Half Sigma

Half Sigma was right about Dominique Strauss Kahn!

May 18, 2011, I wrote about the Dominique Strauss Kahn case:

According to the NY Post the African woman whom Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped is (1) a native French speaker from Guinea a former French colony; and (2) a devout Muslim.

This makes it more likely that it began as a consensual encounter, because Strauss-Kahn was able to “game” her in her native language. But because she’s a devout Muslim, she changed her mind in the middle of the encounter because of religious guilt over what she was doing.

I think the scenario I describe above makes more sense than Strauss-Kahn suddenly raping a woman he never talked to before.

The Post reports that Strauss-Kahn will use consent as his defense, but that’s hardly newsworthy. That’s the standard defense in rape cases, and it works half the time. It worked for William Kennedy-Smith. And it worked the last time a rich person from overseas was accused of raping a chambermaid at a New York hotel.

In fact, I predict an acquittal. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, got Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs acquitted in what should have been an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, so he should have no problem winning an acquittal in a type of case that public defenders routinely win.

I was also skeptical about the DSK being able to overpower a 6 foot tall black woman:

Contrarian writes:

The accuser is reportedly 6 foot tall. Does anybody else find it hard to believe that a small, old, fat Jewish man managed to chase down a tall, young African women (who doesn't have AIDS) twice, carry her off like a caveman and restrain her on the bed?

I also found that odd. A Nubian amazon like the alleged victim should have been able to rape an old Jewish guy, and not the other way around.

Now it turns out that the prosecutors have given up on the case:

The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.

Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.

Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.

Once again, Half Sigma was right! Everyone else was wrong!

Indeed, the very first thing I wrote about this on the day of the news of DSK’s arrest:

Now that I think about it, there have been a lot of famous rape cases involving black women and alleged white rapists in which it turned out the black woman was lying.

Learning that the alleged victim is a black woman and not a pretty young Hispanic thing makes it more likely that this rape charge is bogus.

This is a huge failure on the part of our nation’s law enforcement. We arrested a guy who was possibly the future leader of France because of some lying woman’s story. The people of France have every right to be pissed at us.

If only our highest levels of government would consult me on stuff like this.

* * *

In another shocker, none of the three reporters appearing in the byline, Jim Dwyer, William K. Rashbaum and John Eligon, appear to be elite. Apparently the guys covering the New York City crime beat are the traditional middle-class type of reporter. The kids from Ivy League schools aren’t interested in that sort of journalism, hanging out at police stations and talking to cops. Yuck!

Jim Dwyer lives in Washington Heights. That’s not where the elite live. He’s the son of Irish Immigrants so he doesn’t have a trust fund.

John Eligon is a young, multi-racial guy who lives in Harlem and covers a lot of Harlem stories. Could you picture Catherine Rampell hanging out by herself at a housing project in Harlem trying to get a story? Nope. You need a guy like John Eligon for that.

How to be successful in startup businesses

A commenter sent me this link to a Gawker article about how to be successful in startup businesses.

The secret is to have wealthy parents with wealthy friends who can invest in your business.

But a year later, there’s a NY Times article about how “talented” this kid is. And maybe he is talented, but would a regular middle class kid with the same talents have been able to showcase his talents and profit so greatly from them? Not very likely.

The New York Times unauthorized biography series

Earlier this week I wrote a brief unauthorized biography about New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt, and then I realized that there was an untold story here, and started writing unauthorized biographies of other New York Times reporters and editors.

The story I’m trying to tell is that not just anyone becomes a New York Times reporter. The job is primarily reserved for children of the elite. Of course I’ve been writing about the elites and the benefits of elite educational credentials for years, but I don’t think the message has sunk in until now. Because saying, in the abstract, that “the elites control everything” doesn’t give people enough information to understand it. But when, one by one, I elaborate on the backgrounds of New York Times reporters, people finally start to get the big picture.

This is an important meta-news story because the New York Times, being the most prestigious newspaper in the country, controls how we think about the world, or at least it tells New York Times readers how to think about the world, and New York Times readers are the important people. What People Magazine tells people to think doesn’t have as much consequence.

It’s also a story that, surprisingly, hasn’t been written before. Given the huge number of bloggers out there, it’s pretty hard to come up with some original idea. There are an endless number of blogs, and there’s a big meme in the conservative blogosphere that the New York Times is biased against conservatives, yet no one has bothered to systematically write about the backgrounds of New York Times reporters to see what sort of biases they might actually have.

After examining a few reporters, the following trend emerges:

(1) They usually have elite education. There is a preponderance of reporters who graduated from Ivy League and similarly elite schools. Furthermore, if you can find out what high school they went to, you often discover that they attended elite private schools.

(2) They don’t major in journalism. This is apparently a joke major among real reporters. They usually major in some liberal arts discipline such as English or History. There is a strong bias among the elite about majoring in anything with the tinge of being vocational. Accounting, engineering, nursing, education, are all examples of subjects the elite would not want to major in because they prepare you for actual jobs. Harvard doesn’t even offer a single accounting class, yet Harvard grads have no problem being hired by investment banks to analyze companies’ financial statements

It’s OK to major in something vocational in graduate school. Law school and MBA programs are OK. Medical school is OK. And if you want to be a journalist, a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University is OK but not required.

In order to prove one’s interest in journalism, prospective journalists work at their school newspapers (and the Ivies have pretty high quality school papers) and work as interns at news organizations during their summers.

(3) Most importantly, they have elite parents or grandparents. By elite I mean having at least one of the following: wealthy, elite educational credentials, or some other notable accomplishment such as winning a Nobel Prize (yes, the New York Times reporter and Tea Party expert Kate Zernike's grandfather, Fritz Zernike, won a Nobel Prize in Physics).

