Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 28,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 27,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 2 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 83 posts.

The busiest day of the year was March 19th with 188 views. The most popular post that day was GRE scores of Oberlin College graduates.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were isteve.blogspot.com, anepigone.blogspot.com, blog.vdare.com, google.com, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gre iq, lsat iq conversion, lsat iq, lover of wisdom gre, and lsat iq correlation.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

GRE scores of Oberlin College graduates February 2009
21 comments

Converting LSAT scores to IQ’s January 2009
25 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Converting GRE verbal scores to IQ’s February 2009
39 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Just how smart are philosophy graduate students? February 2009
21 comments

Breakdown of sex and racial group differences in LSAT scores March 2009
18 comments

Her music perfectly fits the bland status of Christian music.  She doesn’t play any instruments and her singing is average.  Here are some photos of her.  She’s as attractive as she was ten or twelve years ago.  So she has good genes, and she seems decently intelligent judging from interviews.  That makes her a good marriage prospect if you are simply interested in having good looking, decently intelligent children.

But I’m not maligning her desire for chastity, a traditional Christian marriage, or that others follow her path.  I agree with her on most accounts.  But I’m going to make the case that she is harming her very own cause.  How so?  She has been waiting to damn long and I doubt she will ever find a husband of her choosing without settling.

There a a number of reasons one of which is demographics (I’ll present other reasons in future posts).  There is a brilliant article written by Mark Renerus in which he discusses the ratio of Christian men to women:

Unfortunately, American evangelicals have another demographic concern: The ratio of devoutly Christian young women to men is far from even. Among evangelical churchgoers, there are about three single women for every two single men. This is the elephant in the corner of almost every congregation—a shortage of young Christian men.

Try counting singles in your congregation next Sunday. Evangelicals make much of avoiding being unequally yoked, but the fact that there are far more spiritually mature young women out there than men makes this bit of advice difficult to follow. No congregational program or men’s retreat in the Rocky Mountains will solve this. If she decides to marry, one in three women has no choice but to marry down in terms of Christian maturity. Many of the hopeful ones wait, watching their late 20s and early 30s arrive with no husband. When the persistent longing turns to deep disappointment, some decide that they didn’t really want to marry after all.

Given this unfavorable ratio, and the plain fact that men are, on average, ready for sex earlier in relationships than women are, many young Christian women are being left with a dilemma: either commence a sexual relationship with a decent, marriage-minded man before she would prefer to—almost certainly before marriage—or risk the real possibility that, in holding out for a godly, chaste, uncommon man, she will wait a lot longer than she would like. Plenty will wait so long as to put their fertility in jeopardy. By that time, the pool of available men is hardly the cream of the crop—and rarely chaste. I know, I know: God has someone in mind for them, and it’s just a matter of time before they meet. God does work miracles. But the fact remains that there just aren’t as many serious Christian young men as there are women, and the men know it.

As we see, the longer St. James waits for her man, the likelier she won’t find him.  Suppose the statistic is correct: there are three single Christian girls for two every single Christian men.  Call the girls Alice, Betty, and Candy; call the guys Dave and Ed.  Alice, Betty, and Candy are praying for the same thing: a good Christian man.  Alice and Betty meet Dave and Ed, they fall in love, and marry.  Alice and Betty praise God for answering their prayers.  Yet this means that God answered “no” to Candy’s prayer.  For God to answer “yes,” He would have to miraculously create another single Christian man, and you and I both know God isn’t likely to do such a thing.

But the problem is even worse than that for St. James.  As she waits longer, the pool of good men shrinks.  At her age, she will have to marry someone in his mid to late thirties or even early forties.  A single guy at that age is either divorced (What is the reason he divorced?  This is a potential mark against him), never married (Why hasn’t he ever married?  This is another potential mark against him), or a rich, alpha playboy (He can have his choice of any girl, and it won’t be St. James.  He will go for someone much younger and more beautiful, even if he wants a good Christian girl).

Rebecca St. James and all good Christian girls should look at Haley’s Halo for good advice in the Christian dating scene.  Guys should look at Dalrock.

1. Achievement test scores predict first year college GPAs better than SAT scores.
2. The rabid focus on SAT by students, parents, schools, and the coaching industry is harmful.
3. And the cognitive stratification of the American society.

I’m going to focus on (1), and argue that Murray’s defense smacks of a shell-game.

