Today's Great Joke: People Are Taking Satoshi Kanazawa Seriously

(Contents include racism and sexism and weird pseudoscience)


That guy is like Teflon.  Nothing seems to stick to him, sigh.

On the other hand, this is really funny:

Satoshi Kanazawa, the LSE psychologist behind the research, discussed the findings that maternal urges drop by 25% with every extra 15 IQ points in his book The Intelligence Paradox. In the opening paragraph of the chapter titled "Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life", he makes his feelings about voluntary childlessness very clear:
If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.

What's funny about that?  Kanazawa is not a psychologist at all but a sociologist who has decided to do Evolutionary Psychology of the type which asks why "all" men prefer blonde Barbie doll women (answer: evolution) and why black women, according to Kanazawa, are ugly (answer: presumed manliness of black women).  He got a slap on the fingers a few years ago but is back telling us "the truth" about complicated issues which  nobody can actually study.

Sigh and sigh and sigh.  For more on this guy, check out my series ( part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and an addendum) on this article.

And another series on Kanazawa:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 .

I'm not gonna write on his arguments because it is a waste of time.   You know, such as IQ being the same as intelligence and all that other crap, not to mention having to wade through his methodology etc.

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Added later:  Oh my.  Lots of people are quoting Kanazawa on this topic, including in the Washington Post. Though at least the author points out that Kanazawa's earlier research was a bit "controversial."

This is really worrying.  If a guy can do his utmost to be outed as something not quite savory, he still gets coverage in all the cool places.

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Media Quicksand. Fox News

I've been on the beach, building sand-mountains (breast or penis symbols, perhaps) and using my bare toes as sand-shifters.  Such fun.

Then I return to my kinda-job as media watcher and I'm sinking in quicksand.   Here's why.  On Sunday I spent about three hours in a living-room with people chatting while the Fox News told everyone what the state of the world is.

And what a state!  Did you know that nothing worth reporting happens in most countries of this world, in the class of international news?  International news is only about Benghazi and about terror threats and how poorly Obama is managing terror. 

US domestic news are about shark attacks and how those are becoming more common.   The pictures repeated often show the maws of sharks coming out of water, trying to eat you up!  The interviews (most of which I couldn't hear well, what with the chatter in the room) seemed to be about how much more common shark attacks are now.

So I tried to find data on shark attacks.  This site suggests that 2013 attacks in the US have caused one death among humans.  The world number of 2013 deaths is eleven.

It could be that the attacks are increasing.  But sharks-as-killers we should worry about instead of the human killers of various types or environmental catastrophe? 

The Fox News are very biased, of course, as are probably any news from political extremes.  But I never realized that the bias is more on WHAT is covered both in what is omitted completely from the coverage (anything having to do with the woes of capitalism, say) and what rubbish is covered 24/7) than in the inserted bias of the contents of specific coverage.

Though the latter abounds, too. 

So I sat there, getting more and more scared.  Not about sharks but about the idea that many people have a completely different idea about world events and what matters, about this quicksand of discussion on Fox News.

Non-news coverage was even more biased, naturally.  A program called The Five told me that criminals exist in direct proportion to broken homes.  This was somehow an obvious thing to blurt out in the coverage of three teenage boys severely battering a fourth teenage boy in a school bus, and the ethical question whether the 64-year-old bus driver should have intervened. 

Several of the Fox critters told that they would have stormed in to give the boys some real lessons and that the bus driver was a wuss for just calling the police and not physically intervening.  Based on the video showing the boys' muscular condition and size, my prediction is that the bus driver would have been killed had he tried to physically intervene.  But never mind.  At least two of the five members of the show stated that they would have stormed in.  That includes the female host of the show.

How cheap talk is.  But the most fascinating blurt-out was that thing about broken homes by Greg Gutfeld, given that I doubt he did research on the family backgrounds of any of the teens.

This teens-story also ran yesterday in the same program.  The final odd bias at Fox is the repetition of a few stories over and over again, as if nothing else happens in the world, as if those stories are the most important news items ever.

Scary stuff. 