Print journalism is seen as a low-paying career* so only people with rich parents can afford to enter this career. Why do people with rich parents want to work at all? This is something that a lot of average people don’t get. They still imagine the rich living lives of idle leisure, but that’s no longer the case. People born to rich parents are expected to do something. They go to college, and then get a job doing something, and they generally get higher paying and/or more interesting jobs than the average non-rich person. Some children of the rich try to become even richer and they go into venture capital or investment banking. But other children of the rich don’t care about that (and it’s easy not to care about money if you have no student loans to pay off and you know that if you ever get sick your parents will pay your health bills and your parents are willing to subsidize your rent to live in New York City) and they pursue various categories of jobs that are considered desirable among the children of the elite, and print journalism is one of those desirable professions.

The New York Times website is a good place to start learning about their reporters, but it just lists their educational credentials and a summary of their professional accomplishments. If you want to find out about their personal lives or who their parents are, you need to do more digging. Fortunately, the internet has made this surprisingly easy. Most people who are important have some sort of internet footprint, and with some expertise in Google searching and using some other free and publicly available online tools you can find out quite a bit.

The problem with the series is that the wealthy tend to be very private people and they don’t like their dirty laundry aired in public, although I haven’t yet written anything that isn’t publicly available on the internet. The rich also like to believe that their children have hit home runs, even though they were born on third base. Of course, as an HBD-blogger, I am aware that intelligence and other attributes associated with success are genetically hereditable traits, so as a general rule the children of the successful are genetically predisposed to be more successful than the average person. But there are also a lot of benefits to being born rich (or at least upper middle class), and the rich are intentionally oblivious to these benefits because they would rather believe that they are morally entitled to their success. So they don’t appreciate being told that their success was not entirely meritocratic.

* Although print journalism is generally a low paying career, and the median salary for a New York Times reporter is between $90,000 and $100,000, those who reach the pinnacle of success at the New York Times can sometimes parlay their credentials into profitable book deals, such as Jodi Kantor’s book on the Obamas for which she is said to have received a seven-figure advance).

Blogging update

The post about Catherine Rampell, the economics editor for the NY Times website, has been temporarily removed because of a threatening email received from one of her relatives.

I've also temporarily put comment moderation back on.

* * *

The Undiscovered Jew doesn’t like comment moderation.

The purpose for it is two-fold: (1) this blog, for some reason, attracts a lot of comments which are unfriendly to Jews, so I delete a lot of them; and (2) people leave various other types of mean-spirited comments which are better off if they never see the light of day.

* * *

I’ve decided not to repost the previous post. There wasn’t anything in there that was important to the theme of this series other than:

1. Catherine attended Phillips Academy, Andover, which is one of the country’s two most elite high schools.
2. Catherine is said to have scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT.
3. Catherine graduated from Princeton in 2007.
4. Both of Catherine’s parents graduated from Princeton.
5. Catherine’s older brother graduated from Harvard and is a successful investor in high tech startup companies (or something like that).
6. Catherine’s father owns an accounting firm in Palm Beach, Florida, which provides services for high net worth individuals, and has “revenues in the mid-seven figures” according to the Palm Beach Post.
7. Catherine’s father bought a co-op apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2007, which cost nearly $1.8 million according to New York City's real estate records which are available for free on a publicly accessible website.

So if you want to work for the New York Times while you're in your twenties, the key is to go to the most elite high school, the most elite college, get a perfect score on the SAT, and have wealthy parents.

Jodi Kantor

Jodi Kantor is the New York Times Washington correspondent (although she lives in Brooklyn, NY). According to her official bio at the NY Times (which has a photo in which she looks quite cute):

Ms. Kantor graduated from Columbia and attended Harvard Law School. But soon after she arrived, she caught the journalism bug, took time off to work at Slate.com, and never looked back. She joinedThe New York Times in 2003 as Arts & Leisure editor, revamping the section and helping lead a makeover of the culture report.

The Wikipedia article says she was born in 1975 which makes her 35 or 36. She dropped out of Harvard Law School (wow! prestigious!) to work as a journalist at Salon, and then four years later she was hired to be the Arts and Leisure editor for the NY Times. So she was another one of those NY Times wonderkids.

She is married to NY Times correspondent Ron Lieber who I will write about in the future.

She is taking a sabbatical from the Times to write a book about the Obamas, for which she was paid a seven figure advance. Wow! I guess that being a NY Times correspondent is so prestigious that it can be used to make lots of money writing books. With this advance, maybe she can finally afford to buy a summer home for her daughter who is quite upset about being the only girl among her circle of friends without a summer home in the Hamptons.

Of course my bio wouldn’t be complete without telling you about the family she came from. It was really difficult tracking down her parents, because Kantor is a common Jewish last name. However I am pretty sure that her father is Harry Kantor who is the CEO of KOR Companies, “a leading, diversified real estate investment and development company” that “has built in excess of $450 million in real estate.” So I would guess that he’s pretty well paid.

And how do I know this is the Harry Kantor who is her dad? I am going off the fact that Harold is married to Wendy according to his bio, and at this web page there is a picture of Jodi Kantor with an older woman identified as Wendy Kantor, and Wendy attended this event with Harry Kantor. Of course, there’s an outside possibility that Harry could be her rich uncle, or there could be two Harry Kantors who are both married to a Wendy.

So anyway, we see that as typical for NY Times reporters, Jodi Kantor has rich parents. It’s extremely rare for a guy from a poor family, such as Brian Stelter, to break into journalism.

If you want to know even more about Jodi, I recommend this article at the Columbia alumni magazine.

