Per capita contributions to '08 Presidential election by state as of 3/31/08

Among many portents of the bloodletting the Republican party faces this November has been the Democratic party's fundraising advantage in the Presidential campaign. For every dollar donated, more than $.61 has gone to a Democratic candidate. In '04, the Democratic contenders outdid President Bush, garnering $.57 of each dollar donated to the election. He still won. But the total four years ago was just over $600 million, an amount already surpassed before the candidates for the general election have been decided. And in '00, Republican contenders brought in more money than Democratic contenders did.

Where has the money been coming from? The FEC maintains a user-friendly site that tracks donations by state and by candidate. Before presenting per capita donations, allow me to address a bemusing aspect of the FEC numbers.

Donation totals by state appear to exclude money given by PACs, political parties, or the candidates themselves, in addition to gifts over $2,300 given by an individual donor, the maximum amount that can be donated to a candidate for a specific campaign. Anything given beyond that amount is reclassified either as being designated for another campaign or as having come from a different person (a spouse, parent, or friend?).

I think this is the case because the national total from data available at the state level comes to $352 million on the Democratic side, while the total individual contribution is listed as $485 million. The total amount given in donations under $2000 comes to $323 million. So if $29 million came in the form of donations in the $2000-$2300 range, that's what's going on.

I'm not sure why this would be, but it'd actually make for a better gauge of popular involvement in the Presidential campaign by removing the few major donors who would otherwise skew per capita donations upward by significant (and varying) amounts at the state level.

However, that presumes over $100 million given by individuals at levels above $2300, which seems too high. It might have to do with people giving campaign contributions from outside the US, or it might just be that the FEC is a little sloppy and hasn't attributed every donation to the state it came from.

There might be something else going on as well. Initially, I used CNN's Campaign Money Race interactive map (scroll down a little and click on the graphic to the left of the page), but it differed from data provided by the FEC in a seemingly random way (it mostly reports lower amounts than the FEC does, but in several cases it reports higher totals than the FEC does). I contacted the organization to ask if they could clear it up for me but haven't yet received a response.

That said, the per capita donations as of March 31, by state in totality and by party affiliation of the recipients:

State	Total	Dems	Reps
1) D.C.	25.70	22.23	3.48
2) Connecticut	4.05	2.68	1.36
3) New York	4.01	3.03	0.98
4) New Mexico	3.85	3.55	0.30
5) Massachusetts	3.29	2.26	1.04
6) Utah	2.84	0.48	2.36
7) Maryland	2.84	2.23	0.61
8) California	2.56	1.81	0.74
9) Virginia	2.39	1.46	0.93
10) Illinois	2.36	1.85	0.51
11) New Jersey	2.22	1.45	0.77
12) New Hampshire	2.05	1.16	0.89
13) Delaware	1.97	1.59	0.38
14) Florida	1.90	0.99	0.91
15) Vermont	1.89	1.53	0.36
16) Colorado	1.86	1.19	0.66
17) Nevada	1.77	0.81	0.96
18) Washington	1.66	1.23	0.43
19) Texas	1.65	0.79	0.86
20) Rhode Island	1.62	1.23	0.39
21) Arizona	1.55	0.55	1.01
22) Wyoming	1.52	0.67	0.85
23) Tennessee	1.21	0.32	0.88
24) Arkansas	1.16	0.62	0.53
25) Hawaii	1.13	0.86	0.27
26) Pennsylvania	1.12	0.78	0.34
27) Maine	1.09	0.83	0.27
28) Oregon	1.09	0.73	0.36
29) Idaho	1.09	0.28	0.81
30) Georgia	1.08	0.58	0.50
31) Missouri	0.96	0.51	0.45
32) South Carolina	0.95	0.39	0.56
33) Oklahoma	0.94	0.53	0.41
34) Alaska	0.93	0.51	0.42
35) North Carolina	0.93	0.62	0.30
36) Minnesota	0.88	0.60	0.28
37) Montana	0.86	0.52	0.34
38) Michigan	0.81	0.33	0.48
39) Iowa	0.78	0.46	0.32
40) Louisiana	0.76	0.37	0.39
41) Kansas	0.73	0.29	0.45
42) Ohio	0.72	0.39	0.33
43) Wisconsin	0.68	0.40	0.28
44) South Dakota	0.68	0.23	0.45
45) Alabama	0.67	0.34	0.34
46) Kentucky	0.62	0.42	0.20
47) Nebraska	0.60	0.35	0.24
48) Mississippi	0.55	0.20	0.35
49) West Virginia	0.53	0.35	0.17
50) Indiana	0.51	0.29	0.22
51) North Dakota	0.36	0.14	0.22

Here's a visual representation via Many Eyes. Proximity to the coasts leads to more money coughed up. That is likely due in large part to Democratic-leaning states giving more than Republican-leaning states have given. Total per capita contributions correlate with Kerry's share of the '04 vote at a statistically significant .67. Donations to Democrats correlate with Kerry's share at a slightly more robust .70.

However, on the Republican side the relationship is much weaker. Donations to GOP candidates correlate with Bush's share of the '04 vote at only .38. As the Republican field leaned considerably further to the left and towards neoconservatism than does the Republican electorate, excepting Mormon Utah (which gave more to Romney than it gave to all the other candidates from both parties combined), the most generous states for Republicans--DC, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York--are hardly conservative strongholds.

Not surprisingly, people in the nation's capital, where politics is in the water, are far-and-away the most likely in the country to make contributions.

I'm curious as to why Nutmeggers have given so much, especially to Republicans. It isn't the result of a single candidate dominating--McCain, Romney, and Giuliani all raised about $1.5 million from the state.

Fielding a candidate helps. Dodd's from Connecticut (#2). Hillary and Giuliani are from New York (#3). Richardson's from New Mexico (#4). Romney is from, uh, both Massachusetts and Utah (#5 and #6). Hunter from California (#8), Obama from Illinois (#10), Biden from Delaware (#13), Paul from Texas (#19), McCain from Arizona (#21), Thompson from Tennessee (#23), and Huckabee from Arkansas (#24). It didn't do much for Edwards in North Carolina (#35) though, where demographics helped Obama outraise the former Senator in the state he'd represented for six years.

Part of the GOP's underwhelming performance might be blamed on the fact that the party's contest was effectively over in early March. That doesn't offer much comfort though. Even having the nomination squared away, McCain's contribution-seeking is resulting in a paucity of donations. Romney still had him beat two months after endorsing the Arizona Senator. Hillary has outraised him more than $2-to-$1; Obama has him beat nearly $3-to-$1. Further, one-in-four Republican primary participants continue to vote against him.

