SAILER ON BLACK VS ASIAN LEADERSHIP / DATING / PAY
<a href="../99/06/masciq.txt">\doc\web\99\06\masciq.txt</a>
From:           	SteveSlr@aol.com
Date sent:      	Mon, 29 Mar 1999 22:12:13 EST
To:             	h-bd@egroups.com
Subject:        	[h-bd] Re: Review of Arthur Jensen's The g Factor


Sailer runs a human biodiversity news list, and makes these
interesting comparisons and theories between success and failures of
blacks vs.  Asians.


arthurhu@halcyon.com writes:
<< Why is it that at moderate IQ levels, black make more money than whites
or Asians with equal IQ? Might this be the elusive un-IQ the anti-IQ
people are searching for?  >>


Steve Sailer replies:


Arthur makes the point that African-Americans do reasonably well in terms
of income when you adjust for IQ. If you also adjust for a measure like
"effort" or "conscientousness," African-Americans probably make even more
money than the model would predict. The flip side of this is that
Northeast Asian- Americans probably make less money than you would expect
based on their above average IQ and their outstanding effort. 


Many East Asian-Americans complain about job discrimination, not so much
at the entry level but at the managerial level. They often argue that they
are being overlooked for leadership positions, which tend to go to
non-Asians with less technical know-how but more political pull. Outside
of the U.S., the Overseas Chinese are some of the world's great business
managers and salesmen, but within the U.S., Chinese-Americans tend to get
stuck in engineering and other technical roles.


This pattern probably stems from the same root causes that lead
Asian-American men to also have problems in the dating and marriage
markets. There are a remarkable number of Asian-American men out there
with good (although generally not great) jobs, nice cars, money in the
bank, a prestigious college degree, a smudge-free record with the police,
etc. who can't seem to get married. African-American men with similar
credentials are also less likely to marry than similar whites, but for an
opposite reason: as Elvis Presley said, "Why buy a cow when you can get
all the milk you want through the fence?"


Although the news media's are voracious in their hunger for stories about
discrimination against blacks and women, there show little interest in
discrimination against Asian-American men in the marriage and management
markets. (Partly this is because Asian-American men tend to be rather
stoic and taciturn: in America the squeaky wheels get the news coverage.)
Still, understanding the causes of Asian-American male frustration can
provide essential clues for understanding many of the topics we've
discussed in our Human Biodiversity group. Please note that what tends to
be a problem for Asian-Americans tends to be an exploitable strength for
African-Americans, and vice-versa.


This raises an interesting issue in the economics of discrimination. Three
well-known exceptions to the rule that competition works to minimize
racial discrimination are (1) rational statistical analysis -- when it
costs too much to find out enough information about the individual so
employers just use racial averages. (2) Customer discrimination -- when a
firm's customers have strong opinions about the race of the employees who
will serve them (this is especially prominent in the lesbian market: e.g.,
the leading womyn's music firm Olivia Records suffered a large-scale
consumer boycott when it was revealed that, although Olivia's workforce
was all-womyn, one employee had formerly been a man). (3) Employee
discrimination -- when employees dislike working with (or in this case)
for members of a certain race. This is most likely to have practical
effect where the employees have a lot of power relative to the
profit-seeking owners -- e.g., among executives or among craft union
workers. 


East Asian-Americans seem to suffer from #3, this reluctance of other
employees to work for them. I doubt that East Asians have to put up that
much anymore with discrimination against their being co-workers, but they
seem to have a hard time getting other employees to see them as leaders. I
doubt that this is even conscious on the other employees part. We really
don't know much about what makes somebody a natural born leader, but one
thing we can say for sure is that leadership talent correlates with
perceived degree of masculinity. Here's Tom Wolfe describing a high IQ
Chief Financial Officer's split opinion of his lower IQ boss:


"The Wiz [CFO of Croker Enterprises] looked upon [Charlie Croker, real
estate developer, good old boy, and ex-football star "with a back like a
Jersey Bull"] as an aging, uneducated, and out-of-date country boy who had
somehow, nonetheless, managed to create a large, and, until recently,
wildly successful corporation. That the country boy, with half his
brainpower, should be the lord of the corporation and that [the Wiz]
should be his vassal was an anomaly, a perversity of fate. . . . Or part
of him felt that way. The other part of him was in awe, in unconscious
awe, of something the old boy had and he didn’t: namely, the power to
charm men and the manic drive to bend their wills into saying yes to
projects they didn’t want, didn’t need, and never thought about before. .
. . And that thing was manhood. It was as simple as that."