Advice for Brian Stelter

Commenter “superdestroyer” asked me to write about the NY Times Media correspondent Brian Stelter, born in 1985 and only 25 years old.

Indeed, Brian came from a very un-elite background. I could find absolutely nothing at all about his parents except that they own a house in Damascus, MD, a town about 20 miles northwest of the Beltway. Acording to Zillow, it’s worth $306,700. If his parents bought it 20 years ago before housing prices in the DC area were jacked up, it was probably affordable on a middle class or even a blue collar salary. His father could very well be a cop or have some other sort of decent-paying blue collar employment.

So how did a guy with such un-elite parents, and a degree from Towson University, a second-rate state school, get hired out of college to be a correspondent for the New York Times? His story is actually quite inspiring. While a freshman in college, he started a blog about the TV News media which became an extremely successful insider blog, and people assumed it was written by an experienced industry insider. Everyone was quite suprised when it turned out that it was run by a college kid. The New York Times hired him because of his proven track record running his blog.

Yes, one of the cool things about blogging is that you don’t need rich parents, elite Ivy League credentials, and a charismatic alpha personality to become a well-read blogger. It’s strictly about the talent and the online self-promotion. Even a chubby beta-looking balding kid with poor parents and admission to a bogus state school can become a successful blogger. One has to be a pretty smart kid to start such a successful blog. I am sure that if he had the same talents and intelligence, but rich parents who knew about the elite status game, then he would have wound up at an Ivy League school.

There is also some very interesting news about who he is dating. That would be Nicole Lapin, who only in her twenties is the anchor for the early morning show at CNBC. Nicole comes from a more elite background than Brian. Her mother was Miss Israel and her deceased father was nominated for a Nobel Prize. She was a child prodigy who skipped two grades and entered Harvard when she was only 15. Brian has done pretty well for himself in the girlfriend department; if you’re into short anorexic-looking girls and can put up with her veganism, then she’s quite attractive, and as a television news anchor she’s going to make a hell of a lot more money than Brian who’s only a print journalist.

And this is where I need to give young Brian some advice. The median salary for a New York Times correspondent is between $90,000 and $100,000 per year. This may seem like a lot of money to you given where you came from, and certainly the NY Times pays better than any other newspaper in the country, it’s nevertheless a crappy salary for living in New York City. I make more money than that and every day I feel poor.

The other journalists who work for the New York Times don’t care that much about their salaries because their parents are rich. Or if they are women, they are married to rich husbands. Or both. You shouldn’t be working their because your parents aren’t rich, and unless you can somehow find a rich wife, you won’t be able to afford a $2 million apartment and $35,000/year private school tuition for your children, which is the only way to live in Manhattan and pass on your eliteness to your children.

Now maybe you can luck out and get Nicole Lapin to marry you, but I am pessimistic about this. I’ve previously written about the problems facing married couples where the wife makes a lot more money than the husband, and they often don’t work out very well.

Luckily, you are only in your twenties, so what you should do is take the GMAT, which I am sure you will do well on because you were probably Ivy League material, and I’m sure you will get accepted to the best business schools such as Harvard or Wharton. Then you can get a job in hedge funds or investment banking and earn a real man’s salary. You can then establish a legacy of eliteness so that your children can work in print journalism.

* * *

A commenter writes:

This is a guy who started a blog for fun about TV news. Now he writes about TV news full time for the NY Times and is banging a hot (well...cute anyways) CNBC anchor. Every day must feel like he won the lottery to him. Good for him. You honestly think he should go slave away at an IB/Hedge Fund to make more money to buy meaningless shit?

This is a legitimate point of view. Except I wouldn’t call a decent coop/condo and private school education for one’s children “meaningless shit.”

The commenter replies to me:

He needs someplace to live and good schools for his kids. While not "meaningless", the co-op and private school tuition are hardly essential to this goal. He doesn't have to live in Manhattan. I just don't understand the logic of giving up his dream job to work all the time for status items. Which the co-op and private school undoubtedly are.

It’s correct that Brian doesn’t “need” these things, but if everyone else that he works with has them (such as his coworker Catherine Rampell who lives in a spacious 2-bedroom on the 34th floor which cost $1.8 million), and if he’s a normal person, he’s going to feel bad about not having them also.

* * *

Why did CNBC hire Nicole anyway? I’m really sick and tired of this trend towards hiring pretty young things to anchor the news. We need more news anchors like the late Mark Haines, a grumpy middle-aged guy from a non-elite family who could put CEOs in their place. Mark Haines is a guy who I would make a special effort to watch. I can’t say the same thing about the CNBC carousel of bimbo anchors.

Amy Harmon

Amy J. Harmon is a national correspondent for the NY Times, covering the impact of science and technology on American life. She is also the least elite NY Times journalist I’ve profiled, so far. And she’s pretty under-the-radar because I wasn’t able to dig up much about her personal life, unlike Catherine Rampell whose personal life is like an open book sitting out on the internet waiting to be read.

Amy is 42 years old, and her 43rd birthday is this September. She has a degree in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Now it’s true that there are two state schools which are more prestigious than all the others, and the twain are the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia [as a reader pointed out, I forgot about UC Berkeley, more prestigious than either Virginia or Michigan]. But still, it’s not Princeton or Yale. At least she knew not to major in journalism if she wanted to be a prestigious journalist. I have yet to come across a New York Times journalist who majored in journalism. It’s just not done.

Like all NY Times journalists, Amy’s parents are rich. Her father, Stephen Harmon, was for most of his career a partner at mid-sized Manhattan law firm specializing in securities law. He graduated from Queens College and Brooklyn Law School, which are not in any way elite schools. But I’m sure he still made a good salary, enough to send Amy to private schools (which is how all partners at law firms in Manhattan educate their children). I guess that a partner in a firm like that would today make about $500,000 per year?

