Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Why Is High-Skill Immigration Beneficial?

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Harvard economist George J. Borjas writes:

A few days ago I was having a discussion about high-skill immigration with some people who should know better. It suddenly struck me that even though everyone favors more high-skill immigration, there is a lot of confusion about why one should be in favor of it.

Suppose all workers are alike. (This is not a trivial assumption, but the argument pretty much carries through if we allowed workers to be different; it’s just harder to explain. I’m also going to focus on the productivity effects of high-skill immigration and ignore the important fiscal impact on the welfare state).

In the textbook model of the labor market (read: supply and demand), immigrants enter the country, and the wage falls in the short run. It is this wage drop that generates the “immigration surplus”–the increase in the size of the economic pie accruing to natives. Over time, the economy adjusts–firms expand, for example–and the wage goes back to what it was in the pre-immigration era (assuming constant returns to scale), and the immigration surplus dwindles down to zero.

Note I said nothing about whether workers are low-skill or high-skill. Regardless, the wage of competing workers falls in the short run, the economy adjusts over time, the wage goes back to what it used to be, and the immigration surplus disappears.

In order for high-skill immigration to be beneficial in the long run, we need to deviate from this textbook model. The deviation that will do the trick is that high-skill immigrants generate “productivity spillovers.” In other words, “we” natives learn stuff from them, becoming more productive in the process. It is this rubbing off of what high-skill immigrants possess that makes high-skill immigration beneficial.

Is there evidence proving the existence of such spillovers? In some cases of high-skill immigration: Yes. In other cases: No. Over the next few posts, I will summarize what I think is the strongest evidence in favor of such spillovers, and why that evidence may not really say all that much about the impact of the type of high-skill immigration we have in mind when we talk about changes in immigration policy.

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High Immigration Levels Brings Wealth To The Protect At The Expense Of The Unprotected

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Harvard economist George J. Borjas writes:

I’ve been watching the civil war over immigration in the Republican party with ever-increasing interest. And let’s be honest–this really is a war for the soul of the party as there is almost nothing in common between some of the approaches that the candidates advocate. I’m sure that I’ll have much more to say as the year wears on. (Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with any political party).

Let me start by noting that I really liked this very insightful piece by John O’Sullivan. The article touches on how Donald Trump changed the dynamics of the immigration debate by emphasizing some of the losses from mass immigration. Inevitably, the discussion is leading to increased questioning of the parameters that should reflect the Republican Party’s immigration policy. O’Sullivan notes:

Globalization has struck the bourgeoisie. Increasing legal immigration levels and extra H1-B visas for occupations for skilled occupations mean that computer programmers are quite as likely as low-paid restaurant workers to see immigration as a threat to their jobs and pay levels. And they are more likely to be vocal about it…
One of the internal contradictions of Kemp-style ideological conservatism was the attempt to combine mass immigration with the scaling back of entitlement programs: Keeping wages down through immigrant competition is incompatible with moving away from state welfare entitlements to market provision…More widely, mass immigration builds up a large new constituency for state welfare programs of every kind.
As a New York Democrat once remarked, the Republicans have a choice: They can either change their policy on immigration or their policies on everything else. Trump stumbled on that insight earlier this year; it may have transformed American politics forever. Or not.

The high-skill workers who are adversely affected by immigration have become much more visible. I have always joked that the best way to ensure a real debate over immigration policy is to create a new type of visa, one that would let just 5,000 journalists enter the country each year. I predict that it would not be long before we saw hard-luck stories of the displaced workers in the front pages of the mainstream media and editorials calling for cutbacks in this very unfair program.

O’Sullivan also touches on the inherent contradiction between the Kemp-style immigration policy that has dominated Republican thought for many years–more is better!–and the welfare state. One often-heard justification for ignoring that contradiction is that “it’s better to build a wall around the welfare state than build a wall around the country.” My reaction to that statement has always been: Which parallel universe are these people living in?

(As an aside, I once had the privilege of sitting next to Jack Kemp on a bus ride in rural Mexico in the mid-1990s. This was shortly after the O.J. Simpson saga had begun. Kemp knew O.J. personally; they had played football together on the Buffalo Bills. Although I’m sure we talked about immigration during the ride, I have to admit that I have no recollection of whatever was said. I was much too fascinated by Kemp’s theory of what really happened in Brentwood the night that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered).

In related news, there’s this account in the New York Review of Books of how Denmark has reacted to the influx of refugees. It seems that, given the choice of which wall to build, they chose to build the one around the country.

UPDATE: And I ran into this excellent Peggy Noonan column shortly after my post went up. Noonan argues that much of what we are seeing is a reaction by people whose well being has been ignored for far too long.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border…
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either…
Mr. Trump came from that.

A key theme of my forthcoming book, We Wanted Workers, is that the benefits and costs of mass immigration have not been shared equitably. And this very large redistribution of wealth–accruing to the protected and paid for by the unprotected–may explain why we are now at this strange point in political life.

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High-Skill Immigration: Experimental Evidence

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Luke Ford

Harvard economics professor George J. Borjas writes:

A couple of weeks ago I promised to summarize the evidence on whether high-skill immigration generates the productivity spillovers that would produce large economic gains for natives. I apologize for taking so long to get back to this discussion, but I have so many other projects on my plate these days that it’s hard to keep up.

By far the most convincing studies that attempt to document the existence of spillovers are those that look at natural experiments. In a series of important papers, Fabian Waldinger has looked at what happened in Nazi Germany after Hitler fired all the Jewish professors . In 1933, shortly after it took power, the Nazi regime passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which mandated that all civil servants who were not of Aryan descent be immediately dismissed. That meant that Jewish professors like John von Neumann, Richard Courant, and Albert Einstein were fired from their university posts. Many of these stellar scientists found jobs abroad, particularly in the United States.

