"WASPs" vs. Jews, notes 4

Michael J. Powell essentially summarizing Baltzell on the formation of the previous American upper class:

In the latter half of the nineteenth century a new American establishment was forged from the union of the old colonial upper class and the new families of wealth spawned by the industrial age. Whereas the old upper class was essentially defined by lineage and, particularly in the South, ownership of large estates, the new upper class was based upon the possession of wealth as it was accumulated by the great industrialists and financiers of the nineteenth century. Parvenu families such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the Mellons and the Vanderbilts, were quickly accepted and incorporated into this new aristocracy. While the old upper class was largely regional in nature, composed of established families of local note, the new upper class took on a national character as the industrial empires built by its members knew no local or regional limits, and as newly constructed national systems of communication and transportation encourage its integration. Yet it was heavily biased toward the Northeast, especially with the eclipse of the South following the Civil War and the rise of the industrial cities in the North. In particular, New York City, the preeminent financial and commercial center of the reconstituted nation, was its base. Even though it contained internal divisions that hindered its exercise of power, this Northeastern establishment came to dominate the Republican party and exercise an inordinate influence on national and local affairs well into the twentieth century.

Threatened by rapid urbanization and an influx of immigrants, the old New England gentry and the new industrial and financial magnates combined to establish a variety of exclusive upper-class associations during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The exclusive country clubs of the suburbs and men's clubs of the cities, the fashionable summer resorts, the boarding preparatory schools, and the Social Register were new upper-class institutions that gave cohesiveness and identity to this new associational aristocracy. These "patrician protective associations," as Baltzell refers to them, were formed primarily for the purpose of sheltering the upper class from the undesirable elements flooding into the Northeastern cities. They also served to transmit upper-class cultures and assimilate newcomers. Behind the walls of these exclusive associations the upper class could maintain its cultural and ethnic homogeneity.

The inclusiveness of this new upper class was strictly limited to persons whose ascriptive characteristics and religious affiliations were the same as those of the old New England families: white and Anglo-Saxon by birth, and Protestant by baptism (WASP). The exclusive upper-class suburbs and summer resorts and country clubs explicitly kept out those without the right parentage and religion no matter what their wealthy or position. Successful Jewish financiers and businessmen found the doors of the prestigious city clubs closed to them, forcing them to form their own. Indeed, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a resurgence of anti-Semitic sentiment among the WASP establishment coincidental with the rising flood tide of immigration. The new American upper class may have been more open than its European equivalents, but it was open only to those who were white, of North European stock, and Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Congregationalist.

[From Patrician to Professional Elite: The Transformation of the New York City Bar Association. pp. 3-4]

Diversity in the Power Elite Richard L. Zweigenhaft, G. William Domhoff:

[p. 8:]
Nonetheless, the fact remains that over 40 percent of other white Americans held clearly anti-Semitic views until the years after World War II, when the full extent of the Holocaust became widely known. As late as the 1940s, there were quotas on the number of Jews who were allowed to attend elite private colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and successful Jewish business leaders were not permitted to join gentile social clubs until the civil rights movement highlighted the extent of all forms of discrimination. For example, it was not until 1977 that the most exclusive downtown club in Los Angeles accepted Jewish members, a change that was accomplished in a hurry when Harold Brown, the Jewish president of the California Institute of Technology, was selected to be the secretary of defense by the newly elected Jimmy Carter.

[p. 18:]
When C. Wright Mills examined the backgrounds of the "very rich" in 1900, 1925, and 1950, he found no support for the prevailing myth that most were the sons of immigrants who had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Instead, the data led Mills to the following characterization: "American-born, city-bred, eastern-originated, the very rich have been from families of higher class status, and, like other members of the new and old upper classes of local society . . . they have been Protestants. Moreover, about half have been Episcopalians, and a fourth, Presbyterians."

The "very rich" identified by Mills were not exactly the same people who occupied positions in the political, corporate, and military elites, but there was, Mills found, considerable overlap, especially between the very rich and the corporate elite. When he looked separately at the men who made up the political, corporate, and military elites, he found, in each case, that most were Protestant, and that they were especially likely to be Episcopalians and Presbyterians. For example, Mills wrote that members of the corporate elite in 1950 were "predominantly Protestant and more likely, in comparison with the proportions at large, to be Episcopalians or Presbyterians than Baptists or Methodists. The Jews and Catholics among them are fewer than among the population at large."

The very rich and the corporate elite also shared one other characteristic that Mills did not mention because of his purposeful neglect of political parties: they were, and still are, overwhelmingly Republican. The relatively few exceptions were wealthy Southern whites, who, until the 1970s, played a major role in the Democratic Party, where they joined with well-to-do Catholics and Jews who were Democrats due to the virulent prejudices of the Protestant rich in the first sixty years of the twentieth century.

[pp. 22-23:]
The data based on distinctive Jewish names provide only an estimate of the percentage of Jews on corporate boards. Still, as table 2.2 shows, these findings, along with other findings reported in this section, demonstrate that as the percentage of Jews in America declined steadily in the twentieth century, the percentage of Jews on corporate boards increased. Jews are most certainly overrepresented in the corporate elite.

[p. 38:]
Although Jews may still be underrepresented in some business sectors within the corporate community, the data we have examined reveal that Jews are overrepresented overall in the corporate elite. Jews are also now overrepresented in both the Senate and the House, where they tend to be Democrats.

[p. 39:]
But we have seen that Jews who have made it to the power elite have been likely to assimilate. In contrast to this pattern, however, we did find that recent Jewish senators were less likely than former Jewish senators to have married Gentiles.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, notes 3

I like standardized tests and I'm not a fan of E. Michael Jones, but I found this interesting.

In the early 1950s Stanley H. Kaplan, a graduate of City College of New York, who in spite of his good grades couldn’t get a job, set up a small tutoring operation in a modest building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Kaplan capitalized on Jewish educational aspirations at a time when the SAT had firmly established itself as the official rite of passage for entry into the colleges that granted access to the top positions in the American meritocracy. The WASP ruling class under Henry Chauncey’s direction had created what it thought was an uncoachable test that measured pure mental ability. The Jew Kaplan was smart enough to see through WASP pretentions and come up with a system that guaranteed better test results. The system was so simple that it hardly qualifies as a system at all. In the days when the blueprint for building the atomic bomb was an open secret compared to the questions on the SAT test, Kaplan came up with a simple but ingenious way to subvert the system. After each class graduated from Kaplan’s school and took the test, he would invite them back to celebrate with hot dogs and root beer; admission to the party was gained by having each student tell Kaplan one question he remembered from taking the test. The net result of Kaplan’s parties was a list of the questions that his students would face when taking the SATs. If Kaplan tutored five classes of fifty students in one year, at the end of that year he had 250 questions. By the time Kaplan sold his test-prep business to the Washington Post company in the ‘70s, for $50 million he had over 30 years experience in gathering questions, which meant he could tell his students with increasing accuracy the answers to those questions as well. Jewish scores on the SATs rose accordingly, as did Jewish admission to the prestigious colleges that had established quotas to keep them out in the early 20th century. It is unlikely that people like Conant and Chauncey and Brigham considered Jews from Brooklyn the candidates most likely to fulfill Jefferson’s ideal of the natural aristocrat, but they were the main beneficiaries of the system that Chauncey and Conant put in place to rescue nature’s aristocrats from the rubbish that the SAT was raking through in the period following World War II. The WASP faith in “science,” based as it was on the idea of noblesse oblige they had learned at schools like Groton, proved no match for clever Jews from Brooklyn, who quickly filled the slots the WASPs had reserved for nature’s aristocrats in the meritocracy. Harvard University can now boast of a faculty and student body that is between 30 and 40 percent Jewish. The type of people that Carl Brigham thought his test would exclude, because they weren’t particularly intelligent, ending up using his test to take over America’s elite universities. Once that happened it was only a matter of time before they took over American culture as well, something that occurred in the mid-‘70s, just as opposition to the SATs was reaching a fever pitch. Perhaps the most visible Jew at Harvard is Alan Dershowitz, who grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and is currently the world’s foremost apologist for Zionism, torture, and targeted assassination. Dershowitz was recently involved in a knock-down-drag-out fight with Norman Finklestein, another Jew from Borough Park, when he waged a nation-wide publicity campaign to deny Finkelstein tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.

[. . .]

As the ‘70s progressed the subversion continued, but because ETS refused to acknowledge what was going on, they played into the hands of Jews like Kaplan and his successor, the founder of Princeton Review, John Katzman. By refusing to acknowledge that people like Kaplan and Katzman could in fact raise test scores by their coaching, ETS unwittingly allowed a generation of cheaters into the meritocracy. This was most certainly not what Conant and Chauncey had in mind when they began promoting the test, but intention is no match for the cunning of reason or the cunning of history, which has its own laws that function according to ways high above human intention.