Amy married Caleb Southworth in 1993. They met at the University of Michigan. They seem to be no longer married, because he lives in Oregon where he works as a Sociology professor at the University of Oregon and she lives in New York City, and that doesn’t seem married to me. This is one of the rare cases of the elite getting divorced.

Amy seemed pretty nice when I spoke with her on the phone. She kept my anonymity and she didn’t make me out to be an evil racist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for the article that she wrote about me (or more accurately for that series of articles). I didn’t realize that the article won a Pulitzer until now. That’s pretty cool that I make it into the New York Times, and then the article wins a Pulitzer Prize.

Good news for free speech

It is good news that the Supreme Court rule that a law prohibiting sales of violent video games to minors is unconstitutional.

It’s good news because the First Amendment is the only thing which prevents the liberal elites who control our country from making it illegal to write the truth about HBD. The McCarthy hearings turned out to be a really good thing in the long run because it put the liberals on board with free speech.

* * *

I think as part of a new feature, every time I link to a NY Times article, I will write something about the guy whose byline is on the article.

Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent for the NY Times, is fifty years old, and was born in the wealthy New York City suburb of Stamford, Connecticut. He went to Yale for both undergrad (BA in English) and law school. He worked as an associate at the elite BIGLAW form of Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Yes, that’s the very same law firm where his co-NY Times Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s dad was a partner.

Adams father, Bela Liptak, is a rather interesting person. When he was 20 years old, be was jailed by the Soviets for his participation in the Hungarian revolution, but somehow escaped prison and became a refugee in the United States where he went then had a successful career in electrical engineering (that’s traditional electrical power engineering and not computer chips) and became the owner of his own engineering firm, and he is an adjunct professor at Yale University. He owns a modest house in Stamford worth only $640,500 according to Zillow.

Adam’s wife, Jennifer Bitman, also graduated from Yale. She’s a veterinarian (a rather weird profession for a Yale grad).

So we see that like every other NY Times journalist I’ve profiled, he has elite education, an elite spouse, and at least upper-middle class parents (although Liptak's family is less elite than most NY Times journalists because his father actually did value creation work and didn't live off a trust fund). Is there anyone at the NY Times who comes from a regular middle class background?

Who do the elites on Wall Street support? Obama!

This $35,800 per plate fund-raising dinner should remind you that they support Obama. They are not Republicans like some of the blog readers here think.

As I keep pointing out, this is why it’s dumb for Republicans to support tax breaks for these bozos.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (like David Leonhardt, another young New York Times journalist with an Ivy League degree and rich parents; his father was a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, one of the most elite BIGLAW firms, and you can read about his sister’s wedding here) wrote a follow-up article in which he claims that Obama doesn’t have as much support on Wall Street as he did the last time he ran for President:

While many of the biggest name financiers feel that they can’t publicly support Mr. Obama through campaign contributions the way they did in 2008 — “it would be bad for business,” one brand-name chief executive of a major bank acknowledged — some still plan to vote for him. And some begrudgingly acknowledged that they don’t yet see a viable alternative to Mr. Obama among the Republican field.

Pretty lukewarm opposition to him, I’d say. He still sells out a $35,800/plate dinner, and the ones who didn’t feel like paying to eat with him are still going to vote for him because there’s no “viable” Republican (in other words, Romney isn't liberal enough).

Who is David Leonhardt?

He’s an economics reporter for the New York Times and he won a Pullitzer prize once. He's approximately 38 years old. But how did he become such an elite reporter?

The key is to come from an elite family. His maternal grandfather, Bernie Alexander (married to Teedie, what an upper-class name that is) graduated from the Wharton School and had a career in business journalism in which he wound up as the “publisher” of Business Week (in other words, the highest level employee at the magazine).

David’s parents, Bob and Joan, live in Ardsley on the Hudson where his father was a French teacher at the Horace Mann School, one of the nation’s most elite private high schools. They give me the impression of people living off their parents’ money. How can you afford a house in Ardsley on the Hudson on a school teacher salary? (Bob did leave Horace Mann to become the head of a the French American School of New York.)

David attended Horace Mann himself, and then went to Yale where he majored in math.

David’s wife, Laura, is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, which is a top-14 law school. They live in a $779,000 house in Bethesda (according to Zillow).

David comes from an interesting class of people whose affluence dates back many generations, but who aren’t obsessed with becoming rich. They are content to be merely affluent, and their families’ eliteness somehow manages to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Marrying well obviously helps here. You might call them “old money” but they clearly don’t have as much money as guys working in investment banking.

As you see, journalism is only a career for people who come from elite families. The problem however is that no one tells this to young people, so we have all these people who have no chance of ever making it in journalism wasting their time and money majoring in it.

David Leonhardt is a moron

David Leonhardt is a moron for writing that college makes people better cashiers and plumbers.

I believe that a college degree gives graduates a real earnings advantage if the degree enables them to get into a higher-paying career track.

However, if all college does is get you the same cashier job you could have gotten without the college degree, then the college degree has done nothing for you. People in these positions are making more money the their non-college-educated coworkers only because they have higher IQ, conscientiousness, and better manners, and all of these things are inherent in the individual rather than something learned at college.

Some interesting HBD news about gender differences

As reported at Poets and Quants:

Though women accounted for 36% of Harvard’s Class of 2009, only 11% of the school’s Baker Scholars were female. That honor is given to students who are in the top 5% of HBS’ graduating class. Meantime, only 21% of the first year honors (for being in the top 20%) for the class were awarded to women and only 22% of the second year honors were given to women.