In his 2010 JPE paper, Waldinger showed what happened to the productivity of the doctoral students stranded behind in German universities after their exceptional mentors were dismissed. The productivity of the students stranded behind in the departments most affected by the dismissals suffered. In his 2012 RESTUD follow-up paper, Waldinger looked at what happened to the productivity of the colleagues of the dismissed scientists. The surprising answer is: Not much.

Here is the trend in the productivity of the graduate students left behind:

And here’s the trend in the productivity of the colleagues left behind:

One lesson I draw is that supply shocks consisting of very high skill workers can certainly generate spillovers, but it seems that there has to be a close personal relationship between the migrants and the recipients of the spillover. There’s also a hint that those who compete for resources may not suffer all that much when their esteemed colleagues are no longer around.

Kirk Doran and I have published a series of papers that look at another natural experiment–the exodus of highly qualified Soviet mathematicians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The New York Times published a report in 1990 detailing the conflicting forces that such a supply shock would generate: Beneficial productivity spillovers and additional job market competition:

[Harvard mathematician] Dr. Diaconis said he recently asked [Soviet mathematician] Dr. Reshetikhin for help with a problem that had stumped him for 20 years. “I had asked everyone in America who had any chance of knowing”…No one could help. But…Soviet scientists had done a lot of work on such problems. “It was a whole new world I had access to,” Dr. Diaconis said…
American scientists…are being peppered with letters and calls asking for invitations…”I have run across a number of very distinguished Soviet mathematicians who have come here as visitors and spend their time going around the country and looking for a job.”

Because of the long separation between Soviet and Western mathematicians, the two groups had essentially gone their own way during the 20th century, with the Soviets focusing more on “Soviet fields” like partial and ordinary differential equations, and Americans focusing more on “American fields” like statistics and operations research. Kirk Doran and I looked at the publication history of Americans who worked in “Soviet fields” and Americans who worked in “American fields” and found that the Americans who most competed with the Soviets experienced a decline in productivity after the supply shock. Here’s the graph from our 2012 QJE paper:

So what does the Soviet context teach us? Although a supply shock of several hundred exceptional mathematicians can generate spillovers, the law of diminishing returns might also kick in (as the busy job-seeking travelers in the New York Times story had suggested). And this additional competition for resources can offset and reverse whatever benefits the spillovers might have produced in the first place.

My take from all this is very simple: At least in the experimental context, the evidence that high-skill immigrants produce beneficial spillovers is most convincing when the immigrants that make up the supply shock are really, really high-skill; when the number of such exceptional immigrants is sufficiently small relative to the market; and when those immigrants directly interact with the potential recipients of the spillovers.

In a future post I will discuss what (if anything) we learn from the non-experimental evidence.

And in case the reader wants more information about these supply shocks: Here’s a very nice AER paper by Waldinger (with Petra Moeser and Alessandra Voena) looking at what happened after the fired Jewish professors reached the United States. And here’s a 2015 JOLE paper by Doran and I looking at the research agenda of American mathematicians after the Soviet supply shock. And here’s a just-published RESTAT paper looking at the productivity of the Soviets left behind.

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Is Your Neighborhood Racist?

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Tamara Shayne Kagel writes:

Amid our ongoing national conversation over race, the denizens of my liberal Los Angeles neighborhood—who like to think of themselves as being Caucasian by accident while being upper-class by dessert—bubbled over with defensiveness when someone politely suggested our listserv was sometimes racist.

It started innocuously enough. Last month, one neighbor sent a typically banal email to the neighborhood forum, including a picture of some white children near an African-American homeless man and this message:

June 23, 2015 11:03 a.m.: These children had to pass by this homeless man camped out next to [identifying information deleted] tunnel today. He was rolling a joint in front of the kids and it is not right for the children to see this behavior. Bike patrol is needed since this area has become the new Venice Beach!!!
Someone else cordially responded a short time later with the accusation:

June 23, 2015 11:27 a.m.: “Homelessness doesn’t equal dangerous. There has [sic] been a lot of racist comments on this group. If I can please recommend everyone double and triple check what they want to send out before they press send. Many Thanks.”
This particular comment ignited a flurry of responses briskly chiming in to explain why everyone’s prior comments weren’t racist:

June 23, 2015 11:38 a.m.: … I don’t consider it racist to be concerned about things like this. And, I do consider there has to be help for the homeless as well.
June 23, 2015 12:27 a.m.: Racist? I did not see ANY racist comments…. Homelessness issues can be best helped if everyone participates in the community meeting!
June 23, 2015 12:55 p.m.: Nonsense! As both the parent and aunt of black children (now adults), I’m very attuned to racist comments. I haven’t seen any racist comments at all on this list.
June 23, 2015 3:25 p.m.: I may have missed the racially charged comments, but this isn’t a race issue, it’s a safely issue, not to mention that it’s illegal. The smell of pot is a given, and it’s only a matter of time until someone steps on a syringe, or worse. There is no way this isn’t a dangerous situation….
June 23, 2015 3:50 p.m.: I hope all of us are aware regarding racist issues. God knows we all need to be, but I don’t see that here.
June 23, 2015 6:46 p.m.: Racism has NEVER BEEN AN ISSUE … human decency IS!
In the photo attached to the original message, a heavy-set dark man is lying on the sandy walkway with his shirt rolled up, allowing his belly to spill out next to the contents of his backpack—a paperback, some CDs and a Discman, shoes, and travel-size shampoos. Absent from the photo was any trace of drugs, weapons, or anything else untoward. The man reclines comfortably but his gaze staring back at the woman taking his picture looks slightly befuddled. The blonde children are taking their shoes off about to run on the sand. Race is never directly mentioned. But everyone agreed: This black man’s presence in our neighborhood was a dangerous threat to our innocent children.

But were we racist?

Everyone who responded was white. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think there are any African Americans living in my neighborhood, although the area that is serviced by this listserv is very small (about a hundred houses). So in a white neighborhood, a bunch of white people went about assuring one another that they were most certainly not doing anything racist. There was not a single email in support of the white woman who had gently (“Many Thanks”!) reminded her neighbors to watch what they sent to the group. And that was that. We moved on to talking about how high our new speed-bumps should be. After all, how could we be racist? We love Obama! We know Dylann Roof is the Devil incarnate! We watched the Wire!