I don't intend my criticisms to be only about Fox News, by the way.  It's always a good thing to follow several news organizations and at least one foreign source.  Otherwise we end up slowly sinking in the quicksand we make our sand castles of.  (Now that was a neat perfect-circle essay just slightly overdone!)

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Katha Pollitt on Abortion in Europe

First read Katha Pollitt's discussion of the newest anti-choice idea:  That making abortion illegal after twenty weeks is AOK because those European countries do it.

When you have recovered from your surprise that anything those surrender monkeys in Europe do is worth quoting approvingly by the American forced-birthers (such as Ross Douthat), you might want to consider the fact that abortion is not the kind of "culture war" issue* in Europe as it is here.  As Katha writes:

And just because you’ve read this far: there are no screaming fanatics thrusting gory photos at you as you make your way to your abortion. No one takes down your license plate in the parking lot and calls you—or your parents—later with hateful messages. Doctors who perform abortions do not wear bulletproof vests, nor are they ostracized by their communities and shunned by other doctors. The whole climate of fear that makes many doctors reluctant to perform abortions and makes some women postpone going to the clinic does not exist.

And as Katha also writes, it's not that abortion is completely unavailable later in pregnancy, as is the desire of American forced-birthers:

Moreover, unlike the time limits passed in Texas and some other states, or floating around in Congress, the European limits have exceptions, variously for physical or mental health, fetal anomaly or rape. Contrast that with what anti-choicers want for the United States, where Paul Ryan memorably described a health exception to a proposed late-term abortion ban as “a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.” If a French or German or Swedish 12-year-old, or a traumatized rape victim, or a woman carrying a fetus with Tay-Sachs disease shows up after the deadline, I bet a way can often be found to quietly take care of them. If not, Britain or the Netherlands, where second trimester abortion is legal, are possibilities. (In 2011, more than 4,000 Irish women traveled to Britain for abortions.)

At the same time, Europe is not one homogeneous place.  It's a conglomerate of countries with different histories, languages, cultures and even religions.  Different European countries have different abortion policies and different abortion rates:

 Abortion is complicated, like everything that has to do with sex. Germany’s abortion rate is much lower than ours, but Sweden’s is almost the same. The Netherlands is almost as low as Germany, despite permitting abortion much later. In much of Italy, it’s hard to find an abortion because so many doctors refuse to perform them—and yet Italy, like Germany, has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. One thing seems pretty clear, though: all these countries have plenty of abortions. But in the Western European countries with time limits, there is less need for second trimester abortion because there is far better access to abortion earlier.

While the 2008 abortion rate for Sweden was 21.3 (measured as the number of abortions per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44), the rates for Norway, Denmark and Finland in that same year were 14.5, 15.0 and 8.9, respectively.  As both Norway and Denmark allow abortion on demand in the early weeks of the pregnancy (and the same is true in practice in Finland), the difference cannot be explained by more liberal Swedish laws. The Nordic countries are very similar in economic and demographic respects, so the higher Swedish rate cannot be attributed to economic or general cultural differences either. **

What's my point here?  Perhaps to remind us that international comparisons are complicated, that sex is complicated, as Katha notes, and that taking something like abortion out to be studied in complete isolation has its problems.   

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*I hatehatehate the term "culture wars". It sounds like arguments about tea vs. coffee or flower arranging or poetry or musical taste, like something less important than economics, even though it is about the lives of people just as seriously as are economic wars.

**I haven't been able to figure out the reason for the relatively high Swedish rate.  I read somewhere that the contraceptive pill has been less popular in Sweden.  If that's true it could explain the higher abortion rate as a consequence of less reliable contraception.  But I was unable to find statistics on this.  Other explanations are possible, of course.

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Fewer and Fewer Women Are Entering the Labor Force?

That's part of the title of a Slate post by Matthew Yglesias (he probably didn't choose the title).  The rest of it is "America is Leaning Out."