The gap narrowed only slightly last year for the Class of 2010, according to the study. Though women accounted for 38% of the class, only 20% of the Baker Scholars were female–a gap of some 18 percentage points. Just 23% of the first year honors for the class were given to women and 28% of the second year honors were awarded to female MBA students.

What makes these differences even more striking is that the study at Harvard found that women place more importance on academics than men and spend significantly more time preparing for class.

At most levels of academia, women get better grades than men, and the study noted that even at HBS, the women are better students.

This article confirms one of two theories floating out there in HBD-land: (1) there is a slight IQ advantage favoring men; or (2) there is greater variance in mens’ abilities because some of the genes which contribute to IQ are on the X chromosome. In both of these cases, the small difference will be most apparent at the very highest levels of ability, which is what you have at HBS.

This theory would be proved if, at a mediocre state school MBA program, women got higher grades than men.

Some good advice for readers in their twenties

Commenter tenthring writes:

Couldn't you try to spend your time posting here becoming an investment banker?

If I did that, you guys wouldn’t have the entertainment of reading my blog posts!

And anyway, the answer is no, I can’t become an investment banker because of the barriers to entry. Middle-aged people without an MBA from Harvard/Stanford/Wharton/Columbia and without prior experience in the industry aren’t welcome into the club.

But it’s useful advice for any blog readers still in their twenties. Go to one of those top four schools and get an MBA.

* * *

And should we worry about the mad stampede of applications to top business schools caused by this blog post? No, because not enough people read this blog, and of those who do, few are in their twenties and are going to follow my advice. If three or four extra people apply, and one of them gets in, then I’m glad I was able to help one blog reader.

A capital gains tax suggestion

Individual taxpayers should be given a $500,000 lifetime exemption for capital gains taxes. After that’s used up, they would pay the full normal income tax rates for capital gains.

This would address the “problem” that some conservative-libertarian types complain about that the tax code prevents people from accumulating enough money to start their own business. Half a million dollars (or one million for a married couple) ought to be enough money to start a business. But the lifetime exemption rule would prevent rich hedge fund managers from making millions of dollars a year and paying only a 15% tax rate on it. Or prevent rich CEOs from cashing in their hundreds of millions of dollars of stock options and only paying 15% tax on it.

We could also roll the lifetime exemption for profits from sale of one’s residence into the $500,000, so we wouldn’t really be losing much tax revenue from this proposal because for most people, the biggest lifetime source of capital gains is from selling a house they lived in.

Of course this suggestion is a waste of time because no one with any power to change the tax code is going to pay attention to my blog post.

China leads the world in bridges

Once upon a time, the United States led the world in bridge building. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, each the longest suspension bridge in the world when they were built.

Today, American bridges are built by Chinese civil engineering companies. Today, most of the world’s longest bridges are in China.

The reason why stimulus spending doesn’t work is because even when we spend on construction projects, the jobs created are Chinese jobs instead of American jobs.

And you should give up trying to change things with political action. You are better off trying to become one of the elite yourself so you can get rich from this stuff and laugh at the little people who don’t have jobs from your Hamptons beach house. Do you think those guys making a millions of dollars a year in investment banking really care that American construction workers and steel workers can't find jobs? It's better to be like them than to worry about this stuff.

Anti-immigration sentiments disguised as parody?

Commenter khwarezmid asked me to read this essay at Salon, which I’ve seen before (it’s a year old) but I haven’t commented on until now (at least I think I haven't).

The point is that, just as much of America's elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported. Small wonder that proposals for "guest worker" programs are so popular in the U.S. establishment.

Normally, anti-immigration sentiments are considered to be racist which is why you rarely see them at mainstream publications, and especially not the left-leaning Salon. I think the author was able to get away with this because it’s written in context of what appears to be a parody, and the essay has an absurd ending with Americans emigrating to India (not likely to ever happen).

* * *

I think I’ve turned over a new blogging leaf. It’s a waste of effort to suggest ways to stop the downfall of middle-class America. All I can do is give advice on how to prosper in the new America, which basically means you have to become one of the elite, because America of the future isn’t going to have much of a middle class.

Bogus list of top high schools vs. real list

Newsweek has a bogus list of America’s “top” high schools. What a waste. Does anyone take this stuff seriously?

The real purpose of high school is to get its students admitted to top colleges, so the real list of top high schools is located here (four years old, but probably still correct). As it turns out the top high schools are mostly private schools in the northeast. Unlike the bogus Newsweek list, the true list of top high schools contains a lot of high schools that I’ve actually heard of and even one that I personally attended.

If you want your kids to have a chance at being elite (and with America turning into a South American country, the alternative to being elite is being a poor person cleaning the houses of the elites), you should make sure they attend a high school on the real list.

Woman hates nice-guy boyfriend

This Instapundit-linked letter seeking advice is too good to pass on. I wonder if it’s even real (because the girl in the letter sounds like parody based on Roissy's game website)?

All of the female commenters urge the advice-seeker to dump her nice-guy boyfriend.

What do you think?

Minorities the new majority

As reported by the Washington Post, among babies under the age of two, non-whites outnumber whites. The mood of the article is celebratory rather than alarmist.

80% of seniors over the age of 65 are white. I predict that this will cause the left to turn away from their support for Social Security, because it will come to be seen as a racist transfer of money from victimized minorities to privileged whites. Social Security is an example of traditional liberalism which is dying, replaced by newer forms of liberalism.

Huntsman the MINO?

What’s that? Mormon in name only.

“Huntsman and his wife are raising their adopted Indian daughter in her native Hindu faith.” That’s something that only unitarian universalists would do. (See my blog post on the religion of the elites.)

And what’s up with politicians with children adopted from third world countries?