The per capita party advantage by state:

State	Dem $ +(-)
1) D.C.	18.75
2) New Mexico	3.26
3) New York	2.05
4) Maryland	1.62
5) Illinois	1.34
6) Connecticut	1.32
7) Massachusetts	1.22
8) Delaware	1.22
9) Vermont	1.18
10) California	1.07
11) Rhode Island	0.85
12) Washington	0.81
13) New Jersey	0.68
14) Hawaii	0.59
15) Maine	0.56
16) Virginia	0.53
17) Colorado	0.53
18) Pennsylvania	0.44
19) Oregon	0.37
20) North Carolina	0.32
21) Minnesota	0.31
22) New Hampshire	0.27
23) Kentucky	0.21
24) West Virginia	0.18
25) Montana	0.17
26) Iowa	0.14
27) Oklahoma	0.13
28) Wisconsin	0.11
29) Nebraska	0.11
30) Arkansas	0.09
31) Alaska	0.09
32) Georgia	0.09
33) Florida	0.09
34) Indiana	0.08
35) Ohio	0.06
36) Missouri	0.06
37) Alabama	0.00
38) Louisiana	(0.03)
39) Texas	(0.07)
40) North Dakota	(0.07)
41) Mississippi	(0.15)
42) Michigan	(0.15)
43) Nevada	(0.15)
44) Kansas	(0.16)
45) South Carolina	(0.17)
46) Wyoming	(0.17)
47) South Dakota	(0.22)
48) Arizona	(0.46)
49) Idaho	(0.53)
50) Tennessee	(0.56)
51) Utah	(1.88)

The swing states are all giving more money to Democrats. Only Michigan--stripped of its delegates and devoid of Obama or Edwards on the ballot--strays from that trend. Even Obama's racialism, leftism, and putative elitism may not be enough to keep him from becoming the most powerful man in the world.

Ag-Jobs resurrected (again) by Feinstein and attached to war funding bill

++Addition++The full Senate is going to begin 'working' on the bill tomorrow (Tuesday). There is still time to share your thoughts on the amendment with your Senators. Contact them here.

---

The Senate Appropriations committee has approved a free-riding Feinstein Ag-Jobs amendment to an upcoming Iraq spending bill. According to NumbersUSA, it will grant legal status to as many as 1.35 million migrants and their families for at least the next five years, when the provisions sunset.

Feinstein asserts that without the amendment, food will rot in the fields and farmwork will move to Mexico. But if you haven't noticed, food prices keep shooting upward. Food shortages have resulted in riots in several poor countries, because it's becoming more expensive to eat. As the USDA reports, it's a good time to be involved in agriculture:

Net farm income is forecast to be $92.3 billion, up 4.1 percent above the $88.7 billion farmers are projected to have earned in 2007 and 51 percent above its 10-year average of $61.1 billion.

Net cash income, at $96.6 billion, is forecast to be $9 billion (10 percent) above 2007, which was the previous record. Net cash income is projected to rise more than net farm income because of the large carryover of crops harvested in the prior year, which will be sold in 2008.

The story in 2008 is the value of crop production ($175.5 billion), which is forecast to exceed the 2007 record by $25.9 billion (a 17-percent increase). Prices of major crops (corn, soybeans, wheat) were trending upward in late 2007 and are expected to maintain or add to those gains in early 2008.

An end to all illegal farm labor would, by the pro-legalization Utah Farm Federation Bureau's own estimates, result in a net loss of $5 billion (as of '06) for US farmers. So the industry would see its profits reduced by less than 10%.

As CATO's Daniel Griswold points out, the industry receives nearly four times the amount of that profit loss each year in the form of government subsidies:

During the past twenty years, farm programs have cost America's non-farm households a cumulative $1.7 trillion. That is how much non-farm households would have in the bank today if they had been allowed to save and invest what they have been forced to surrender to favored farmers through our never-ending farm programs. ...

Farm support programs cost taxpayers nearly $20 billion a year, real money even in Washington. ...

Average household income for family farms is now 10 percent [how fitting!] above the average income for non-farm households.

That the agricultural industry receives double-subsidization while still coming out nearly $100 billion in the black reveal Feinstein's warnings to be tripe. But I'd much rather increase federal subsidies another $10 billion through guaranteed purchase agreements and even direct cash transfers than grant legalization to millions of migrant farmworkers.

The costs of unfettered immigration of Hispanic menials far exceeds an accounting cost of $5-$10 billion for US farm interests. In addition to at least half of illegal immigrant households costing the net taxpayer an average of over $22,000 a year in benefits beyond the tax contributions they make, these costs include depressed academic achievement and lowered average IQ, a decrease in housing affordability, increased infrastructure usage and pollution, atavistic diseases returning to the US after decades of absence, an increasing percentage of the population lacking health insurance, etc.

The Senate could potentially vote on the bill, which has now cleared committee, as early as today. If not today, then sometime early next week. Contact your Senators and let them know how you feel about granting amnesty to illegal farmworkers. Information for doing so is available here. NumbersUSA has some useful talking points that can be used equally well if you decide to call, write, fax, or email. You might also mention disgust at the furtive way Feinstein is going about pushing this on us, attaching it to a war spending bill.

Coming up with monetary SoL by state without dropping $95

I'd like to do a follow-up on Steve Sailer's monetary standard-of-living by state post, but using a more valid cost-of-living measure than he did. The Missouri Economic Research and Information Center (MERIC) quarterly puts out a nationwide cost-of-living by state table. That's where Steve's CoL data come from.

MERIC gets its numbers from ACCRA's (now called C2ER) cost-of-living index, which measures CoL by city across six cost categories, which are then used to compute each city's total CoL index score. MERIC comes up with a simple average for each state using all of the cities within that state that participate in the survey. It makes no adjustment for population size. So in California, the cities of Palm Springs and Los Angeles are given equal weight in determining the CoL for the state as a whole.

Conveniently, this method makes Missouri appear more affordable relative to other states than it should. ACCRA uses 100 as its index average, so a city's score is always relative to the other city's participating during the same time period. MERIC boasts that Missouri has the fifth lowest cost-of-living in the country, at 90.3. If Missouri's composite score is adjusted for population size, it rises to 92.2. Only two of the seven participating cities are in the more expensive northwestern section of the state (Kansas City and St. Joseph), even though they represent nearly half of the participating population.

But for most states, the MERIC simple average actually makes them appear more costly than a weighted average would. The MERIC method yields a simple state average of 104.3 and a population-weighted state average of 106.3 for the US as a whole.