In 1977, David Halperin, a state senator from Brooklyn introduced the New York State truth-in-testing bill because, as “one of the striving Jewish boys tutored for the SAT by Stanley Kaplan,” he felt that it was unfair that he not only recognized many of the questions but also knew the answers to them when he took the SATs. Halperin’s solution was to make the questions public, something which happened when the bill he co-sponsored was passed by the New York legislature. In doing that, Halperin effectively kicked over the secret ladder that had been used to subvert the tests and insured that no one else who took the prep courses after 1977 would have the advantages that the Jews had had up until that time.

[. . .]

But the short and abortive career of Professor McGreevey as a Catholic intellectual brings up the further question, “what is anyone allowed to say?” What is the tattered remnant of the WASP ruling class allowed to say? What are Harvard professors allowed to say? John McGreevey was a professor at Harvard before he cast his lot with Notre Dame, the Realschule where Catholic bean-counters and FBI agents get their marching orders. But he was a Catholic, you say? Well, what about Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, certified members of the academic establishment who teach at Harvard and the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago. What are they allowed to say? What about Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States? What is he allowed to say? What about Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish pariah? What is he allowed to say? The answer to that question is, “Anything that Alan Dershowitz finds acceptable.” The answer to all of the other questions is “Anything powerful Jews find acceptable.” But even that falls short by way of explanation because the American imperial juggernaut at this point in time is the closest thing the human mind has come to creating the perpetual motion machine. Jews most certainly are “masters of discourse,” as Israel Shamir claims, but the empire is a runaway locomotive with no one at the throttle. Think of public education for a moment. It is a juggernaut that has grown so big and powerful that no one is powerful enough to reform it. It has become a cancer in the American body politic and will only stop growing when the body nurturing it dies.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, notes 2

Audacious Epigone presents data showing Episcopalians average higher IQs than Jews while earning much less. Jews apparently earn much more than their IQs would predict, while Episcopalians earn less.

Looking at GSS data from 1996-2006, it appears only 52/132 = 39.4% of Episcopalians report "England & Wales" ancestry, only around 3/4 of those raised Episcopalian remain Episcopalian, and only around 2/3 of Episcopalians were raised Episcopalian. In other words, Episcopalians don't represent some sort of separate, endogamous breeding group, but merely a self-selecting subset of white Americans. For example, the GSS dataset shows 7 individuals with average 7.43 wordsum who were raised Southern Baptist and are now Episcopalian, and 5 individuals with average wordsum of 5.75 who were raised Episcopalian and are now Southern Baptist.

Update: Inductivist links to this analysis of NLSY data showing that at any given level of IQ White Males earn less than male Jews.

"WASPs" vs. Jews, notes 1

[Reposted from elsewhere.]

Nathaniel Weyl's calculations show Jews rather dramatically underrepresented in the Social Register as of 1984.

Performance Coefficient - National Name Group
763 Puritan + Old Dutch
328 English Clerical
210 Welsh
165 English
144 Scottish
[100 national average]
95 Dutch
93 Irish
71 German
71 French
64 Swedish
49 Scandinavian
45 Danish
14 Jews
6 Spanish
[Adapted from The Geography of American Achievement, p. 35]

Weyl: 'These coefficients reveal the perhaps not surprising fact that the social elite represents the ethnic and nationals stocks with "old money" and suggests that the Social Register remains a rampart against the winds of change.'

Especially considering Jews were dramatically overrepresented in most indexes of achievement by this time, it's clear no heightened affinity exists between Jews and the old upper class -- just the opposite. One of Baltzell's primary purposes in writing The Protestant Establishment is to flog "WASPs" for their "anti-Semitism".

While La Guardia's sense of social inferiority was primarily a product of his Italian-American origins, it is important to note that he was partly Jewish. And as far as Jews are concerned, once again we find the 1880's a dividing line. While sporadic and idiosyncratic anti-Semitism had been characteristic of the gentile gentleman's code since Colonial times, it was only in the 1880's, when the flood tides of immigration began to rise, that upper-class anti-Semitism gradually became rigid and institutionalized.

[p. 32]

[Bernard Baruch] was never accepted either on The Street or uptown in the sociey to which his affluence and ability as well as his handsomeness and engaging manner might have led him. Though he has always been listed in the Social Register and many of his and his wife's friends were of the upper-class world, the Baruchs were faced with such humiliations as their daughter's being refused admission into a dancing class which her mother had once attended.

[p. 33]

Except for the captains of industry, whose money-centered minds continued to welcome and encourage immigration because they believed it kept wages down and retarded unionization, most old-stock Americans were frankly appalled at the growing evils of industrialization, immigration and urbanization. As we have seen, the closing decades of the nineteenth century were marked by labor unrest and violence; many men, like Henry Adams, developed a violent nativism and anti-Semitism; others, following the lead of Jane Addams, discovered the slums and went to work to alleviate the evils of prostitution, disease, crime, political bossism and grinding poverty; both Midwestern Populism and the Eastern, patrician-led Progressive movement were part of the general protest and were, in turn, infused with varying degrees of nativism; [. . .]

In so many ways, nativism was part of a more generalized anti-urban and anti-capitalist mood. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is often allied with an antipathy toward the city and the money-power. Thus the first mass manifestations of anti-Semitism in America came out of the Midwest among the Populist leaders and their followers. In the campaign of 1896, for example, William Jennings Bryan was acused of anti-Semitism and had to explain to the Jewish Democrats of Chicago that in denouncing the policies of Wall Street and the Rothschilds [. . .]

Nativism was also a part of a status revolution at the elite level of leadershiop on the Eastern Seaboard. "The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters of the great corporations," wrote Richard Ofstadter, "were bypassing the men of the Mugwump type--the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era. In scores of cities and hundreds of towns, particularly in the East but also in the nation at large, the old-family, college-educated class that had deep ancestral roots in local communities and oftend owned family businesses, that had traditions of political leadership, belonged to the patriotic societies and the best clubs, staffed the government boards of philanthropic and cultural institutions, and led the movements for civic betterment, were being overshadowed and edged saside in making basic political and economic decisions. . . . They were less important and they knew it."

Many members of this class, of old-stock prestige and waning power, eventually allied themselves with the Progressive movement. Many also, like Henry Adams, withdrew almost entirely from the world of power. The "decent people," as Edith Wharton once put it, increasingly "fell back on sport and culture." And this sport and culture was now to be reinforced by a series of fashionable and patrician protective associations which, in turn, systematically and subtly institutionalized the exclusion of Jews.

The turning point came in the 1880's, when a number of symbolic events forecast the nature of the American upper class in the twentieth century. Thus, when President Eliot of Harvard built his summer cottage at Northeast Harbor, Maine, in 1881, the exclusive summer resort trend was well under way; the founding of The Country Club at Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1882, marked the beginning of the country-club trend; the founding of the Sons of the Revolution, in 1883, symbolized the birht of the genealogical fad and the patrician scramble for old-stock roots; Endicott Peabody's founding of Groton School, in 1884, in order to rear young gentement in the tradition of British public schools (and incidentally to protect them from teh increasing heterogeneity of the public school system) was an important symbol of both upper-class exclusiveness and patrician Anglophilia; and finally, the Social Register, a convenient index of this new associational aristocracy, was first issued toward the end of this transitional decade in 1887 (the publisher also handled much of the literature of the American Protective Associationl which was active in the nativist movement at that time).

The Right Reverend Phillips Brooks--the favorite clergyman among Philadelphia's Victorian gentry, who was called to Boston's Triniy Church in 1869 [. . .] was one of the most sensistive barometers of the brahmin mind. Thus, although he himself had graduated from the Boston Latin School along with other patricians and plebeian gentlemen of his generation, he first suggested the idea of Groton to young Peabody in the eighties and joined the Sons of the Revolution in 1891, because, as he said at the time, "it is well to go in for the assertion that our dear land at least used to be American."

[E. Digby Baltzell. The Protestant Establishment. pp. 111-113]

RE: notion that the roster of the Council on Foreign Relations is filled with "just the mix of old WASP names and Ashkenazic Jewish ones that MM identifies as composing the present American socioeconomic elite."