(As a digression, let me mention that I'm particular struck by the near-
universal assertion among literary critics that Wolfe is weak at
characterization and psychology. Yet, this single paragraph of his more
accurately captures the essence of my 16 year long corporate career than
anything I've read in all the novels by all the literary masters. Many
people find Wolfe annoying and disturbing, I believe, because in his old
age, he is not mellowing but is stepping up his assault on how humanity is
traditionally viewed in literature. Wolfe has taken his early perceptions
about what drives humans and has recently fleshed them out by studying
evolutionary psychology. He makes himself even more unpopular by being a
close student of human biodiversity, emphasizing huge but previously
ignored fields like racial patterns in sports, or the physical and
psychological differences between black and beige African-Americans. Most
tellingly, "A Man in Full" might be the first novel ever to describe its
characters largely in terms of their muscle to fat ratios.)


Along a similar line, Harvard requires an interview with admissions
applicants. On it, African-American applicants tend to outscore Asian-
Americans on "leadership". By the way, that "leadership" box used to be
labelled "manliness."


Maybe even more than in management, those who succeed big time in sales
tend to be extremely masculine. Even in my business, the not-exactly macho
industry of marketing research, sales personnel are coloquially know as
"sales guys," because, well, that's what they are.


For an East Asian-American ambitious to rise in general management or
sales, this all raises unpleasant questions about what he can do to get
ahead. Is it discrimination if you have a harder time leading employees
because they think East Asians aren't good leaders? If your job is to lead
people, and they don't seem to want to follow you, is that discrimination
or a fact of life? What can you do about it? Lift weights? Pop steroids?
Wear vertical stripes to look taller? Organize paintball tournaments? Take
military courses in leadership? (The military believes leadership can be
taught, but they also take care to recruit highly masculine personalities
-- e.g. West Point loves high school football team captains.) The one
social structure where whites and blacks willingly concede leadership to
Asians is in the martial arts, an environment designed by Asians to
reinforce the authority of the instructor. Of course, I suspect that what
the world really wants is a martial arts instructor who is an extremely
muscular, shaven headed black man (you may have noticed Billy Blanks
peddling his ultra-successful Tae-Bo exercise tapes on seven or eight
channels simultaneously).


Let's assume that one problem facing Asian-Americans is lack of height.
Americans seem to prefer big and tall leaders -- the last small President
was Harry Truman, and recent Presidents have been quite tall. I was struck
recently while watching a photo op of Bill Clinton and 66 home run slugger
Sammy Sosa, to see how much taller and broader the politician (6' 2.5" and
God knows how many pounds) was than the famously strong sports star (6'0"
and 200 pounds). 


One apparent solution for shorter Asians might be to go into managing
organizations with lots of women underlings, since even short men are
generally taller than women. But that often doesn't work because East
Asians tend to have highly masculine cerebral talents (e.g., math,
manipulating 3-d imaginary objects, etc.). Thus, they tend to work in
areas where an above average number of employees are male. Further, an
East Asian tends to be highly focused on using facts and logic, and thus
he tend to offend a female subordinate who come to him with a problem by
insensitively offering her a solution to her problem rather than talking
about how the problem makes her feel (see Deborah Tannen's books). In
contrast, black men tend to be quite good at reading what women want to
hear, and at telling them exactly what they want to hear at the moment.


This is related to the issue being discussed in another thread of whether
these perceived differences between the races relate to differences in sex
hormone levels, or differences in sex hormone receptor locations. For
example, while East Asians tend to be the least muscular and the least
aggressive, they tend to be the most masculine in mental skills. This
implies that the races might not differ in an overall sense in terms of
masculinity, but instead differ in <how> they are most masculine (e.g., in
physique and personality for West Africans, in mental skills for Northeast
Asians). This, in turn, would seem to imply that the Northeast Asian
difference comes from androgen receptor distributions rather than some
overall shortage of androgens. Unfortunately, hormone
 research is remarkably complex (as Helmuth Nyborg's recent message made
clear), and practically no research has yet been attempted in regard to
racial differences in receptors. 


