Recent Links

James had serious questions about the possible HSV-1 influence on IQ, that I linked from Aporia last week. A guest-poster at Cremieux has already jumped in with reasoning that supports James's immediate suspicions. Did Herpes Cause the Achievement Gap?

A different IQ discussion at Aporia, about Afro-Carribeans vs Indo-Carribeans in Trinidad and Tobago. 

Immigrants are almost twice as likely to start a business as their native-born peers.  Absolutely bears out in my sons and daughters-in law. Two of my Americans plus their wives have side-hustles in photography, one now dormant. The latest potential DIL (American) is trying to establish an online presence in teaching calm and wisdom - but has a regular marketing job. But the Romanians both have major side hustles, and the Filipina has the largest of all, even though they all have regular jobs.  None have done this with any kind of government loan or support for immigrants. Neither my wife nor I were ever side-hustle people, though we flirted with that at times.

Gregory Clark and the inheritance Social Status again, this time at City Journal. The association between first-degree relatives is modest, suggesting environment still has a say. But the decay of status to second, third, fourth-degree relatives is surprisingly small, suggesting that it's genes plus luck, not environment.

Clark, instead, looks at what happens as you move further out on the family tree. When one moves from siblings all the way to cousins in that same housing-value analysis, the correlation drops only modestly, to 0.21. The general rule he discovers—across many different status measures, and across several centuries notwithstanding massive changes to society and technology—is that these correlations, despite starting out at a modest level, drop by only about one-fifth with each extra degree of relatedness. (Cousins are two steps more distant than siblings in this sense.

Thus, our focus shouldn’t linger on the modest correlations among immediate family members. Those aren’t a beautiful testament to the randomness of life and the possibility of change; they’re just misleading. Rather, the very slow decay of the correlations as we move through family trees is where the action is. It reveals a “latent” status that is extremely persistent. Clark finds measurable links in status even among fourth cousins, whose shared ancestors are five generations back. 

 Seven Dudes Could Take Over Any Small Town in America  No, not at gunpoint. Just move there. An interesting counterintuitive idea that some of us have experience with.