Mars Needs Women

was the title of a campy sci-fi/horror film of the the 1960s. Of course, Mars is a frozen, airless rock spinning in infinity and needs nothing.

China, on the other hand is a nation on Earth. In 1979, the Chinese Government adopted a policy of allowing, subject to certain exemptions, each family to have only one child. Wikipedia has a couple of relevant articles. Chinese people, have for various, social and cultural reasons, a strong preference for having boys. So it is not surprising to learn that: "According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there will be 24 million more men than women of marriageable age by 2020."

This is a problem. Marriage civilizes men. Unmarried men are constant source of disorder and violence. It has been hypothesized that in societies where polygyny is the norm, there is a problem with large groups of unmarried young men. They are often directed to military occupations where they have hope of booty and perhaps a woman to bring home. Even more than the rest of the world, the Chinese regime must worry about this phenomenon in modern China, as a potential source of political disorder in a state without democratic institutions.

Solving the problem is tough, especially when it is due to manipulation of the circumstances of birth. Start to birth more girls today, and the Chinese might have an adequate supply in 2035.  Military raids to steal women are another traditional method, but the risks of triggering a larger war are probably unacceptable. The slave trade was another path, but slavery has a bad name in the modern world.

It is therefore unsurprising to read that the Chinese have taken to buying brides from Pakistan.

"Pakistani Christian girls trafficked to China as brides" By Kathy Gannon and Dake Kang on May 7, 2019 at APNews.com

GUJRANWALA, Pakistan (AP) — ... hundreds of poor Christian girls ... have been trafficked to China in a market for brides that has swiftly grown in Pakistan since late last year, activists say. Brokers are aggressively seeking out girls for Chinese men, sometimes even cruising outside churches to ask for potential brides. They are being helped by Christian clerics paid to target impoverished parents in their congregation with promises of wealth in exchange for their daughters.
* * *

In China, demand for foreign brides has mounted, a legacy of the one-child policy that skewed the country’s gender balance toward males. Brides initially came largely from Vietnam, Laos and North Korea. ... “It’s purely supply and demand,” she said. “It used to be, ‘Is she light-skinned?’ Now it’s like, ‘Is she female?’”

Pakistan seems to have come onto marriage brokers’ radar late last year. ... Since then, an estimated 750 to 1,000 girls have been married off ... Pakistan’s small Christian community, centered in Punjab province, makes a vulnerable target. Numbering some 2.5 million in the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim population of 200 million, Christians are among Pakistan’s most deeply impoverished. They also have little political or social support.

Among all faiths in Pakistan, parents often decide a daughter’s marriage partner. The deeply patriarchal society sees girls as less desirable than boys and as a burden because the bride’s family must pay a dowry and the cost of the wedding when they marry. ... By contrast, potential Chinese grooms offer parents money and pay all wedding expenses. ... They pay on average $3,500 to $5,000, including payments to parents, pastors and a broker ...

We are, of course, expected to be horrified by this gross violation of human rights. The article goes to the source: "Human Rights Watch called on China and Pakistan to take action to end bride trafficking, warning in an April 26 statement of 'increasing evidence that Pakistani women and girls are at risk of sexual slavery in China'."

I have expected to see all along. In that, it is sort of like the College Admissions Scandal, I commented on previously. China has too many men and not enough women. The Muslim countries of MENA and SEA have too many people and not enough capital. The logical thing for both sides is to trade women for money. This will cause white liberals in the EU/USA to have conniption fits, but their disapproval caries no weight in other parts of the world. I do not think that either Islam or Chinese philosophies have any deep seated objection to the idea.

Is there a glimmer of light at the Southern Border?

I have over many years come to despise Tom Friedman, who is the NYTimes lead op-ed columnist, unfailing fountain of pious liberal conventional wisdom, and pompous windbag. Early in his career, he was a reporter on the foreign desk, and as such spent several years in the Middle East. He wrote a book about the experience "From Beirut to Jerusalem", which I thought at the time was pretty good. After he took up residence in the Washington office he started writing bilge like "The World Is Flat". I stopped reading his stuff and I have been calmer, if not happier, since then.


Usually when his columns are linked on the websites that I attend to, it is to ridicule them. Typically with good reason as they are pious liberal conventional wisdom, expressed by a pompous windbag. I was prepared for the usual when I followed a link to: "Trump Is Wasting Our Immigration Crisis: The system needs to be fixed, but “the wall” is only part of the solution." by Thomas L. Friedman on April 23, 2019.

But, when I read this:

SAN DIEGO — On April 12, I toured the busiest border crossing between America and Mexico — the San Ysidro Port of Entry, in San Diego — and the walls being built around it. Guided by a U.S. Border Patrol team, I also traveled along the border right down to where the newest 18-foot-high slatted steel barrier ends and the wide-open hills and craggy valleys beckoning drug smugglers, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants begin.

* * *

The whole day left me more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate — but a smart gate.