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Steve Sailer: ‘Why does the reporter assume that there’s something tragic about young Keith Frazier not getting much of an education?’

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Because liberals view higher education institutions as socializing/indoctrination centers that churn out people with the correct beliefs and people who are properly socialized and who won’t turn to anti-social activities like crime.

* The real tragedy is that so many grown men have nothing better to do with their free time than to sit and watch a bunch of other guys throw a ball around.

Think about all the money that we piss away on sports, professional and otherwise. Taxpayer subsidies for NFL stadiums alone run into – what? – the tens of billions of dollars. Then you have to factor in the billions given to the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL, among others.

(Many stadiums are declared obsolete only a decade or two after their construction.)

But the masses need their bread and circuses, don’t they? Male aggression needs to be channeled into useless sideshows, lest it be harnessed into a worthy social cause. If the drunken white fans woke up one morning and realized that they’d better off directing their hatred for their team’s rivals toward, say, the globalized elite who are screwing us all, then the powers that be would have something to worry about.

That will never happen, though.

* Sports occupies such a large portion of White male attention because every other avenue — entertainment, politics, arts, etc. has been profoundly feminized and made as hostile to ordinary White men as a fabulous gay Broadway production. Or the View.

There is a lot of hubris, in that older White males tend to see themselves as rescuers of not very bright but talented athletically younger Black males. No one can be “rescued” — people with gifts either apply them or not.

Clearly, for example, Vince Young was not cut out to be an NFL player, because despite his physical gifts he lacked the discipline and enjoyment of the game. Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Russell Wilson spend hours in film rooms just breaking down defenses with coaches, and probably spend hours talking about it during meals, etc. They do it because they love the game — they can’t get enough of it.

To be a professional athlete even in the NBA requires a floor of minimum discipline, attentiveness, staying out of the worst of trouble, and grinding through ugly road trips given an 82 game schedule. And some people despite physical gifts lack the ability to simply grind things out. That is not a tragedy, just a disappointment.

A LOT of what is wrong with the current zeitgeist, the anti-White male attitude, comes from Black male dominance in football, basketball, and the fading of baseball as the national pastime.

* Big-time sports in the USA is a nexus of so many primal instincts, fervent hopes, and half-acknowledged prejudices that it’s hard to know how to start thinking about it.

In one sense, the Frazier story is indeed a tragedy, in that it’s all about the American equivalent of Achilles or Odysseus. The ancient Greeks had great warriors steeped in the pursuit of arête; we’ve got college hoops stars.

But in other ways college athlete narratives go well beyond heroic tales. Frazier and his cohort of black, inner-city sports stars are exemplars in the heretical Christian progressive redemption narrative that drives so much of western culture. They are lost souls, atoned for by the good intentions of coaches, boosters, and fans, and then redeemed and raised up to both potential fame and fortune, and, as Anon and Olorin have noted, to equal place with their benefactors, i.e. as ‘college graduates’.

College and pro sports therefore provide the perfect vector this redemption narrative to be spread out to a far wider proportion of the American people. It’s not only for hard lefties and SJWs; lots of good red-blooded conservative sports fans can partake as well.

* Well of course organized sports is bread and circuses for the masses, the elites love it because it causes lower class whites to misdirect their tribal nature and nationalistic loyalties to some bulls**t game played by thug blacks. Rather than noticing the systematic screwing they are getting at the hands of the elites.

It’s the modern day Soma drug. The last thing elites want is a white working and middle-class looking out for their country and their own well being. As generally that leads to revolutions and rebellions.

It’s really sad when you look at the white men who really buy into organized sports, they are complete wastes. They don’t even get how pathetic they look and act. They end up worshiping black men who if it were not for organized sports would be beating the s**t out of white men like them and raping their women. And guess what? They often engage in fights and scuffles in bars and others establishments but it’s kept out of the papers. They still end up raping women but thanks to six and seven figure payoffs by the teams, women don’t file charges.

* I suspect back-up quarterbacks who stick it out tend to have a fairly realistic sense of the future. My son’s quarterback classmate in high school went to USC where he dutifully backed up various future NFL quarterbacks. By the time his four years of NCAA eligibility were up, he already had his Masters in Real Estate Development and a good job lined up with some alumni.

* “Keith changed our program,” Brown said at the time. “We’ve never been successful in recruiting inner-city kids.”

It’s worth taking a moment to think about Brown’s phrasing. I’m guessing very few people would be confused as to what Brown means by “inner city kids.” However, had he substituted the word “black” for “inner city,” he would have been in for a world of pain, because whereas everyone knows “inner city kids” are essential to a successful college basketball program, the racial composition of the team can’t possibly have anything to do with its potential for success.

I’d never heard of Keith Frazier before so I Googled his hometown: Irving, Texas. Not really most people’s idea of the inner city. I’ve never been there, but apparently Irving is a part of something called the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The metropolitan airport is there.

Irving is predominantly non-hispanic white and hispanic. Blacks make up 10% of the population, in other words, less than the black national average. But would an Angloish-looking hispanic kid, or for that matter an Asian kid (8% of the population) from Irving be described as inner city?

Everyone knows what Larry Brown means by “inner city,” but it could be worth one’s job to point it out.

* In college, the easy way to win is to break the recruiting rules. But that means it helps to move on, like Pete Carroll moved on from USC to the Seattle Seahawks before the NCAA hammer came down on USC.

On the other hand, some long term college coaches managed to institutionalize rule bending. For example, Wooden outsourced to a booster named Sam Gilbert the shadier side of keeping players happy (although back then the stakes were lower and so were the payoffs — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, probably the most valuable recruit in college basketball history, has funny stories about the summer jobs he had in college to scrape by). Dean Smith of North Carolina responded to the rise of Duke by ginning up the Afro Studies Department system for keeping black jocks eligible.