UPDATE

The article has changed. It no longer says that the daughter is being raised Hindu. It now reads:

And a Huntsman spokesman, Tim Miller, says the Huntsmans are raising their adopted Indian daughter “to learn about and appreciate her native culture and the faiths associated with it.”

Nevertheless, if Huntsman believed that Mormonism was the one true religion, he wouldn’t want his daughter to be exposed to untrue religious beliefs that could send her soul to hell.

Fred Wilson’s blog post

Kiwiguy linked here.

For some reason, Fred Wilson’s blog has come up here before (or more accurately, the blogs of his family members).

Anyway, from reading the blog post and comments, we see that Fred Wilson doesn’t see himself as an American, and certainly not as a white American (god forbid, that would be racist, which is the most evil a person could be without actually murdering anyone).

Fred is a member of a global elite, and working stiffs in America are no different to him than the non-rich people in other countries. Flies to be swatted, resources to be used to make him and his in-group wealthier. He doesn’t care about immigration. Immigration is great for him making more money in venture capital. He probably wishes he could invest more money in places like India, but he doesn’t trust the Indian legal system to safeguard his investments, so the solution is to let more Indians move here so he can invest in India without the money actually being subject to Indian laws.

Immigrants without capital pose no threat to himself. Nor to his daughter who doesn’t seem interested in any value-creating career. She hangs around with other children of rich parents and takes photos (something which she actually does pretty well, because she inherited her father’s high-IQ Ivy League genes). Of course, I don't really expect her to work as an actuary or something boring like that when she has absolutely no need of money nor does she have the ability to earn any money that's anything more than insignificant compared to the vast wealth she will one day inherit. However, it's important these days for rich children to DO something and not just be a rich person who appears not to work, so she has her photography "career" which is really a hobby.

Fred hates Republicans and loves Obama (which he mentions in a comment), so this is one of the reasons why it’s stupid for Republicans to fight against Obama’s tax increase on people like Fred Wilson. If Fred Wilson voted for a tax increase for himself and others like him, let them have it.

Response to TUJ's comment on abortion

The Undiscovered Jew (TUJ) writes:

[It’s] stupid for pro-abortion conservatives like Half Sigma to vote against a pro-life Republican for president solely because of the abortion issue simply because abortion isn't going anywhere.

The reason abortion won't be restricted anytime soon even if a pro-life Republican is elected is because college educated women want to retain the option to have an abortion as an insurance policy in case any "mistakes" are made. Granted, college educated women and their daughters generally use birth control and normally don't get pregnant, but unwanted pregnancies aren't so extraordinarily rare that the middle and higher classes would want to completely lose the option of abortion because they college educated women have high enough future time orientation to understand that an unwanted pregnancy is not unheard of among young, educated women.

I have consistently voted for Republican candidates even though the majority of them support policy goals with respect to abortion that I disagree with.

When it comes to choosing who to support in a Republican primary contest, however, I think that it’s fair to give Republican candidates supporting abortion rights a big plus factor. As TUJ correctly points out above, abortion rights are very important to the elite, because they understand that a woman who gives birth out of wedlock suffers a huge drop in social class, so all members of the elite are very afraid of this and desire for abortion to remain legal as a backup plan in case they or their daughters or their sisters become accidentally pregnant. Even though the elites are very good at avoiding accidental pregnancy, it still happens from time to time.

I disagree with TUJ that abortion restriction isn’t something that people who care about the issue need to worry about. It’s clear that Christian Republicans very much do want to outlaw abortions. If the matter were left up to the states, in all of the Bible Belt states abortion would be illegal. Only Supreme Court-made-law prevents this from happening.

I could theoretically buy into the argument that abortion should be left up to the states, but that is something that’s not ever going to happen. Leaving abortion up to the states isn’t what the “pro-life” movement wants, what they want is for abortion to be illegal everywhere, because they believe it’s evil. Their states’ rights arguments aren’t sincere.

By controlling the Supreme Court in 1973, the liberals managed to get a policy enacted that has lasted for nearly 40 years, and prevents a Republican majority from simply reversing the policy. Reversing the policy is not even as simple as appointing more “conservative” justices to the Supreme Court because it’s not clear to me that the existing conservative justices want to violate the principle of stare decisis with respect to abortion.

The problem with pro-life Republican candidates are:

(1) They scare away elite voters, and it’s very important for the future of the Republican Party that some of the elites support the Party.
(2) Anti-abortion Republicans often support other stupid policies like teaching creationism in the schools.
(3) They use abortion as a litmus test for making appointments to the Supreme Court, which rubs elites the wrong way, and it also prevents qualified conservative judges who aren’t Catholic from getting appointed by Republicans. (On the other hand, a good thing to come out of Roe v. Wade is a renewed appreciation for Original Intent.)
(4) If there are enough anti-abortion Republicans in power, they will manage to outlaw abortion, either by packing the Supreme Court or threatening to pack the Supreme Court (as FDR did), or by constitutional amendment.

For these reasons, my preference is for voting for pro-choice Republicans, all else being equal. With respect to the current-cycle presidential primaries, Romney is the least scary to pro-choice elites because he was in favor of abortion before he was against it. And Mormons, because of their status as a minority religion (although they are often in denial that they are a distinct religion from Christianity), are more in favor of separation of church and state than true Christians.

A pro-abortion post

I don’t understand why so many readers of this blog are anti-abortion, and so much against supporting Mitt Romney, the only Republican candidate who was for abortion before he was against it, implying that he doesn’t feel very strongly about the issue.