Ethnic/geographic origins of the CFR directors:

Co-Chairman of the Board Carla A. Hills - born in Los Angeles, perhaps "WASP" in a broad sense, but not obviously of the old Eastern establishment
Co-Chairman of the Board Robert E. Rubin - Jew
Vice Chairman Alexandre Louise Mohan - Jew (unless it's a Francophone subcon)
President Richard N. Haass - Jew
Board of Directors
Peter Ackerman - Jew
Fouad Ajami - Lebanese
Madeleine Albright - Jew
Charlene Barshefsky - Jew
Henry Bienen - Jew
Alan Blinder - Jew
Stephen W. Bosworth - born in Michigan
Tom Brokaw - born in South Dakota; Irish mother
Sylvia Mathews Burwell - "Born and raised in Hinton, West Virginia, into a Greek-American family"
Frank J. Caufield - California venture capitalist; could conceivably be of Irish Catholic descent
Kenneth Duberstein - Jew
Martin Feldstein - Jew
Richard N. Foster - unable to confirm birthplace; possibly New England
Stephen Friedman - Jew
Ann M. Fudge - Negress
Helene D. Gayle - Negress
Maurice R. Greenberg - Jew
J. Tomilson Hill - ?
Richard Holbrooke - Jew
Karen Elliott House - "A native of Matador, Texas, [pop.: 740]"; Irish-surnamed mother; married to a Jew
Alberto Ibargüen - Cuban / Puerto Rican
Shirley Ann Jackson - Negress
Henry Kravis - Jew
Jami Miscik - Czech?
Michael H. Moskow - Jew
Joseph Nye - New Jersey
Ronald L. Olson - Swedish-surnamed Midwesterner
James W. Owens - "a native of Elizabeth City, North Carolina"
Colin Powell - Negro
David Rubenstein - Jew
George E. Rupp - "born in Summit, New Jersey, the son of [German] immigrant parents"
Anne-Marie Slaughter - "raised in Charlottesville, Virginia by her American father and Belgian mother"
Joan E. Spero - Jew
Vin Weber - Minnesota; Catholic
Christine Todd Whitman - New York
Fareed Zakaria - Indian

I see no more than four directors -- Whitman, Nye, Foster, and Tomilson -- who could potentially resemble the Northeastern "WASP" stereotype.

Meanwhile, I count 17 Jews, 4 blacks, 1 Hindu Muslim, 1 Hispanic, 1 Arab, 1 Greek, 1 Czech, 10 other whites (two of those being offspring of immigrants).

17/40 = 42.5% of CFR board members are Jewish, versus about 2.2% of the U.S. population.

16/40 = 40% of board members appear to be of European descent, meaning whites are substantially underrepresented.


RE: intermarriage

"The Jewish-Catholic Connection":

Special To The Jewish Week
A few months ago, Pope Benedict XVI, decked out in trademark white robes and white skullcap, became the first pontiff to enter an American synagogue.

The visit to Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue — where the pontiff apparently opened his speech with a “shalom” — was an indicator of how, despite some stumbling blocks, Catholic-Jewish relations have never been better.

The same might be said for Catholic-Jewish relationships.
Since my husband, Joe, is a lapsed Catholic, my radar is always up for Jewish-Catholic marriages. However, in two years of writing this column, I have not had to look far for examples of such couplings: whether the topic is gentiles at the seder table or women who convert to Judaism after many years of marriage, virtually every interfaith family I encounter is Jewish-Catholic. And the same is true in my social circle and extended family, despite the occasional Jewish-Protestant or Jewish-Hindu pairing.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this Catholic-Jewish attraction. Suzette Cohen, a longtime facilitator in Atlanta of the Mothers Circle, a program for non-Jewish women raising Jewish children, estimates that at least 60 percent of her participants are Catholic or formerly Catholic even though she’s “in Georgia, a Baptist part of the world.”

In his recent book, “The New American Judaism: The Way Forward on Challenging Issues From Intermarriage to Jewish Identity” (Palgrave Macmillan), Rabbi Arthur Blecher notes that in the approximately 1,000 Washington, D.C.-area interfaith couples he has interviewed in the past two decades, slightly more than half of the gentile spouses were Catholic. “It made no difference whether a man or woman was the Jewish partner,” he writes, adding later that Jews and Catholics share a “social affinity.”

The U.S. Religion Landscape Survey released this spring by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life also confirmed the trend, finding that 12 percent of married Jews have Catholic spouses, while only 7 percent have Protestant spouses (the rest are married to Jews, atheists or people of other faiths). That’s in spite of the fact that American Protestants outnumber American Catholics nearly 2 to 1.

Religions of CEOs of large American companies -- 1917 vs. 1997

Source: The American CEO in the Twentieth Century: Demography and Career Path

For comparison, according to a 2001 survey [1]:
1.3% of Americans identify as (religiously) Jewish (although it's typically claimed ethnic Jews account for something like 2.2% of the U.S. population);
24.5% identify as Catholics;
1.7% identify as Episcopalian;
2.7% identify as Presbyterian; and
6.8% identify as Methodist

Note that Jews are overrepresented in the 1997 sample by a factor of 10. Catholics are overrepresented to a lesser degree. While some mainline Protestant denominations maintain above average representation, Protestants as a whole are underrepresented; keep in mind that in no sense do, e.g., Episcopalians form an endogamous caste, whereas Jews obviously do.

[1] Kosmin et al. (2001). "American Religious Identification Survey, 2001" (pdf)

Old rich more conservative than new rich

The Myth of Old Money Liberalism: The Politics of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans (pdf):

In the sociology of the capitalist class, no concept is more widely accepted as a framework for explaining political and ideological differences among owners of great wealth than the distinction between old money and new money. According to the conventional view, old money tends toward political liberalism (or, at least, toward a moderate and mildly reformist variant of conservatism), while new money is inclined to embrace more hard-line conservative views. [. . .] As with many tenets of the received wisdom in social science, the empirical evidence for this view turns out, upon close inspection, to be virtually non-existent. During the last half century, the widespread acceptance of the thesis has rested on little more than a handful of highly selective examples. Subjecting this thesis to empirical test, as I do in this paper, reveals no evidence of greater liberalism on the part of old money and no support for the claim that right-wing conservatism is more often embraced by the new rich than by inheritors of established wealth. If anything, the evidence is more consistent with the opposite view.

As already noted, evidence to support the thesis of old money liberalism, when any is given, typically takes the form of confirmation through the selective citing of individual cases. For example, Franklin Roosevelt is routinely cited as evidence of the liberal predisposition of old money. The fact that Roosevelt was almost universally loathed within aristocratic circles as a “traitor to his class” (Aldrich 1988:227, 238) and bitterly opposed by a phalanx of du Ponts, Mellons, Pews, Harknesses, Aldriches, Pratts, and even Roosevelts within the ranks of the arch-conservative American Liberty League (Wolfskill 1962) is for some reason not seen as a problem for theory. To demonstrate the right-wing proclivities of the nouveaux riches it usually suffices to mention a Texas oil millionaire or two who have bankrolled right-wing causes (Sale 1975:160) or to assemble a list of a dozen new rich supporters of Ronald Reagan (Davis 1981:39–40). Whether these cases are representative of new wealth in general or whether a comparable list of old rich supporters of right-wing causes and candidates might just as easily have been assembled are never seriously considered.

Michael Allen and Philip Broyles (1989) studied the presidential campaign contributions of 629 members of 100 wealthy capitalist families in 1972. Most of the persons included in their sample would qualify as “old rich,” with the majority being third or fourth generation heirs. Allen and Broyles found that most members of these wealthy capitalist families contributed overwhelmingly to the Republican Party, with Democratic Party supporters being common only among the small minority of Jewish and Southern families.

[. . .]

In a series of studies, G. William Domhoff (1972, 1990) has examined the characteristics of wealthy contributors to the Democratic Party. Although he has not looked specifically at the question of partisan differences between new and old money, certain of his findings may have relevance for this topic. Like Allen and Broyles (1989), he has consistently found Jewish capitalists to be over-represented among big Democratic Party donors. 2 If one assumes, as seems plausible, that old wealth tends to be more uniformly WASP in composition, while new wealth includes a larger share of religious and ethnic minorities, then (other things being equal) the greater proportion of Democratic Party supporters among Jewish capitalists should mitigate any tendency toward right-wing Republicanism among the new rich.

[. . .]

To test the thesis of old money liberalism, I chose as my sample all persons listed by Forbes magazine as among the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1995 through 1997. The Forbes list is well-suited for this purpose since it includes numerous representatives of old established families like the Rockefellers, du Ponts, Mellons, and Pews, as well as those among the latest generation of self-made millionaires who have been successful enough to match the former in net wealth. Drawing upon the research of Elwood, et al. (1997), I classified each of these persons into one of three categories: 1) New Rich were defined as those whose parents did not have substantial wealth or own a business worth more than $1 million. 2) Rising Rich were defined as those who inherited small businesses or wealth worth more than $1 million, but insufficient to place them on the Forbes list without a significant increase in their wealth during their lifetimes (usually a result of their success in building a small business into a large corporation). 3) Old Rich were defined as those who were born into wealth sufficient to place them on the Forbes 400 list.

