perusing various websites of artists who paint landscapes, I’ve noticed a trend: a lot of these artists are into Christianity.

The most famous living landscape artist is Thomas Kinkade, who calls himself “the painter of light.” And the light in his paintings is supposed to represent the light of Jesus.

Art which depicts anything in a realistic manner, be it landscape, figure, or still life, has been out of favor for over a century. Or I should say, it has been out of favor with the elites. I don’t think anybody naturally likes non-objective art all that much, but people from the higher social classes are good at convincing themselves that they like what other members of their social class like. Proles, being less conformist, are free to enjoy the type of art they enjoy. I guess that, because there’s a correlation between Christianity and proleness, and a correlation between pretty paintings and proleness, there would alsy be a correlation between Christianity and pretty paintings.

Given the spread of the new Gaia religion among the elites, which worships Mother Nature, I’m surprised that realistic landscape painting hasn’t made a comeback with the elite. What better way to worship Mother Nature than to paint landscapes?

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Mark Tully writes:

The elites cannot stand landscapes. Realistically portraying nature means portraying it as a physical realm. The elites have no real spirituality except a worship of the physical (i.e. nature). To display the object of worship as a physical representation, paradoxically, is to degrade it. So the elites prefer pieces that distort the thing being painted or, in the instance of abstract art, art that reflects a mental state. I suppose that the new religion has its own version of the command, thou shalt have no graven images.

The prohibition of depicting the holy is unique to Judaism and Islam, the latter being a more violent clone of Judaism. The Hasidim, to their credit, haven’t beheaded anyone for painting Yahweh, at least not in this century.

Most other religions delight in depicting their deities. Gaiaism borrow heavily from Buddhism, and the Buddhists love their Buddha statues.

No, the reason the elites like non-objective art is because realistic art requires the skill of the individual to create, and the leftists hate the skill of the individual. And leftism is the primary political ideology of the elites.

I predict that as the religion of Gaia continues to spread, landscape paintings will become more popular with the elite. An Albert Bierstadt painting would be a much better investment than an Andy Warhol. His smaller works are still affordable.

The decreasing efficiency of large organizations

I imagine that one of the reasons why things got done faster in previous decades, such as being able to send men to the moon in only eight years, is because large organizations were run more efficiently. People who were considered to be competent were put in charge of things and allowed to make their own decisions. In contrast, in the modern organization, everything is decided by committee, and no one is allowed to do anything without getting approvals.

Technology, ironically, has made things less efficient. In the 1960s, email didn’t exist. Voicemail didn’t exist. Powerpoint didn’t exist. Because it was so difficult for people to get in touch with each other, organizations were forced to give the workers more autonomy. With autonomy, people just did their jobs and got things done, instead of constantly emailing multiple people for approvals and attending meetings (which are no longer face-to-face but done via conference calls).

Technology has created the ability to micromanage, and this ability has been abused.

Blog reader Rorschach test

I thought my posts on the Apollo program were rather pointless, yet surprisingly they aroused strong emotions in some readers, who are pissed at me for some reason.

Empire State Building v. One World Trade Center

Contruction on the Empire State building , the tallest building in the world when it was built, and still the tallest building in New York, began on January 21, 1930 and was completed 410 days later.

In contrast, construction on the new One World Trade Center began sometime in 2006, and the thing is still under construction, not expected to be completed until 2013.

Despite construction technology having advanced by 75 years, it now takes six times as long to build a really tall building. Maybe there’s something to the Bruce Charlton theory that human capability is declining. And this, rather than a hoax, explains why man has been unable to return to the moon.

Moon landing hoax?

Was I serious about the moon landing being a hoax?

I guess the answer is, does the moon landing being a hoax cause the world to make more sense, or does it cause the world to make less sense?

If it were a hoax, this would explain why we are unable to go back there. NASA has been continuously funded to the tune of billions of dollars per year. So why can’t we go back there with technology 41 years more advanced than we had in 1969? (Yeah, going to the moon is a waste of money, but so was launching the Space Shuttle over and over again--there was clearly a willingness to waste a few billion dollars per year on sending men into space.) And it would explain why the Russians never duplicated this feat. And why the Chinese can’t do it. Surely, China is as technologically advanced today as the United States was in 1969.

On the other hand, if it were a hoax, this creates the mystery of how the government has been able to keep it secret. Even if the vast majority of NASA employees were not in on the hoax, it surely must have required a few hundred people with knowledge of the hoax. Surely one of them would have spilled the beans by now?

* * *

This page debunking the moon hoax theory is a lot more impressive than any page debunking global warming skeptics. This leads me to believe that the moon landing is more likely true than global warming.

Also, I may add that the liberal elite would love to prove that moon landing a hoax, because such a revelation would bring America down a notch, something which the liberal elite loves to do. It would make them feel less guilty about being American if America never sent anyone to the moon.

The moon mystery

Bruce Charlton says that human capability is on the decline, as evidenced by our inability to send men to the moon, something we did several times between 1969 and 1972.

Ah, but maybe the moon landings were a hoax?