Abortion is the best tool we have for fighting a much bigger problem, and that is unwed mothers. All women who get pregnant and who aren’t married should be actively encouraged to have an abortion. This would reduce welfare costs, and reduce the number of low-IQ children. I’ve established many times before that becoming pregnant outside of marriage is highly correlated with low IQ and low future time orientation. Responsible women use birth control and have less unmarried sex in the first place.

I am aware that commenters have argued that legalizing abortion caused the problem of widespread premarital sex and unwed motherhood. My response to this is twofold. First of all, the causation is not at all clear because there were a lot of social changes taking place at that time of which legalizing abortion was only one facet of. Secondly, even if there was some causation, that’s a Pandora’s Box which has already been opened, and making abortion illegal is not going to stop single motherhood because single motherhood has become destigmatized. At this point, it will only make the problem worse.

Finally, the claim that abortion must be made illegal because it’s evil doesn’t hold up because the majority of people don’t think it’s so evil that it needs to be outlawed, and in times past it was considered acceptable to kill babies even after they were born. No one is going to be forced to commit the act themselves if they don’t want to (although they should be encouraged to do so for the reasons explained above).

Also, I’m sick and tired of hearing arguments that we must act against our own obvious interests to prevent evil. Liberals, for example, argue that it’s evil to restrict immigration, so we must allow unfettered immigration of whoever wants to move here. I think it's evil to allow our country to deteriorate through policies that cause the average IQ to decrease.

More Republican Party history

As I noted yesterday, Mitt Romney was the second-place finisher in a previous Republican presidential primary. This tends to be the candidate most likely to be nominated.

I also noted that it applied to McCain in 2008 and Bob Dole in 1996. Certain commenters said “Ah ha! those candidates lost!” Well it also applied to George HW Bush in 1988 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, and those candidates won. And then there was the 1968 primaries in which Nixon was not merely the second-place finisher in a previous Republican primary but the winner of a previous Republican primary. Nixon won the general election the second time around.

* * *

Today, Intrade lists Romney at 33.1% and Perry is in second place at 16.4%. It’s interesting that the wisdom of the market thinks that Perry has the best chance of beating Romney even though he hasn’t even announced that he’s running, and his similarity to George W Bush (both governors of Texas, both male cheerleaders in college) seems like a minus to me. Who wants another President Bush?

51-year-old marries 16-year-old

The 51-year-old is actor Doug Hutchison (who mostly plays secondary characters in TV shows). The girl is a pretty blonde with large breasts who weighs only 96 pounds. The story is newsworthy because of the vast age difference and the girl’s youth.

It’s interesting to note how rare marriages like this are. You would think that in a country with a lot of rich horny men and poor teenage girls, this would happen more often. But it seems to be less common than prostitution and a hell of a lot less common than teenage girls just getting pregnant and collecting welfare.

Prediction: Mitt Romney will win GOP nomination

This prediction is now a no-brainer. Romney will win the nomination in 2012 for the reasons that McCain won it in 2008.

Romney was the second-place finisher in a previous Republican primary contest, and that’s a really good place to be when running for the Republican nomination. That’s where McCain was in 2008 and where Bob Dole was in 1996.

In 2008, McCain was perceived as a moderate candidate while Romney positioned himself as a conservative candidate. The conservative voters split their votes between Huckabee and Romney, and that made McCain the winner in many key primary elections.

That wasn’t how Romney planned his 2008 campaign. He thought that Giuliani and McCain were his two top challengers, and by positioning himself as the conservative candidate, he’d win because Giuliani and McCain would split the moderate vote. But what happened was that Giuliani fizzled out really early and Huckabee appeared to take away Romney’s conservative votes. Romney learned his lessons from that campaign, and is now positioning himself as the moderate candidate. Right now there is no moderate challenger, but a lot of conservative challengers to split the conservative votes.

The only likely moderate challenger on the horizon is Jon Huntsman. There is no way that Huntsman, who has never run before in the Republican primaries and is not even officially in the race yet, could ever successfully compete against Romney’s momentum. What exactly does Huntsman offer that’s different? Huntsman is like a clone of Romney. Another filthy-rich Mormon. People will vote for the filthy-rich Mormon they’ve heard of rather than the filthy-rich Mormon who’s the newcomer.

RICK PERRY UPDATE

Rick Perry was mentioned several times in the comments.

I don’t see him as being a threat to Romney, because he positions himself as a hardcore social conservative, and being anti-abortion seems to be his main topic.

His competitor is not Romney, but Michele Bachmann and all the other hardcore Christian-right Republicans lined up against Romney. As I stated above, they are going to split the Christian-right vote, and leave Romney clear sailing into the White House.

Game summary

The point I’ve been trying to make during the last two weeks is specific to marriage, and that “game” blogs have falsely smeared that institution. Objective research shows that marriage makes people happier (and there’s evidence from reading the GSS that it’s marriage which causes people to be happier than they would have been if they were not married, and not that happy people are more likely to get married), and they also have better career outcomes (once again, although men with better careers are better at attracting spouses, there is also evidence that employers prefer married men and also I suspect that being in a marriage helps you make better career decisions). Married people also live longer.

Divorce is overrated as a concern if you are in the right social class. I don’t think that any proles are reading my blog. Everyone here is a college graduate with the exception of a few younger readers who haven’t completed college yet. Divorce is pretty rare among college graduates, and I suspect it’s rarer still among higher quality college graduates. You should also note that 95% of divorces are uncontested (which doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no alimony or child support, merely that the parties agreed to whatever they agreed to without going to court). While it may appear that women come out better from divorce than men, one must also remember that an older divorced women with children is a much less desirable marriage partner than a young woman without children.

It’s possible that marriage is inequitable, that it creates, for sake of example, 200 points of benefit, and that women get 120 points of benefit and men get only 80 points of benefit. I’m in favor of equalizing those benefits and support men’s rights organizations that seek to do that, but marriage still appears to be a win-win arrangement.