It's fun to parse those kinds of titles.  This one uses both a link to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean-In movement and a type of exaggeration: "fewer and fewer women are entering the labor force."  The doubling of "fewer" implies continuous diminution.  The Sheryl Sandberg linkage implies that the women "choose" not to be in the labor force, in a manner opposite to "choosing" to do well in one's career or job.

But the research the post discusses has nothing to do with either of these suggestions.

It has to do with the rates of labor market entry and exit after an earlier recession and after the most recent one, and tells us nothing about continuous diminution of women's labor market participation rates or the reasons for the figures the researchers found. 

The authors of that study use two tables to argue that it's reduced labor market entry by women in the lowest age categories which is the major cause of the falling labor market participation rate in the US.  I reproduce the second table here.  It shows entry rates by age groups and separately for men and women:

The caption at the bottom of the table must be wrong.  It applies to the first table in the research paper, about labor market exit.   The proper caption should probably be "the percentage of people in labor force who were not in it four months earlier."

The crucial data, for the purposes of the post's title, has to do with what is going on in the younger age groups (up to age 54, even).  Women's entry into labor force after the most recent recession is lower than after the 2002-2003 recession, while men's entry in the younger age categories is slightly higher or the same as in 2002-2003.

This is all the data tells us, by the way.  It doesn't tell us what caused those differences.  To discuss them is speculation, ranging from the possibility that women are more likely to choose education at younger ages than men (thus leaving the labor force temporarily or delaying their first entry) to the possibility that women are "choosing" to stay at home with their children while men are "choosing" to enter the labor force.

The comments to the Yglesias post have the usual MRAs telling us that women naturally prefer to stay at home and that at least this gives the poor unemployed men a better chance to fulfill their god-given male role and so on.  But if the reason is that women choose more education, the MRAs could tell us that women are hogging all the good spots in colleges and so on.  They are a gift that keeps on giving.  And yes, I know I should not read comments.

It's worth pointing out that the study (which is not given in much detail in the pdf I linked to) is a comparison of the aftermath of two recessions.  It's not about the general labor market participation rates of women and men in general.  In that sense the information it conveys is much more limited and cannot be used for the kind of emotional arguments the title suggests.

Because the debate abstracts away from that contest it fails to ask what might be different between the 2002-2003 recession and the most recent one.  For example, could it be the case that female dominated occupations are simply not hiring as much after the most recent one, compared to the earlier one?  And if that is the case (say, because of the belt-tightening of health care and education industries), could it not be the case that women are more likely to find their job search fruitless and therefore more likely not to try entry or re-entry into the labor force?

I don't know the answer to that.  But focusing only on the supply side of labor is probably insufficient.  The demand side matters, too, and women and men are still largely working in different types of jobs and industries.

 

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I Lack Gravitas. So Does Janet Yellen.

Writes she, while happily skipping about, cracking jokes and then bursting into feminine tears. 

Well not really.  But I was trying to reduce the gravitas of a post about Al Hunt writing on the relative merits of Janet Yellen and Larry Summers as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.  This is what Hunt wrote:

The public airing of the Summers-versus-Yellen debate has made the selection more controversial. Summers, who served as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary and was Obama's chief economic adviser, would face a difficult Senate confirmation.
The president, according to people familiar with his thinking, believes Summers has the experience and expertise to succeed Ben Bernanke. No one doubts Yellen's credentials as an economist, but questions have been raised, mainly by those in the Summers camp, about whether she has the gravitas to manage a financial crisis. 

Bolds are mine.

Here's one dictionary definition of gravitas:

gravitas

n.
1. Substance; weightiness: a frivolous biography that lacks the gravitas of its subject.
2. A serious or dignified demeanor: "Our national father figure needs gravitas, [but] he's pitched himself as the kid brother" (John Leo).

What's the problem with that criticism?  As Matthew Yglesias writes

This is also a great example of why lining up woman validators to vouch for Summers' feminist bona fides won't really answer the charge that sexism is driving the pro-Summers sentiment. The sexism at work here just isn't about whether or not some of Summers' best friends are women. It's about the fact that there's never been a woman leader of a major central bank. Consequently, the social image of a classic central banker is necessarily the image of a man.As a result, a 60-something woman who's served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, chaired the Council of Economic Advisors, led the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and become Vice Chair of the Fed Board can be dismissed as lacking "gravitas" compared to an alternate candidate who on paper seems less qualified. If a woman can't acquire the necessary "gravitas" to do the job by having Yellen's career, then what exactly could she do?