Since ACCRA's average is actually 100, the MERIC method is inflating most states' CoL, while deflating Missouri's. Again, Missouri's score of 90.3 using the MERIC method is lower than the 92.2 it receives when population is taken into account, something ACCRA presumably does. But the nationwide average is 104.3 or 106.3 using the MERIC method--higher than the ACCRA average of 100. Sneaky devils!

With access to ACCRA data for all participating cities across the country (MERIC's site shows the numbers for each of Missouri's particpating states), it would be possible to come up with a more accurate state CoL comparison than what MERIC provides. However, in Excel format, it runs at $95 for a single quarter.

Setting myself back like that is psychologically tough to do. I love blogging and wouldn't want (okay, wouldn't be able) to make a penny from it, but incurring accounting costs* in doing so is a hard pill to swallow, even a trivial amount like this. So if anyone happens to have access to the data and would be willing to send it to me, it'd be greatly appreciated. I wouldn't make the ACCRA data public, of course.

* As active bloggers know, work is an infernal enemy always nipping at the ankles. Economic costs certainly do exist.

Hillary's avalanche: Momentum not worth mentioning

With the question of how Florida and Michigan delegates will be placed (if at all) effectively Hillary's last stand, the Senator is (finally) hinting at how she's better able to attract white support than Obama is:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Pointing out that modestly educated, working-class whites are a foundational pillar of support is enough to make most whiterpeople vomit. But from the beginning of March onward, Hillary's domination of the white vote has grown increasingly pronounced.

Two-thirds of the voters in the states that have held Democratic contests from March 4th to today (Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wyoming*, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina) have been white. Hillary has garnered 61% (4.4 million) of these voters to Obama's 39% (2.8 million). She failed to get a majority only in the two smallest of those states, Vermont and Wyoming.

She's also headed for an easy win in blue-collar, white West Virginia today.

Granted, it is improper for a white candidate to harp on 'momentum' among white voters! But that Hillary is beating Obama (who represent more than three-fourths of the electorate) by a wider margin among white voters than Bush beat Kerry by (58%-41%) is something she and her surrogates would be crazy not to point out. That they've mostly avoided the racial angle, when it has been absolutely essential to Obama's success, is more startling than her bland truism excerpted above.

* Since Wyoming held caucuses, no exit polling data from the state are available. To estimate, I compared the number of voters in Vermont (the total populations of the two states are similar) who supported Kerry in '04 with the number of voters who supported him in Wyoming, then extrapolated an estimated turnout for Wyoming's Democratic caucus based on the turnout for Vermont's primary (thus overestimating Wyoming's caucus numbers, as caucuses bring out fewer people than primaries do). I assumed Wyoming's racial/ethnic mix in the caucus mirrored the state's demographic profile on the whole. Both of these assumptions inflate the total white support Obama netted in the state relative to Hillary.

Treat the girl like a hill to be taken?

The topic of "what women want" isn't one I spend much time contemplating. I tend to think the (non-post modern feminist) conventional wisdom regarding what is desired in a man more-or-less gets it right: Financial success, self-confidence, good personal hygiene (including dress), intelligence, being one standard deviation above the mean in height, a symetrical and handsome face, somewhat older (in the range of 2-8 years), a toned upper body, the more athletic the better, etc.

But I've put myself on a sort of self-imposed relationship hiatus, to attain financial security and sow my other wild oats, like catching up on my RPG pile and biking the terrain trains once chugged across. So I'm aware I might not know what I'm talking about. At Al Fin, I saw Dennis Mangan mention this post from Roissy, who I've seen commenting in other areas of the blogosphere I frequent but who sticks in my mind because I like her, er, his, name*. It suggests as much to me, that I am indeed uninformed (I toned the vulgarity down):

What is it that separates those select few men from all the rest? The ones who wield illimitable power to inflame the desires of women?

The key to their power is not money or sports cars or beach houses or post graduate degrees or 50 inch plasma TVs or chocolate covered strawberries on a bed of rose petals or any of that. All of that is incidental and is only important to the extent that it improves your state of mind. No, the real source of this power is already within you. It is how you SEE YOURSELF. It is your decision to move through the world without apology, to set aside complaining for decisive action, to let your brass balls do your talking for you.

The quintessential masculine quality women can’t resist is SUPREME UNSHAKEABLE CONFIDENCE. You can be poor, out of shape, stupid, unemployed, addicted to drugs, and meet every one of society’s standards for LOSERNESS but if you radiate those confident vibes that say you are PERFECTLY PLEASED WITH YOURSELF you will get laid ALL THE TIME. And the kinds of girls who get wet for such men aren’t just bar sluts. Smart women, women with high self-esteems and MBAs and, yes, even — ESPECIALLY – HARDCORE FEMINISTS will crave the man who exudes such power and happily take it if it means he will grace her with the pleasure of his company for a little while longer.

My first reaction was to smile at yet another apparent truism contained in the satirical pleasantries of the pre-11th season Simpsons:

Bart: Face it, Lis--men are dogs. The worse we treat you, the more you want us.
Lisa: That's not what dogs do!

I wonder if those men would be even more desirable if they took that confidence one step further, saying, "To hell with whether or not the girl wants it, she's going to get it, and she's going to like it, my balls being as brass as my knuckles!" Would that "inflame" female desires even more? As much as I detested those Evremonde brothers in A Tale of Two Cities, maybe I should've embraced a dark admiration for them instead!

When I dwelled on her post a little longer though, I realized my own personal experience seems to commend it. My high school and college days are tales of getting the friends of the girl I was after. I have a tendency to deify the girls I like, acting the chivalrous and selfless older brother interested only in a platonic relationship. That's not really my natural personality, which is more arrogantly flirtatious in a playfully insulting way. Simply put, the latter has been much more effective in reeling them in. The result was several flings that lasted a couple of weeks or even days, and having been asked out by more girls than I've asked out.

I've known for years that genuflection hasn't been the road to success. My longest relationship, lasting a little over a year, was with a girl I did manage to convince (over several months) with the weak strategy, and she was very candid about it later. She'd thought I was cute and funny enough, but that I was so distant she had no idea I had any interest in her at all and was surprised when I asked to get serious. Of course, looking back she now loved the approach!

Another girl I was disinclined (okay, afraid) to let my feelings be known to crashed her car into another parked car as she was reading the note asking her out that I'd left on her windshield! (If anyone's still reading this, I'm really going to get myself in trouble--a consequence of that sacrosanct devotion is that I'm still in contact with almost every serious girlfriend I've ever had. On the other hand, I can't even get my own mother to read the blog on a regular basis, and virtually every comment I've ever had appears to have come from a male--hardly a unique phenomenon in the blogosphere--so I'm probably safe).

