Half Sigma

Roissy’s blog is gone

Click the link, and there’s a message that the authors deleted the blog.

Did Roissy really delete his blog, was he hacked, or is this a case of Wordpress.com deleting a politically incorrect blog?

* * *

But it still appears at a different url: http://heartiste.wordpress.com/. Is that still Roissy, or did a fan preserve his writings?

* * *

I admit to not following Roissy's blog that closely. I do note that the blog name used to be "Roissy in DC” but some time ago for a reason unknown to me, the name changed to “Citizen Renegade.” There was also a new blogger “Chateau.” Was that Roissy or someone else?

So maybe the original Roissy no longer runs the blog, and the guys currently running the blog got sick and tired of people thinking they were Roissy, so they got rid of the old domain name which was roissy.wordpress.com? Or maybe Roissy just wants the world to think he’s no longer running the blog?

Wordsum and STEM

SDA 3.5: Tables GSS 1972-2010 Cumulative Datafile

Jul 28, 2011 (Thu 08:46 AM PDT)

Variables Role Name Label Range MD Dataset Row WORDSUM NUMBER WORDS CORRECT IN VOCABULARY TEST 0-10 -1,98,99 1 Column COLMAJR1(Recoded) R MAJOR IN COLLEGE 1-3 1 Weight COMPWT Composite weight = WTSSALL * OVERSAMP * FORMWT .1927-11.1290 1

Frequency Distribution Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N COLMAJR1 1 English Literature 2 STEM 3 all other majors ROW TOTAL WORDSUM 0 .0 .0 .0 .0 2.9 11.1 2.1 11.1 1 .0 .0 .0 .0 2.1 8.0 1.5 8.0 2 .0 .0 2.5 2.7 .0 .0 .5 2.7 3 .0 .0 3.9 4.2 2.9 11.1 2.9 15.4 4 .0 .0 1.0 1.1 8.1 30.7 6.0 31.8 5 5.8 2.1 6.4 6.9 11.8 45.0 10.3 54.0 6 8.7 3.2 21.7 23.3 19.9 75.8 19.5 102.3 7 17.4 6.3 16.3 17.5 18.3 69.9 17.8 93.8 8 20.3 7.4 19.7 21.2 16.8 64.1 17.6 92.7 9 24.7 9.0 22.2 23.8 10.3 39.2 13.7 72.0 10 23.2 8.5 6.4 6.9 6.9 26.5 8.0 41.9 COL TOTAL 100.0 36.5 100.0 107.6 100.0 381.5 100.0 525.6 Means 8.19 7.18 6.46 6.73 Std Devs 1.50 1.86 2.23 2.17 Unweighted N 34 100 376 510

Color coding: <-2.0 <-1.0 <0.0 >0.0 >1.0 >2.0 Z N in each cell: Smaller than expected Larger than expected

Summary Statistics Eta* = .23 Gamma = -.31 Rao-Scott-P: F(20,2040) = 4.14 (p= 0.00) R = -.23 Tau-b = -.19 Rao-Scott-LR: F(20,2040) = 4.48 (p= 0.00) Somers' d* = -.27 Tau-c = -.17 Chisq-P(20) = 56.48 Chisq-LR(20) = 61.04 *Row variable treated as the dependent variable.

Recode for 'COLMAJR1' 1 = 1 "English Literature"; 2 = 9,10,14 "STEM"; 3 = 0,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,11,12,13,15 "all other majors"

Standard error calculations Sample design: stratified cluster sample Stratum variable = SAMPLERC Cluster variable = SAMPCODE Method: Taylor series approximation

Allocation of cases (unweighted) Valid cases 510 Cases with invalid codes on row or column variable 54,577 Total cases 55,087

Datasets 1 /html/D3/GSS10 2 /html/Npubvars/GSS10

This is a really useful General Social Survey chart I should have done sooner.

People often criticize my use of the Wordsum score because they say it discriminates against STEM majors. They say the reason why there doesn't seem to be a correlation between Wordsum and income for college gradautes is because the STEM guys make more money and they don't do as well with Wordsum.

In 1993, the GSS asked respondents for their college major. In the chart above, STEM represents people who say they majored in Science, Math, or Engineering.

It's not too shocking that those who majored in English Literature had the highest mean Wordsum score, but we do see the surprising result that, excluding the English Literature majors, STEM majors had higher mean Wordsum than all other college majors.

My explanation for this is that Wordsum is correlated with general intelligence, and majoring in STEM requires higher general intelligence than most other stuff that people study in college.

Nerds and value creation

Nerds are the primary value-creators in a technological society, a contribution for which they are not adequately rewarded. Although a nerd working in engineering or computers may make more money than the average college graduate, society’s greatest rewards go to the value transferers.

At all companies, the highest salaries are paid to higher level managers and not to the nerds doing the actual value-creation work. This is not to say that management functions add no value at all. It’s only saying that managers, especially higher level managers, are paid more, often far more, than the true value they add. The difference between the manager’s salary and the manager’s actual value-creating contribution is the manager’s value transference bonus.

The skills needed to be a manager are more common than the skills needed to be an engineer. The apparent rarity of managers is an artifact of the pyramidal command structure of businesses. For example, there only 500 companies in the Fortune 500, so the group of people who are or have been CEOs of these companies is a pretty small group, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be millions of people capable of doing those jobs if only they had the opportunity to be on a career track where they could acquire the specific knowledge needed to do the job.

Furthermore, the skills required to win the competition to become a CEO are not necessarily the same skills required to actually be a good CEO. There are some CEO functions that a nerdy engineer might do better than the kind of people who become CEOs. Bill Gates is an example of an accidental CEO; had he not lucked into owning Microsoft, it’s doubtful that anyone would have hired him for the C-suite fast track, but people think he did a pretty good job running Microsoft. Nerds may not be good at leadership and inspiring people to work harder for lower salaries, but nerds are good at making decisions involving product development and the strategic direction of the company.

The nerdish cognitive profile probably evolved because nerds have been better at value creation throughout the centuries. Before modern technology, nerds were craftsmen. Nerds were also better at the strategic aspects of farming, such as when and where to plant crops. In modern society, nerds are looked down upon by women for not being cool, but in the past, nerds were held in much higher regard because women of the past valued the nerd’s ability to provide for his family.

Nerds, then and now

I did a Google search for the psychology of nerds, and found an article in Psychology Today. Do people think there is any truth here?