Indeed. I guess Yellen could try to figure out how she could look more weighty, filled with more substance or how she could acquire a more dignified demeanor.  But if being qualified is insufficient I'm not sure what might work.  Wearing a Larry Summers mask?

The point of this post is not to debate the relative advantages of these two candidates as individual professionals.  It's to demonstrate how seemingly gender-neutral criticisms might not be so neutral, after all, if they are used differently about men and women, say.

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A Trivial Feminist Post

I specialize in those.  This one is about two things.  First, what  USA Today wrote about Simon Cowell yesterday:

'X Factor' creator Simon Cowell will be the only man on the four-judge panel.

Now do a gender reversal on that and various television panels.  Nobody would write about a woman that she was the only woman on a four-judge panel, mostly because having one woman on such a panel looks like equality to most of us.  That's what we are used to.  Three guys and one gal is fair representation, three gals and one guy is a chick-fest.

Second,  here's a fun video about Bill O'Reilly and  James Garfield Carville, two older guys, arguing about what causes teenage pregnancy in the US.  What O'Reilly says is hilariously inane, naturally.  But note that having two older guys as the experts on this topic might not be noticeable because we are used to the idea of older white guys as the experts on everything.  And note how O'Reilly starts the segment by turning a question about heterosexual intercourse into something that is only about gate-keeping by teenage girls.  It takes two to tango but teenage heterosexual sex is only about the gurlz:

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The Whip, Not The Carrot. The American Conservative Approach to Education.

That whip-and-carrot business applies to the old adage about how to make a donkey or a horse do your bidding.  American conservatives like the negative enforcement (whip) applied to schools, to get better workers for their global corporations.  The liberals they see as the carrot brigade, not demanding anything from  children at all but offering them succulent carrots for no work.

The equivalent of the whip are standardized tests when it comes to students.  When it comes to teachers, everything is the whip.  I've found this fascinating.  Teachers should be willing to take lower and lower pay, longer and longer working days and a much reduced retirement package, while being judged (often quite mercilessly) by how well students do in standardized tests.*

Atrios linked to a fun piece about the importance of standardized tests by Norman R. Augustine,  a former chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corp.. 

This is fun, because education is actually a skill which requires years of training and such, except in the US where business bosses know better how to make children learn than those who dedicate their lives to acquiring that skill!  It's hilarious.  Or would be, if education wasn't one of the most crucial things we humans do in this world for the sake of the posterity.

I'm not against standardized testing which compare how students are doing.  I'm very much against using MULTIPLE-CHOICE standardized tests to determine which students will thrive and which students will be condemned to a lesser life, or using such tests to determine which teachers should earn more and which teachers should be fired.

This is because multiple-choice tests are a rotten measuring device.  Real national tests should make students write essay answers, tested by someone outside the school system.  Real national tests should make students show all their work in mathematics and science tests.  Even if such tests were routinely performed, we should remember that they don't measure all aspects of learning and that they don't encourage creativity or necessarily measure the skills that students need for life.

In short, standardized tests have only limited benefits.  But they are a very good whip for those who think that the schools in the US can be beaten into shape. 

They are even better for those who don't really want to pay anything much for education and then must think of some other reason than lack of funds spent on the poorest (and most needy) school districts for the less-than-wonderful performance of US students in international comparisons.

To see what Mr. Augustine truly thinks about education is visible in his first sentences if you remember that he begins by presenting the views he opposes:

The chief problem with U.S. schools apparently isn’t high dropout rates or underqualified teachers but standardized testing. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the push by parents and teachers in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Seattle and elsewhere to help students opt out of taking standardized tests.
Members of this burgeoning anti-test movement fail to grasp testing’s valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers. Preparing young Americans for success in the global economy will require our schools to improve, not abolish, academic standards.