[. . .]

As shown in Figure 1, the new rich contributed an average of two dollars to Democratic candidates for every three dollars contributed to Republicans. The old rich contributed roughly one dollar to Democrats for every three dollars contributed to Republicans. The average for the rising rich lay between these two extremes. 6 This pattern is precisely the opposite of what the thesis of old money liberalism would predict.

Since averages can sometimes be deceiving, I also divided the sample into five discrete categories of political partisanship: 1) Strong Republicans were defined as those who contributed 90% or more to Republican candidates. 2) Republicans were defined as those who contributed between 70% and 90% to Republicans. 3) Bipartisans were defined as those who contributed between 30% and 70% to each party. 4) Democrats were defined as those who contributed between 70% and 90% to Democratic candidates. 5) Strong Democrats were defined as those who contributed 90% or more to Democrats. Figure 2 shows the breakdown of the new rich and old rich into these five categories of partisanship. As shown here, strong Republican partisans accounted for 59% of the old rich, but only 36% of the new rich. Conversely, strong Democratic partisans accounted for 20% of the new rich, but only 13% of the old rich. Almost half the new rich were in either the Democratic or bipartisan categories—a surprising finding, considering the reputation of the Republicans as the traditional party of wealth and the reputation of the new rich as the most conservative, anti-tax, anti-union, anti-welfare segment of the upper class. This, again, is precisely the opposite of what the thesis of old money liberalism would predict.

As an alternative measure of old money status, I identified those members of the Forbes 400 who were listed in the Social Register. The Social Register is widely used as an indicator of the inclusion of individuals within the exclusive social circles of the upper class—circles that are typically closed to first- or second-generation wealth (Domhoff 1967:13–16). Although far from a perfect indicator, it provides an independent measure that defines old money from a sociological, rather than a purely economic standpoint. There were 51 persons in the sample who were listed in the Social Register or whose immediate family members were listed. On average, these persons gave 82% of their campaign contributions to Republican candidates— even higher than the average for the old rich defined in economic terms. Strong Republican partisans accounted for 75% of this group—also higher than the old rich defined in economic terms. Only 10% of those listed in the Social Register qualified as strong Democrats.

Finally, since much of the literature on old and new money is concerned with understanding the backgrounds and motivations of that small minority of the wealthy who are highly active in politics, I gave special attention to those within the sample who exhibited the highest levels of political involvement. First, I looked at those among the strong Republicans and strong Democrats who contributed in excess of $100,000 to their chosen party. Among the old rich, Republican large donors outnumbered Democratic large donors by 12 to 2. Among the new rich, Democratic large donors outnumbered Republican large donors by 18 to 17. Thus, the more one moves toward the extremes of political partisanship, the more implausible the thesis of old money liberalism becomes.

Next, I examined in greater depth those individuals in the sample for whom I found substantial evidence of liberal or right-wing activism that went beyond making contributions to political candidates. Four persons stood out as the strongest liberals within the Forbes 400. These were George Soros, David Geffen, Warren Buffett, and Susan Buffett. All four are new rich.

Note that both of the "strongest liberals" besides the Buffetts are Jews.

The most right-wing members of the Forbes 400 are Richard Mellon Scaife, Roger Milliken, David Koch, Charles Koch, and Richard DeVos. Scaife, Milliken, and the Kochs are old rich, while DeVos is new rich.

While none of the "most right-wing" five are Jews.

In summary, contrary to the thesis of old money liberalism, none of the liberal activists among the Forbes 400 are old rich, while all but one of the right-wing activists are inheritors of great wealth. Hence, whether one looks at the overall pattern of political partisanship revealed by campaign contributions, the breakdown of the very biggest political donors, or the characteristics of persons who occupy the left and right political extremes within the upper class, the evidence consistently shows that old money is more—not less—conservative than new money.

Does this conclusion also apply to earlier decades? An analysis of similar samples of wealthy individuals from 1956, 1972, and 1980 suggests that it does. [. . .]

Lacking detailed information on family origins, I used the Social Register as an indicator of old money background. The Social Register is admittedly a fairly restrictive standard that tends to undercount persons of hereditary old wealth. In the 1995–1997 sample, roughly one-third of the old rich were listed in the Social Register. On the other hand, the Social Register rarely errs in the opposite direction by listing persons of new wealth, no matter how great their fortunes. Only 3% of those identified as new rich in 1995–1997 were listed in the Social Register. This guarantees that persons listed in the Social Register will be much more homogeneously old rich than a general sample of wealthy persons. Comparing wealthy persons listed in the Social Register with those who are not listed, will, therefore, tend to underestimate the absolute difference in political behavior between old rich and new rich, but it will, nevertheless, accurately reflect the direction of that difference.

As with the Forbes 400 sample, I used the percentage of political contributions to Republicans versus Democrats as the basic measure of political behavior and ideology. 9 Figure 3 shows the difference in political partisanship between wealthy persons listed in the Social Register and those not listed for each of four years. In 1956, the election year that coincided with the publication of The New American Right , the old rich (those listed in the Social Register ) are shown to be more conservative than the rich in general. In 1972, the election year preceding Kirkpatrick Sale’s (1975) popularization of the Yankee-Cowboy version of the old money liberalism thesis, the old rich are again shown to be more conservative than the rich in general. In 1980, the year in which Ronald Reagan’s election was heralded as a victory for the reputedly reactionary nouveaux riches, the old rich are again shown to be more conservative than the rich in general. These differences in political partisanship are similar in magnitude to those found in the more recent 1995–1997 sample of the Forbes 400 richest Americans.10 The consistency of these findings suggests that the relative conservatism of old money has been a stable feature of American political life for at least the last forty years.

[. . .]

The relative exclusion of the new rich from the social and cultural networks of the old rich has even more pronounced consequences in certain cases. Compared with the old rich, a larger percentage of the new rich are racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. A particularly high number of the new rich come from Jewish backgrounds.12 Black wealth, although it rarely reaches the threshold for the Forbes 400 list, also tends to be new wealth. The slowness with which these minority nouveaux riches are integrated into the predominantly WASP social circles of the upper class makes it more likely that they will retain identification with the traditional party and politics of their group of origin. In the case of Jews and Blacks, this means retaining their identification with the Democratic Party (Isaacs 1974; Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1982). In an earlier period, the same was probably true for the Catholic nouveaux riches. The ostracism that minority nouveaux riches experience within upper-class circles also inclines them to prioritize issues of racial justice, civil liberties, and religious tolerance over pure economic self-interest.

That's one way of putting it.

Roughly 29% of the new rich contributors on the Forbes list were Jewish, compared with 18% of the old rich.

I strongly suspect the "old rich" sample minus Jews would be even more Republican.

Jews genetically distinct

Not exactly news, but we do finally get to see European, Jewish, and Middle Eastern samples on the same plot.

This plot seems consistent with the idea of Ashkenazi as Middle Easterners with moderate Southern European (and/or minimal Northern European) admixture.

Need et al. A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans. Genome Biology 2009, 10:R7doi:10.1186/gb-2009-10-1-r7

These analyses make clear that individuals with full Jewish ancestry are a genetically distinct group from those having no (self reported) Jewish ancestry. Of the subjects that self-identified as Jewish and knew their type, almost all were Ashkenazim.

[. . .]

This leaves open the question, however, of why Americans of Jewish ancestry are a distinct group. There are two extreme possibilities: Either the Jewish group reflects ancestry from source populations other than those of non-Jewish Americans, or Jewish populations have undergone bottlenecks that change their genetic makeup.

These possibilities can be distinguished to a degree by comparing the position of the full Ashkenazi Jewish cluster to a series of geographically distributed populations represented by the human genome diversity panel [9]. We found that the full Jewish cluster fell between that of Middle Eastern and European populations. We also compared the average heterozygosity across the set of LD-pruned polymorphisms in those with full Jewish ancestry to those without, and found that the subjects with four Jewish grandparents were, on average, slightly more heterozygous than the subjects with no Jewish ancestry. These data therefore suggest that the Jewish group is distinguished from non-Jewish Europeans more because of their genetic heritage in the Near East than due to population bottlenecks perturbing the genetic composition of Jewish groups.