* ro coaches/managers generally have a more straightforward job since the leagues have very carefully rules about how players get assigned.

The most radical approach was that of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner — a personality not wholly unlike that of Donald Trump in his nonstop media feuds — in the 1970s and 1980s who frequently fired and rehired Yankees managers. Billy Martin served five different tenures under Steinbrenner from 1975-1988. Bob Lemon, Dick Howser, and Gene Michael served two separate terms each.

It was extremely exhausting to read about in the sports section. It seemed particularly bizarre to an L.A. Dodgers fan like myself who had 2 managers over 43 seasons — Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully plans to retire this coming October after his 67th season as a Dodger radio announcer. (Los Angelenos love ancient sports announcers like Scully, who has been with the Dodgers since 1950, and the late Chick Hearn of the Lakers).

But, Bill James has said that he thinks Steinbrenner’s system of constant hiring and firing of managers made sense. For example, Billy Martin tended to light a fire under his teams, but also burn them out. For example, Martin famously jumpstarted the 1980 Oakland A’s by having their young starters pitch huge numbers of innings, but they were never the same afterwards.

* There’s also a class angle to “inner city kids.”

For example, Stephen Curry, who will likely win his second NBA MVP award after this season, is not an inner city kid. He is the son of a 16 year NBA player, Del Curry. Steph went to posh Davidson College, where he appears to have fit in nicely. He likely would have been welcome at SMU before Larry Brown’s arrival.

It’s possible for a few colleges to stock their teams from black suburban middle class kids. Duke long did that with guys like Grant Hill (whose father knew George W. Bush at Yale) and Shane Battier.

In contrast, LeBron James, to pick a successful example, is an inner city kid from Akron. His mom is, what, only 16 or 17 years older than him?

Michael Jordan would have fallen in-between, a lower middle class kid.

* If you go back to the Dream Team, the most ghetto guy on the team was Chris Mullen. It was either working class kids like Ewing, Jordan and Magic or Southern rural guys like Barkley or Malone. There is something of a history of Black America in the class background of NBA stars. In the 1970′s, a lot of ghetto guys came into the league and burnt out on coke. In the 80′s, the inner-city went to crap to such a degree that none of the stars came from really poor backgrounds. In the 90′s, we got much better in getting the stars out of the ghetto early, but we never really got the ghetto out of the stars and a lot of them burnt out early. By the 2000′s, the inner city was recovering and scouting got so good that potential stars were identified in 3rd grade and they are almost like robots.

Larry Brown is the only person to win an NCAA championship and NBA championship, so its not only recruiting violations (btw, Pete Carroll did the same, UCLA crybaby, and he was never even accused of recruiting violations). OTOH, Brown is one of two American coaches to lose an Olympics and the only one who lost in the pro-era.

* Next Town Brown.

It really is an amazing career. All-American under Frank McGuire at UNC, part of the NYC pipeline that started up the ACC as a power, although Everett Case at NC State really had started it all. Larry actually played high school ball out on Long Beach, lived in Lido Beach.

Carolina got put on probation while he was there, so he played under Dean Smith at the end of his college career, but never had Dean’s shiny reputation.

MVP of the first ABA all-star game. He and Doug Moe led Oakland to an early ABA title.

As a kid my first memory of him was coaching the Carolina Cougars. Great team, fast paced, led by fellow UNC alumnus from Brooklyn, Billy “Kangaroo Kid” Cunningham. Larry wore loud, multi-colored checked jackets with bell-bottoms.

Then he coached the great Denver Nuggets teams with more of his preferred ACC guys like the great David Thompson from NC State and Bobby Jones from UNC. Dan Issel rounded it out so he’d throw in an SEC guy now and then. They had the best regulate season record but lost to Dr. J’s Nets in the ABA, but the Nuggets kept winning under Larry when they made the NBA transition.

Then he takes UCLA to their first title game since Wooden retired.

Off to an awful Nets team that he turned into a playoff team. More ACC guys like Buck Williams, Albert King, Mike Gminski and Mike O’Koren. And also Darryl Dawkins, Chocolate Thunder, who didn’t like Brown. Said he played favorites with his ACC guys. Although DD shoukd look at his stats and realize Buck Williams was 3 inches shorter and gave up 50 pounds to him but out-rebounded him by 4-5 a game.

He leaves the Nets right before the playoffs for a vacant Kansas job.

Kansas has had 8 coaches in 118 years. Their first coach is Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game. Their third coach is Phog Allen, the legend, who coached Dean Smith AND Adolph Rupp, at one time 1 and 2 in college coaching wins. He leads them to the 1952 title. Dean was a reserve on that team.

In 1957 Kansas goes to the finals with Wilt, but loses to an undefeated North Carolina.

Ted Owens coached Kansas for many years and had some good teams, made two Final Fours, coached Jo Jo White etc, but Kansas wasn’t the annual powerhouse then. They had to go through cycles like most teams, and when Owens led 3 losing teams in 4 years and lost 9 straight to Kansas State and lost to Wichita State the year they made the tournament in that stretch, he became the only Kansas coach ever fired.

So Brown comes in. He hires Ed Manning to be his assistant. Ed had played for him on the Cougars. Ed’s son Danny spurns the local ACC teams and goes to Kansas. Kansas makes two Final Fours and wins the 1988 NCAAs. Then Larry high tails it right ahead of probation.

But Larry re-established Kansas. Roy Williams comes from UNC to keep the UNC-Kansas pipeline going, wins 19 his first year then gets Kansas into every NCAA tourney thereafter until he goes back to UNC. Now Kansas is an annual beast under Bill Self, a former Larry assistant. And John Calipari also was an assistant to Larry at Kansas.

Larry goes to, you got it Reg, his 4th old ABA team, the Spurs of the NBA. They are awful at first but he leads them to 2 50 + win seasons with a young David Robinson. His assistants included a young Greg Popovich. Pretty illustrious coaching tree but he is like Belichik to Brown’s Bill Parcells.