So it's dropout rates and underqualified teachers that Mr. Augustine sees as the real problem.  Ironically enough, both of these problems are amenable to the use of funds!  But nope, adding more money to encourage more motivated and better prepared students in teaching is out  of question, because it would be a carrot.  We need to whip, whip and whip.  Likewise, dropout rates correlate directly with poverty, and positive discrimination (more funds for poorer schools, more attention to students in trouble) would work there, too.  If it wasn't a carrot, that is.

All this is a bit muddled, and I apologize for this.  I just got back from my Finnish vacation. 

But while there, I talked to several teachers.  They are highly respected in their communities.  They come from the top ten percent of university students.  They get paid a salary commensurable with that.  They are given lots of freedom to experiment with individual students, they spend a lot of time in teacher education and they work in teams when necessary.  Class sizes are small.  National exams are obligatory for students only at the point of leaving the school system.  Other standardized exams are optional, though most teachers opt to have them.

And the Finnish schools right now do extremely well in international comparisons. 

It is true, as the critics say, that Finland is a more homogeneous country than the US and that it has much more equal incomes.  It is also true that teaching in the US with its greater heterogeneity and income inequality is a far bigger challenge, and that the "Finnish Miracle" may not work out as well with increased immigration and the cultural and language differences it entails.

But does this mean that the US has nothing to learn from Finland?  American conservatives seem to think so.  Better just apply a bigger and bigger whip, rather than those wussy carrots.

It's as if the American exceptionalism applies even here!  Americans work better than whipped, the lesser nations may thrive on carrots.  Something of that sort?

My point is, naturally, that even if the US couldn't achieve the Finnish results everywhere it might improve by adopting the Finnish principles.  The most important of them is that education is a skill, something to value, something that requires work to learn and to apply.  Far too many Americans appear to think that we can learn all we need about educating little children from the successes and failures of WalMart or General Motors.

I'm the first to admit that education is difficult, that families matter greatly, that values and culture, including the popular culture, matter greatly.  Much of education is an art, not a science.  But I'm quite certain that the principles of basic market models are not the proper way of looking at education.  Indeed, education has always been one of the industries where nonprofits and charitable organizations and other not-for-profit arrangements have been dominant, and there is a reason for it.

That reason is the difficulty of the job, the problems in defining and measuring the quality of education and the fact that the "production process" in education is a very collaborative one:  Everything that happens to a child affects it and the child herself affects it, too.  Finally, different children thrive on different incentives and need different amounts of attention.  Some need more whip than carrot, others the reverse.  But ideally education should be a preparation for life, not a preparation for becoming a better cog in the organizations of multinational corporations.

Juxtapose that with the usual American conservative approach to education where the main attack is against teachers' unions, teachers' benefits and so on, and where vouchers and magnet schools etc. are intended to somehow alter education into a more functioning system. 

It's an odd combination of pro-market ideas (school choice, focus on private schools) and anti-market ideas (forcing teacher salaries down outside the marketplace).  What it does share with the most clawed and fanged business is the rat-race focus:  If only we can make the rats run faster, nobody needs to pay much at all to fix the problems. 

As a corollary of that, schools must get rid of breaks, athletics, art and music, to become little factories where students on the assembly lines get those pass-the-test chips installed by minimum pay workers.

This is not going to work, by the way, but at least someone gets to wield the whip, and there's a certain satisfaction in that.

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*All this has a feminist connection:  In the past educated American women were steered into just a few possible careers and one of them was teaching.  The sex-segregation of occupations meant, among many things, that the Americans could get very good teachers for relatively low pay.  That changed when other career opportunities opened for women, but the conservative critics have never really understood this nor the fact that the shorter working days and longer vacations are the necessary trade-offs for the lower pay for many women.  They allow work and the care of minor children.  If the pay is kept the same or reduced while the annual working hours are increased, that benefit disappears, and fewer women will become teachers.  This market-aspect of education is oddly ignored in the conservative theories.

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