What causes someone to develop the nerd personality? Biology is partially responsible for creating what Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen calls a "systematizing brain," or "S-brain"—a brain good at figuring out logical rules. The opposite is an empathic brain; E-brains are good at divining what people are feeling, and people with E-brains develop sharper social skills. More men have S-brains than women, and more women have E-brains than men—though men and women both fall all over the spectrum.

People with autism, or its milder variant, Asperger's syndrome, are biologically disposed to have extreme S-brains. Nerds stand squarely on the S-brain side of the spectrum, but not necessarily enough to have Asperger's or autism. Some nerds have Asperger's, but not all. Nerdiness and Asperger's aren't the same thing, but they have a lot in common.

"Nerd" is a vernacular label, not a scientific one, but it's usually earned by a love for activities that are logical rather than sensual or physical—math, biology, or coding rather than cooking, ballet, or football. The leisure activities we associate with nerds—chess club, computer games, electronics projects in the garage—all depend on rational, systematic thinking, and tend not to involve emotionally nuanced conversation with other humans.

I don’t know if the last paragraph explains why nerds like comic books and renaissance fairs. Neither involves rational, systematic thinking. Does it explain why nerds like science fiction over other types of adventure stories? Kids who do well at math are considered nerdy, and I previously hypothesized about sex hormones stunting the mathematical development of the brain, so I think that low testosterone may contribute to the nerd personality, and at the same time explain why male nerds aren’t good at athletic activities.

Parenting can also be a major factor in creating a nerd, says Mel Levine, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina. "It's the tastes they develop in their kids, the clothing and pursuits they pick for them," he says. But adults shouldn't force children to conform to middle-school social conventions. "There are a lot of depressed cool kids, and it's better to be a happy nerd than a popular anorexic," he says. "Nerdiness isn't a pathology."

I think there is something to that. Parents who know what they are doing can prevent their kids from becoming nerds, or at least from becoming really bad socially awkward nerds (assuming their kids don’t have a full-blown case of Asperger’s or autism).

What I find mysterious about the nerd phenomenon is that it’s a recent one. The word didn’t even exist before the 1970s. (Earlier use of the word “nerd” might refer to a plant mentioned in the Old Testament, or an archaic spelling of the word “need”.) People believe that the word first start being used as a pejorative term for uncool people by the Fonz character in the TV sitcom Happy Days. The 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds may have further popularized the word, but it was used frequently prior to the movie.

Did nerds exist in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century? What did those early nerds do before science fiction, computer games, and Dungeons and Dragons? According to Peter from Long Island, tinkering with cars is not nerdy because it’s traditionally masculine, but maybe tinkering with cards is exactly what nerds did in the first half of the 20th century. Perhaps tinkering with cars doesn’t have the same social stigma because the nerd personality wasn’t as stigmatized in the first half of the 20th century?

Is the recent awareness of nerds related to the recent increase in autism diagnoses? Is there some factor causing both nerdiness and autism to increase?

Still playing Civilization IV

Four years ago I reviewed Civilization IV. I am still playing this game. With Civilization IV, turn-based strategy gaming has finally reached such a level of perfectness that there’s no need to ever play another computer game. It’s kind of like chess (but more interesting, because I can’t beat the computer at chess).

I have not been able to get into any other game since I started playing Civ4. Civ5 sucked, and I got bored with WoW before I was able to get a character to level 80 and experience theallegedly exciting endgame play.

Some of the advantages of playing a six-year old game are:

(1) The complete edition of the game sells at places like Amazon.com for about $20, which is a lot less than new games. (People who are willing to break the copyright laws can probably figure out how to obtain the game for free.)

(2) When the game first came out, people complained that it didn’t run on older computers, but that’s not much of a problem today. Any computer bought during the last five years should be powerful enough to play it, although I did notice that when I upgraded to a computer with an Intel Core i7, the game was finally playable on a huge map.

(3) The patches have fixed all of the bugs and many game balance issues which were in earlier versions of the game, and the Better AI mod I mentioned above significantly improves the AI, so you are playing a much better game than what early adopters played.

(4) One of the later patches for the game removed the copy protection, making the game much more convenient to play because you don’t need to have the DVD in your DVD drive and you don’t need to be connected to the internet. This makes it especially convenient to play on a laptop—and nowadays, they have laptops with graphics powerful enough to play this game (probably, any laptop with something like ATI/AMD Mobility Radeon graphics will suffice).

* * *

The proper way to play this game is with the BTS expansion, the BTS 3.19 patch, and the BTS Better AI mod. The mod was developed by some fans and significantly improves the computer opponents’ gameplay.

I usually play with Small maps, and sometimes Standard maps. The problem with Standard maps is that the turns start to take too long when you get closer to the endgame and have to micromanage so many cities and have to move around such a large number of military units. I seldom play a game to completion. I usually quit when I feel confident that I’ve won. This is because the final mopping-up phase takes too long. I also quit when I feel confident that I’ve lost. Once you’ve seen all of your cities crushed by the enemy once, there’s no joy in seeing it again. At Emperor level (the normal level I play on) and the Better AI mod, the game is hard enough to win when everything goes perfectly. When an enemy stack of doom suddenly takes over one of your cities, you’re probably a goner at that point.

I always play the game with tech-trading turned off. I never liked that aspect of the game. It’s more interesting to research all of the technologies yourself, and if you are able to obtain a tech advantage, you get to enjoy it for a while. Expert players use tech trading to keep up with the computer players at the highest levels of difficulty (Immortal and Diety), but tech trading makes the game harder at lower levels of difficulty because it’s one more strategy you need to know about and if you don’t play the tech-trading game then the computer players will trade with each other and achieve a tech advantage over you.

The reason why Civ4 works so well as a game is because the gameplay is so varied and there are so many different strategies which are evenly balanced with each other. Civ4 is both a civilization-building game as well as a wargame. You can seldom win a game with a peacemonger strategy at the higher difficulty levels. The advantages the computer players have allow them to jump too far ahead of you. A successful war against a weaker civilization allows you to obtain more cities and territory (which eventually means more research, more income, and more production of military units) and more special resources (and special resources are the key to growing large cities because you need the health and happiness bonuses) and the large military you build up discourages the computer players from attacking you, and if they do attack you the large military enables you to fight them off.

