Policy Review: A vs. E:

 Let us consider an imaginary university system, the Generic State University System.  Their board of regents is trying to decide between two policies for admitting students to degree programs whose graduates typically become wealthy professionals such as (but not limited to) engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, and the like.  Their foremost goal is to increase black participation in these professions, where they are underrepresented.

Policy A will result in a mean of 60 out of every 100 black applicants to these college programs being admitted, and about 16 of those sixty graduating and joining these well-paid professions.

Policy E will result in a mean of 30 out of every 100 black applicants being admitted, and about 24 of those 30 graduating and joining these well-paid professions.

Now, which of these policies is better for the black community?  I would argue that Policy E is better for the black community, because it results in 50% more blacks entering these well paid professions where they are currently underrepresented.

Which policy is better for everyone else?  That's also Policy E.  The number of available slots for admission to the GSU system is limited.  With Policy A, more freshmen in the GSU system will never graduate.  Those freshman slots are wasted when the students who filled them drop out.  They represent people of all other races who could have entered those professions and provided services to the rest of society, who now are stuck in lower-paid, less valuable work.  With Policy E, fewer slots are taken up by people who won't graduate, instead of more.  And with policy E, there are more highly qualified professionals providing valuable services to the community, both among blacks and among everyone else.

Policy A is affirmative action.  Basically, the rule is that a black student doesn't have to be as good as others to be ADMITTED to a university, but still has to be as good to graduate.  Blacks who would have a very good chance of graduating from (e.g.) University of California at Irvine or UC Santa Cruz, because they're smarter than 80% of the general population, and going on to a successful career, instead would be admitted to (e.g.) UC Berkeley or UCLA, which are geared to challenge students smarter than 99% of the population, where most people only(!) in the 80th percentile would fail, regardless of race.

In 1996, Californians passed an amendment to their state constitution, forbidding use of race in choosing how to fill any sort of government opportunity, including college and university admissions.  

That resulted in Policy E, or Equal Opportunity at the University of California system, in which people get opportunities based on how well they perform against a set of objective criteria, like SAT and ACT scores, high school grades and transcripts, and extracurricular load.  This is also what happens in sports, where the NFL, NBA, and MLB, not to mention track and field, all see blacks outperforming whites, and they do so according to objective criteria.

Four years after this amendment was passed, when the blacks who entered the UC system under this policy first started graduating, the number of black graduates increased by 55%, and they graduated with higher grades and in more challenging fields than under affirmative action.  

Unfortunately for the blacks and everyone else who benefited from equal opportunity, the California state legislature is trying to get the equal opportunity amendment to the California state constitution repealed.

Don't do it, California!

On infanticide (blogrollin')

There is apparently a pair of bioethicists who claim it is moral to perform post-birth abortions, which are somehow not the same thing as infanticide, in spite of both being the act of intentionally slaying an infant member of the species Homo Sapiens. I have no intention of linking to the article. Rather, I link to William Briggs' most excellent fisking, in which he points out the myriad of fallacies, false premises, non sequiturs, and most important, their failure to point out with anything approaching precision when infanticide becomes moral.

Salute to John C. Wright, comments further.

New Site

I've put a new site in my Catholic Links sidebar, the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, which explains how recent advances in cosmology and physics provide strong support for the ontological proof for God, which has been discounted and marginalized ever since Immanuel Kant. Read and enjoy.

In Which I Remain Too Lazy to Create Content of My Own

I refer you to this column by David Warren. Tolle, legge. It is a delight.

Progressivism and Intelligence

Salute to The Western Confucian.

A peer-reviewed journal, Intelligence, has published a study that shows that conservative (that is to say, traditionalist) values negatively correlate with high scores on SATs, when one statistically analyzes the aggregates. Here is a piece analyzing the study and common liberal ivory-tower attitudes.

The short form: While it requires a certain level of intelligence to break from tradition, it does not follow, nor do the data demonstrate, that the majority of intelligent people do so, or so do permanently. It is entirely possible that the lowest 3 quintiles are 90% conservative, and the upper two are 75% conservative.

Super short form: Just because most "progressives" are high-IQ people, doesn't mean that most high-IQ people are "progressives."

Gay Adoption

Here's something our Cultural Elites will bury as deeply as they can, because it reveals how powerfully they are bound and allied to the Culture of Death. Don't read it unless you have a strong stomach.

Our cultural and political elites serve Moloch. This is just another example of them sacrificing children to the Culture of Death. Allowing homosexuals to adopt children is one more stream of children being led to the altar.

The Global Warming Hoax

from Catholic Exchange:

And how do you propose to regulate the earth’s temperature when as much as 3/4 of the variability is due to variations in solar activity, with the remaining 1/4 due to changes in the earth’s orbit, axis, and albedo (reflectivity)? This truly is “mission impossible.” Mankind can no more regulate earth’s temperature than the tides.

Even if the “greenhouse effect” were greater than it actually is, the EPA and Congress would be powerless to alter it for several reasons:

1. Human activity (according to NASA data) accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO2 emissions.

2. CO2 itself accounts for only 10 or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect. (This discloses the capricious nature of EPA’s decision to classify CO2 as a pollutant, for if CO2 is a pollutant because it is a greenhouse gas, then the most common greenhouse gas of all—water vapor, which accounts for almost 3/4 of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect—should be regulated, too. The EPA isn’t going after water vapor, of course, because then everyone would realize how absurd climate-control regulation really is.)

3. Even if Americans were to eliminate their CO2 emissions completely, total human emissions of CO2 would still increase as billions of people around the world continue to develop economically.

The actual motivation behind the global warming scare is power, pure and simple. If one can demand that energy production be reduced, one can, in essence, demand that those of us who are not poor become so, and that the poor die earlier and more frequently.

In other words, it is the culture of death, all over again.

Academic Freedom

I found a link to this movie on LewRockwell.com, where I was reading some of the Western Confucian's essays. While it may or may not be as biased as any of Michael Moore's so-called "documentaries," it surely deserves as much attention. I hope it gets it.

In it, Ben Stein records his investigation of the Intelligent Design movement. He makes the claim that their work is suppressed on the basis of the conclusions they reach instead of their data or methodology. The trailer does not make the case, but then, it isn't supposed to; it's supposed to get people to go see the film.

If Mr. Stein is correct, I think that's unfortunate, though hardly surprising. Every subsidy given to academics has had the net effect of making them beholden to government, and government is always far more likely to be freedom's enemy than its guardian. And from my own knowledge, admittedly mostly anecdotal, nearly every academic discipline has its own acceptable orthodoxy and tolerates no dissent outside of narrow variations.

In his novel Bug Park, hard science fiction author James P. Hogan asserts, through one of his characters, that such orthodoxies only truly die when most or all of their adherents do, and that science is stifled greatly thereby. It wouldn't surprise me if Hogan is correct, and that Mr. Stein is merely finding another example of it.