I said to myself, wow, isn't that almost exactly what Trump has been saying for the last six months? Who let Tom of off the ranch? Last time the subject of a wall came up Nancy Pelosi declared it to be immoral. so, I read on. Tom said that:

Without a high wall, too many Americans will lack confidence that we can control our borders, and they therefore will oppose the steady immigration we need. But for this wall to have a big gate, it has to be a smart and compassionate one, one that says, “Besides legitimate asylum seekers, we’ll accept immigrants at a rate at which they can be properly absorbed into our society and work force, and we’ll favor visa seekers with energies and talents that enrich and advance our society.” That’s the opposite of the unstrategic, far-too random, chaotic immigration “system” we have now.

That’s been a “system” in which millions of people could cross into our country illegally or overstay their visas. Or cross over and claim asylum and then melt into society while awaiting their hearings. Or bring in their family members through family reunification programs. And that’s no matter their possible impact on communities and social welfare resources or their ability to assimilate and contribute to society.

* * *

And in an era when more and more countries will fracture under environmental, population, criminal and technological stresses, we simply cannot take everyone who shows up at our border.

End chain migration. Accept legal immigrants on a rational basis. Revise the asylum system to only admit genuine cases of persecution. Limit the number of legal immigrants to the rate at which they can be absorbed. These are all propositions that Trump and most Republicans can accept.

Of course, Tom is writing for the NYTimes and he must sound the "Orange Man Bad" gong:

Instead, we’re stuck with a man who just exploits the border crisis and uses his “wall” to divide the nation and energize his base.

Or, as Frum put it: “The gratuitous brutalities of the Trump administration shock the conscience, and fail even on their own terms. Intended as deterrents, they are not deterring. They are succeeding only in counter-radicalizing liberal opinion to stigmatize almost all immigration enforcement against nonfelons as cruel, racist and unacceptable.”

I am not a huge Trump fan, but guys like Tom and Frum have spent the last few years criticizing Trump's rhetoric, not on the basis of what Trump said, but of what his Democrat and Media opponents have said that he said. Or, even worse, on the basis of what some drunk in the last row said. Further, Trump's rhetoric is off the cuff, and full of bombast and rodomontade, often humorous, and simply will not bear careful parsing.

But, Tom's exit is graceful:

In sum: we need new walls; we need a serious strategy for mitigating climate change and offering economic and governance assistance to countries to our south that are being destabilized by poverty and extreme weather; we need to rethink who is entitled to asylum, so people fleeing economic dislocation don’t overwhelm our borders and harden our hearts to people truly fleeing tyranny; we need to encourage legal immigration of people who can help our country thrive in the 21st century; and we need to partner with Mexico on a Mexican-American plan to manage the flow of migrants through Mexico to our border. 

None of these alone will work. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not been to the border.

If there were any Democrats in Congress who could bear the slings and arrows of their outraged base, Tom's column could provide the basis for legislation that would go a long way to resolving the crisis on the border. I think that they would be surprised to find that Republicans would work with them.

The College Admissions Scandal, Such As It Is.

They caught a bunch of parents using a “consultant” to bribe various college people, like soccer coaches, to get their little Olivias into “elite” colleges. (USC? are you kidding?).

I won’t wax moralistic. I don’t care. The world has real problems. Whether one one rich white kid goes to Ivy U and another one has to go to Cal State Northridge is of no concern to me.

I will say I told you so. For years I have said that there must be a way to payoff admissions people. It must be happening because there is too much demand, the system is too opaque, and the people who run it are low status (among their peers on college campuses) and not well paid.

Why didn’t those people go through the door of legal bribery via a donation to the colleges endowment? Easy. They are, for the most part, HENRYs (High Earnings Not Rich Yet). It takes a lot of capital to be able to peel off a 7 figure donation, which is what it takes. Five or six figures they can handle.

I think it is all about status anxiety. It is not enough to obtain high status for yourself, you must be able to pass it on to your children. You see, 300 years ago in Europe, status was conferred by inheriting lands and titles. That kind of status is easily given to your children.

In modern America status is conferred by things like having a role in a movie, being an elected official, being a partner in a big law firm. Those are very hard to give to children. And that makes parents very anxious.

The odds are that if you are in the right tail of talent, your kids will be closer to the mean (regression to the mean). Finding out that this is true is quite blow to the aspirations of the blessed.

One status thing that parents can give kids is children is a tuition at an “elite” college. All the kid needs to do is gut it out for 4 years. The evidence is that everyone who is willing to make a minimal effort to play the part, gets a sheepskin in 4 years no matter what.

So, yes the whole thing is upper class parents plagued by status anxiety trying to drag their children over the finish line. And the fight is entirely inside the upper class.

Elite Colleges — What do they do?

Many commenters, seem to be under the illusion that the highly rated colleges in this country have very smart students and who learn lots of really important stuff from the world famous professors at those schools. I think that is wrong.

In all but a few cases (Cal Tech), the “elite” colleges are where the bright, but not necessarily extraordinary children of the upper classes go to get indoctrinated into mores and crotchets of the ruling class. What is important is not reading any particular text or solving any particular mathematical equation. What is important is learning to be like the others, and not to be a bitter clinger, one of the deplorables, or what is even worse, some kind of a religious fanatic.