Because each Civilization and leader have slightly different advantages, and because there are such a wide variety of maps, each randomly generated, the replayability is nearly infinite. During the past two weeks I’ve been trying to win this game using a Small size Islands map with six civs (including my own). I haven’t been able to win this yet at Emperor level. The island I start on always seems too small to build up a civilization that can challenge the computer players. I had more success playing the Standard size Islands map, but then the game took too long to play.

* * *

Compared to WoW, Civ4 is a single player game. So with Civ4, you don’t get the illusion of increasing your status relative to other players. WoW simply rewards playing the game for a long time, but Civ4 rewards playing the game smartly and learning the winning strategies. And while each Civ4 map is different, Civ4 doesn’t give you the vicarious thrill of exploring virtual worlds. Civ4 also lacks interaction with other players, but I never experienced that part of WoW because I never got to the endgame.

* * *

The downside of Civilization IV is the nerd factor. It’s not something you are proud to admit to. If you spend your free time golfing or sailing or something like that, there’s no shame in telling the world. It’s even OK spend your time watching professionals play sports. But people look down on those who play computer games. The time spent playing Civ4 doesn’t increase your income or status, and it doesn’t attract women. (If you are a female who plays Civ4, it might attract men with the same hobby.)

Norway terrorist, WoW player

Anders Behring Breivik writes in his manifesto

I took a year off when I was 25 and played WoW PvE hardcore for a year.

Conservatism - Alliance, human female mage – PvE, Server: Silvermoon
Conservative - Horde, tauren female resto druid – PvP, Server: Silvermoon

I raided hardcore and was a guild leader in a couple of hardcore guilds: Virtue, then Unit, Nordrassil – Rank 1 Alliance PvE. We transferred the guild to Silvermoon. I grew tired of running the guild and sorting recruitment issues so I joined Nevermore, another hardcore guild on Silvermoon (Rank 3). Silvermoon is the most progressed Alliance server in the world out of more than 300 servers (10 million + players worldwide) so the competition is extremely hard. This means we were one of the most progressed guilds in the world at one time. I can honestly say running a hardcore WoW guild is equally challenging to running your own business with 7 employees or more. It requires an extreme amount of work in order to be successful and get server first kills. It was a good experience and something I wanted to do at least a limited amount of time during a period of my life.

Notice that both of his characters were female.

* * *

The vast majority of Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto is composed not of his own writings, but a selection of his essays written by others, mostly anti-Islamic bloggers. He reads Jihad Watch, Little Green Footballs, and Gates of Vienna. And his favorite is the European white nationalist blogger Fjordman. No, they are not the same person. (To the credit of white nationalist Europeans, they are not anti-Jewish like white nationalists in the United States. MSM journalists, unfortunately, don't understand the difference between white nationalists and neo nazis.)

This guy has done a great deal of harm to the movement that he supports. Now people will say that right-wing types are a bigger terrorist threat than Islamic jihadists. And people will say that right-wing blogs are fanning the flames of “hate” and they will be blamed for this incident. Maybe governments will use this incident as an excuse to suppress the free speech of blogs they disagree with.

Norway Manifesto

I haven’t read it yet, but here’s a link to the 1518 page document.

Wordsum vs. the Bible, education held constant

Previous posts in this series:

1. Chart: income vs. degree
2. About Wordsum
3. Chart: Wordsum vs. median income

SDA 3.5: Tables GSS 1972-2010 Cumulative Datafile

Jul 23, 2011 (Sat 05:21 PM PDT)

Variables Role Name Label Range MD Dataset Row WORDSUM NUMBER WORDS CORRECT IN VOCABULARY TEST 0-10 -1,98,99 1 Column BIBLE FEELINGS ABOUT THE BIBLE 1-4 0,8,9 1 Weight COMPWT Composite weight = WTSSALL * OVERSAMP * FORMWT .1927-11.1290 1 Filter DEGREE(3) RS HIGHEST DEGREE(=BACHELOR) 0-4 7,8,9 1

Frequency Distribution Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N BIBLE 1 WORD OF GOD 2 INSPIRED WORD 3 BOOK OF FABLES 4 OTHER ROW TOTAL WORDSUM 0 24.2 2.6 37.4 4.1 38.4 4.2 .0 .0 100.0 10.9 1 19.5 2.2 42.8 4.8 23.5 2.7 14.1 1.6 100.0 11.3 2 7.1 1.1 38.9 5.8 39.3 5.8 14.7 2.2 100.0 14.8 3 22.8 8.8 59.1 22.9 12.7 4.9 5.5 2.1 100.0 38.7 4 29.9 27.6 48.8 45.1 20.4 18.8 1.0 .9 100.0 92.4 5 26.4 56.5 58.9 126.2 12.2 26.2 2.5 5.4 100.0 214.3 6 22.0 113.6 59.3 306.6 16.8 86.9 2.0 10.2 100.0 517.3 7 14.5 74.2 65.2 333.1 18.7 95.5 1.5 7.8 100.0 510.6 8 14.3 68.0 63.6 302.3 21.3 101.1 .9 4.2 100.0 475.6 9 7.4 28.6 55.0 213.1 36.4 140.7 1.2 4.6 100.0 387.1 10 10.0 28.3 52.2 148.1 36.3 103.0 1.4 4.0 100.0 283.4 COL TOTAL 16.1 411.5 59.1 1,512.0 23.1 589.7 1.7 43.1 100.0 2,556.3

Color coding: <-2.0 <-1.0 <0.0 >0.0 >1.0 >2.0 Z N in each cell: Smaller than expected Larger than expected

Text for 'BIBLE' 120a. Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about teh Bible? 1. The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. 2. The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word. 3. The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men. [Half Sigma omitted a bunch of stuff that was here.]

Allocation of cases (unweighted) Valid cases 2,564 Cases excluded by filter or weight 47,439 Cases with invalid codes on row or column variable 5,084 Total cases 55,087

Datasets 1 /html/D3/GSS10 2 /html/Npubvars/GSS10

If Wordsum doesn’t predict higher income, some people might get the idea that it’s useless.

But in fact, Wordsum has some interesting correlations with other questions in the GSS. In the table above, we hold education constant, showing only respondents who have a bachelor’s degree, just like the table in my previous post where I compared Wordsum to the respondent’s median income.