These distinctions between Asians and Africans might be explained by the
theory that attributes the notable modern differences in the U.S. between
Northeast Asians and West Africans to differences in natural and sexual
selection forces at work in Ice Age Northeast Asia vs. in always-tropical
West Africa. In a cold climate where women can't feed themselves over
winter, male hunters compete for women by being the best providers. And to
be good at hunting mega-fauna they need to cooperate with other men. Since
wives are expensive, few can afford more than one wife, so they tend to be
less competitive with other men. They've got to get the job done, and
style doesn't matter much. 


In contrast, in a tropical environment, women can feed themselves and
their kids well enough without a man around. So, men have to compete for
women by being attractive and charming: e.g., muscular, a good dancer, a
sweet-talker. And the incentives for cooperating rather than competing
with other men over women are less because one man can afford an almost
unlimited number of wives, since they can support themselves. So, men
compete furiously with each other for women since the chances of huge
success or complete failure are both large. (I'm not convinced by this
theory yet, but it does have the potential to parsimoniously explain a lot
of what we see all around us, at least in North America.)


Now, a crucial point is that these particular frustrations of
Asian-Americans offer economic opportunities for African-Americans. If
East Asians tend to be below-average in leadership charisma, well,
African-Americans tend to be above-average. If East Asians have trouble as
salesmen, because they aren't that good at telling customers what they
want to hear at the exact moment they are emotionally ready to here it,
well, West Africans tend to be good at blowing smoke. My ideas on how
black men could make more money by specializing in careers where their
particular comparative advantages are most valuable are fully discussed in
my 8/12/1996 National Review article "Great Black Hopes" at
http://members.aol.com/steveslr/blackath.htm .


I took a lot of heat for suggesting that sales careers should be
particularly attractive to black men. Currently, blacks are greatly
underrepresented in sales, probably because of fear of discrimination, and
because affirmative action lures men into other careers where compensation
is less tied to performance.  Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal on
2/19/99 ran a remarkable article on how Asian-Americans and
African-Americans are working together profitably by specializing in their
strong suits. This article illustrates, under extremely adverse
conditions, a lot of the themes of my thinking. 


A young Korean-American entrepreneur in Chicago has become the first
retailer to successfully run 10 athletic shoe stores (I forget whether
they are Foot Lockers or Athlete's Foots) in the worst big city black
neighborhoods. Like most Korean shopowners he had a hard time keeping up
with fast-changing black fashions and even the ever-changing words used to
describe shoes. So, he hired black kids from the neighborhoods who had
clean police records, but, he says, they tended to be too "nerdy" and
"shy" to make good eye contact with customers and really smooth-talk them
into buying more than they needed. Then one day into his one store walked
a tremendously personable, charismatic young black man looking for a job.
He said he knew exactly what the fashion trends in shoes were among the
trend-setting drug gangs of the neighborhood. There was only one problem
-- he was an expert because he had just gotten out of prison for
gang-related drug dealing. But the Korean boss decided to take a chance,
and soon found he'd hired a super-salesman. Soon he was hiring more young
ex-cons, who tended to be talkative, aggressive, popular salesmen, and he
relied on his top salesman to keep them in line. He also never let any
blacks touch the cash register -- only Koreans could do that. Soon, the
Korean was running 10 stores in areas that the corporation had said were
hopeless due to too much crime. And at the end of the article, the
super-salesman becomes the first black promoted to a management job.



Finally, let me point out that something that will continue to slow black
male economic progress: while Asian immigrants have flourished in part by
their objective skills with numbers, blacks' advantages are typically in
working with people. Thus, blacks are more susceptible than Asians both to
residual bias and to debilitating fear of bias. I don't know of any quick
solutions to this.


Steve Sailer
http://members.aol.com/steveslr


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