Next I think it’s the Sixers? Gets Allen Iverson to practice long enough to make an NBA finals. Then the Pistons and finally an NBA title.

Then a disaster with the Knicks under fellow UNC New Yorker Donnie Walsh.

Then, yup, a so-so run in Charlotte.

And somehow he has turned SMU into a damn good team. Somehow? Oh yeah, more probation.

I think Larry had always wanted that UNC job. He loved Dean. Said it would hurt him more when Dean said Larry I think you can do that better than when MCGuire would call him a stupid Jew.

Carolina rightfully probably thought he was too ethically loose. Of course now Carolina has the cloud of a close to 20 year scandal of a no class’s Af-Am department paper class that was graded by a secretary which allegedly kept athletes eligible. Of course, who knows but that some players but a lot of effort in their paper in The Life of Sojourner Truth.

Anyway it tars everyone, including academic first team all-American Marcus Paige, recruited after this practice ended. On senior night the other day he commented that it annoyed his teammates that he corrected their grammar.

Carolina alumni are proud of him, but would be prouder if he finally can lead his senior class to at least an elite 8. Only two classes since 1966 at UNC haven’t made it at least that far. Which was two years before Dean Smith recruited Charlie Scott as the first black player in the ACC below the Mason Dixon line. I had to add that qualifier since Maryland had a couple before but no one remembers that.

Anyway, Larry is part of a great tradition, at times sordid, but great. And even Darryl Dawkins said he helped him develop his left hand.

* So…people who like to blow off steam, spend time with old friends via the common interest of a favorite team, or just simply enjoy the excitement of sports should refrain as long as there are elites taking advantage of the masses.

And do what? Post sanctimonious blog comments telling hard-working adults how they should spend their down-time?

OK–How about this: You’re a grown man who comments on blogs. Many people might claim that you should find something better to do with your free time.

Cuz, really, Stan, at least the sports fan has fun. He’s laughing, he’s bonding with his kids. If he’s younger, he’s forging memories with his buddies. He’s checking out the girls during the time-outs and when the game ends, he’ll head out on town and more fun (and possibly even some trouble) awaits. All in all, young and old alike are having a good time.

But not Stan. He doesn’t have time for a good time. He can’t because we live in this unusual time, where the elites take advantage of the masses. There is no time for relaxation. No time for fun. There’s definitely no laughs. No friends. No diversion. Nope, it’s just Stan and his computer making the world a better place.

Hey Stan, while you’re making the world a better place, I want you to do me a favor: Follow this link to Wikipedia and read about “Narcotizing Dysfunction”:

* I’ve stood next to both Larry Brown and his coaching brother, Herb Brown. Neither man was more than 5’8″, at most – short by point guard standards, even of the 1960′s.

However, Larry knows his X’s and O’s. The Pistons definitely improved once he took the reins before the NBA championship season of 2004.

I think what great NBA coaches do best is to identify the extremely talented ( yet under-producing) players on other teams, and then somehow get them by hook or crook onto their own rosters.

Larry Brown’s behind the scenes maneuvering to get the mercurial Rasheed Wallace – a fellow UNC Tar Heel- at power forward was the stroke of genius that put the Pistons over the top. Rasheed was incredible for two years under Larry Brown, and un-coachable for everyone else.

* I have a couple of friends who played baseball at college with a big-time football program. They described to me the army of handlers available to them in order to do everything from homework to course selection to crisis management.

The tutors weren’t supposed to actually give them answers or direct them what to write on their assignments, so they used this kind of Socratic kabuki to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability that they were openly doing the athletes’ coursework for them.

OK, so if the answer is a whole number between 1 and 3, what is it?

And these were the baseball players, most of whom weren’t on scholarship. They were bright, white, and paying their own freight. Imagine what the football and basketball players had.

* I haven’t followed the details of the AfAm Studies Dept debacle at UNC because the leftist destruction of that once great university is almost enough to cause me to root for Dook today. I would only be paying attention in an effort to bolster what I already know to be true.

It would not surprise me to know that Dean knew about it. On the other hand, when the football coach was sacrificed a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that the academic dept had some time ago taken control of the athletic studies programs away from the athletic dept. What was unsurprising was that they were still able to blame the athletics side for being responsible.

Dean was certainly known for running a clean program. Another poster mentioned the famous JR vs Ferry SAT score debate. But, Dean was also a big Democrat booster, and while the local media would always bitch about even the hint of Coach K supporting a Republican candidate, they won’t offer an unkind word about Dean. Don’t you know that Dean (entirely unselfishly, I have no doubt) broke the color barrier in the ACC by recruiting Charlie Scott??? So, who knows what he may have known.

Dean was also notoriously demanding as a coach; at practices running his players to exhaustion, and having very little tolerance for injury, just as two examples. Since another poster mentioned George Lynch, I know from a friend who was on the JV team at the time, that Lynch was the only guy on that NCAA championship team that Dean couldn’t break in running. Dude could apparently run all day long(***). That reminds me that I took a racket ball class with Derrick Phelps who was so ridiculously athletic that he was easily beating the instructor, at a game he had (as far as I know) never played before, in almost no time at all. The season after winning it all, our hopes were dashed by an injured Phelps going out against Boston College, wherein he was added to the list of players who’s injuries as a result of dirty plays would ruin a potential national championship for a UNC team (cf. Kenny Smith and Kendal Marshall).

(*** George Lynch was a stud despite being several months premature and just a few pounds at birth. Looked like he was beat on the second or third play of the game against Juwan Howard but then smacked his sh-t off the backboard from behind (which in my memory was a tone-setting play). Lynch was the guy who, when a ball was floating naked in the air between him and one or more opponents, always seemed to just reach out and demand possession of it. Just a stud. Oh, and I guess he played on that Philly finals team under Larry Brown).