Even though everyone has the same level of education, respondents with high Wordsum scores are far more likely to view the Bible as a book of fables, while respondents with low Wordsum scores are for more likely to view the Bible as the literal word of God.

People on the Christian right like to blame liberal college professors for brainwashing young minds and causing them to turn away from religion. But as we see in these GSS results, that’s not the way it happens. Smarter people just have a harder time believing in all that Biblical nonsense.

Higher verbal ability leads to lower income

Previous posts in this series:

1. Chart: income vs. degree
2. About Wordsum

Respondent’s median income (RINCOM06) vs. Wordsum

Selection criteria:

Age: 35-64
Year: 2006-2010
Highest degree: Bachelor’s

Wordsum	Weighted N	Median Income
6	75.3	$50,000 TO 59,999
7	64.2	$60,000 TO 74,999
8	46.7	$40,000 TO 49,999
9	40.9	$40,000 TO 49,999
10	17.9	$40,000 TO 49,999

Using the same selection criteria as the first post in this series, we are looking only at respondents whose highest educational credential is a bachelor’s degree.

We see the shocking results that, when education is held constant, the respondents with Wordsum scores of 6 and 7 have higher median income than the smarter respondents with Wordsum scores of 8-10.

No, there’s nothing wrong with the numbers. The sample size is small, but these results are consistent with other years in the GSS, and with other datasets. I found the same pattern in the dataset used by the Dale Krueger study.

Why don’t higher verbal abilities lead to higher income? The answer has to be that employers hire people based on their degrees and not their actual ability. Once on the job, employers don’t value the superior job performance of those with higher ability. This is why we talk about “career tracks.” Once a person gets on a track, they just proceed along the track regardless of their ability.

Tradable vs. nontradable jobs

There’s some interesting economics analysis by Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton.

In the tradable category are manufactured goods, farm products, raw materials and financial, consulting, educational, computing and other technical services. Prominent in the nontradable sector are government, health care, retailing, construction, restaurants and, for the most part, legal services.

. . .

The net effect has been that of the 27.3 million jobs created in the American economy from 1990 to 2008, only 662,000 new jobs were added by the tradable sector. That is only 2.3 percent of total job creation in the economy.

I’m not sure I get the part about education being a tradeable service.

The quoted text doesn’t tell us what happened after 2008, but I suspect that many of the jobs lost during the recession have been in the tradable sector, and those jobs are not going to come back in the United States because they can be done for less money overseas. Thus we see continuing high unemployment that his unresponsive to stimulus spending, because stimulus spending doesn’t increase demand for government or health care, and we still have an oversupply of buildings from the housing/construction bubble.

* * *

As I previously wrote, the three biggest sectors of the economy (from the perspective of how many people work in the sector) are healthcare, education services, and government. Manufacturing is fourth, but it’s a declining sector, and it's not going to be the sector that brings down the unemployment rate.

Is there any way to bring down the unemployment rate without either (1) increasing the number of jobs in government, education, and healthcare; or (2) decreasing the supply of labor?

* * *

“T” writes in a comment:

In the past our economy consisted of mostly value creation jobs. As value creation became easier and easier value transference jobs were created to occupy the populace. The solution is to reduce working hours. If we cut working hours to 20 we would need twice as many people in value creation industries in order to maintain our standard of living. We would then be "short" workers in the value transference sectors, but since those workers mostly did nothing of value it wouldn't matter.

This sounds like a good solution to me. The first step in this direction would be to shorten the standard workweek to four days of eight hours each (meaning a 32-hour workweek).

What’s strange is that there’s not a single mainstream economist or op-ed writer that I can think of who has endorsed this idea. Why is it that what seemed like a good idea in the 1930s (fighting unemployment by shortening the workweek) no longer seems like a good idea in the 2010s?

* * *

JP writes:

If you advocated shortening the work-week then you would have to argue that we have "too much" labor available. This is obviously true but unthinkable to discuss because to do so would strongly support the case for closing the borders (no more immigration) and deporting the excess immigrants who have recently arrived. As with so many other things, what prevents a rational solution is irrational liberal ideology.

I should have thought of that. It makes perfect sense.

A word about wordsum

This chart was run using the same filters as I used for the previous post about education and income (ages 35-64, years 2006-2010).

SDA 3.5: Tables GSS 1972-2010 Cumulative Datafile

Jul 21, 2011 (Thu 03:36 PM PDT)

Variables Role Name Label Range MD Dataset Row WORDSUM NUMBER WORDS CORRECT IN VOCABULARY TEST 0-10 -1,98,99 1 Weight COMPWT Composite weight = WTSSALL * OVERSAMP * FORMWT .1927-11.1290 1 Filter AGE(35-64) AGE OF RESPONDENT 18-89 0,98,99 1 Filter YEAR(2006-2010) GSS YEAR FOR THIS RESPONDENT 1972-2010 1

Frequency Distribution Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N Distribution WORDSUM 0 .6 12.6 1 1.2 25.5 2 2.6 57.0 3 4.1 89.0 4 9.1 198.4 5 16.6 362.3 6 22.9 500.0 7 17.8 388.6 8 12.2 267.3 9 8.9 194.0 10 4.0 87.5 COL TOTAL 100.0 2,182.1

Summary Statistics Mean = 6.18 Std Dev = 1.97 Coef var = .32 Median = 6.00 Variance = 3.89 Min = .00 Mode = 6.00 Skewness = -.31 Max = 10.00 Sum = 13,490.65 Kurtosis = .10 Range = 10.00

Statistics exclude missing-data and out-of-range values.

Standard error calculations Sample design: stratified cluster sample Stratum variable = SAMPLERC Cluster variable = SAMPCODE Method: Taylor series approximation

Allocation of cases (unweighted) Valid cases 2,163 Cases excluded by filters or weight 50,348 Cases with invalid codes on row variable 2,576 Total cases 55,087

Datasets 1 /html/D3/GSS10 2 /html/Npubvars/GSS10

Wordsum is the score on a 10 question vocabulary test. Obviously it’s not as useful as a more comprehensive test because it tests a narrow range of cognitive abilities and because there are only 10 questions it has a high measurement error. Nevertheless it’s pretty useful because it correlates with general intelligence and verbal ability (according to Razib, a 0.71 correlation with an unnamed IQ test) , and it’s in the General Social Survey which is the most accessible dataset available for amateur sociologists such as myself to analyze.