Why are the colleges failing to be what they want us to think they are?

First, the students are a very mixed bag.

A. Athletes. The schools, even the Ivy League, recruit a lot of athletes. They need to field a lot of teams, not just football and basketball, but soccer, lacrosse, track, and rowing, I have been told by reliable sources that upwards of 40% of the incoming class at some ivy league schools are recruited athletes. Now, those kids are not dummies, but most of them are ordinarily bright kids with decent grades and board scores. The real secret here is that like the colleges, the high schools have been inflating grades like Macy’s inflates balloons for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It is very common to hear about ordinary suburban high schools where 15% of the kids are “valedictorians”. And the College Board has been dumbing down the SAT to fit the crappy educations the high schools are giving the kids for years.

B. Legacies. The schools know that Alumni whose children are rejected don’t donate. So they follow the golden rule: “money talks”. Again, the legacies are not dummies, but, see above about what their grades and board scores mean.

C. Affirmative action. Ideally the schools would like one eighth of the incoming class to be black and one eighth Mexican. They can’t do that even when they count the basketball players and football players. So they need some ringers, like African immigrant kids who work like Asian immigrant kids, and the children of white upper class Mexicans from Mexico.

D. Miscellaneous gets. Children of powerful politicians. Kids who have starred in Hollywood motion pictures. Children of really rich people who are not alums, but who will fork over now.

The bottom line is that about a quarter of the class is left for kids who will raise the average SAT score. Just make sure that less than half of them are Asian. So that is about ten percent of the class for smart white kids — just make sure they don’t need scholarship money. That goes to the A categories.

Second. The teaching is, if anything, even less to write home about. Ivy League professors are hired because of their research production. Teaching is, as far as they are concerned, a distraction. The really famous ones only teach a couple of graduate classes, which are focused on their research interests. The classroom experience for undergraduates is no better at Ivy U than it is at Kent State. Which is just fine as far as the students are concerned because class is just a distraction from their real interests which are binge drinking and fornicating.

What the kids graduate with is status. That is what their parents want to give them. The only fix is to pull the ‘elite” colleges down to earth.. It shouldn’t make any difference if you went to Harvard or 2 years at Plano CC followed by 2 more at UT-Arlington.

Admissions System

What makes the situation even worse is that the admissions system for elite colleges is not objective, not transparent, and not fair.

Admissions committees have neither the expertise nor the ability to conduct the kind of scrutiny that would expose cheating, nor the kinds that they claim to do and claim to want to do. It is all a charade. The problem is acute because of the increasing grip that elite colleges have on entry into the ruling class and media and financial elites.

The only possible way out of this bind is to remove control of the process from the colleges. Many educated people believe that admissions should be controlled by a third party testing authority as it is in many other countries. Their intuition is that such a system would be acceptable to everyone.

There are objective systems in Europe and East Asia, the kids take examinations such as the French Baccalauréat or the German Abitur. The tests are written essay type exams, and some of them are even oral. They are far harder to cheat on than the multiple choice parodies of examinations used in the US such as the SAT.

Testing wont work

A testing system would make many large and powerful political groups very unhappy. It is clear to me that a sufficient portion of the public, no doubt concentrated in certain groups, has rejected the very idea that testing can be fair or efficient. Check out the reaction created by the latest round of admissions to NYC public magnet schools. Stuyvesant High School admitted 895 students for fall 2019. Only 7 of them are black. But only 22% are white. Two thirds are Asian. The Mayor is very unhappy.

American parents are not prepared to find out that their precious snowflakes have skated through their inferior high schools without learning anything. And certain classes have not inculcated a love of learning among their children, nor have they called out the politicians and teachers unions who conspire against them.

None of these people will accept the verdict of a test or system of tests. They will fall for the siren song of demagogues who claim that the system is based on sexism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia, racism, and bigotry.

The only admission system I can think of that is objective, transparent, and fair is a random draw.
A lottery would be fair to everyone. No one could claim that they were handicapped by their race or the fact that they were limited by circumstance to poorly run and financed public schools. No one would be advantaged by being able to afford exam tutors, admissions consultants, social justice expeditions to third world countries, alumni donations, or participation in private school only sports like rowing.

People I have proposed this idea to have objected that the quality of those being educated would drop drastically.

Compared to the social justice warriors they are graduating now? The joke is that the so-called elite selective schools provide for most students (especially, the legacies, athletes, and affirmative actions) no better education that most second string State Us (e.g. Kent State, Western Kentucky. Eastern Michigan, etc.).

The engineering schools provide rigorous educations, but so do the engineering schools of the state universities. Besides, those programs are always self selective. Organic Chemistry has ended more medical careers than cocaine.

So what would the impact of an admissions lottery be on this system. The biggest one I can see is on the rowing teams. Do you have any idea how few rowers there are outside of New England prep schools.

As for the general intellectual level of the colleges. Meh. Yes, there would be a few non A category kids who were too stupid to get by. They can be pushed out pretty quickly, if the schools care, and I am not sure they do.

BTW, another thing that we will need to do is impose wage and price controls on colleges, so that they do not use pricing to scare away non-rich children.