* “As a parent saving for college, find it infuriating people like Brown and Dick Vitale advocate paying college athletes in addition to already giving them a shot at a free education. And I say that as a parent who has a son who may benefit from a college football scholarship.Here’s a half million dollars of education and room and board, and that’s not enough.”

Actually, for an 85 IQ but athletically top .1% or .01% athlete, it is indeed not enough. More accurately, it’s like giving a Ferrari to a tribe in Africa with no gasoline, no paved roads, no tools, no mechanical skills, and no clue what it is. The “education” is worthless to them because they can’t utilize it, except to get a gummint or AA sinecure for a minority with a degree.

What it does do to them is to burn their time. If you are an athlete at this level, you have a finite number of hours of play, and a finite number of years to use them in. Instead of giving their full attention to the only thing they will ever do in life that will honestly earn them more than a subsistence income, they are having to pretend to be students, and they aren’t very good at it, it stresses them, and it teaches them that you have to scheme, connive and dodge to get along.

By forcing basketball and football to build out a farm club system, these athletes can focus on what they do best and be paid for it. If the leagues were morally sound, they’d require contractually each athlete have a professionally managed sequestered account into which a percentage of their pay had to go so they could live the rest of their lives without going on welfare.

Meanwhile, it frees up “slots” at colleges for real students. Those athletes that really could benefit from education will be easily able to afford it if they go pro for even a couple of years when their playing days are done. It keeps these powerful adolescents off campus for their wildest years, too, meaning coeds don’t get turned out.

Posted in Academia, Basketball, Blacks, Education, Sports | Comments Off

Sweden to become a Third World Country by 2030, according to UN

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT: According to UN projections, Sweden will be a much poorer country by 2030, much worse than what anyone in the Swedish government indicates.

The UN report HDI (Human Development Index) predicts a significant decrease in Swedish prosperity, unlike their Nordic neighbors, who will retain their top positions and even strengthen them globally in the long run.

In 2010 Sweden had the 15th place in the HDI rankings but according to UN forecasts, Sweden will be #25 in 2015, and in 2030 on the 45th place.

Sweden is one of few countries with such a sharp deterioration from what it had in 2010.

Finland demonstrates one of the world’s best school systems, while the Swedish school have lost competitiveness.

Fewer ends up on welfare dependency in their Nordic neighboring countries while Sweden continues to have a greater amount of family households forced to live on welfare, which are a couple factors causing the dropped global competitiveness.

Negative developments, or rather liquidations can be exemplified by Orrefors Kosta Boda, which in 1992 had 940 employees in Sweden and was a profitable industry. Today less than 100 remain in the company after further cost reductions and adaptations in order to meet global competition.

Most of today’s less developed countries such as Cuba, Mexico, the Baltic countries and Bulgaria according to the 2030 UN report will be passing Sweden in prosperity.

Even Greece, which today is more or less bankrupt, but will be on 13th place by 2030.

Sweden’s leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism: large scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on earth. Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi.

“We had a perfectly good country,” Ingrid Carlqvist, a journalist said. “A rich country, a nice country, and in a few years’ time, that country will be gone.”

The logic should be really simple to understand, yet many have difficulties grasping it: If you import the Third World, it’s what you’ll get.

Posted in Sweden | Comments Off

Hands up! Don’t Shoah!

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

* Some goyim raised their hand at a Trump rally. I’m so very triggered.

* So unfair to help Germany transition to her new multicultural Muslim status and not include Austria in the fun!

* These goyim think they can just elect whomever they want!

Goyim get to pick one from APPROVED options. This is NOT acceptable. Trump was never an approved option!

* We should give daily awards to whichever Jew is the most shrill in his/her denunciation of Trump. There can be more than one category.
1) Most over-the-top Hitler/Fascist comparisons.
2) Most condescending nasal-snide dismissal.
3) Guilt by non-association smear.
4) Best referencing of Jewish nationalist org (SPLC, ADL, SWC).
5) Most condescending swipe at his working class white voters.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off

National Review Advocates Committing A Crime To Stop Donald Trump

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comment: This seems like a pretty big deal to me. National Review has published an article by John Fund that urges Republican delegates to commit a misdemeanor in order to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination:

“If Donald Trump won’t release his tax returns prior to the GOP convention, the delegates pledged to him on the first ballot should abstain from giving him their votes. Other than their vote not counting, there are no realistic consequences for any delegate doing so on the first ballot. A few states make breaking the first-ballot pledge rule a misdemeanor, but no one is ever prosecuted. In theory, state leaders could exact political retribution but such discipline is rarely exercised.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432326/donald-trump-tax-returns-must-be-released?target=author&tid=902877

National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, presumably approved this for publication.

I realize things are getting crazy on the donor side, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around this: National Review just knowingly advocated the commission of a crime in order to subvert the democratic process. It couldn’t be real … but it is! It really happened. That’s a big deal, isn’t it? Over its history NR has fired writers and editors for much less.

Because it’s an iSteve world, Fund’s author bio at National Review is hilarious:

“In 2004, he wrote Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. He has written two books with Hans von Spakovsky: Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/author/john-fund

Posted in Donald Trump, National Review | Comments Off

Indians Are Nice

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

AP: “In its request for consultation, India alleges the U.S. had increased fees for temporary visas in December, officials said. It argues that as a result, some Indians receive unfair treatment compared with Americans in the United States in providing similar services in sectors like computer services.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Indians in India are nice, but there’s a reason progress is slow in India. It’s a low-trust, high-talk, all-time-politics, nepotistic, low-do culture.

* I’ve now worked in several places that go out of their way to hire H1Bs, usually Indian but not uncommonly Chinese. The main reason for hiring these people directly is that they are effectively indentured servants. To stay in this country and eventually get trhe coveted green card they must keep theit H1B employer happy. They will do anything to keep the visa including working uncompensated hours until late into the night and weekends.