You have to admit, it’s pretty mysterious that, in just eight years, using 1960s technology, we were able to send men to the moon, but now it’s 41 years later and we can’t even put men in low orbit anymore.

Men in space and the decline of the United States

Last week, commenter “sabril” wrote:

It would be cool if China actually did something like send a man to Mars or put a colony on the moon. Then the West might actually wake up and realize that there is more to life than fighting against performance gaps between blacks and whites.

I previously predicted that China would be the first nation to send men to Mars.

Manned space travel has no purpose except for chest-beating. China wants to show the world that China is the new super-power and is willing to spend a lot of money on manned spaceflight to prove it. But the elites running the United States feel guilty about U.S. power, and they will say that we have no business spending hundreds of billions of dollars on sending men to Mars when there are more important things to do such as fight against the performance gap between blacks and whites. At the same time, they will delight in seeing a foreign nation kick our ass in the space race, because they feel less guilty when the U.S. is brought down a notch.

I doubt that the United States will ever even send men back to the moon. People like to say, “if we can send men to the moon, why can’t we ... ?”, but when’s the last time we sent men to the moon? A lot of my blog readers weren’t even born the last time this happened. Sending men to the moon turned out to be a technological dead end which is now lost.

Polygamy and IQ

Steve Sailer asks if polygamy raises or lowers IQ.

Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQs, and they never practiced polygamy. Most societies with polygamy have lower IQs. The development of high IQ seems to coincide with monogamous marriage.

Theoretically, if there was a correlation between a man having a high IQ and having many wives, polygamy would raise IQs. The fact that polygamous societies don’t have Ashkenazi Jewish levels of IQ demonstrates, however, that such a correlation doesn’t hold. Probably, polygamy favors alpha males with average intelligence but high testosterone over brainy beta males. Polygamy probably causes the genes of the most intelligent men to be culled from the gene pool.

The Hate and Harassment Team

There’s a NY Times article about Facebook’s “hate and harassment team.” This team would probably interpret the truth about HBD to be “hate speech” against blacks. It was probably a similar team at Google that got my blog banned from Adsense.

Another comment from Steve Sailer’s blog

none of the above said:

Lots of brilliant, talented people aren't that good at business, or aren't very good negotiators. And they often don't make a big pile of money, even when they're amazingly brilliant creative people, or scientists who ultimately change the world.

Indeed, my impression is that the folks who are having the biggest long-term impact on the world are scientists, who usually don't make a whole lot of money. (Some do, and that's a good thing, but most don't get rich, even if they do really important, world-changing stuff.)

By contrast, any number of highly successful salesmen, lawyers, and financiers seem to me to be taking their impressive gifts and using them to enrich themselves, usually without doing much for the rest of the world. That's fine--they don't owe me anything--but I also don't owe them anything.

Judging people’s (and politicians’) intelligence

The best way to judge a person’s intelligence is though their standardized test scores. George W. Bush scored 1206 on the SAT (before they renormed it and made it easier). This is not especially high, and not normally high enough for admission to Yale, but there were certainly students at Yale with lower SAT scores than Bush, and it’s probably not lower than that of the average Democratic politician. Despite this solid evidence of Bush’s respectable (but not spectacular) intelligence, liberals like to say how stupid he is. This sort of wishful thinking, that your side is smart and the other side is stupid, plagues readers of this blog as much as it plagues liberals.

Unfortunately, most politicians do not release their SAT scores. I find this rather unfortunate.. Candidates are expected to release their tax returns and their medical records, yet the best measure of their reasoning ability is considered private.

So how do we judge the intelligence of people when we don’t know what they scored on the SAT? First of all, we need to define intelligence. I like to simply define it as the ability to reason and learn. And more specifically, it’s more about the ability to learn by figuring things out rather than the ability to learn through rote memorization or by mimicking.

The ability to write a good speech is more highly correlated with intelligence than the ability to give a good speech. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever known a person who is very smart but also very nerdy. It’s even possible that very high intelligence is negatively correlated with social skills, because they very intelligent, during their childhood years, are often isolated from their peers because they have so little in common with the average person their age (the nerd effect, again), so they don’t get to practice their social skills (which are learned more by mimicking than by reasoning). Sarah Palin gave a good speech at the Republican Convention, but it doesn’t mean she’s smart, because speech giving ability is a different ability than the ability to reason and learn. Blacks are especially good at performance art relative to their IQ, which is why blacks are well represented in the fields of acting, music, and why blacks are also good con-men. Blacks also have good “game,” so are good at picking up white women. In contrast, there exist smart but nerdy men who are unable to use their intelligence to successfully pick up women.

People with Williams Syndrome can appear much smarter, at first, than they really are, because they are highly skilled at conversation relative to their IQs. But in fact, people with Williams Syndrome have low IQs.