It's not just a matter of making the easier catch, either. My aesthetics are sort of eccentric. I've always been fond of coordinated, athletic girls with tomboyish tendencies--not the 5'8 blonde with long legs in designer jeans but the 5'2 gymnast in sweatpants**.

So Roissy's advice (or revelation), to the extent that it's more-or-less accurate (maybe it's just self-projection), came years too late. In half a decade, when I plan to have a wife in the sights, she won't fit that 'swoonable' profile that Roissy attaches in a general way to most women.

Then again, when I look back at how much time I squandered, even as things were, that I could've used to prep myself for graduate school in one of the sciences or to make myself familiar with the history I'm only now learning, maybe it's not overdue. In any case, the chivalrous distance I maintain is surely more the result of some psychological insecurity than any noble intention on my part, and as such, is not too malleable. Maybe it's what I should do. Won't be what I will do, though.

*This post came out of the assumption that Roissy was female. Naturally, a guy telling other guys what girls want should be, ceteris paribus, treated with more skepticism than should a girl telling guys what girls want.

** That's meant my naive initial image of shy abstention has usually been overly optimistic.

Where do "diversity immigrants" come from?

In an unsettling Parapundit post on Yemen's freeing of those involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, Brent Lane points out that 70 Yemenis have been "registered" and now qualify for permanent residency visas through this year's Diversity Visa Lottery. The DVL is a program that grants legal residency "to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States". Annually, 50,000 visas are granted.

Randall Parker notes the inanity of accepting more Yemenis than Finns into the US:

Seventy Yemenis won US visas through our mind bogglingly foolish diversity lottery. So did 4392 Egyptians. Wonder if any of Mohammed Atta's relatives or friends were among the lucky winners. More Yemenis than Finns came up winners. Can someone explain how this isn't just an incredibly stupid idea for a policy?

I certainly cannot.

The DVL is our most conspicuously idiotic immigration policy, and that's saying a lot. The fewer non-refugee (refugees and asylum seekers do not count 'against' a country in terms of the number of potential diversity visas its citizens are eligible for) immigrants a country has sent to the US over the past five years, the better chance each of its applicants has of winning permanent residency through the DVL. Nearly twice as many applicants are notified they've been "registered" as will actually be granted permanent residency. This is in anticipation that many who are selected will fail to complete their application processes by the end of September, won't receive their snailmail notifications* for a variety of reasons, or will not meet the qualifications for a visa grant.

How stupid an idea for a policy is the DVL? The application process does require a bit more industriousness than following coyotes across the Southern border does. It's not a completely unfettered process.

Applicants must have either graduated from high school or attained an educational equivalent, or have two years of work experience in an occupation that requires as many years of training and/or experience to perform. I wonder how rigorous the educational verification for the more than one thousand people selected from the Sierra Leone really is?

Also, the applications must be submitted electronically, which presumes access to the internet (although agents may act on an applicant's behalf at the applicant's expense, and based on the existence of for-profit services in the US assisting potential applicants, there are surely similar services in operation at the sending end in many countries). The application requirements are fairly detailed ("Photographs of individuals wearing head coverings or hats are only acceptable if related to his/her religious beliefs, and even then, may not obscure any portion of the face of the applicant,"), probably weeding out the least literate who are acting without assistance.

Besides these modest proxies for general competence, however, the lottery is a random process. It is almost the polar opposite of a merit immigration system that selects newcomers based on how they are perceived to benefit the receiving country.

Of the 6.4 million eligible applicants, 96,691 have been registered and now have five months to get everything squared away if they are to become one of the 50,000 who make the 'final cut' (it's not first-come first-served during this time frame--each individual chosen at random receives a number from 1 to 96,691, and the lowest 50,000 who complete all the steps are granted permanent residency in October).

So where do these "diversity immigrants" (really, that's what they're officially called) come from? Here's a visual representation, via Many Eyes, by country of origin. (If anyone is aware of a better application to use for visualizations, please let me know. Many Eyes is quick and easy, but it's too limiting. Most countries send fewer than 1,000 people through the DVL, but the graph doesn't distinguish between those who send a handful and those who send several hundreds).

The percentage breakdown by area of origin for the 96,691 potential residents:

Region
Islamic world	37.63%
Africa	34.81%
Europe**	18.04%
Asia	5.81%
Latin America	1.91%
Oceania	1.77%
North America***	0.02%

The Islamic world includes nations where the majority of the population is Muslim. The other continental regions include registered applicants from all non-Islamic majority countries on those respective continents (thus Asia does not include Iran, Afghanistan, etc).

Nigeria, which received the greatest number of registrations, is split equally between the Islamic world and Africa. Half its population is Muslim. If Nigeria is instead counted as part of the Islamic world, the African percentage drops to 30.27% and the Islamic percentage rises to 42.17%. If it is counted as African, the African percentage rises to 39.34% and the Islamic percentage declines to 33.10%.

The European contingent disproportionately comes from Eastern Europe. Only one-fifth of registered applicants from the Old Continent actually hail from Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland^, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). Thus, Western Europeans comprise less than 4% of the total registered applicant pool. As a majority of US citizens trace their ancestries to Western Europe, this makes perfect sense!

Who is the DVL giving us? Presuming these potential immigrants are representative of the countries they come from^^, the weighted average IQ, as estimated at the national level by Lynn and Vanhanen in IQ and Global Inequality, of registered applicants is 79.9^^^, on par with Guatemala and Bhutan. That would put the middling diversity immigrant at about the 36th percentile among blacks, or the 9th percentile among non-Hispanic whites in terms of IQ.

The weighted average Human Development Index (HDI) score~ for the registered applicants' countries of origin is .628, on par with Equatorial Guinea and India. The (apparently unweighted) world average is .743. The US gets a .951. A .999 is the best score attainable. The HDI is comprised of three factors: Life expectancy, education levels, and purchasing power parity.

Even without considering cultural friction and incompatibilities (did we mention that roughly one-in-three of these registered applicants are Muslim?), this is foolish. The Diversity Visa Lottery program should be abolished. Both the House and the Senate voted to strip funding for the DVL in '07, but amendments to the final bill, quietly signed into law by President Bush on December 26th of last year when no one was watching, negated these funding cuts.

Tell your representatives that you don't just want funding cut, you want the entire monstrosity axed. Easily find and contact them here.

The Excel data, including registered applicants by individual country, is available here.

* Curiously, applications must be submitted electronically, but the notices of registration the US government sends out to potential new residents are only distributed via snailmail.

** Israel, from which 150 registered applicants come, is included in the European total. It's not very satisfying, but the other potential classifications--the Islamic world and Asia--are both even less so.