You will observe that the median score is six. More people score higher than six than score lower than six. You may think of the sixes as a group of people who have an average IQ in the high 90s and a standard deviation that’s less than 15 but greater than zero. (Remember, that IQ is defined having a median score of 100 and standard deviation of 15).

Sixes are generally not college material, but they are just smart enough so they can graduate from a mediocre college, and we will soon see that when they take this path, they are rewarded with higher income.

New GSS income charts, part 1

The General Social Survey) has been asking the same income question for the 2006, 2008, and 2010 surveys, so this is a good time to do some new income analysis. (The variable in question is coded RINCOM06).

For starters, here is a chart of the respondent’s median income ( NOT family income) by highest level of educational credential. Furthermore, I added the following constraint:

Ages 35-64. Because this covers people’s prime earnings years. We wouldn’t learn as much about how well people are doing if we included respondents still in college or just starting out and respondents who are retired.

Education	Weighted N	Median Income
Less than High School	300.9	$17,500 to 19,999
High School	1586.4	$30,000 to 34,999
Jr. College	307.3	$30,000 to 34,999
Bachelor’s	627.1	$50,000 to 59,999
Graduate Degree	399.9	$60,000 to 74,999

As we see, more education leads to higher median income. This should be not surprising to anyone, we already know this from other large and more accurate data sources (such as the Census), but it’s a good reality check to make sure the GSS is on the same page.

* * *

Some clarification to those getting here from John Derbyshire’s link at NRO.

(1) The intent of this post was to do a follow-up, soon, to see how a GSS respondent’s Wordsum score (that’s a 10-question vocabulary test which gives us a rough approximation of the respondent’s verbal ability and general intelligence) impacts income when combined with education.

(2) Education causes higher income because, in our society, the career track one gets into is highly dependent on one’s educational credentials. For example, a significant percentage of people with Bachelor’s degrees get into career tracks for which people without Bachelor’s degrees wouldn’t even be considered, no matter how intelligent or motivated they might be.

It is said that after your first job, people look at your experience and not your education. And this is true to a large extent, but if the college graduate’s first job is working as a junior financial analyst, and the high school graduate’s first job is stocking shelves at Target, then the college graduate’s work experience is going to get him a much better second job than the high school graduate’s work experience.

(3) These number are averages, and therefore they can hide some sad stories. For example, a young person who graduates college this year and can’t find a job that’s any better than stocking shelves at Target is likely not going to have a much better career than if he just skipped college entirely. But I guarantee you that at least some of this year’s college graduates will get better jobs than they would have gotten without the college degree.

How the rich raise their children

This is a story about a rich guy who took his white daughter to Singapore so she could get a proper Chinese education.

A poised and precocious blonde, Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers, nicknamed Happy, would be at home in the schoolyard of any affluent American suburb or big-city private school. But here, at the elite, bilingual Nanyang Primary School in Singapore, Happy is in the minority, her Dakota Fanning hair shimmering in a sea of darker heads. This is what her parents have traveled halfway around the world for. While her American peers are feasting on the idiocies fed to them by junk TV and summer movies, Happy is navigating her friendships and doing her homework entirely in Mandarin.

. . .

According to [Jim] Rogers, who in 2007 left New York’s Upper West Side to settle in Singapore with his wife, Paige Parker, and Happy (Beeland Anderson Parker Rogers, called Baby Bee, was born the next year), parents who really care about their children must also ponder this: are we doing enough to raise “global” kids?

“I’m doing what parents have done for many years,” Jim Rogers says. “I’m trying to prepare my children for the future, for the 21st century. I’m trying to prepare them as best I can for the world as I see it.” Rogers believes the future is Asia—he was recently on cable television flogging Chinese commodities. “The money is in the East, and the debtors are in the West. I’d rather be with the creditors than the debtors,” he adds.

The rich know that American middle class is doomed, but they are unconcerned because they plan for their families to remain among the elite.

Why am I writing about Christianity?

This was a question someone asked in the comment. Maybe I’m mad at Christians because a “shiksa” dumped me. Or something like that.

This blog has always been about contrarian issues. The consensus of the majority is wrong about so many things: HBD for example. The consensus of “experts” is that there are no IQ differences between blacks and whites, and only racists (the most evil type of people in the whole world) would say such a thing.

I hope that all of my readers understand that the supernatural stuff in the Old and New Testaments, as well as all other supernatural stuff in other religions, is myth and didn’t really happen. No, my interest in religion is in the psychology behind it. Why do so many people believe in nonsense? And with modern science making the supernatural stuff in traditional religions seem so unbelievable, are people turning to other types of religious thinking which are harder to disprove (such as global warming and HBD-denialism)?

As I said in the other post, I always just assumed that Jesus was an historical person, but after reading about it I was surprised to discover that there’s no convincing independent non-Christian documentation of Jesus. No serious historian would ever say that Jesus definitely exists. The only dispute among serious historians is whether he probably existed, or he probably didn’t exist.

Regardless of what the majority of serious historians think (and it’s hard to separate the serious ones from the ones trying to prove the truth of Christianity), it’s my hunch, based on the type of arguments made by R.G. Price, that Jesus was a completely made-up person. The R.G. Price article also has some other interesting observations, such as that the Gospel writers copied from the Greek version of the Jewish bible rather than the original Hebrew/Aramaic version. It’s also well known by scholars that the Gospels were written in Greek. This suggests that the Gospel writers weren’t living in Palestine at the time, because Jews in Palestine would have written in Aramaic or Hebrew and copied from Hebrew/Aramaic sources. Nope, Christianity was probably started by Hellenized Jews living in Anatolia, Greece, or Rome (while Latin was the language of Rome, the educated people also spoke and read Greek). Don’t believe that Christianity began in Palestine just because it says so in the New Testament. If you are living in Rome and want to make up a religion, it makes sense to create a fake founder who lives in Palestine, because none of your followers have the means to go to Palestine and check out the story.

* * *

I have also learned, from my recent readings in the history of religion, that what they call Rabbinic Judaism was created [or at least strongly influenced] by a guy named Hillel the Elder. Hillel came from Babylon (which tells us that Judaism was a religion which had spread around the ancient world and wasn’t limited to Palestine). The Talmud also says the he lived to be 120, which I find extremely unlikely—that’s one of those whoppers you find in holy books. He allegedly died in the year 10 AD. Hillel was the guy who began writing the Talmud Mishnah [maybe], which predates the Talmud. The religion which Jews practice today is based on the Talmud which didn’t exist at the time Christ was allegedly born, which demonstrates my point about Judaism splitting into two camps after the Romans kicked Jewish ass in the war from 66 AD to 70 AD.

