Undead Astronauts

This week in the NYTimes, we have a couple of stories that both pertain to giving your kids the best shot at a good life. The first story is a report that most of the money spent on education may be wasted.  The reason is that differences in cognitive abilities appear at an early age.

Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments.

More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3.

“The gap is there before kids walk into kindergarten,” Mr. Heckman told me. “School neither increases nor reduces it.”

If education is supposed to help redress inequities at birth and improve the lot of disadvantaged children as they grow up, it is not doing its job.

It is not an isolated finding. Another study by Mr. Heckman and Flavio Cunha of the University of Pennsylvania found that the gap in math abilities between rich and poor children was not much different at age 12 than it was at age 6.

For this reason, some researchers have suggested better nutrition for mothers-to-be with low income. Not an easy task to solve. Few will bring up the idea that it might be they don’t have the genes to pass down that will result in high achievement.

The second story approaches the same issue from a different perspective. What do the rich and the elite do to ensure their kids have the best chance to stay an elite? Susan Patton had the temerity to suggest that Princeton girls should look for husbands while they’re at Princeton. The reaction to her article was widespread condemnation. But Ross Douthat sums up the breach of protocol pretty well here:

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it!

The article itself is op-ed gold and expresses something I didn’t understand well at the time, or possibly even now. College isn’t about learning so much as connecting. A college degree gives you a signalling device for employers. Your college classmates set you into your social class. None of this is set in stone of course – I’m talking about averages.

An admission officer’s uncomfortable explanation for why they don’t get in as often as their test scores would predict suggests it’s not.

Are Ivy League institutions discriminating against Asian Americans by limiting how many are admitted? That’s the subject of a debate published this week in the New York Times. Let’s start with the folks who believe that there’s effectively a race-based quota limiting Asian Americans.

1. More speculation on why Asians don’t vote more Republican from Charles Murray. There’s legitimate speculation from around the web that Asians should be a natural Republican constituency due to their income levels, family oriented values and “leave me alone” attitude towards gov’t. But Asians, like Jews before them, have gone solidly Democratic.
2. Intrade has now been banned for being detrimental to larger society. They were allowing unregulated trading, but when a similar outfit had applied for a permit, they were denied. Why don’t they just go and ban all commodity trading?
3. More on corrupt Ivy League admissions here.
4. Brazilian candid camera show with a prank that could cause heart attacks.

For any given open competitive academic slot, a non-Asian minority is less likely than an Asian to win that spot on average. In NYC, where Asians only comprise 14% of students, they are 70% of the population of Stuyvesant  So the non-Asian minorities have now sued to get rid of the single test entrance exam. Their complaint is that they don’t get to take the expensive prep classes that Asians (of all economic backgrounds) take. But here’s the kicker:

The city began offering a free test-prep program several years ago for black and Hispanic students, but after a legal challenge, other ethnic groups were granted the same access to the course. Today, 43 percent of the students in the program are Asian.

So… who cares and who doesn’t care about whether they get in? Seems pretty clear to me. If you can’t compete with Asians on an exam, don’t attempt to study. Just cry racism. Maybe you’ll get the test dumbed down enough that 42% of non-Asian minorities get a 97 and you can pick students randomly. There’s a new firefighter lawsuit by the way. Not content to make the academic half of the test meaningless, women are suing for the physical part. Women are screened out from the physical exam at higher rates than men. Apparently they don’t do as well as men on “arm and leg lifts, arm endurance tests, hose dragging and stair climbing.” Absolutely shocking, I know!

“It’s a test that doesn’t really test for the abilities you need to become a firefighter, and screens out women needlessly and unjustifiably,” said attorney Marni Willenson, who represents some of the women in the Godfrey suit and is lead attorney on Vasich.

Uh huh.

Pew Research has a wide ranging report on the status of Asians in the US. One wonders if the author was thinking about China’s “rise” when he titled this report.

It covers some familiar ground about education and income (Asians are group with highest in both). It also reaffirms some long held views that I haven’t seen numbers on, such as importance of family.

More than half (54%) say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life; just 34% of all American adults agree. Two-thirds of Asian-American adults (67%) say that being a good parent is one of the most important things in life; just 50% of all adults agree.

They are more likely than all American adults to be married (59% vs. 51%); their newborns are less likely than all U.S. newborns to have an unmarried mother (16% vs. 41%); and their children are more likely than all U.S. children to be raised in a household with two married parents (80% vs. 63%).

The tiger mom perception is confirmed to no one’s surprise.

Nearly four-in-ten (39%) say that Asian-American parents from their country of origin subgroup put too much pressure on their children to do well in school. Just 9% say the same about all American parents. On the flip-side of the same coin, about six-in-ten Asian Americans say American parents put too little pressure on their children to succeed in school, while just 9% say the same about Asian-American parents.

Religiosity and political views in this survey generally matches the information posted yesterday. There’s a ton more information in the full report, but it’s so large I haven’t finished reading it. Here are some of the key numbers.

The full report is 8 pages. Quite comprehensive and really too much to cover in a blog post. As I read more of it, I’ll post anything that sticks out.

1. Both Newsweek and USNews released their annual best high school lists. Grissom ranks 623 and 804 respectively. Unfortunately, USNews this year failed to provide the same sorting features they did last year, so you can’t find a list of schools with high minority enrollment unless you make it yourself. Also unfortunately, their methodology rewards high non-Asian minority representation unlike Newsweek which doesn’t look at race and is therefore more strictly meritocratic. Newsweek’s weakness is that they only looked at a fraction of the schools that USNews did – something like 2000 compared to 22,000.

2. More PISA analysis that delves into how much immigrant populations affect PISA scores and national IQ. For most nations, the effect is unfortunately negative. Noticeable exceptions are some middle eastern nations like Qatar and Dubai where the immigrants far outscore the natives. The differences are so stark that I wonder if they’ll soon develop market dominant minorities along with all its consequences. 2nd generation scores also differ, and show that some countries with elitist high IQ immigration laws like Singapore and Australia have kids that get better scores than natives. Singapore’s results are interesting in particular because of Lee Kuan Yew’s opinions on race realism and the fact that he tailored his immigration policies in part based on those beliefs.

3. This graphic makes me thirsty. Head here for the math.

US News has put out a ranking of the top 100 public high schools in the US for 2011. Conveniently they let you see the schools with high Asian American percentages. 4 of the top 5, and 6 of the top 10 schools have high Asian American attendance (>20%). 40 schools with a high Asian population are on the list. Only 2 are ranked 90 or lower. Well no surprise there. Tim at 8asians also points out that 10 of those 100 schools are in San Francisco. I counted at least 21 in NYC metro area. Not all of those schools are Asian dominated of course, but a significant fraction of them are.

(more…)