*** The Bahamas exclusively. Neither Canadians nor Mexicans are eligible to participate in the DVL.

^ My judgment call. Only 59 of the nearly 100,000 registered applicants are from Finland, so the classification is negligible one way or the other.

^^ Historically, they tend to be above average, especially those from Europe and Asia, at least in terms of reported educational attainment.

^^^ China's IQ is used for Macau. Serbia's IQ is used for Montenegro. Papua New Guinea's IQ is used for Nauru. Four-fifth's weight is given to Papau New Guinea's IQ and one-fifth's weight is given to China to estimate Palau's IQ. Equal weights are given to Morocco's and Mauritania's IQs to estimate Western Sahara's average IQ.

~ France's HDI is used for French Polynesia, French Guinea, and Martinique. The Netherlands' HDI is used for the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. I calculated the HDI using CIA factbook figures for Afghanistan, Iraq, Kiribati, Liberia, Macau, Monaco, Nauru, North Korea, Palau, Serbia, and Somalia, as UN figures for these countries were either dated or non-existent. Instead of giving a two-thirds weight to literacy and a one-third weight to combined gross enrollment ratio for the "education" portion of the HDI, I simply gave full weight to the literacy rate.

Archiving content in case blog gets vaporized

Since I do not (okay, could not) make any money blogging, I've developed a sense of entitlement to being able to do it for free. After all, that is only "free" in the accounting sense of the word, not the economic one. Not only am I entitled to blogging for free, but also to the guarantee that I'll be able to continue to do it for free, irrespective of the blog's content. Take that 'right' away from me, Google, and expect me to react like Comic Book Guy:

Bart: Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?
CBG: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: What? They've giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
CBG: [pauses] Worst episode ever.

Mensarefugee, remarking on Blogger's removal of the blog Why South Africa Sucks for "racist content" (it has since reappeared under a new address), brought up why that might not be the wisest presumption to make:

This was a years old blog with over 3,000 posts - collaboration between at least 5 people, and hundreds of hours of work - just gone.

For others who are concerned about the same thing potentially happening to them, I've been using Facebook as an archive for years. FB imports the contents of my posts into the "notes" application, embedded links and all. I'm hesitant to connect my real name with the blog, as that can wreak serious havoc on one's career, so I've used the notes privacy setting to only allow myself to see the posts as they're fed into my FB account.

There are of course other ways to archive content externally, but I find the FB method especially nice as it is free, the content is transferred verbatim without any transcription issues, and it requires zero work on my part. It all goes automatically. Setting up an account is easy, and it has some other benefits, too.

Top-tier people, ideas, inventions, events, and countries from 1700-present

My younger brother wanted my take on the five most influential and important people, ideas, inventions, events, and countries from the beginning of the 18th Century to the present. I'm notoriously bad at comprising such lists, especially off the top of my head. That's why normative rankings I post here are always (uh, except this time) comprised via a quantitative formula that I am able to explain.

My choices should be enough to cut it in high school honors history, but reader lists would be greatly appreciated. I can never tap that collective erudition enough.

Shooting from the hip in response to a request like his allows me to reflect on why I lean towards some thing and leave another out. Dressing downs for my inclusions and/or omissions are also welcome. I ticked off fifteen people to insulate myself as much as possible from looking foolish by missing somone truly monumental, although in leaving the list devoid of 18th or 19th Century British economists (and every US President including Washington, as Half Sigma points out), I probably did so nonetheless.

People

1) Karl Marx
2) Immanuel Kant
3) Charles Darwin
4) Isaac Newton
5) Alexander Hamilton
6) Josef Stalin
7) Napolean Bonaparte
8) Winston Churchill
9) Albert Einstein
10) Thomas Edison
11) Ben Franklin
12) Francis Galton
13) Adolf Hitler
14) Mao Zedong
15) Ronald Reagan

Ideas

- Natural Selection
- Marxism
- Isonomy (codified equality under the law)
- Secularization of government, politics, culture
- Nationalism

Inventions

- Gasoline-powered internal combustion engine
- Airplanes (or human-on-board flight)
- Microprocessor/PC/internet
- Modern antibiotics
- Steam power

Events

- American Revolution
- Industrial Revolution
- French Revolution
- World War II
- Landing a man on the moon in '69

Countries

- US
- Great Britain
- Russia
- Japan
- France

Demographic profile of the US' top 50 most influential political pundits

++Addition++Steve Sailer weighs in. Bottom-line: The most influential pundits look a lot like the people you see flying in first class. Middle-aged white guys run the country.

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The Telegraph has released its list of the 50 most influential political pundits in the US. Last winter, the British newspaper released a similarly formatted list of the 100 most influential conservatives and liberals on the US political scene.

That compilation struck me as having a palpable Beltway bias. This time around it feels the same. Michelle Malkin, regular FNC contributor, major league blogger, and author didn't make the cut, but Rachel Maddow, who has a radio show on a network few people listen to, did. Karl Rove was given the top honor, although it strains credulity to think what he says carry more electoral weight than the words of Rush Limbaugh do. Chris Matthews comes in second, bemusing as his program only draws one-fourth the viewership that Bill O'Reilly does. Even The Factor re-run at 11pm eastern draws more than twice the viewership of Matthews' primetime airing. And O'Reilly has a radio show to boot.

This stems from the Telegraph trying to arrive at political parity. I come up with 40% of the pundits falling on the left, 44% on the right, and 16% more-or-less politically neutral (that breakdown may vary a bit--if I had to categorize the 50 dichotomously, I'd probably put all but one member of the neutral contingent on the left).

With most media outlets leaning to the left, that ends up looking silly. If there are more pundits espousing left-leaning commentary, it follows that those pundits will have to divvy up the popularity pie into more pieces than the relatively scarce right-leaning pundits will. And that's on the assumption that the market for political analysis is ideologically split down the middle. Surveys consistently show about twice as many people identify themselves as ideologically conservative compared to the number of people who identify themselves as ideologically liberal, pushing the per pundit popularity balance even further to the right.

But as Steve Sailer has said, the point of these sorts of arguable lists is to, well, generate arguments. Fair enough.

In any case, these lists paint a reasonable demographic picture of the elite opinion makers in the US. The list of the 100 top libs and cons revealed a strong white male dominance on both sides of the political divide.

Many of the people included in those rankings were current or former politicians who are likely to reflect their constituencies, however. Others have military backgrounds or are racial-interests leaders who do not enjoy broad enough appeal to propel themselves into the opinion-giving stratosphere. The elite fifty are even more male and even more white. They're younger too (the top 100 libs and cons averaged around 58 years of age). This isn't a moribund punditry class.

For four people, I had to give my best guess as to their nominal religious affiliation based on birthplace, surname, and commentary. For occupational status, I went with each person's primary medium of communication (Limbaugh as "radio" even though he's written books, Krugman as "print" even though he makes TV appearances, etc).