They didn’t teach me any of this useful stuff at Hebrew school.

Whatever happened to Stephanie Grace?

Remember the cute 3L from Harvard Law School who sent a private email in which she expressed HBD-aware views, and then got accused of being a racist by HLS.

Well apparently she still got to keep her clerkship with Judge Alex Kozinski, and she’s on such good terms with him that they wrote an op-ed together.

The op-ed argues that 4th Amendment privacy protection has been seriously weakened by convenience technology. Every time you buy something with a credit card, or every time you send an email, there’s a record of your activities.

What happens in the future when people who purchase books by Arthur Jensen are outed as racists?

The end of Borders

No, I’m not talking about international boundaries, I’m talking about the bookstore chain. Yes, they are in bankruptcy, but that usually doesn’t mean a complete liquidation of the business. Kmart survived bankruptcy. But apparently there’s no profit in running any of Borders’ stores, so this is the end.

At the same time, Barnes & Noble has also been closing some their bookstores. In fact, this means that there will soon be no bookstore for me to visit. There used to be a Borders and a Barnes and Noble within walking distance from my apartment, the Borders being closer. But the Borders will soon be gone and that particular Barnes and Noble branch recently closed. So goodbye to buying books at a physical store. It's not just the end of Borders; it's the end of bookstores.

* * *

This also means there will be 10,000 fewer jobs at the end of the summer. Although they weren't great jobs.

Mystery religions

One of the interesting things about religious practice in the Hellenized pre-Christian world was the popularity of “mystery religions.” They are called that because their rites and beliefs are mysteries to us. They left no writings behind explaining their religions because their religions were secrets only for the initiated to know about.

Mystery religions, or “cults,” are looked down upon today. Christianity, being monotheistic (or maybe tri-theistic), doesn’t look kindly about cults dedicated to worshipping other gods. When people learn that their kid has joined a “cult,” they frantically start searching for someone who can “deprogram” them. But back in pre-Christian Hellenized times, they believed in a large pantheon of gods, so someone in a cult worshipping another god wasn’t any more alarming than being in a bowling club today.

There are only two major mystery religions in the United States today, Mormonism and Scientology. They are mystery religions because they don’t tell converts the “secrets” of the religion right away. Scientologists don’t get to find out about Xenu the Galactic Overlord and Mormons don’t get to find out that God came from the planet Kolob* until they have moved up in the religion enough to be worthy of learning the secrets.

But how do I know the secrets? The answer is that there are no secrets in the age of the internet. Mystery religions simply don’t work today. To see how a modern religion is created and spread, one must study Gaiaism, which is destined to become the first internet-age religion.

* The first time around, I accidentally wrote "Kobol" which is the planet in Battlestar Galactica. Glen Larson, the creator of the original Battlestar Galactica, was a Mormon.

The lower-middle class

I define the lower-middle class (based upon Paul Fussell) as people who have jobs or education which might otherwise place them in the prole class, but they have middle class values and they have books in their house.

This class is a pretty small class, and they are often immigrants whose children attend college and become true middle class. Or sometimes their children drift downward and become prole.

Was there a historical Jesus?

This question is not whether God impregnated a virgin woman, but whether there was an actual man named Jesus who started Christianity, or inspired others he personally spoke with to start Christianity.

I always assumed the answer was yes. For example, Ghandi, a Hindu, seemed to believe that Jesus was a real person. He said, “The example of Jesus suffering is a factor in the composition of my un-dying faith in non-violence. What then does Jesus mean to me? To me, He was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had.” This is the polite thing to believe, but is it true?

Upon doing some research on the internet, I now think it’s most likely that Jesus was a myth made up by early Christians rather than a real historical person. Were Hercules or Dionysus real people? Today we understand that they are myths, but during the time of the Roman empire, you might get punched in the face for telling someone that Hercules never existed. I mention those two because they were both, allegedly, the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. As you see, the idea of a guy being the son of a god but having a human mother was hardly very original. Dionysus was also resurrected, so that part wasn't original either.

Learning that the Gospels weren’t actually written by people who knew Jesus or by the authors they are attributed to, and knowing the complete implausibility of the events in the Gospels, I am lead to suspect they were acts of creative story-telling rather than based on an account of an actual person’s life. And for all we know, Christianity evolved from a Dionysian mystery religion rather than being created from scratch. They are called “mystery religions” because we know nothing about them.

Some people seem to get pissed off upon hearing that Jesus never existed. Why does it matter?

* * *

Here is an an extremely detailed explanation for why Jesus was not a real person. It has the aura of truth about it.

STEM angst

According to this Fortune Magazine article, there is a rising demand for STEM jobs (that's science, technology, engineering, and math), and the article implies that there are not enough qualified Americans to fill them.

Shelley Dubois writes:

STEM education will need to pick up soon so that schools can prepare middle and high school students who will enter the workforce when those jobs become available.

If not, America will face an embarrassing problem -- a pocket of good, available jobs and an inability to fill them.

It has been my impression that a lot of people who major in STEM fields in college can’t find jobs in what they majored in and wind up working in computer programming. So this means we have too many people majoring in STEM (except for computer programming) rather than not enough STEM majors. And computer programming doesn’t require any fancy education in high level math and science. Anyone who understands algebra can learn to program computers. Before they started importing a lot of immigrant programmers, they would hire people who majored non-STEM fields to be computer programmers. And I have to say that some of the best programmers I’ve worked with did not major in STEM.

Regarding the math skills of middle and high school students, that’s highly correlated with g so there isn’t much we can do to fix that problem except to have eugenics laws which encourage high-IQ people to have children and discourage low-IQ people from having children. So what the reporter writes is a lot of nonsense.

* * *

Who is Shelley Dubois? I found this bio (and there’s a photo of her there) which was written before she graduated from NYU:

Shelley is in New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. She graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a B.A. in biological anthropology. Her experience in Costa Rica her junior year — collecting insects, tagging plants, and chasing capuchin monkeys — solidified her love of science. As a senior, she discovered UCSD's science writing curriculum and has pursued internships in the field ever since, most recently at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She also volunteered for three months on a sustainable farm in Ghana.

