Illegal immigration and unemployment

In the comments from the previous post, blogger Robert Wiblin contested my presumption that unskilled immigration raises the native unemployment rate. We may be talking past one another, as he provided links to studies finding small decreases in unemployment from increased levels of overall immigration. Given the inherent difficulty in tracking illegal immigrants, these studies probably disproportionately attempt to gauge the relationship between...

Employment and satisfaction with standard-of-living

In February 19th's Radio Derb podcast, John Derbyshire commented on a recent Gallup poll concerning the percentage of adults in a state expressing satisfaction at their individual standard-of-livings (explicitly, "all the things you can do and buy"):Here's a new Gallup poll on how satisfied people are with their standard of living. Guess which state came out top? Yep, it's...

Crusade calumnies

In Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried excerpts (p62) from a speech given by Bill Clinton a couple of months after 9/11 as an illustration "exemplifying the power of multicultural concepts to influence political celebrities independently of tangible career interest" (that is, multicult worship is not merely a tool for achieving some desired political...

Intelligence isn't just good for your head, it's good for your heart!

Work by Britain's Medical Research Council (similar to the NIH in the US) provides more support for the assertion that intelligence is good for your health:Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work.Research by Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient...

If you build them...

From the WSJ's What's News section:Home builder are ramping up speculative construction to attract last-minute buyers who want to tap a soon-to-expire tax credit [the purchase must be signed by April 30 and closed on by June 30]. Houses were being built with reckless abandon a few short years ago, and times were good then. Clearly, we need the relentless construction to resume. Never mind that 2009 was yet another record year for home foreclosure...

Robbing Peter to pay Pablo

Intellectual leaders of the Democratic party fear that if President Obama is unable to salvage a health care bill that increasingly looks like it it's indefinitely stuck in legislative limbo, party members will be unwilling to touch it in the future:"If Bill Clinton couldn't get it done, and Barack Obama can't do it, no Democrat will ever try again," said economist Len Nichols, health policy director at the New America Foundation...."History is written...

Colored people and blacks, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians and Orientals

In putting together a follow-up to the previous post tracking the descriptors for blacks through time, I checked the first few pages of return results to see if "colored" would be used as an adjective to describe something other than race. This article on an anniversary for the "colored home" grabbed my attention as a possible false-positive, but it's genuine. The colored...