Some are decent tech workers. Most are only semi-competent. Their employers rely on a small cadre of retained, native-born and educated workers to debug and correct all but the most obvious problems. higher level work beyond simple coding and support is almost invariably the purview of the native-born cadres. Employment contractors, like the notorious TaTa and various domestic exploiters like Covansys, Deloitte and Touche, etc., make a mint by over-rating their H1Bs, getting them high paying jobs that they cannot handle, and reaping enormous profits from fees and grossly overpriced G&A and Overhead charges. They don’t care whether the workers supply can do the work.

It’s a particular issue in state government work. US native-born tech workers are screwed over three times: (1) Their jobs are stolen from them by unqualified foreigners; (2) They wind up training and supporting these foreign workers; (3) Tax payers are stuck paying inflated wages for incompetent and destructive employees w ho have no investment in their work or the citizens they supposedly serve.

Meanwhile, the US pipeline of STEM workers is closing down as native-born students interested in these fields see that their is no future for them if they continue in STEM. If they do follow their interest, by the time they’re thirty they’ll have trained their incompetent H1B replacement and taken their place on the unemployment line behind their native-born predecessors.

Even if Trump wins and fulfills all his promises it will take more than a decade to correct the havoc wrought on native-born workers by these ill-advised immigration policies.

* Once people understand the loss of sovereignty in these trade deals, a move to repeal or renegotiate them will have a majority. If there’s a president who pursues it.

* I sometimes feel guilty about treating my own children different from other people’s. Aren’t they, like, all equal, man?

MORE COMMENTS:

* Global trade rules need to be renegotiated on this point of governments needing to treat foreign workers as the equal of their own. Is that really what American citizens want from their society or does society exist to serve the interests of global capital? No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, will touch this. It’s his for the taking.

* Shouldn’t the Indians themselves be against this? Where’s are India’s nationalists on this one? I would have thought the Indians needed tech savvy workers for their own ambitious infrastructure targets.

No country has ever gotten rich through remittance money. The only way to go from poor to rich is by producing useful products and developing a strong domestic infrastructure. The remittance road to prosperity story is yet another lie being peddled by the ultra-liberals.

* Over 600,000,000 of them still poop and pee on the ground, even though they know that it spreads disease. They don’t have the collective mental capacity to build an advanced civilization. Their leaders know this and therefore encourage anyone with talent to leave and colonize other countries, as would you if you were in their shoes.

If you were an elite Brahmin would you stick around in your country building toilets (that the peasants likely won’t use) or would you abandon your country and go live with a more advanced race and civilization?

* Why doesn’t the USA just give Puerto Rico its independence? This article is just one more reason for it. I have never seen what the benefit is to keeping an impoverished, Spanish-speaking island hundreds of miles from America. The USA has also gotten stuck absorbing millions of P.R’s excess population. America didn’t even manage to switch it over to English. If it ever becomes a state it could be the Trojan horse for bilingualism in the USA. As a Canadian, I can tell you that is the last thing in the world you want to have.

* It’s totally absurd that Puerto Rico is allowed to play a role in the Republican (and Democratic) presidential nominating process since Puerto Ricans play no role in Presidential elections. PR gets 23 delegates. Since Trump is unlikely to get any delegates from PR, it is ironic that PR may play a role in denying Trump the nomination. If you were to subtract the 23 PR delegates from the total, Trump would only have to get 1225 delegates, rather than 1237, to secure the nomination. It will be interesting to see how many delegates Trump gets by the time of the Convention. BTW there are other territories which don’t vote in Presidential elections yet get delegates to choose the party nominees. They should also be denied participation in the nomination process.

* If you think like a capitalist, the absurd thing is that Americans demand better treatment than indians when the latter is willing to do the same work for less.

To a non-nationalist migrant, the idea that you should particularly care about people that you share absolutely nothing with except that you happened to be born kind of close to them is also not a given. If you need visible ethnic breakdown to visualize it fully, think of South African whites migrating out. Co-nationals just don’t mean that much.

The nationalists here love to say “that is what separate nations are for.” To the elite of many nations, a separate nation might be a improvement but that is not easy to do. (look at south asian chinese expats consider singapore heaven) Failing that, walled compounds or migration to places that shares more of their values is better.

From a economics point of view, network effects counts for quite a lot and productivity is raised if you just gather enough smart people at one point. It is better to be in disadvantaged in a productive spot than be the most talented person surrounded by envious retards. National IQ have stronger correlation with income than the personal one.

If you view your in-group as a class as opposed to a nation and care about their interests, you get different answer for the immigration question.

* The documentary “Cartel Land” is on Netflix. Amazing film, it’s as good as drama as it is as reportage. Anyway, anyone who wonders why we need a wall, a big one, right now, should watch that movie.

* There are two basic approaches to voting. One is that voting is a job, and we want informed and conscientious voters, which I think is the approach most people take naturally without thinking much about it. In that case some people aren’t qualified to vote and you should spend time determining what the qualifications are.

The other approach was taken by Aristotle, who argued that if the government could cause you harm, such as through taxation, conscription, or imprisonment, then you should have a say in what the government does. Incidentally, Aristotle was not considered to be as much of a small “d” democrat as most Greeks because he favored keeping the older aristocratic and monarchical elements in the government. But he wanted the democratic portion to be really democratic.

I agree with Aristotle’s approach, and its hard from that line of reasoning to deny the franchise even to prisoners currently serving their sentence, because they are under the control of government more than most. And actually polling places in prisons and even lunatic asylums is not unheard of outside the US.

With the “voting is a job” approach, then you can get from their to disenfrachising prisoners and even convicted felons not in prison, but there is a problem in that it doesn’t stop there. Do you take the vote away from a high IQ felon and give it to a low IQ non-felon? Or do you deny it to both? Which level of IQ/ income/ problems with the law exactly do you draw the line? Does the nature of the crime itself matter? What if the law that had been broken was pretty much bs?

So I don’t think a criminal conviction should result in removal from the voter rolls, but I disagree with polling places in prisons or giving prisoners absentee ballots. But on paper you should be able to vote as long as you keep your citizenship.