Murray argues that the SAT is redundant if students also take the College Board’s achievement tests.  Where the SAT-I (and the new version) tests verbal and mathematical ability, the SAT-II tests mastery of specific subjects.  And the SAT-II predicts freshman GPAs better than the SAT-I according to a University of California study:

Achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting freshman grades. High school grade point average, SAT scores, and achievement test scores were entered into a statistical equation to predict the grade point that applicants achieved during their freshman year in college. The researchers found that achievement tests and high school grade point each had about the same independent role—that is, each factor was, by itself, an equally accurate predictor of how a student will do as a college freshman.

But the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college—the reason to give the test in the first place. In technical terms, adding the SAT to the other two elements added just one-tenth of a percentage point to the percentage of variance in freshman grades explained by high school grade point and the achievement tests.

What about students from families with low incomes? Children of parents with poor education? Here’s another stunner: after controlling for parental income and education, the independent role of the SAT in predicting freshman grade point disappeared altogether. The effectiveness of high school grade point and of achievement tests to predict freshman grade point was undiminished.

I don’t doubt the study’s claims or Murray’s conclusion, but you and I both know why the achievement tests predict so well: they are more g-loaded than the SAT.  That is, they are better assessors of the students’ cognitive abilities.  The post-1995 SAT-I was heavily massaged to reduce the gender and racial score disparities due to politically correct pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s.  The pre-1995 SAT was much more g-loaded, evidence being its ability to discriminate very high IQs due to a higher testing ceiling.  However, Murray anticipates this objection and points out:

Did the pre-1994 SAT measure something importantly different from what the post-1994 SAT had measured? Don’t bother asking the College Board. The data for answering that question would require the College Board to reveal just how well the original and revised SATs measure the general mental factor g, the stuff of intelligence/aptitude, and the College Board does not want to acknowledge that the SAT measures g at all or, for that matter, that g even exists.

Seen from an outsider’s perspective, the changes in 1993–1994 do not look particularly important. Twenty-five antonym items in the SAT Verbal were replaced with reading-comprehension items, on grounds that the antonym items could be compromised by students who memorized vocabulary lists. The math test saw some changes in the answer format. But samples of the new items appear to be plausible measures of g and not obviously inferior to the items they replaced.

Despite the College Board’s rhetoric about revamping the SAT to reflect curriculum, the changes in the test in 1993–1994 probably did not have much effect on the SAT’s power to measure g—in the jargon, its g-loading. (I would not make the same statement about today’s SAT, which has eliminated the highly g-loaded analogy items and added a writing component that carries with it a multitude of scoring problems.)

If I am wrong, and the pre-1994 SAT measured g much better than the SAT used for the UC study, then I hope some disaffected College Board psychometrician leaks that news immediately. I will thereupon join a crusade to restore the old SAT. But given the available information, I think it is probable that even analyses conducted prior to the revisions in the test would not have shown a major independent role for the SAT after taking high school transcript and achievement test scores into account. To put it another way, those of us who thought that the SAT was our salvation were probably wrong. Even coming from mediocre high schools, our scores on achievement tests would have conveyed about the same picture to college admissions committees as our scores on the SAT conveyed.

I’m sure the pre-1995 SAT is more g-loaded than Murray is willing to admit.  And I’m also sure that his assessment is correct such that adding the pre-1995 SAT to a battery of achievement test scores and high-school GPAs will add little in better predicting freshman GPAs.  But that’s because the College Board is performing a shell-game, and Murray knows it.  The shell-game consists of moving the heavy g-loading from the pre-1995 SAT to the SAT-II tests while calling them “achievement tests.”  The SAT-I is then massaged to placate the politically correct minded.  We can focus less on the SAT-I, which wrongfully emphasizes “ability,” and focus more on achievement tests, which rightly emphasizes “mastery of specific subjects.”  But this is a ruse; the achievement tests test cognitive ability better than the SAT-I.

If the status-quo continues, then Murray is correct—we should do away with the SAT-I while keeping the SAT-II achievement tests.  However, premise (2) will continue to be true simply for the coaching industry will shift their focus from the SAT to the achievement tests.  Students, parents, and universities will continue to stress, and the politically correct minded will have something new to complain about.  What we truly need to abolish is current educational system.  But that for another discussion.