Average Age	52.4 years
Male	86%
Female	14%
Homosexual	6%*
Religion/heritage
Protestant	29%**
Catholic	40%***
Jewish	27%
Orthodox	2%^
Mormon	2% ^^
Race/ethnicity
White	90%
Black	10%
Hispanic	0%****
Asian	0%
Occupation
Television	34%
Radio	18%
Internet	12%
Print	30%
Campaign work	4%
Polling	2%^^^

* 8% if Matt Drudge is included
** In cases like Bill Maher's, where one parent is Jewish and another is Catholic, 1% of the total is allocated to "Jewish" and the other 1% is allocated to "Catholic"
*** Those who've converted to/from Protestantism to/from Catholicism are counted as belonging to what they have become, not what they were born as (ie, Laura Ingraham)
**** Juan Williams, who was born in Panama, might be considered Hispanic, although as far as I can tell he does not speak Spanish and at least his father, if not also his mother, was black
^ Ariana Huffington; She seems to be some sort of spiritual mystic, but is Greek by heritage
^^ Glenn Beck
^^^ Frank Luntz

No Hispanics or Asians make the cut. The two fastest growing racial/ethnic groups, due in large part to our immigration policies, have not (yet?) entered the ranks of the opinion-dispensing kingmakers.

Uh, I wonder if this provides some insight as to why the elite punditry is so keen on open borders? The newcomers don't compete with them, and they push less desirable elements out into the nation's hinterland for the rednecks to deal with. Even the bright Chinese and Korean arrivals head to MIT instead of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

How much of this utter absence is due to Hispanics' and Asians' high levels of introversion as compared to whites and especially blacks? How much has to do with leading Hispanics focusing their efforts on fighting for special privileges on behalf of other Hispanics? Does the Asian (especially East Asian) tendency towards agreement and collectivism keep them away from the media circuit? Or is it only a matter of time before the talking head class starts to look more like America?

Gays appear to be represented in proportion to their numbers in society at large. Not surprisingly, the Jewish presence far outstrips its representation in the population at large. It is in line with Jewish representation among US nobel prize winners (27%). More remarkably, Catholics are about twice as prominent as would be expected by their national numbers. Is this primarily geographic, as most nationally-syndicated punditry comes out of New York, or something else?

Finally, the internet strikes me as an underappreciated medium of communication, but I suppose I'm biased in this regard!

Most racially motivated crimes don't show up in hate crime statistics

The Inductivist Ron Guhname looks at the '04 NCVS, one of the two primary ways the FBI goes about compiling national crime statistics (the other being the UCR), and finds that the official hate crime statistics do not accurately represent the racial distribution of crimes motivated by hate:

Percent of all racial hate crime offenders

White 21.0
Black 53.3
Other 13.3
Don't know 1.9
Residue 10.5

So, the majority of crimes committed out of racial hatred are perpetrated by blacks, but even this does not show the magnitude of the difference since the U.S. population is only 13% black. Doing the calculations, a black person is 13.3 times more likely than a white to commit this type of crime.

The FBI's most recent report on hate crimes in the US shows blacks to only be 2.2 times more likely to commit a hate crime than whites* are. Since there is more political pressure for prosecutors to designate crimes perpetrated against non-whites (especially blacks) by whites as hate crimes than when the race of the victim and perpetrator are reversed, hate crimes (which might be better dubbed "crimes with hateful motivations") inflate the perception of white nastiness while downplaying the perception of non-white aggressiveness.

Actually surveying victims of criminal activity is a more sound way of approaching the issue. The official 'hate crime' designation obfuscates the actual level and direction of 'hate'-motivated criminality in the US. The way it is reported on demonstrates this to the point of absurdity: The putatively most hateful states report the fewest hate crimes, an increase in hate crimes is seen as an improvement in racial relations or acceptance of alternative lifestyles, and a steep rise in the number of black perpetrators of hate crimes is seen as reason enough for black leaders to decry the rise in total hate crimes as indicative of the increased hate directed at (rather than dispensed by) black America.

The FBI estimates that only 44% of 'hate crimes' are actually reported to law enforcement agencies. There were 7,722 total hate crime incidents reported, of which 51.8% were racially motivated and another 12% motivated by ethnicity or nationality. However, the jurisdictions participating in data collection covered 85.2% of the nation's population. Assuming those motivated by race, sexual orientation, religion, etc are equally likely to go unreported by type and by jurisdictions not reporting, this leads to an estimate of 13,142 for the actual number of racially motivated (I'm including those motivated by ethnicity or nationality in this figure as well) hate crimes annually occuring nationwide. This suggests one racially motivated hate crime is committed for every 22,827 people in the US** each year.

The data Ron uses inquire about the previous six-month period, in which 105 of those interviewed had been a victim of racially motivated crime. To get an annual estimate, double the number to 210. The NCVS interviewed a total of 149,000 individuals. Going this route, we get one racially motivated hate crime committed for every 727 people in the US on an annual basis.

The above suggests that there are 31 times as many people who report to have been a victim of a racially motivated crime than the FBI believes there are crimes taking place that should be designated as racially motivated hate crimes.

There are several informed assumptions in the calculations above that make the specific magnitude of the difference a ballpark estimate. But clearly most victims who believe they've been victimized due to racial hostility are not included in official hate crimes statistics. That the survey method shows blacks to be more than 13 times as likely to commit racially motivated crimes as whites are, while official statistics only show blacks to be a little more than twice as likely to do so suggests that racially motivated crimes targeting whites are much less likely to be included in official hate crimes figures as crimes targeting blacks are.

Hate crime numbers are used to try and bolster the narrative that the US is a dangerous place for non-whites, who are constantly being preyed upon by the white majority (although even these selective numbers, which count most Hispanics as white, still show Native Americans and blacks as more likely to commit hate crimes than whites are). They tell us little about the actual state of racial relations on the street.

* One particularly overt absurdity of hate crimes stat-keeping is that Hispanics are not counted separately as perpetrators but they are counted separately as victims. Thus most Hispanic perpetrators are included in the white perpetrator figures, but are not included in the tally of white victims. This artificially inflates the perceived level of white aggression by boosting the number of white perpetrators relative to the number of white victims.

** I describe it that way instead of saying one out of every 28,000 people are the victims of a racially motivated hate crime, as some crimes involve multiple victims and it is possible that some people are victims of more than one hate crime in the course of a year.