* Thank you Mr. Trump for breaking through the Great Wall of Smugness these mainstream people were comfortably living within. Now they have to entertain the possibility that they haven’t got us all figured out.

It looks like one of the positive side-effects of Trump tearing the cozy neocon-cuckservative love nest to shreds is that he’s also forcing Guardian types to wonder whether things are more complicated than they thought. The Grand Vermifuge really is a tonic for our sick political body.

* So I am sitting in our mess hall next to an Episcopal priest from Virginia and across from one of my liberal colleagues from Massachusetts, and they are talking about Trump. The priest says with a condescending tone, “I’ve never met anyone who is going to vote for the man.” I stick my hand near his face and say, “Pleased to meet you.” They stopped talking about Trump.

* I’ve slowly been working on a story about how a young man comes out to his liberal parents from the father’s point of view. You know, the signs had been there, vulgar web sights, changing outlook on life, even the way he spoke and his vocal intonations changed at bit.

The boy had totally new friends of the working class persuasion. The family had not had a manual laborer in it since 1850, etc.

The boy had never believed in Santa Claus and even as a young child has a Matrix poster on his bedroom wall featuring some shiny Red Pills.

And of course the boy is coming out of the Trump-closet to his parents. His father then declares that boy is no son of his and the mother screams hysterically that it was the most disgusting thing she could think of was what he and his new friends get up to when they all go to the polling booth to pull the lever for Trump.

And in the end the boy is kicked out of the house and written off forever by his parents!

* This seems like a pretty big deal to me. National Review has published an article by John Fund that urges Republican delegates to commit a misdemeanor in order to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432326/donald-trump-tax-returns-must-be-released?target=author&tid=902877

National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, presumably approved this for publication.

Because it’s an iSteve world, Fund’s author bio at National Review is hilarious:

http://www.nationalreview.com/author/john-fund

* America. Both LOL and sigh.

A land where Jews force all politicians to pledge to AIPAC but then complain of Trump’s authoritarian style.

A land where a clown like Beck accuses Trump of not being serious.

* You can do a lot of stuff in a Latin American prison that you can’t do in an American prison.

Mel Gibson’s movie “Get the Gringo” is pretty informative: the traditional rule was that the prisoners can’t leave but anybody else in town could bribe their way in — e.g., prostitutes, families, cable TV hook-up guys, carnival ride operators, or gangsters needing a place to hole up from the law. Latin American prisons tend to be vibrant!

* Israel seems to have a booming high-tech sector without importing so much as a single Indian. So why does America need them? The Ashkenazi-White IQ gap isn’t that big.

* Lots of Israeli tech workers in America too, though they are unlikely to be at the low end of IT jobs. America is the tech workshop of the world, so every ambitious tech person wants to be there. Anywhere else (India definitely, Israel too) is a backwater doing grunt work.

* The whole world has noticed that America is now a nation of beta pushovers who have bent so far over backward they can see the other side. Women get whatever they want by simply demanding it “It’s unfair, Unfair, UNFAIR!” There’s no demand too extreme. Why shouldn’t India make demands? It’s unfair! America is descended from Britain and shouldn’t they feel guilty for having ruled India for centuries? No reparations will ever be enough.

* Free trade agreements prohibit India from giving priority to its farmers and local farm products over those produced by foreign countries. The US keeps its farm produce artificially cheap (and extremely competitive) by subsidizing its farmers. That has the effect of killing off agriculture in poor countries (and in India, literally killing off the farmers, many of whom commit suicide because they are unable to pay off their debts.) The percentage of population that is rural is much higher in India (and other poor countries) than it is in your country. But you all don’t see, or care for, the effects of free trade on others, and just raise a hue and cry when it affects you.

Go ahead and elect Trump. Let him roll back all free trade agreements. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

* “The US has a visa waiver program with many countries (typically OECD) which allows you to travel without visas.”

US citizens are free to visit most European countries without a visa, but the US government requires visas for citizens of European countries to visit the US. A pretty glaring non-reciprocity that is often pointed out by Europeans when they visit here.

* One of the driving forces behind unionization was the “sharing of tribal knowledge”. As workers got older and more experienced, they knew more about the equipment and processes and had developed various efficiencies. They had no incentive to give this knowledge away with coworkers. When people were laid off, they needed to show their value above and beyond that of their peers. Only by having union seniority rules (LIFO) could they be cajoled to work as a team and share their knowledge with the new guys.

Now that we are returning to pre-union employment conditions (wholesale replacement of existing workers with cheap alien labor) it would behoove every worker to keep their work practices and procedures secret. As all non-union craft and industrial workers knew in 1890, you need every edge.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, India, Puerto Rico | Comments Off

Why Doesn’t Europe Defend Itself From The Muslim/African Invasion Of Refugees?

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “It’s almost as if Europe should have policies in place to defend itself from being overrun by guys in shiny tracksuits so that it doesn’t really matter what Putin is up to with regard to immigration in Western Europe.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Basically anti-immigrationists are to be regarded like communists in the Cold war, as Russia’s potential fifth column. Really perverse how the nation-wreckers are trying to cloak their project in the language of patriotism.

* It’s almost as if nobody has any idea what is going on besides the people rushing in for free stuff and unprosecuted rapes.

NEWSFLASH:

People respond to incentives. Stop incentivizing crime, start enforcing laws.

For the love of god, Europeans take back your countries and restore order.

For the future well-being of the world to be ensured, the future well-being of European ancestry countries must be ensured.

Europeans brought the modern world into existence. If European ancestry countries decay, so goes the world. If Europeans flourish, the world flourishes.

* “Russians are messing with our patriotic duty to abolish ourselves!!!”

But the irony.

During the Cold War, the West encouraged nationalism in Eastern Europe to undermine Soviet domination.

Now, Russia is encouraging nationalism in the West to undermine EU domination.

But for real patriots, Putin is doing them a favor.

A scream that says WAKE UP, DAMMIES!!!

Posted in Europe | Comments Off