Restrictionist sentiment grows alongside resentment of elites

In cataloging the sorry state of California's financial affairs, Parapundit explains how the host will become increasingly intolerant of the parasites who feed off of it:Hitting the wall of government growth means resentment of elites will grow. It also means the elite factions and other factions will come into more direct conflict and settled issues will become unsettled again. Fixed entitlements will become unfixed. Decades long promises will...

Attitudinal and behavioral differences towards work by race

In a previous post, I looked at attitudinal and (self-reported) behavioral differences towards work among the sexes. There are several reasons for the wage gap between men and women putatively doing the same work; men tend to have been employed for a longer period of time than women have been (a function of the relatively recent uptick in the percentage of women entering the workforce), men are more willing to work oddball shifts which tend to include...

Challenging Russ Roberts and Bryan Caplan on why the US should have open borders

A few weeks ago, GMU's Ross Roberts hosted colleague Bryan Caplan on EconTalk to refute arguments against open borders. Roberts putatively played devil's advocate, challenging Caplan from a restrictionist's perspective, but both guys are clearly in favor of unfettered immigration into the US (Roberts demonstrates his lack of familiarity with restrictionist thought by being unable to recall the term "coyote" as one that refers to those who assist...

Juan Williams

The controversy pits candidness against political correctness:A leftist equipped in a panoply of diversity do-gooding (black, Hispanic, immigrants, wrote a book about civil rights, etc) gets the guillotine for expressing thoughts--after prefacing them with a recitation tolerance rosary--that an overwhelming majority of Americans share:When I get on a plane, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and they're identifying themselves first and foremost...

Achievement gap achieved household status a decade ago

I've been having some fun using the NYT archives to look at the usage history of phrases that seem to me to have been used regularly for as long as I can remember but that are, to those a generation older than, relatively new to the media lexicon. The phrase "achievement gap" falls into that category. The following graph shows the occurence of articles containing the phrase...

IQ and age differential at first marriage

A couple of years ago I posted on the relationship between estimated average IQ and desired age differential in marriage partners by women at the national level. The revealed correlation was a statistically significant .58. That is, the lower a country's average IQ, the older that country's women want their men to be.How does this align with what actually happens? Extremely...

Islam's media presence over time

In a Taki's Magazine column, John Derbyshire writes: Plainly Islam was not, up to 1976, anywhere near the front of anyone’s mind in conservative intellectual circles.The same was still true in 1986. By 1996, I think, there had been some modest awakening. Now, of course, we are all up to speed. Book-reading aside, the ordinary attentive reader of newspapers, magazines, and...

Gay black men 86x as likely to be HIV+ as rest of non-gay male population

The CDC released a report this week quantifying what had previously been widely known to be true, but only in a general sense--that AIDS is a gay problem. Pat Buchanan put it bluntly when he wrote that gays "declared war on nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution".It's also a black problem. And an intravenous drug use problem. What it definitely is not is...