European prisoners disproportionately Muslim

In a feature article, WaPo foreign reporter Molly Moore laments how Muslims in European prisons are being snubbed by policies that 'cater' to Jews and Christians. These chosen faiths enjoy better spiritual services, as the chaplain-to-Jewish/Christian prisoner ratios are intolerably lower than the Muslim cleric-to-Muslim prisoner ratios are.

Estimates from the article of how many times more likely Muslims are to be incarcerated than are non-Muslims in the following European countries:

France -- 14 times
Britain -- 4 times
Netherlands -- 4 times
Belgium -- 9 times

An important French prison official in charge of integration is there to assuage our concerns, however:

"Many immigrants arrive in France in difficult financial situations, which make delinquency more frequent," said Jeanne Sautière, director of integration and religious groups for the French prison system. "The most important thing is to
say there is no correlation between Islam and delinquency."

Correlation doesn't necessarily indicate causation, but there very clearly is a correlation between Islam and criminality in Europe, as Sautière acknowledges one sentence before asserting that no correlation between Islam and criminality exists.

Apparently statistical literacy is not a requirement of those who pursue a noble career in the multicultural racket. Then again, she might realize that indeed a correlation does exist, but, as her line of work dictates, she understands stating that no such correlation exists (irrespective of reality) is of the utmost importance.

More on miscegenation and its effects on the demographic landscape

++Addition++John Savage responds here. He makes an interesting remark regarding the elite opinion on immigration--even if we assume the reality of human biodiversity is understood, the establishment has many reasons to lower the average IQ of the populous. Steve Sailer has summarized the elite opinion on IQ as this: It doesn't matter, but they have higher IQs than everybody else. If Steve's pithy descriptor strikes you as accurate, it's hard to argue that what John asserts doesn't describe the situation right now.

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Responding to a post here on one of his own, John Savage entertains the idea of a one-drop non-white rule for preferential treatment at the national level but ultimately finds several faults in it. He points out that transnational differences, an important driving force behind whiterpeople's support for liberal immigration policies, will remain unchanged. Thus white guilt will become mocha guilt, the end result being more of the same. He also suggests that one-drop non-whites will still identify as non-whites, and thus clamor for lots of immigration from non-white places. Rather than excerpt snippets and thus obfuscate John's points, I urge you to read his post in full if the discussion interests you. My response, which I left at BNWW, is below.

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The strictly national, one-drop discussion is a thought experiment. I'm not endorsing it, although I do think it would be preferable to a nominal non-white percentage requirement for preferential treatment.

No claim to a crystal ball here, either. But it's uncertain that an 80/20 white/non-white 'homogenuous' (that is, everyone is more or less mostly white with about the same amount of black/Amerindian ancestry as contemporary blacks have European ancestry--and with a one-drop rule, whites would have greater opportunity for fecundity due to greater desirability, so the mix would probably be something more like 85/15 or 90/10) will be one supportive of open immigration from Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean. Most blacks express restrictionist views on immigration, while Hispanics tend to split or lean modestly towards restrictionism, depending on how the issue is presented to them.

Hispanics today, especially those of first generation in the US, understandably feel closer to other Hispanics entering the US than hypothetical 80%+ Euros will sometime in the future. It will similarly be more difficult for open border elites to leverage ethnic solidarity in this future, because the Indians simply won't be there (even if there is no shortage of aspiring chiefs). I suppose the pertinent question is how strongly the population buys into the tripe about one-drop. Will most people see it as a legal requirement to be exploited (in short order by virtually everyone), or as an accurate descriptor of biological reality?

Presuming only blacks and whites for a moment, were the public to overwhelmingly support unfettered immigration from Haiti or Nigeria, we'd have to throw out the working assumption that people are rationally attempting to maximize their own IQs and the IQs of their offspring. That calls into question your initial assumption that all people will have become racial realists.

Barack Obama's dominance among blacks shouldn't necessarily be taken as evidence that someone of mixed European and Other ancestry will reliably be able to appeal to Others as they rally behind him. With this presumption, it stands to reason that the mixed leader will play up his Otherness. And against an opponent who is entirely white, it will work. But against someone who is entirely Other, the mixed person will lose the battle for the Other vote.

We see this in Latin America regularly. The Amerindians back a fellow Amerindian or Mestizo who is mostly Amerindian against a more European-looking candidate (ie Morales in Bolivia, Chavez in Venezuela, Obrador in Mexico).

With Hillary as an opponent, Barack has the black vote in the bag--the mixed candidate leveraging his Other credentials to take the Other vote against the white candidate. But when he ran for Congress in 2000 against the very black Bobby Rush (who was heavily involved with the Black Panthers and is now, in addition to being a Congressman, also a preacher) in the very black 1st district of Illinois, Bobby beat Barack by a margin of more than 2-to-1--the mixed not being able to win over the Others like someone who is 'authentically' other can.

Extremists, not Islam, the problem?

The State Department, DHS, and the NCTC urge that it's time to forever separate Islam and terrorism--in our diplomatic lexicon, that is:

Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as "jihadists" or "mujahedeen," according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. Lingo like "Islamo-fascism" is out, too.

The reason: Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.

For example, while Americans may understand "jihad" to mean "holy war," it is in fact a broader Islamic concept of the struggle to do good, says the guidance prepared for diplomats and other officials tasked with explaining the war on terror to the public. Similarly, "mujahedeen," which means those engaged in jihad, must be seen in its broader context.

"Islamo-fascism" never made much sense. "Islamic fundamentalism" is a better descriptor of the ideological force driving terrorist attacks on Western targets. Of course, such a phrase indictes Islam as a compelling engine of the contemporary international terrorist problem. Can't have any of that.

Can Islam be stripped of its martial essence? Tough to see how that'll be pulled off, since Islam's central figure, an expansionist military leader, is having revealed to him (and his followers) the commands and teachings of God throughout the Koran.

In contemporary Christianity, by contrast, the divinely blessed violent conquests are in books most Christians know almost nothing about. Joshua paraded around Jericho and it fell, right? Oh, the walls fell and then all the inhabitants inside (including livestock) were massacred? My pastor never told me that. Judges, I assume, has to do with ideals of justice, right? Oh, you mean it's a compendia of accounts of the violent military expansion and contraction of Israel under various obscure leaders? Huh, wasn't aware.

Christians primarily pay attention to the four gospels (especially Luke and John) which together comprise about one-tenth of the Good Book. And that 10% doesn't condone violent militancy at all.

We'd be better off pointing out the strong connection between Islam and terrorism against the West and then doing everything we are able to do to separate Islam and the West from one another.