She graduated from UCSD in 2007, so she's probably 26 years old.

Strangely, I couldn’t find anything else about her using my normal internet sleuthing techniques. So I don’t know where she lives or where she’s from or who her parents are. But her parents must be at least wealthy enough to pay for her trips to Costa Rica and Ghana.

Given her non-elite education, I don’t think it’s likely that she will ever get hired by the New York Times.

Stargate Universe

This post is simply a spoiler-free review of Stargate Universe (SGU), which I thought was an outstanding science fiction series. All forty episodes of the series are now available on Netflix for instant streaming, so this is the perfect time to watch.

Although it’s a spinoff of the two previous Stargate series, it’s completely different in tone and style. The wisecracks and the campiness are gone. The mood of SGU is dark and tragic, and sometimes like a soap opera in space. The show it most resembles is the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, and it also borrows from Lost and Jericho. While other shows have a nerdy character, SGU tries to show what it feels like to be a nerd pining for the pretty girl, only to see the pretty girl stolen by a buff military guy.

The show has its flaws. I could have done with less body-switching and without the lesbian scenes (an attempt to be politically correct and edgy at the same time). And without giving too much away, I think that Colonel Young made a decision towards the end of the first season that was out of character and should have had far more disastrous consequences than it did. I also thought the show drifted too much from the original premise during the second season, with the character drama being replaced by space battles, perhaps to placate complaining Stargate fans who didn't get what the show was supposed to be about.

I don’t think you need to watch the previous Stargate series to enjoy this show. The show begins with the video game nerd, Eli Wallace, being recruited into the Stargate program, and through his eyes the viewer is introduced to the basic concepts of the series. Unfortunately, the show was canceled because of bad ratings, and probably the reason why the ratings were bad was because of the Stargate baggage. The serious and mature themes of SGU turned off the fans of the more juvenile previous Stargate series, and non-Stargate fans probably thought (wrongly) that they had to watch previous Stargate shows before they could watch this one.

The only downside of watching a canceled series is that it just ends with no resolution.

HBD, vouchers, and Republicans

When I use the word “vouchers” in the headline, I’m sure everyone knows I am talking about school vouchers. Because what other vouchers have ever been discussed much in the last two decades?

I should point out that, because education is local, and there are some localities where Republicans have a strong majority control; surely Republicans could have instituted vouchers somewhere if they had really wanted to?

Because Republicans deny HBD nearly as much as Democrats, any voucher system created anywhere will not solve the real problems of education because politicians deny what the real problems are.

Those who try to measure the “success” of the voucher program will try to determine if test scores have improved for poor, minority and “disadvantaged” kids, and I guarantee you that scores on the highly g-loaded reading and math tests will not improve. If anything, the public schools, with their emphasis on endless drilling for the tests, have maxed out any possible score increases for these kids, and higher quality instruction would probably result in lower scores.

* * *

Now, before I write any more, I want to state that I believe that most public schools suck, and that most non-religious private schools provide better education for the students. I wish there were some way that deserving middle class kids could have the opportunity to attend a superior non-religious private school.

But let’s get back to vouchers.

* * *

Liberals see public education as a valuable tool in the fight against the spread of prole sects of Christianity. If vouchers allowed parents to take their kids out of public schools, the parents who would care most about this are fundamentalist Christian parents who would send their children to a school where they teach that God created man and other such nonsense. The liberals have a valid point here.

* * *

Republicans worship at the altar of free enterprise, and believe that anything run by a private organization is going to be superior and more efficient to anything run by the government. But I think the reality is that public education isn't that expensive. At all decent private schools, tuition tends to be three times the per-pupil cost of public education in the same geographic area. And those private schools also have fund raising drives on top of that, so they spend more like four times as much per student, and they don’t even have to deal with “special needs” students.

As I previously pointed out, at the Brearley School, the black woman they hired to head the place made $486,749 per year. No wonder why the tuition is so high.

* * *

The simplest thing we could do to vastly improve the quality of public education is to separate the intelligent children from the less intelligent children. But liberals are adamantly opposed to this because they say it’s racist. I also don’t see Republicans championing the idea. I guess it doesn’t do anything to support their ideas about free enterprise and it doesn’t make Christian schools more powerful.

Death panels

David Brooks implies that we need death panels. I agree.

Republican HBD-denialism

HOUSING

Jack Kemp was the father of the idea that we could improve the lot of poor people by getting them into housing that they own. No doubt you can find plenty of correlations between owning a home and all other good things. This is primarily because various genetically influenced traits such as IQ, conscientiousness, and future-time orientation are positively correlated with home ownership. People with these characteristics earn more money so they can afford to buy a house.

But Jack Kemp and other Republicans came up with the notion that housing projects suck because the people who live there don’t have any ownership interest. Wrong! Housing projects suck because the people who live there are lacking in IQ, conscientiousness, and future-time orientation.

This attitude led to the housing crisis and near economic collapse, because the government encouraged giving mortgage-loans to people who had no business owning a house in the first place. Democrats are even more complicit than Republicans, and both parties still ignore the real reasons for the housing crisis.

PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY

This was a policy pushed by Republicans during the last decade, and it’s based on the same wrongful thinking as housing. I am sure that there are a lot of positive correlations between investing money and various indicators of good citizenship.

Social Security, like it or hate it, is based on the very correct proposition that a lot of people simply lack the intelligence and future-time orientation to save enough money for their own retirement. These same people also, no doubt, lack the intelligence to make wise investment decisions, so giving people any choice in directing their social security payments means that a lot of proles will be ripped off, and a lot of financial-Wall-Street types will be unjustly enriched.

SPREADING DEMOCRACY

It appears that Democracy only works well in countries where the average IQ of the people are sufficiently high. This is why Democracy has worked well in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. But it’s not going to work in places like Iraq or Egypt, and it barely works in most countries in the Americas. Mexican Democracy is corrupt, and in Venezuela the people elected Chavez.

The spread of Democracy was fine rhetoric for when we were fighting the Cold War, but now that the Cold War has passed, it’s rhetoric that would best be discarded.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

This is a Republican policy based on the wrong idea that black children can perform just as well academically as white children if only the schools would do their jobs properly. The idea behind NCLB is that if schools were punished for failing to properly educate black children, they would start educating them properly to avoid the punishment.