You have to scroll to around minute 2:35 to hear the comment in its context.  In short, Al Di Meola states that Asians and European Caucasians are unlikely to be able to play against the time.  Playing against the time involves one keeping a basic beat, without the aid of a metronome or other device, and being able to play radically different rhythms without swaying from that beat.

I follow a lot of guitar playing, and what Di Meola says seems to be true.  Do you think it is true?  And if so, what could be a potential HBD basis for it?

Nazism is Socialism*

Friedrich August von Hayek
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 19 October 2009

Published in the spring of 1933

Incomprehensible as the recent events in Germany must seem to anyone who has known that country chiefly in the democratic post-war years, any attempt fully to understand these developments must treat them as the culmination of tendencies which date back to a period long before the Great War.  Nothing could be more superficial than to consider the forces which dominate the Germany of today as reactionary in the sense that they want a return to the social and economic order of 1914.

The persecution of the Marxists, and of democrats in general, tends to obscure the fundamental fact that National “Socialism” is a genuine socialist movement, whose leading ideas are the final fruit of the anti-liberal tendencies which have been steadily gaining ground in Germany since the later part of the Bismarckian era, and which led the majority of the German intelligentsia first to “socialism of the chair” and later to Marxism in its social-democratic or communist form.

One of the main reasons why the socialist character of National Socialism has been quite generally unrecognized, is, no doubt, its alliance with the nationalist groups which represent the great industries and the great landowners.  But this merely proves that these groups too, as they have since learnt to their bitter disappointment, have, at least partly, been mistaken as to the nature of the movement.  But only partly because, and this is the most characteristic feature of modern Germany, many capitalists are themselves strongly influenced by socialistic ideas, and have not sufficient belief in capitalism to defend it with a clear conscience.

But, in spite of this, the German entrepreneur class have manifested almost incredible short-sightedness in allying themselves with a movement of whose strong anti-capitalistic tendencies there should never have been any doubt. A careful observer must always have been aware that the opposition of the Nazis to the established socialist parties, which gained them the sympathy of the entrepreneur, was only to a very small extent directed against their economic policy.

What the Nazis mainly objected to was their internationalism and all the aspects of their cultural programme which were still influenced by liberal ideas.  But the accusations against the social-democrats and the communists which were most effective in their propaganda were not so much directed against their programme as against their supposed practice — their corruption and nepotism, and even their alleged alliance with “the golden International of Jewish Capitalism.”

It would, indeed, hardly have been possible for the Nationalists to advance fundamental objections to the economic policy of the other socialist parties when their own published programme differed from these only in that its socialism was much cruder and less rational.  The famous 25 points drawn up by Herr Feder, one of Hitler’s early allies, repeatedly endorsed by Hitler and recognized by the by-laws of the National-Socialist party as the immutable basis of all its actions, which together with an extensive commentary is circulating throughout Germany in many hundreds of thousands of copies, is full of ideas resembling those of the early socialists.

But the dominant feature is a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic-individualistic profit seeking, large scale enterprise, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, “international finance and loan capital,” the system of “interest slavery” in general; the abolition of these is described as the “basis of the programme, around which everything else turns.”  It was to this programme that the masses of the German people, who were already completely under the influence of collectivist ideas, responded so enthusiastically.

That this violent anti-capitalistic attack is genuine, and not a mere piece of propaganda, becomes as clear from the personal history of the intellectual leaders of the movement as from the general milieu from which it springs.  It is not even denied that many of the young men who today play a prominent part in it have previously been communists or socialists.

And to any observer of the literary tendencies which made the Germans intelligentsia ready to join the ranks of the new party, it must be clear that the common characteristic of all the politically influential writers — in many cases free from definite party affiliations, was their anti-liberal and anti-capitalist trend.  Groups like that formed around the review “Die Tat” have made the phrase “the end of capitalism” an accepted dogma to most young Germans.

That the movement in more anti-liberal than anything else is closely connected with another important aspect of it, the anti-rational, mystical and romantic sentiment, which has been growing for years among the youth of Germany. The protest against “liberal intellectualism”, which was recently so strongly voiced by the students of the University of Berlin, was not an isolated aberration but a true expression of the feeling of great masses of the people.

It would be too long a story to go into all the different intellectual sources of the anti-rational tendencies in art and literature which have all converged, often to the amazement and consternation of their originators, in the Nazi movement. But it must be said that here again the main influence which destroyed the belief in the universality and unity of human reason was Marx’s teaching of the class-conditioned nature of our thinking, of the difference between bourgeois and proletarian logic, which needed only to be applied to other social groups such as nation or races to supply the weapon now used against rationalism as such.