Intelligence is the ability to reason, but just because people have the ability doesn’t mean they use it all the time. A good analogy is the very strong man who is lazy, and spends his free time watching TV instead of using his strength to do strong stuff like play football. Similarly, a person who can apply his reasoning ability to get a high score on the SAT can turn off his reasoning ability during everyday life. In fact, because we live in an age of political correctness, people are strongly incentivized to not use their reasoning ability on politically correct topics such as genetic differences in intelligence between races. Very smart people can believe in really stupid things by selectively turning off their reasoning ability. Mitt Romney can believe that an angel visited Joseph Smith and that his Mormon underwear protects him from evil. A typical liberal can believe that the average black is just as smart as the average white. A libertarian economist can believe that everyone creates value equal to exactly as much money as they’ve acquired, despite the obvious evidence that rich people like Paris Hilton and Al Gore haven’t created much value. A Universalist can believe that Islam is a religion of peace, despite all the wars and the terrorism caused by Moslems.

Intelligence is the ability to learn, and smart people are better at learning what behaviors and beliefs are expected of them. Stupid people at Walmart are observed acting in a nonconformist manner that’s shocking to smarter people. Intelligence and conformism, therefore, are positively correlated with each other, except perhaps for super-smart people such as Rick Rosner who march to the beat of their own drummer. The regular smart people (those with IQs below 145) call people like Rick Rosner “weird” or “eccentric.” The regular smart people are highly susceptible to smart-people memes such as the belief in global warming. The regular smart people use their intelligence to figure out that other smart people believe that blacks are just as intelligent at whites, then they conform their beliefs to what other smart people believe. For most regular smart people, the desire to believe what’s socially correct is stronger than the desire to reason out the real truth.

Grades in school are correlated with intelligence, but very high grades are a better predictor of very high intelligence than low grades are a predictor of low intelligence. This is because grades are also correlated with how much effort one put into it, and smart people can succumb to laziness. So if Barack Obama had very high grades at Harvard Law School, but merely average grades at Columbia, this indicates to me that he wasn’t trying as hard at Columbia.

Certain educational accomplishments indicate a minimal level of competency. A certain cohort of readers of this blog think very highly of engineering degrees. I do agree that obtaining a degree in engineering requires a higher IQ than obtaining, for example, a degree in sports journalism from the University of Idaho. That’s an example of a major in which it’s easy to get by without doing much work. On the other hand, graduating at the top of the class at a difficult school always requires high intelligence, no matter what the major, because of who you are competing with. It’s very impressive that Richard Nixon was third in his class at Duke Law School, because he had to beat out so many smart people. This is a more impressive than Jimmy Carter graduating from Annapolis with a degree in nuclear engineering. I give credit to Carter for being smarter than John McCain who graduated at the bottom of the class from the same military academy. But this doesn’t make Carter a genius. Carter didn't work as an engineer designing submarines, he just served on them.

I estimate that being able to pass the bar exam requires the same level of IQ as being able to graduate from a state school with a degree in engineering.

Law school is more difficult than business school. I’ve attended both. Compared to law school, business school is a joke. Obtaining an MBA from a non-competitive school doesn’t impress me at all. Obtaining an MBA from a top school such as Wharton is on par with obtaining a JD from a regular state school. Obtaining high grades in law school is a better indicator of intelligence than obtaining high grades in an MBA program. So I’m pretty impressed that Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Only someone who’s very smart can do that.

A gaffe is an unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator. When Obama refers to 57 states, that’s a gaffe. Obviously, a guy who’s smart enough to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard knows that there are 50 states. When Sarah Palin thinks that Africa is a country, this does not seem like a gaffe to me. People of average intelligence are very bad with geography, and that is exactly the sort of thing that they mess up.

Good news for Manhattan: IHOP is coming

IHOP is coming.

Gothamist makes fun of it. That’s completely unwarranted. Before Times Square had a lot of chain restaurants, it had a lot of porn stores and peep shows. Would Gothamist rather go back to peep shows?

Gothamist has a point about the stupidity of tourists from middle America coming to Manhattan to eat at IHOP. But I predict that IHOP will be successful with local residents. The IHOP on Fairfax Drive in Arlington was always mobbed on weekend mornings. You had to wait in line a half hour in order to eat there. IHOP has a retro-ironic-coolness that Applebee’s and the Olive Garden will never have.

Obama haters and productive people

Lawrence Auster writes about unprincipled Obama haters.

I have to agree that the writer of the editorial reproduced by Mr. Auster is a partisan hack. He no doubt would have attacked Obama for letting tax rates rise, but now he attacks Obama for cutting a deal with Republicans and betraying liberal principles.

I get the same vibe from commenters at my blog who keep insisting that Obama is stupid because they don’t like him. Sorry, but Obama (who is half-white and is not descended from any slaves) is the smartest president since Nixon. (Obama’s half brother has a graduate degree in Physics from Stanford University. Obama Sr. passed on some mighty high-IQ genes to his descendants.)

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If the richest people are the most productive people, that means that Al Gore, who’s net worth exceeds $100 million, is one of the nation’s most productive people.

Michelle Obama is also pretty productive, with $325,000 of income in 2006.

So do we need lower taxes on the rich so productive people like Al Gore and Michelle Obama can create jobs? I think not.