Nature: "notions of [. . .] race may need revising in the age of personal genomics"

One Aravinda Chakravarti opines in Nature [1]:

Genealogical records are currently the system of choice for people tracing their family history. But in the next decade, we will be able to identify many of our relatives by searching a DNA database of personal genome sequences. There are good reasons for switching to DNA: in general, historical records cover at most the past 500 years; our genomes, in contrast, bear the stamp of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years of history. Even individuals without genealogical records will be able to correctly create a family tree with connections to known relatives, to those they were unaware of, and to relatives so distant that they stretch the meaning of the word ‘family’.

In fact, DNA and traditional genealogy complement one another. The competent researcher will not "switch" to DNA, but will use all available resources to reconstruct relationships. Paper records offer an imperfect and temporally-restricted window into one's ancestry, but DNA has its own weaknesses: "Within historical times, you have ancestors from whom you have no DNA". Genetic material, not being infinitely divisible, is necessarily transmitted in discrete blocks, rendering it impossible even in theory to reconstruct complete pedigrees from an individual's DNA. In practice, even where DNA is transmitted, its informativeness will have limits.

The practical limits of DNA pedigree reconstruction remain to be determined, but even if it proves possible to go back, say, ten generations or more in fairly complete fashion using only DNA of living individuals, such skeletal outlines would prove rather lifeless without names, dates, locations, and historical context.

Of course, on questions of genetic affinity among the living, full genome sequences will ultimately decide.

But speculating about how genotyping or sequencing data will affect genealogy is not really the point of the article. The purpose is, in the words of some Nature editor, to argue that "[o]ur notions of family, population and race may need revising in the age of personal genomics".

Only skin deep
Perhaps the most striking consequence of more and more people having their entire genome examined for genetic variation is the blurring of our concept of discrete human populations. Current thinking, championed by anthropologists and buttressed by old genetic data, is that human populations are intact groups that have had their own language and culture for eons.

Oh, that's the dominant strain of anthropological thought the Boasians have been pushing. I'd thougt they were 100% agreed with Mr. Desi that race is purely a "social construct". And I'm pretty sure it's new genetic data Chakravarti is trying to run damage control on: that is, in the face of genomic data that proves traditional racial classifications are meaningful, scientists must continue to maintain something along the lines of "science proves race doesn't exist". That's the sort of "revising" Chakravarti wants to do.

Currently, the population view dominates in genetics because researchers sample clusters of individuals from distantly related groups. The clearly observable, or measurable, physical and genetic differences between people are especially marked when people from the peripheries of the spectrum of human variation are compared — so, for example, when Africans are compared with Europeans or Asians.

Race has long been a socio-political construct. But by focusing on the effects of natural selection on genes whose effects are visible, and sampling people from the extremes of human diversity, geneticists have unwittingly (and sometimes wittingly) added credence to society’s views on separateness by genetically characterizing racial categories.

Chakravarti tries to imply that natural selection has caused populations to diverge only in genes affecting physical appearance. The actual evidence points elsewhere. See The 10,000 Year Explosion.

However, the current picture emerging from genetic studies is that we are all multiracial, related to each other only to a greater or lesser extent. More detailed data on genetic variation, along with an improved sampling of humanity, are showing continuity in variation across the globe, not abrupt transitions between population-specific sequence patterns. Differential population growth, about 10,000 years ago, based on the evolution of agriculture, technology and politics seems to have made sparse isolates of our species into the ‘major’ groups of today. In other words, except for immigrants, kinship between two humans seems to be directly related to the geographical distance between their birthplaces.

"Peripheral" "sparse isolates" numerically dominating intermediate populations tends to undermine the "clines means race doesn't exist" argument.

An even clearer, and unbiased, picture of humanity’s genetic diversity and relationships would emerge if geneticists focused on individuals instead of populations. This may involve sampling humans randomly across a grid, and then assessing their individual and group features (such as birth place, parental birth places, language and group affiliations). Genome-wide studies carried out in this way could result in individual identity and kinship coming to define populations rather than the other way around. We could test once and for all whether genetic race is a credible concept.

Not a bad idea. Data is good. The more surveys of this sort, the better. Not that I would expect any imaginable result of a study of this sort to affect the substance of the pronouncements of the Chakravartis of the world. This is why:

This would be tremendously exciting. It is bound to stir up our deeply held notions of who we are, where we came from, our history and thus our politics. More often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. In this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society. By dismantling our notions of race and population, we may better appreciate our common, shared and recent history, and perhaps more importantly, our shared future. Overhauling such concepts in the light of genetic research is particularly important if we are to accommodate the changing face of human groups around the world thanks to increased immigration to distant lands. Such migration has happened before, as our genomes show, only slowly, over 150,000 years.

I'm sure I don't need to spell out for you the irony in the above paragraph.

[1] Aravinda Chakravarti. Being Human: Kinship: Race relations. Nature 457, 380-381 (22 January 2009) | doi:10.1038/457380a; Published online 21 January 2009

deCODE update ancestry analysis

According to David Faux:

Any of you who have decodeme data will be pleasantly surprised at the new ancestry features now or soon available. The entire site has a "new look". There appear to be a few rough edges to iron out but now the output is much more in keeping with what one would find at 23andme (e.g., placing your genome on a "spot" best representing your total genome - much like 23andme's Advanced Global Similarity).

Hopefully their new ancestry assignments make more sense than their old ones.

UK racial classifications

Looks like someone forgot to tell GW's countrymen that all Europeans are identically "white". London police radio codes:

Giving evidence in a begging case at Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court, WPC Linda Nicholls said that she saw the defendant stop an IC1 in the street. What, enquired the magistrate, Mr St John Harmsworth, was an IC1? Amid laughter the WPC explained that it was part of a code: "An IC1 is a white man, an IC2 is an Italian, and an IC3 is a West Indian." When WPC Nicholls reverted later in the evidence to more traditional language and said that the defendant had also stopped an Italian, the magistrate, warming to the theme translated: "An IC2".

[. . .]

It is difficult to encompass the world with six groups but the Metropolitan Police assign "white-skinned European types - English, Scottish, Welsh, Scandinavian and Russian" to IC1; "dark-skinned European types - Sardinian, Spanish, Italian" to IC2; "Negroid types - Caribbean, West Indian, African, Nigerian" to IC3; Indians and Pakistanis to IC4; "Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, Siamese" to IC5; and "Arabians, Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans and North Africans" to IC6.

[Lindsay Mackie. Race causes an initial confusion. Wednesday June 14, 1978. guardian.co.uk]

IC1 White - North European
IC2 White - South European
IC3 Black
IC4 Asian
IC5 Chinese, Japanese or any other South East Asian
IC6 Arabic or North African

[Abbreviations - A-Z Glossary of Police Terms]

Rapid Evolution in Icelandic mtDNA Pool

Helgason A, Lalueza-Fox C, Ghosh S, Sigurðardóttir S, Sampietro ML, et al. (2009) Sequences From First Settlers Reveal Rapid Evolution in Icelandic mtDNA Pool. PLoS Genet 5(1): e1000343. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000343

Ancient DNA studies have great potential to shed light on the evolution of populations because they provide the opportunity to sample from the same population at different points in time. However, ancient DNA studies are often based on DNA extracted from only one or a few individuals and, therefore, do not lend themselves to statistical inference. Here, we describe the analysis of a sample of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences from 68 Icelandic skeletal remains that are about 1,000 years old, from the time that Iceland was first settled. We show that the ancient Icelandic mtDNA sequences are more closely related to sequences from contemporary inhabitants of Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia (and several other European populations) than to those from the modern Icelandic population. It appears that the array of sequences carried by the first generations of Icelanders was better preserved in the gene pools of their ancestors than among their modern descendants because of a faster rate of evolution due to genetic drift in the Icelandic mtDNA pool during the last 1,100 years. These results demonstrate the inferential power that can be gained from studies by applying the methods of population genetics to samples of ancient DNA sequences.

Male-Biased Sex Ratios among Billionaires

Cameron EZ, Dalerum F (2009) A Trivers-Willard Effect in Contemporary Humans: Male-Biased Sex Ratios among Billionaires. PLoS ONE 4(1): e4195. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004195

Natural selection should favour the ability of mothers to adjust the sex ratio of offspring in relation to the offspring's potential reproductive success. In polygynous species, mothers in good condition would be advantaged by giving birth to more sons.

[. . .] Here, we take a subset of humans in very good condition: the Forbe's billionaire list.

[. . .] Humans in the highest economic bracket leave more grandchildren through sons than through daughters. Therefore, adaptive variation in sex ratios is expected, and human mothers in the highest economic bracket do give birth to more sons, suggesting similar sex ratio manipulation as seen in other mammals.

Newsweek alarmed about dysgenics

For wildlife:

Researchers see 'evolution in reverse' as hunters kill off prized animals with the biggest antlers and pelts.