How completely this Marxian idea has permeated German thought can be seen from the fact that, during the past few years, it has actually been promoted, as “sociology of knowledge”, to the rank of a new branch of learning. It is obvious that, from this intellectual relativism, which denied the existence of truths which could be recognized independently of race, nation, or class, there was only a step to the position which puts sentiment above rational thinking.

That anti-liberalism and anti-rationalism are so intimately bound up with one another is easy to understand, and is, in fact, inevitable. If rule by force by some privileged group is to be justified, its superiority has to be accepted for it cannot be proved. But what is less easily understood, though of immense importance, is the fact illustrated by German and Russian development that the anti-liberalism which, when confined to the economic field, today has the sympathy of almost all the rest of the world, leads inevitably to a reign of universal compulsion, to intolerance and the suppression of intellectual freedom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere. Beyond certain limits, collective action in the interest of all can only be made possible if all can be coerced into accepting as their common interest what those in power take it to be. At that point, coercion must extend to the individuals’ ultimate aims and ideas, and must attempt to bring everyone’s Weltanschauung into line with the ideas of the rulers.

The collectivist and anti-individualistic character of German National Socialism is not much modified by the fact that it is not a proletarian but middle class socialism, and that it is, in consequence, inclined to favour the small artisan and shop keeper and to set the limit up to which it recognizes private property somewhat higher than does communism. In the first instance, it will probably nominally recognise private property in general. But private initiative will probably be hedged about with restrictions on competition so that little freedom will remain.

Artisans, shop-keepers and professional men will, in all likelihood, be organized in guilds, like those of the medieval crafts, which will regulate their activities. In the case of the wealthier capitalists, state control and restriction of income will leave little more than the name of property, even while the intention of correcting the undue accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals has not yet been carried out.

Even at the present moment, state commissioners have been put in charge of many important industries and, if the more radical wing of the party has its way, the same is likely to happen in many other cases. At the present time, when the National Socialist party has grown to such an enormous size, and accordingly embraces elements with very divergent views, it is, of course, difficult to say which views on economic policy hold the field, it will mean that the scare of Russian communism has driven German people unaware into something which differs from communism in little but name.

Indeed, its more than probable that the real meaning of the German revolution is that the dreaded expansion of communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognised because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden behind the difference in the phraseology and the privileged groups. For the present, the German people have reacted against the treatment received from the community of democratic and capitalistic countries by leaving that community.

Nothing, however, would be less justifiable than that the nations of western Europe should look down on the German people because they have fallen victims to which, in this country seems a kind of barbarism. What must be realized is that this only the ultimate and necessary outcome of a process of development in which the other nations have been for a long time steadily following Germany, albeit at a considerable distance. The gradual extensions of the field of state activity, the increase in restrictions on international movements of both men and goods, sympathy with central economic planning and the widespread playing with dictatorship ideas, all tend in this direction.

In Germany, where these things had gone furthest, and intellectual reaction, which will now hardly survive, had been definitely under way. The fact that the character of the present movement is so generally misjudged makes it seem likely that the reaction in other countries will speed up, rather than weakened, the operation of these tendencies which lead in the direction in which Germany is now going. So far, there seems little prospect that the reversal of these intellectual tendencies elsewhere will come in time to prevent other countries from following Germany in this last step also.

*This memorandum may be found in the Hayek Paper, box 105, folder 10, Hoover Institution Archives.

Modern man a wimp says anthropologist

By John Mehaffey

LONDON (Reuters) – Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled “Manthropology” and provocatively sub-titled “The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.”

McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.

“If you’re reading this then you — or the male you have bought it for — are the worst man in history.

“No ifs, no buts — the worst man, period…As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.”

Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

FLEET-FOOTED ABORIGINALS

An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics.

In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.

“We can assume they are running close to their maximum if they are chasing an animal,” he said.

“But if they can do that speed of 37 kph on very soft ground I suspect there is a strong chance they would have outdone Usain Bolt if they had all the advantages that he does.

“We can tell that T8 is accelerating toward the end of his tracks.”

McAllister said it was probable that any number of T8′s contemporaries could have run as fast.

