Undead Astronauts

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.

i recently mentioned the idea of getting immigrants to buy a house for a green card. it looks like that idea is picking up steam. MR mentions a WSJ article and some other writer’s support for such a move.

the wsj even mentions that it’s been done before in vancouver:

There is a high correlation between education and incomes, and in today’s uncertain economic climate, many wealthy foreigners desire U.S. resident status just as a number in Hong Kong secured residences in Singapore and Canada before the British handover to China in 1997. They rapidly became over a quarter of Vancouver’s population, and brought in billions of dollars to buy houses and make other investments.

it should be noted that one of the wsj writers is a real estate dev whose financial interests lie w/ keeping home prices from falling further. personally, i want prices to decline further. let’s see prices drop another 20% and i’ll help bail out the country by buying a house.

but instead we’re going to take taxpayers’ money and bailout a bunch of homeowners and businesses and get nothing in return. well hell, why take my money when they can take rich foreigners’ money? these ppl won’t even be competing against me for jobs b/c they wouldn’t be citizens. there really are such things as free lunches.

there’s a forbes story making the rounds that coronates indian americans as the new model minority. this isn’t exactly news to ppl who follow this kinda stuff, but its interesting to see the mainstream media picking up on this.

East Asians continue to excel in the U.S, but among minority groups, Indians are clearly the latest and greatest “model.” In 2007, the median income of households headed by an Indian American was approximately $83,000, compared with $61,000 for East Asians and $55,000 for whites.

About 69% of Indian Americans age 25 and over have four-year college degrees, which dwarfs the rates of 51% and 30% achieved by East Asians and whites, respectively. Indian Americans are also less likely to be poor or in prison, compared with whites.

the author also mentions high indian IQ as a possible contributing factor.

Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.

Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement.

so the next question might be whether indian immigrants are typical of indians from the subcontinent. there have been some studies on indian IQ which show something like 80-85, but none of them are definitive b/c the caste system has created a bunch of endogamous groups, and on top of that there are regional ethnicities that prefer endogamy. it’s a statistician’s nightmare and it’s possible that indian IQ variance is very high.

but it’s instructive to look at another group of immigrants to at least see how self-selection might influence representation. africans have generally averaged lower IQ scores than other groups. whether this is due to environmental factors like nutrition or to genes is up for debate. but african immigrants to the US have higher educational attainment than any other regional group including asians  (note: indian americans as an asian subgroup probably still has a higher attainment) according to the 2000 census. their median income was also comparable to that of asian immigrants.

in fact, african immigrants or their kids may compose up to 2/3 of black students at ivy league institutions like harvard. obama is only the most obvious example. he graduated harvard law magna cum-laude, and that is not something harvard gives away as an affirmative action nicety. his dad was a harvard grad, and one of his brothers is a physics phd. these immigrants however only compose 0.2% of the US population, so most of the time they aren’t especially visible. one of the few that i’ve actually met was in my graduate applied mathematics course and he was sharp as a tack.

oddly, the dataset which produced this result for indian immigrants contains info for african immigrants and shows it to be 89. there’s a significant disconnect here and i’m not sure how to explain it.

UPDATE: hmm. well, i’ve been reading some and one theory on why educational attainment of african immigrants don’t match their iq is that the content in the education is not up to standards in the west. apparently US universities won’t accept credit transfers from many african institutions. e.g. south african credits were always taken until sometime after aparteid when the classes became easier. i don’t know how true this explanation is, so caveat lector.

it’s funny how sometimes seemingly contradictory information comes out almost simultaneously. in this case the issue is whether asians are taking over or leaving.

a few days ago, slashdot pointed to a story about how many skilled immigrants (primarily east and south asians) are heading home and potentially producing a brain drain.

Despite the fact that they constitute only 12% of the U.S. population, immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s technology companies and contributed to more than 25% of our global patents. They make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor’s degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. Immigrants have co-founded firms such as Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), eBay (EBAY), and Yahoo! (YHOO).

these aren’t old fogies going back to retire in asia. these are young professionals with full careers ahead that are leaving.

The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master’s degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master’s and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups—precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy and to business and job growth.

this doesn’t bode well for a desperately needed economic recovery. the problem gets worse b/c of visa issues that many of them face. on the other hand, slanteye points to new census info saying aa’s are the fastest growing ethnic group in america.

as of 2007, there were 15.2 million Asians in the United States. Percentage growth of the Asian population between 2006 and 2007, the highest of any race group during that time period. Asian Americans were also the most educated, according to the report. Among Asians over 25 years old, 50 percent have a Bachelor’s degree, compared with only 28 percent of the total U.S. population. About 20 percent of Asian Americans hold Master’s degrees, which is twice of the national average. Among all Asian Ameicans, Indians have the highest education and income level. Nearly 70 percent of Indians in the United States have Bachelor’s degrees and the average annual income of Indian families is $83,820.

which is leading to hilarious counterreactions like this:

I grew up in this area my whole life and you asian fucks come here and use your fucking opium money to buy our land, build a million fucking wedding shops and refuse to put signs up in ENGLISH! FUCK YOU! … If you DON’T LIKE US THEN MOVE BACK TO YOUR FUCKING HOMELAND!

which is kinda ironic since that’s exactly what they’re doing. obviously the census data isn’t taking into account events of the past year, but this phenomenon isn’t necessarily limited to immigrants and isn’t necessarily a short term economic thing. amongst many of my asian american friends, there’s a feeling that moving to asia and becoming an expat is a valid, and maybe even preferred, move for career and/or personal reasons.

the upshot may be that asians do both. many skilled asians could end up leaving and prolonging the economic downturn. and the ones that stay? well they may end up “taking over” as it were. haha.

interestingly, tom friedman suggested one path to dramatically shortening the downturn would be to ask asian immigrants to help out.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

that’s laughably stereotypical, but it’s also change i could believe in.