Some of the most iconic photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the first conservationists in American politics, show the president posing companionably with the prizes of his trophy hunts. An elephant felled in Africa in 1909 points its tusks skyward; a Cape buffalo, crowned with horns in the shape of a handlebar mustache, slumps in a Kenyan swamp. In North America, he stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and elk, which he called "lordly game" for their majestic antlers. What's remarkable about these photographs is not that they depict a hunter who was also naturalist John Muir's staunchest political ally. It's that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare.

Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers. Africa and Asia still have elephants, but Roosevelt would have regarded most of them as freaks, because they don't have tusks. Researchers describe what's happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

[. . .]

Tusked elephants, like the old dominant males on Ram Mountain, were "genetically 'better' individuals," says Festa-Bianchet. "When you take them systematically out of the population for several years, you end up leaving essentially a bunch of losers doing the breeding."

[Lily Huang. It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny. NEWSWEEK. Published Jan 3, 2009. From the magazine issue dated Jan 12, 2009]

This is not the first time someone's made this sort of observation.

At the age of sixteen, Madison was sent to the German city of Dresden, where for the next four years European tutors provided him with the best possible classical education. During this tie he managed to travel to every country in Europe (where he visited all the zoos and most of the natural history museums of the continent) and throughout North Africa and the Middle East as well. But his most significant visit was to Moritzburg, the baroque hunting lodge just outside Dresden, where my guess is that Grant found himself transfixed by the extensive collection of red deer antlers. The trophies--which had been collected three hundred years earlier--were impressively large, and the more the young student stared at them the more troubled he became. At some point, it occurred to him what was amiss: antlers of that size simply did not exist anymore on living European deer. Grant realized that, contrary to the Victorian understanding of evolutionary progress, the red deer had been getting smaller and smaller over the years. The species was actually degenerating.

Furthermore, Grant's naturalistically inclined mind apparently put together what he knew of the geographic range of the red deer, along with the sizes of the various specimens he had encountered in the wild, and he instantly envisioned a perfect continuum: At the far eastern edge of the red deer's range (in the Caucasus) the animal was almost as large as it had been in the sixteenth century. But toward the west (in the Carpathians) the deer began to diminish in size. Even farther west (in Saxony) the stags were smaller still, and at the far western limit of the animal's range (in Scotland) the red deer had shrunk to their smallest proportions.

Grant reasoned that this decline in size was indubitably the result of trophy hunting. Trophy hunters, of course, target the largest bulls with the finest antlers, which leaves the breeding to the inferior males. As one moves from east to west across Europe, the human population increases, as does the number of hunters, and the inevitable result is an ever-greater decline across space, and over time, in the size and vigor of the deer stock. In other words, as human civilization advanced, the deer declined. And Grant was struck by the fact that if the trend were to continue, the red deer would diminish in size and vitality to the point where ultimately the species would not be able to survive in the wild.

[Jonathan Spiro. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Vermont: 2008. pp. 7-8.]

[source]

I don't foresee Newsweek opening their pages to consideration of human dysgenic breeding trends any time soon. Madison Grant, of course, wasn't so limited.

Indeed, wherever one looks in the world, the Nordics appear to be an endangered species. [. . .] The demographic decline of the European Nordics is hastened by the fact that they are currently killing each other off in the fratricidal Great War, which is nothing less than "class suicide on a gigantic scale."

[. . .]

Even in North America, the habitat to which they are so well acclimated, the Nordics are passing from the scene. "Survival of the fittest," after all, means the survival of the type best adapted to prevailing environmental conditions. In colonial times, the environment that confronted the settlers was an untamed continent, and survival entailed clearing the forests and fighting the Indians--tasks for which the Nordics were eminently suited. But the United States has changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing society, and "the type of man that flourishes in the fields is not the type of man that thrives in the factory." The truth is that the dark, little immigrant can operate a machine and navigate a sweatshop far better than "the big, clumsy, and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat, and air, and cannot live under Ghetto conditions." It is with great pain that Grant is forced to admit that, "from the point of view of race," the environment of his homeland is leading to the "survival of the unfit."

Little wonder that America patricians are refusing to bring children into a society where they must compete with the Italians, the Slovaks, and the Jews. And, as with the Red Deer of Moritzburg Castle, when the fittest males do not breed, the result is racial degeneration. The old-stock American is "withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed."

[. . .]

But, of course, there is hope, and it is provided by the new faith of eugenics. Unfortunately, so long as the United States is a democracy, it will be extremely difficult to enact a eugenic program. Ever since "the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics" inflicted on us "the dogma of the brotherhood of man," Americans have had a perverse fondness for democracy. The consequences of republican government were not overly detrimental as long as the electorate was predominantly Nordic. But in the late nineteenth century the country had permitted the beaten men of beaten races to enter its portals, and then carlessly granted political rights to these incoming "plebeians." The effect of universal suffrage has been to secure "the transfer of power . . . from a Nordic aristocracy to lower classes predominantly of Alpine and Mediterranean extraction." And it is difficult to see how the enfranchised "helots," indoctrinated by "the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development," will ever allow the government they now control to enact eugenic measures.

[Spiro. pp. 153-155]

Selection, isolation, and the Puritans

Vanishing American has posted excerpts from an article on the origins of the Puritan settlers of New England, which I reproduce in part below:

While search for the physical means of sustenance is thus in most cases the principal motive for immigration, and was a principal motive in the case of most of the American colonies, the settlement of Massachusetts does not seem to have been determined to any appreciable extent by such a cause. Neither would it be quite correct to describe the founders of Massachusetts as driven from England by persecution, like the men who settled Plymouth.

[. . .]

They attached such great importance to regular industry and sedate and decorous behavior that for a long time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of Massachusetts is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which so often made hideous the first year of new communities. On the other hand, the strictness with which the Puritan colonists sought to realize their theocratic ideal of society resulted sometimes in reprehensible intolerance.

[...] All things considered, then, the character of emigration to New England appears to have been pre-eminent for its respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it consisted of country squires and yeomen, but with this difference in its favor, that a principle of selection had been at work whereby the squires and yeomen who followed Winthrop had approved themselves men of exceptionally serious and lofty characters, with minds that had been purified through steadfast devotion to a noble and unselfish ideal.

[...] Thus, as regards their social derivation, the people of New England were homogeneous in character to an unparalleled degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of the English stock.

[...] In all history there has been no other instance of a colony so exclusively peopled by picked and chosen men. The colonies knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his election sermon in 1688,"God sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness."

[...] Those 21,000 English Puritans, who came over to New England before the meeting of the Long Parliament, have now increased to nearly 13,000,000. According to the most careful estimates, at least one-fourth of the whole population of the United States at the present moment is descended from these men. Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the fact of the original migration, when we stop to contemplate it in its full meaning."

["From the Harper's Magazine collection, 'New England', 1990. The collected pieces were all written around the turn of the 20th century. The following is from 'Colonial New England', p. 212"]

Ellsworth Huntington documented a sample of the descendants of these Puritan settlers, who, as might be expected, went on to be quite successful. Starting from the example of the Puritan settlement of New England, Huntington draws a perhaps obvious lesson:

The lesson, as we see it, is that by proper selection the people of the United States as a whole, just as they are today, may give rise to descendants who possess unusually high qualities. Selection is the key word of this whole book.

If selection is to accomplish its full work it must be followed by segregation, or better still by continued selection from generation to generation. It is a common and very true saying of anthropologists that individual differences, even among closely related people, are far greater than the average differences between races. We believe that selection on the basis of individual differences is the reason why the New England type stands out so conspicuously. But since the selection occurred mainly in a single generation, segregation of the selected people was absolutely essential to permit them to develop their individuality. If it could produce desirable results by selecting certain person among the people of eastern England three centuries ago, there is no reason why it should not produce still better results if a more rational system of social selection in each successive generation can be devised here in the United States today. [After Three Centuries, p. 184]

Testosterone miscellany

Some trivia, apropos of nothing in particular. I've formed no strong opinion on the validity of the individual claims below, but these excerpts do reinforce for me the following:

(1) Androgens aren't all the same.
(2) Androgens don't make you dumb.
(3) Androgens don't make you criminal or anti-social (at least, they don't make you economically unsuccessful, on average).

Rushton's notion of "testosterone" as a "master switch" that neatly explains various racial differences has never been well-supported by the evidence. Despite this, the idea (which Rushton himself proposed only as a possibility) has been lapped up and internalized as perfectly obvious fact by untold numbers of "hbd" types and racialists.