Encouraging miscegenation could make Western nations either more, or less, European

John Savage recently posted on an older discussion at VFR about William Saletan's assertion that increasing interracial marriage rates--reuniting the human genome--is the quickest way to close the IQ gap. John suggests that rather than requiring a global totalitarian government to force greater interracial birthing, preferential treatment could do the job:

The point would be to create a strong enough incentive for whites and Asians to believe their children will be better off if they have children exempt from the global program of discrimination. Say the threshold is that people who are 50% or less white are exempt from discrimination, whereas those who are at least 50.1% white are subject to profound discrimination. As a result, I can reason that my reproductive fitness would wind up being greater if I marry someone 100% nonwhite, and have children who are only 50% white and exempt from discrimination. They will have lower IQ than if I’d had white children, but if the discrimination is sufficient as to outweigh the disadvantage of the low IQ, I will be better off having children who are only half white. The 100% nonwhite person, on the other hand, will benefit (and will know it if we’re honest about IQ, as we’re assuming here) by having a smarter child than if she had married another nonwhite.

For sake of argument, assume John has an IQ of 100 (to those familiar with him, that's a grossly understated assumption I know, but for conceptual purposes it works). He can either procreate with a white woman, IQ 100, or a black woman, IQ 84. If he goes with the white woman, his kid has an IQ of 100. If he goes with the black woman, his kid has an IQ of 92.

So the affirmative action benefits for the oreo would have to exceed in value what an additional 8 IQ points would net him for John to choose the black woman. For sake of argument, grant that society's preferential treatment amounts to more for the oreo than 8 additional IQ points will grant him. Assuming each person is aware of his own IQ and the IQ of the others, the black woman will want John to choose her. The white woman, however, will not want to be John's mate. She'll be after a black guy for the same reason John wants to mate with the black woman. John wouldn't choose the white woman, anyway. Non-whites are thus able to max out reproduction, with an accessible supply of white mates that far outstrips their demand for white mates.

John's oreo is best off finding another oreo, but would still take a black mate with an IQ of 84, resulting in a child with an IQ of 88, over a white mate with an IQ of 100, resulting in a child with an IQ of 96. The 75%-black, 25%-white kid is eligible for benefits resulting in a boost of more than 8 points, so his 'effective IQ' is higher than the 25%-black, 75%-white kid with an IQ of 96 who is not eligible for preferential treatment.

Thus the blending is underway in the first generation. In subsequent generations, the ideal becomes being 50% white. Being more than 50% white is bad news, with 50.1% white (not entitled to preferential treatment) the worst situation of all. With this price-is-right dynamic, mating pairs will try to get as close to 50% white as possible without going over. Thus they will accept offspring that is 40% white, but not 60% white.

Whites will be bred out of existence. Once someone falls below 50% white (say 40% white), when there is no one who is more than 50% white but less than 100% white around, the white percentage in that line will begin to drop further. Only those who are less than 40% white will see an advantage in mating with the person who is 40% white--those between 40% and 50% white will look elsewhere, to a limited (and dwindling) supply of half-whites.

Those who are 100% white, who could conceivably boost the white percentage back up, will have no incentive to breed with anyone who has any white in them at all--and if one does, it'll be with someone else who is 100% white, not the the 40% white person. A 100% white mating with a 40% white would lead to a bad outcome for both parties, as their offspring would be 70% white with an IQ of 95 and no preferential treatment eligibility. If the 100% white is going to doom his kid to no preferential treatment, he might as well do it with another 100% white so that the kid has an IQ of 100 instead of an IQ of 95.

In a rational world, John's proposed strategy would work. For simplicity, I'm avoiding the varying amount of European blood in American blacks (averaging around 15%-20%) that complicates the computations and I'm not touching the Hispanic category, which really gets dicey. I'm operating under the assumption that cheap genetic testing becomes widely available, and that the whiteness metric is clearly defined--for $100 bucks, you find out, among other things, that you are X% white. I'm also assuming that people act in a rational manner, which isn't always the case when it comes to two becoming one. Nor will downward pressure on average IQ make people any more rational.

I'm also ignoring the desirability premium intelligent non-whites would enjoy from such strong preferential treatment going into effect and keeping Asians out of the picture altogether.

The discussion centered on a global governing body granting preferential treatment on a worldwide scale. But at the national level, the effect of John's strategy would be the same. However, a one-drop rule, absent immigration, would have the opposite effect. Given current TFR rates by race and ethnicity in the US, a one-drop non-white rule for preferential treatment would be a way of keeping the country as European as possible.

With free-for-all mating, the smaller groups inevitably get gobbled up by the largest group, which is only marginally effected by the mixing. We see this clearly in American blacks, who on average, after more than three centuries here, are nearly one-fifth white. American whites, however, are on average less than 1% black. If preferential treatment is given for any nominal percentage of non-white blood, whites would be encouraged to find non-white mates, with those who are only marginally non-white becoming especially attractive. Non-whites (or non-100% whites in this case), from those who are 99% white to those who are not white at all, would conversely try to find the whitest mate possible, since their offspring will already be given preferential treatment due to their own non-white blood.

In any country where the white population is a majority but in the process of becoming a minority due to differential fertility rates, immediate interracial increases with a one-drop non-white rule for preferential treatment is, theoretically, a way to stop the trend, freezing the current total genetic profile and distributing it evenly across the population over time, so that a nation that is 80% white and 20% black moves towards becoming 100% white with a mocha tint.

I messed up

Statistics require attention to detail. Early Tuesday morning, with the Pennsylvania primary coming up, the idea of predicting the outcome based on a simple linear formula built from regression data on race of the states having voted up to that point came to me. I pulled my data from my email account since I wasn't at home at the time. Anyway, I didn't save the equation after I plugged in the Pennsylvania numbers.

When I recreated it at home this morning, I came up with a different result--Hillary winning by 4.4 points, 52.2%-47.8%, instead of 8 points as I'd said earlier. After toying around for a bit, I found the mistake. I took the white and black percentages as a total of all voters, and then multiplied it by the white+black total (.96), to come up with Obama's share. The last step isn't needed. So the polls were more accurate.

I'm really sorry for the carelessness. It's why doing things at home without pressing time constraints is a much better way to go (that's where I almost always do my blogging).

Hillary's better performance than the crude equation predicted likely comes from news about Obama over the last several weeks being worse for him than news about Hillary has been for her. Also, most of those sitting on the fence going into the primary are now voting for Hillary. Before March 4, they'd been voting for Obama. The thrust of the post remains the same--demographics are an anchor, while all the other things that go on comprise the wind, shifting the electoral boat back and forth along its anchor-restricted range at the surface.

The equation used:

Barack's total share = ((((46+[black percentage of voters]*-.28436)*[white percentage of voters])+([black percentage of voters]*.84))+(.33*[Hispanic percentage of voters]))/[1-percentage of remaining voters]