However, what this really does is punish schools for failing to do the impossible, and encouraging mass cheating like we saw recently in Atlanta.

CREATIONISM

The very basis of HBD is that differences in cognitive abilities and personality are a result of evolutionary forces, so to deny evolution is to deny HBD.

SO WHY VOTE REPUBLICAN?

Because they are not as bad as liberals who control the Democratic Party. It is always liberals who are moving the envelope forward with respect to HBD-denialism and accusing people of being racist unless they are in line with the liberal groupthink.

Hellenic-Judeo-Christian

The term “Judeo-Christian” really does great disservice do the Greeks who are the true founders of our Western values.

It should be especially noted that (1) the story of Jesus heavily borrows from the story of Heracles, and (2) the greatest Rabbi ever, Maimonides (1134-1204 AD), was also a scholar of Aristotle, and Aristotelian ethics heavily influenced his canonical compilation of all Jewish law into the Mishneh Torah. Of course, Aristotle also influenced a lot of Catholic philosophers. And some of the later Catholic philosophers came to Aristotle by way of Maimonides, most notably Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD).

Judeo-Christian

The term “Judeo-Christian” was rarely used before the 1960s (although first use of the term dates back to 1829).

I’ve seen some animosity to the term in some blog comments. I think the commenters feel that this is one of those unnecessary politically correct changes to the language with the intent to make Jews feel less left out, sort of like how I felt about using “tsunami” instead of “tidal wave”.

In fact, it’s probably true that political correctness is behind the recent popularity of the term.

But is the term actually useful? Is it better to speak of “Judeo-Christian values” instead of just “Christian values”?

The Ten Commandments are considered an integral component of Christian values. But who wrote the Ten Commandments? Christians? No, the JEWS wrote them! (Well, if you actually believe that the Bible is the literal truth, then God wrote them and then gave them to the Jews. But either way, they’re Jewish and not Christian in origin.)

I’ve come to think of Judaism and Christianity in terms of three distinct religions.

First there was ancient Judaism, what some people practiced before the first century A.D. This was a proselytizing religion involving a hereditary class of priests and animal sacrifices.

During the first century, after the Romans kicked Jewish ass, ancient Judaism came to an end, branching off into two new religions. One is Christianity, which is the Old Testament from ancient Judaism plus the New Testament. The other is Talmudic Judaism, which is the Old Testament plus the Talmud.

And during the 19th century, there was the creation of a fourth religion with Jewish roots, Mormonism, which is the Old Testament plus the New Testament plus the Book of Mormon.

If I were in charge of the language I would throw out “Christian values” and “Judeo-Christian values” in favor of the even more accurate and less religiously-biased term “Occidental values”.

Rorschach HBD

My post from yesterday about whites and HBD was sort of a Rorschach post. Despite the fact that I didn’t really say much of anything and I certainly didn’t advocate for any action, the post inspired a lot of passionate responses, and another blogger wrote a post in response.

I’ve been accused of supporting the position that IQ is the only thing that matters, and that’s not so true. On the other hand, it would be true statement that I believe that IQ is the most important determinate of social class, and that’s a surprising statement to some because they usually think of social class in terms of education, income, and one’s parents’ social class.

Obama, Social Security, and Republicans

If you read the news, you know that Obama has offered to accept cuts in Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republicans agreeing to raise taxes on people with incomes greater than $250,000.

People think of Social Security as being the backbone of the Democratic Party, but as I’ve written before, that’s traditional liberal thinking. Today, liberals are more concerned with racial and sexual equality, fighting against the Christian influence, and cutting carbon emissions. Obama also knows that senior citizens are predominately white and they very strongly supported Republicans in the 2010 elections. Cutting Social Security would be punishment for white people who voted against him.

What makes less sense is why Republicans are so adamant about keeping taxes low for the wealthiest Americans. As I keep pointing out, those with incomes greater than $250K supported Obama in 2008 and they still support him. Why do Republicans care so much about people who voted against them?

If Republicans were serious about cutting government spending, they would grab this deal. It’s a lot easier to find the political will in the future to lower taxes than it will be to cut Social Security. They can lower taxes again as soon as Obama is voted out of office, but the opportunity to cut entitlement spending is extraordinary and shouldn’t be passed up.

HBD and whites

People in the HBD-blogosphere tend to group all whites together and say that they have a median IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15.

Let us divide whites into two groups.

Group 1 is prole whites. These are all whites with IQs of 104 and less. They comprise 62% of whites.

Group 2 is middle class and upper class whites. These are all whites with IQs of 105 and more. They comprise 38% of whites.

The median IQ of Group 1 is 92.5 (similar to the IQ of mestizo Mexican immigrants).

The median IQ of Group 2 is 113 (similar to the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews).

I assume that all of my white readers come from Group 2. What do we really have in common with the stupid people from Group 1 except a similarity of appearance? (Although I guarantee you that if I photographed a hundred white people with IQs of 113 and a 100 white people with IQs of 92.5, everyone would instantly be able to identify the smart group and the stupid group.)

Ironically, liberal HBD-denialists as well as white nationalists would group us all together. The liberal HBD-denialist would say that we are all beneficiaries of white privilege, and the reason that the whites from Group 1 don’t do well economically is because they were too lazy to go to college (ignoring the implausibility of someone with an IQ of 92.5 being able to learn college-level material). The white nationalists would say we all have to stick together because we are all white (although they would exclude me from the we because they don't think that Ashkenazi Jews are white).

Liberals and the national jobs emergency

Alan S. Blinder, former Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he states that we have a national jobs emergency, and then wonders why politicians don’t seem to care about it:

All this adds up to a national jobs emergency. Tragically, however, it is not being treated as such. When is the last time you heard one of our national leaders propose a serious job-creating program?

I think the current situation adds further evidence to my theory about the phases of liberalism, and that we’ve moved so far away from the traditional liberalism of FDR that liberals no longer care about unemployed Americans. Liberals today have more important concerns such as promoting equality and protecting the rights of the planet. If Americans were all worked up about jobs, they might demand a halt to immigration under the theory that immigrants are taking jobs away from American workers, which is exactly what happened during the Great Depression.

Liberal elites don’t care too much about unemployed white workers because statistics show that these unemployed people are disproportionately those without college degrees. Liberal elites all have degrees from elite colleges, and they think that uneducated whites are receiving their just deserts for not doing the right thing and going to good colleges like they did.