If a hairy man becomes insatiably curious about what it means to have all that hair, he may well run across the work of Dr AG Alias. (Yes, that is his name.) Alias is an expert on certain aspects and implications of the hairiness of men. He has taken a special interest in hairy military leaders, hairy intelligentsia, low-ranked hairy boxers, and Marlon Brando. Last year he wrote this shorthand version of his views:

"I am fairly certain that the vast majority of hairy/hirsute men, compared to the respective 'much less' hirsute men of the same race and ethnic group, are strikingly more intelligent and/or educated, but only from a statistical point of view."

Male hairiness enjoys a complex and often unclear relationship with intelligence and behaviour. Alias, based at the Chester Mental Health Centre, in Chester, Illinois, has tried to tease out a few of the many subtleties. His reports have been published in Biological Psychiatry, Medical Hypotheses, Schizophrenia Research, and other medical journals that do not fear hairy questions.

Alias attracted attention in 1996 when he presented a paper called A Statistical Association Between Liberal Body Hair Growth and Intelligence to the Eighth Congress of the Association of European Psychiatrists, in London. He reported that hairiness is common among successful male academics, engineers, and physicians - and also among the men who join Mensa.

This was just a year after Alias had published a paper titled Top Ranked Boxers Are Less Hirsute Than Lower Level Boxers. In it, he discusses mesomorphs - big-boned, muscular men. Dr Alias carefully analysed 380 drawings in William Sheldon's book Atlas of Men. This was to gain a general understanding of whether big brutes have lots of body hair.

Alias then carefully examined Harry Mullen's tome Great Book Of Boxing, in which "body hair-revealing pictures are printed of 49 top-ranked, white heavyweight boxers, 15 of whom became world champions". Alias concluded that, as a rule, champions were less hairy than non-champions. However, he cautions that the difference is not statistically significant.
[Marc Abrahams; Hirsute pursuits; guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 September 2004 02.17 BST ; link]


[A . Alias. Top ranked boxers are less hirsute than lower level boxers: An example for the importance of 5?-reductase?. Biological Psychiatry , Volume 37 , Issue 9 , Pages 612 - 613. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0006-3223(95)94485-F]


Higher body hair with lower mesmorphism ratings were observed in Caucasian homosexual men compared with the general male population, reflecting elevated 5alpha-reductase (5alphaR) activity, and higher dihydrotestosterone-to-testosterone (DHT-to-T) ratio, in sharp contrast to 46,XY 5alphaR 2 deficiency subjects, who are often born with ambiguous, or female genitalia, but tend to grow up to be muscular, heterosexual men with very little body hair, or beard. One study also showed them scoring around dull normal IQs. A greater prevalence of liberal body hair growth in men with higher IQs and/or educational levels was also observed in several samples. The exceptions to this statistical trend are too unsettling, however. Nevertheless, the results of a number of published studies, including one showing higher DHT-to-T ratio in homosexual men, done with different objectives over a span of 80 years, together strongly support these findings. Furthermore, in an animal model, "cognitive-enhancing effects" of "5alpha-reduced androgen [metabolites]" were recently demonstrated.
[Alias AG. A role for 5alpha-reductase activity in the development of male homosexuality? Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2004 Dec;1032:237-44. link]

According to Erik at femininebeauty.info, a plot of mesomorphism ratings vs. body hair ratings for male Caucasian samples from Sheldon shows: "Starting from an effeminate physical build, as the physique becomes naturally more masculine, body hairiness increases, which appears intuitive, but beyond a certain point, greater body hairiness corresponds to a weaker physical build."

Objective: To document the relative importance of endogenous sex steroids in modulating the frequency of orgasms, the dominant aspect of sexual behaviour in healthy eugonadal men.
Design: Measurement of adrenal and testicular sex steroids in a sample of army recruits and study of their relation to frequency of orgasms ascertained by questionnaire after potential confounding variables were controlled for.
Setting: Military campus and military hospital laboratories in Athens, Greece.
Subjects: 92 consecutively enrolled healthy male recruits aged 18-22 years.
Main outcome measures: Weekly number of orgasms. Serum concentrations of testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate, dihydrotestosterone, oestradiol, oestrone, {delta}-4-androstenedione, and sex hormone binding globulin.
Results: Serum dihydrotestosterone concentration was the only independent hormonal predictor of the frequency of orgasms; an increase in concentration of 1.36 nmol/l (about 2 SD) corresponded to an average increase of one orgasm a week.
Conclusions: Differences in concentrations of circulating dihydrotestosterone within the normal range may represent a major predictor of sexual activity in healthy young men.
[BMJ 1995;310:1289-1291 (20 May); Contribution of dihydrotestosterone to male sexual behaviour; Mantzoros, CS and Dimitrios Trichopoulos; link]


Associational loosening, slow and faulty information processing, poor gating of irrelevant stimuli, poor ability to shift attention, poor working memory, passivity, ambivalence, anhedonia, and impaired motor coordination are cardinal features of schizophrenia but, unlike delusions and hallucinations, they are related more to negative/deficit symptoms. As summarized by Bass, numerous studies have correlated leadership with 'ambition, initiative and persistence' (opposite of passivity), 'speed and accuracy of thought', 'finality of decision,' or decisiveness (the opposite of ambivalence), 'mood control, optimism and sense of humor' (opposite of anhedonia), etc. Andreasen et al postulate that a disruption in the circuitry among nodes located in the prefrontal regions, the thalamic nuclei, and the cerebellum produces 'cognitive dysmetria', meaning difficulty in prioritizing, coordinating, and responding to information, and that it can account for the broad diversity of symptoms of schizophrenia. A relationship between cognitive processes and cerebellar and basal ganglia functions, and a role of neocerebellum in rapidly shifting attention, have been demonstrated. The cognitive styles, including a proficiency to quickly shift attention, of several famous leaders are used as examples of this contrasting model. Julius Caesar and Napoleon, for instance, could dictate to up to six secretaries simultaneously, using their exceptional working memories, and proficiency in quickly and effortlessly shifting attention while flawlessly gating irrelevant external and internal stimuli. It is suggested that specific brain imaging studies could illustrate this contrast. Gray et al noted positive correlations between 'dominance', an important leadership trait, and serum levels of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and testosterone (T), but not of more potent dihydrotestosterone (DHT), in over 1700 older men. Though not scientifically rigorous, the author noted positive correlations (P = 0.0162) between the self-rated ratings of voice depth (promoted by T) and of leadership, but none between those of body hair (DHT dependent) and of leadership in 47 male US National Academy of Sciences members. And 43 male US Senators had deeper voices than 36 male House members (P<0.01) who, in turn, had deeper voices than either of two groups (numbers 102 and 72) of male scientists (P<0.01). Therapeutically, before chlorpromazine, DHEA had been used in young schizophrenics with modest success in improving deficit symptoms. DHEA, or other sex hormones, or some of their natural and synthetic derivatives may prove to be valuable to treat deficit symptoms of schizophrenia in both sexes. Copyright 2000 Harcourt Publishers Ltd. [Alias AG. Schizotypy and leadership: a contrasting model for deficit symptoms, and a possible therapeutic role for sex hormones. Med Hypotheses. 2000 Apr;54(4):537-52. link]


Controlling for other variables, age and BMI were associated with lower bioavailable testosterone levels, whereas PCS12, smoking status, and higher SES were associated with higher bioavailable testosterone levels. [Table 2 shows SES (socioeconomic status) correlates 0.12 with bioavailable testostorone, 0.14 with DHEAS, and 0.00 with DHT.]
[Litman HJ et al. Serum androgen levels in black, Hispanic, and white men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006 Nov;91(11):4326-34. Epub 2006 Aug 15. link]

The result reported in the final study above is opposite the (small) negative correlation between T and SES claimed by Mazur, but Mazur's comments still apply:

The reliable association of high T with antisocial behaviors, including marital disruption and violent criminality, raises an interesting puzzle. These negative behaviors foster downward social mobility. Under the basal model, which assumes T level to be a persistent trait, we should expect an accumulation of high T men in the lower ranks of society. Indeed, as we have noted, correlations between T and various measures of socioeconomic status (occupation, income, education) are significantly negative. But they are slight in magnitude. Thus, leaving aside honor subcultures, we find little concentration of men with high T in the lower classes. Why not? One possibility is that the downward flow of high T men who are antisocial is nearly balanced by an upward flow of high T men who are prosocial. This hypothetical stream of prosocial high-T men remains invisible to us, so far, perhaps because past studies have used as subjects mostly working class men or convicts, who have limited opportunities for legitimate advancement.

The nearly uniform distribution of T across social classes is less puzzling under the reciprocal model, which regards T as malleable rather than a stable personality trait. Again excepting honor subcultures, where challenges are exceptionally common, dominance contests probably occur nearly as frequently among elites as in the working class, as often in the boardroom as on the shop floor. Therefore, T responses to challenge, and to winning and losing, should be distributed fairly evenly across classes. Under this reciprocal model, we would expect little accumulation of T at the bottom levels of society.