Game blogs have some good insights when they aren’t spreading falsehoods about marriage. I learned a lot about alphas and betas from reading Roissy’s blog. And there is obviously a need for lower beta and omega men to learn how to meet women because the benefits of marriage are useless to them if no woman will tolerate their company. But game blogs would be more socially responsible if they encouraged responsible dating with the goal towards marriage, rather than having sex with slutty women who aren’t quality marriage material.

One interesting thing I learned from reading Roissy is that there is this other-world of slutty women having frequent casual sex with alpha males (or AMOGs as Style called them in his book). One not understanding the dynamics of human behavior might think that a beta’s best chance of sex would be with a slutty girl, but actually it’s the opposite. Slutty girls will only give it up to alphas because they have no intention of settling down so they prefer sex with those men who most turn them on. Betas have the best chance of getting sex if they focus on the approximately 80% of women who are not slutty. But most game advice seems focused on creating an illusion for the slutty girls that the PUA is alpha. Any woman who would fall for some magic trick or a pickup line about horoscopes is likely not good marriage material.

Now of course, the counterargument here is that in order for a lesser beta or omega to get the confidence he needs to attract a non-slutty girl to be his girlfriend and eventually his wife, a sexual conquest of a slutty girl is exactly what he needs. Maybe that is true. But the impression I get from the game blogs is that sexual conquest of slutty girls is an end rather than merely an intermediary step.

Real divorce statistics

How did I almost miss this? An article in today’s NY Times about divorce.

According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.

The lesson is that if you marry the right girl, one who has a good education, the chance of your marriage ending in divorce is extremely low. The people writing at “game” blogs are completely wrong about divorce.

And this includes just regular college educated people from state schools. Among the upper middle class, divorce is rarer still, and women who are divorced feel extremely ostracized:

After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.

It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt badly for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”

This is the complete opposite of the impression one gets at “game” blogs that women can’t wait to divorce you and swindle you out of your money.

Bottom line is that a non-slutty upper-middle class girl is extremely unlikely to divorce you.

* * *

Of course there’s a dark side to this article, which is the worsening behavior of the proles, among which single motherhood has become a viable and socially accepted option, and even when they get married they have trouble staying married.

There’s also some hypocrisy here in that the upper classes live with the benefit good values, but they vote against government policies to encourage these same values among the proles. The upper classes are ten times more concerned with legalizing gay marriage than they are with the fact that the institution of heterosexual marriage is crumbling among the lower classes.

The real estate benefits of having rich parents

How do young people afford to live in Manhattan? Their parents buy them apartments.

The Waldmans eventually bought a two-bedroom condo for $1.15 million on East 72nd Street, a few blocks from where Olivia Waldman, 31, works as a physician’s assistant in surgery. A doorman building, it was recently renovated and outfitted with amenities like a spa, a climbing wall and a basketball court. Norma Jean Nesheim, the building’s sales director, said that about a dozen parents had bought apartments there for children in the last year.

“It still feels too good to be true,” said Ms. Waldman, who moved into the apartment in February. “This helps me financially and I get to live in a fabulous apartment I couldn’t afford on my own.”

I sure wish I could trade parents.

More about Giuliani for VP

So I received a lot of negative comments about the idea. But the commenters are wrong.

First of all, a lot of people explained why Giuliani wouldn’t be able to win the Republican nomination, which if true (it is probably true), is irrelevant. Only one man can win the Republican nomination, and in just about every presidential election, the nominee picks as his VP someone who wouldn’t have been able to win the Republican nomination. Often it’s someone he gave a good beating to in the primaries. Joe Biden’s chance of winning the Democratic nomination was pretty abysmal, but Obama chose him for VP and then the two of them clobbered McCain/Palin.

It’s not entirely clear to me that the Giuliani couldn’t win the Republican nomination. He had a really crappy campaign strategy in 2008, but he’s an excellent tactical campaigner. He’s charismatic when giving speeches. If he ran with a better campaign strategy, I could easily see him coming in second against Romney, because no one else is trying to outflank Romney right now to the moderate side.

Whatever Giuliani thinks about the issues should be completely irrelevant to anyone who cares about issues, because the Vice President doesn’t make policy, all he does is go to funerals and wait around in case the President dies. Theoretically, if there was a tie in the Senate, he could go break the tie in a direction that the President was opposed to, but when was the last time that happened?

Some commenters said that the VP needs to “excite the base”, but that would be truly disastrous, because the person who “excites” the Christian-right base completely repels the MSM and a lot of swing voters who let the MSM tell them how to think. The base hates Obama, and if Romney can’t excite the base based on their Obama hatred, then he’s too hopeless to win the election anyway.

Giuliani’s personal flaws have been vetted in the 2008 primaries. Everyone knows everything about him, and it wasn’t that big of an issue in 2008. Reagan was divorced and had kids he didn’t see eye-to-eye with, and it didn’t stop him from being loved by Republicans.

As I wrote above, Giuliani is an excellent campaigner, and will do a good job in the VP nominee role of giving speeches and rallying support for the ticket.

It’s true that Guiliani doesn’t bring a swing state with him (I doubt that New York will switch to Romney because of Guiliani), but that factor is overrated. Bush didn’t need Cheney to bring him Wyoming and Obama didn’t need Biden to bring him Delaware. What Guiliani could bring to Romney is a lot of campaign donations. Giuliani has a lot of ins with the Wall Street crowd and other wealthy New Yorkers. Guiliani raised a lot of money when he was campaigning in 2008.

Giuliani is the VP pick if Romney is serious about winning.