Cochran/Harpending on Proto-Indo-European expansion

Their book (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution) hasn't yet been released, but much of it is now readable on Google Books. Here is Cochran and Harpending's take on the spread of Indo-European:

Milk and the Kurgans

Improved variants of the Kurgan hypotheses fit many facts, but what they don't do is explain why the Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded at the expense of neighboring peoples [. . .]

We suggest that the advantage driving those Indo-European expansions was biological--a high frequency of the European lactose-tolerance mutation (the 13910-T allele). The usual story about lactose tolerance is that it's the result of a cultural innovation, the domestication of cattle. That innovation led to selection for a new mutation that extended lactase production into adulthood. But there's more to the story.

Initially, selection favored individual carriers of the lactose-tolerance mutation, but the mutation was rare and had little social effect. Cattle were used for plowing and pulling wagons, for their beef, and as a source of secondary products like leather and tallow. But when the lactase persistence allele became common, so that a majority of the adult population could drink milk, a new kind of pastoralism became possible, one in which people kept cattle primarily for their milk rather than for their flesh. This change is very significant, because dairying is much more efficient than raising cattle for slaughter: It produces about five times as many calories per acre. Dairying pastoralists produce more high-quality food on the same amount of land than nondairy pastoralists, so higher frequencies of lactose tolerance among Indo-Europeans would have caused the carrying capacity of land to increase--for them.

Standard ecological theory indicates that when two similar populations use the same resources, the one with the greater carrying capacity always wins. In more familiar terms, the Proto-Indo-Europeans in our scenario could raise and feed more warriors on the same amount of land--and that is a recipe for expansion. The same basic idea is behind theories of the expansion of farming through local population growth (called demic expansion): Farming produces more food per acre, therefore farmers will outnumber foragers, and so farmers will expand at the expense of foragers.

Proto-Indo-Europeans probably were most competitive in areas where grain agriculture was marginal. In the steppe, the problem was limited rainfall. Since raising cattle there had been competitive with grain farming even before dairying arose, milk-drinking Indo-Europeans would have had an absolute advantage and should have spread rapidly over the steppe. In much of northern Europe, shorter growing seasons must have interfered with production of cereal crops such as wheat, particularly when agriculture was new there, as those crops had had little time to adapt to the local climate. Eventually, other cereal crops, such as oats and rye that could do well in those climates, were developed--probably by accident, starting as weeds in wheat or barley fields. But that happened in the Bronze Age, long after the introduction of farming. Dairying may have been more productive than grain farming in northern Europe during the late Neolithic. Even if it was not, it may have been close enough to let other advantages of the pastoral way of life tip the scales. It seems clear that the Proto-Indo-European form of patoralism did have other advantages in intergroup competition.

As the Proto-Indo-Europeans became dairymen, they should have come to rely more and more on their cattle and less on grain farming. As that happened, they would have become mobile, which is a military advantage, especially against farmers. Farmers have homes and villages that they must defend, whereas pastoralists can fight at a time and place of their choosing.

[. . .]

Back in the early days of their expansion, the Indo-Europeans appear to have encountered farmers in the Balkans who had been farming since about 6000 BC, but who weren't under a powerful central government. Around 4200 BC, things went sour. Ancient village sites were abandoned, advanced work in metals and ceramics became rare, and the inhabitants shifted to easily defended sites such as caves, hilltops, and islands. We find an increasing number of Kurgan burials similar to those found earlier on the steppe. (Interestingly, the bodies in those Kurgan burials averaged almost four inches taller than the earlier peoples of the region--milk does a body good.)

We suspect that pre-state farmers had a lot of trouble with invading Indo-European pastoralists. It wasn't just that dairying was productive and conferred increased mobility. It made cattle very valuable, and cattle are far easier to steal than heaps of grain: They can walk. It looks as if the early Indo-Europeans spent a lot of time rustling each other's cattle, fighting over cattle, planning revenge for previous raids, and in general raising hell. They became a warrior society.

So far, so plausible. Now it starts to get a bit pat.

European languages and culture spread past those regions in which dairying was favored--for example, into southern Europe and Iran--but strong states probably limited their expansion into the Middle East.

As much as anything, those peripheral expansions were probably driven by what might be called historical momentum: Peoples with a long record of success in war and raiding kept expanding even in areas where they had no special ecological advantages. Something similar happened when the Indo-Aryans moved into India: Internal weakness, possibly even collapse, of the Indus civilization may have allowed that expansion to occur.

In Understanding Human History (pdf), Michael Hart attributes conquests of more southerly peoples by Indo-Europeans to higher intelligence among the latter, which, while it may not be a complete explanation, I find more compelling than "historical momentum". Continuing:

Today the LCT 13910-T variant has reached almost 100 percent frequency in some parts of northern Europe; it is common in northern India and can even be found at low levels among some pastoral peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Fulani and Hausa.

Moreover, there is reason to think that this historical phenomenon has happened at least three times. Cattle herders of East Africa in the region of the Upper Nile and further south are lactase-tolerant[sic] milk drinkers dure to a younger mutation of their own. They, too, have expanded: They have become warlike, and there are fascinating parallels between their religions and social structure and those of the ancestral Indo-Europeans. Another separate pair of mutations causing lactose tolerance happened in the Arabian peninsula, driven in this case by the domestication of camels. This may have been an important cause of the explosive growth of Islam and the Arab conquests of the sevention century AD and later.

"Half of Brits have immigrant ancestors"

Headline from The Telegraph, reporting on the results of a survey by ancestry.co.uk last month. The Daily Mail has more details:

[British] who investigated at least four generations of their family tree revealed just over half had recent immigrant ancestors.

The majority came from our European neighbours, including a quarter from Ireland, one in ten from France and a similar number from Germany.

But distant countries which featured high on the list included Canada, where one in 20 of us can trace a family member - a reminder of our close links with the Commonwealth country.

Around one in 30 have American blood in their veins - the country which gave us Christmas turkey.

[. . .]

Yet most of us remain unaware of the rich mixture of nationalities in our families. In all, 84 per cent of us know nothing about our foreign background, says ancestry.co.uk which commissioned a poll of 2,500 individuals, including 500 who had investigated their family trees.

I don't know how representative of Britain ancestry.co.uk's sample is, but I'm aware of other surveys showing large proportions (19% to 77%) of Londoners report Irish ancestors.

Most of the reporting on this story conflates/equates immigration from neighboring European countries and immigration of non-Europeans, which is of course nonsense. This survey bears notice, however: the presence of a significant recent non-English element in England complicates efforts to make historical inferences from genetic surveys of the present-day general English population. The People of the British Isles project, sampling rural people "whose parents and grandparents were all born in the same locality", should allow clearer results than studies based on medical samples.

Update on Pacific BioSciences sequencing technology

New Scientist: Molecular fireworks could produce '30-minute genomes':

A more promising approach is to watch a molecule of double-stranded DNA being constructed from a single strand in real time. The trouble is that this occurs on such a small scale that it has been impossible to see. Now a team at Pacific BioSciences in Menlo Park, California, says it has worked out how this can be done (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1162986).

[. . .]

So far, the team has built a chip housing 3000 ZMWs, which the company hopes will hit the market in 2010. By 2013, it aims to squeeze a million ZMWs onto a single chip and observe DNA being assembled in each simultaneously. Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000.

"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant"

"WASP" is a pejorative for (unhyphenated) "American". The term may be applied to broad or narrow segments of the founding American ethny, in terms of class, region, and ancestral background, leading to many opportunities for confusion and misdirection. "WASP" functions primarily as an instrument for delegitimizing and dispossessing the progeny of the founders.

Exactly who it is that will take over the center is a problem of definition. Wasps are not so easily characterized as other ethnic groups. The term itself can be merely descriptive or mildly offensive, depending on the user and the hearer; at any rate, it has become part of the American idiom. In one sense, it is redundant: since all Anglo-Saxons are white, the word could be Asp. Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment; at the widest, they include Okies and Snopeses, "Holy Rollers" and hillbillies. Wasps range from Mc-George Bundy and Penelope Tree to William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Phyllis Diller. Generously defined, Wasps constitute about 55% of the U.S. population, and they have in common what Columnist Russell Baker calls a "case of majority inferiority."

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost." Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp's traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.

Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels—the big cities—were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos—schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies.

Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and "swarthy" persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation's intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O'Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students."

Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will—and money—can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd.

[ARE THE WASPS COMING BACK? HAVE THEY EVER BEEN AWAY? Time Friday, Jan. 17, 1969]