“We have to remember too how incredibly rare these fossilizations are,” he said. “What are the odds that you would get the fastest runner in Australia at that particular time in that particular place in such a way that was going to be preserved?”

Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century.

STARK DECLINE

“It was an initiation ritual, everybody had to do it. They had to be able to jump their own height to progress to manhood,” he said.

“It was something they did all the time and they lived very active lives from a very early age. They developed very phenomenal abilities in jumping. They were jumping from boyhood onwards to prove themselves.”

McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of Schwarzenegger’s bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

“But because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, she would slam him to the table without a problem,” he said.

Manthropology abounds with other examples:

* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.

* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.

* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).

McAllister said it was difficult to equate the ancient spear with the modern javelin but added: “Given other evidence of Aboriginal man’s superb athleticism you’d have to wonder whether they couldn’t have taken out every modern javelin event they entered.”

Why the decline?

“We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear,” McAllister replied. “These people were much more robust than we were.

“We don’t see that because we convert to what things were like about 30 years ago. There’s been such a stark improvement in times, technique has improved out of sight, times and heights have all improved vastly since then but if you go back further it’s a different story.

“At the start of the industrial revolution there are statistics about how much harder people worked then.

“The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.

“We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven’t developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn’t come close to replicating that.

“We wouldn’t want to go back to the brutality of those days but there are some things we would do well to profit from.”

Stock market crashes and market efficiency

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 21 September 2009

The share market crashes that reverberated around the world confirmed the prejudices of many (some of whom are paid to know better) as to the irrationally of markets. There was much gleeful parroting of Keynes’ misleading comments stating that share markets were nothing but casinos that graphically demonstrate the excesses of capitalism. Of course there has been a great deal said in recent years about the efficiency of markets and the cause of fluctuations. Since the 1960s the efficient-market hypothesis has held sway among a great many people. This thesis holds that markets are extremely efficient in the sense that all information about the past, the present and the future are swiftly built into share prices.

This view is derived from the model of perfect competition in which all market participants share the necessary information, resources are never misallocated, prices never distorted and adjustments are instantaneous. This is a thoroughly mechanistic and fallacious way of looking at the economy and explains why the theory has been unable to account for, let alone explain, market crashes.

In brief, the market-efficiency theory asserts that stock markets are perfect. If these markets had attained the degree of perfection that advocates of the market-efficiency theory claim for them then they would cease to be markets. It is little realised, even among a large number of economic commentators, that markets exist because certainty does not. It is because we live in an uncertain world in which the future is always unknown (though we can usually form sound expectations of what it will be like, at least in the short run ), where knowledge is ephemeral, subjective, widely dispersed and continuously changing and where expectations are always clashing and plans failing that the market comes into existence as a spontaneous coordinating process.

Two conclusions can be immediately drawn from the market-efficiency theory: (a) it is impossible for people to consistently make profits on the market; (b) a less obvious conclusion is that prices are never falsified or distorted and thus cannot contain misleading information. As for the first conclusion, a small minority of investment advisors like Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet, for example, have out-performed the market over a long period. The second conclusion founders on the little known but vital fact that credit expansion distorts prices and creates malinvestments.

By expanding bank credit we distort investment decision-making, we also create surplus ‘investment funds’ that generate speculative frenzies. Shares (which are really titles to land and capital goods) become overpriced as speculators inflate their values. But this goes in tandem with a credit boom that also inflates company profits and hence generates expectations of increasing income streams which are then embodied in share prices. When central banks eventually take steps to curb the excesses the speculative bubble collapses.

That this process seems to happen on a regular basis has given rise to the business cycle myth. That economic history in the form of boom-and-bust ‘cycles’ seems to repeat itself with painful regularity demonstrates that people never learn from their economic mistakes. The origins of this theory go back to David Ricardo and the currency school. The ‘Austrians’ revived and greatly refined it. If it was not for the Keynesian counter-revolution in economic thinking what has become known as the Austrian theory of the trade cycle would now be the standard explanation.

Notwithstanding the theory’s explanatory power, most economists, especially in Australia, insist on looking elsewhere for an explanation of market ‘bubbles’, speculative frenzies and depressions. They completely overlook the obvious: only sustained credit expansion can inflate share prices and fuel lengthy speculative frenzies.

The market is not a mechanical system, the workings of which can be easily mapped and its motions predicted with clockwork-like precision. It is a spontaneous institution (meaning that it was not consciously designed), an astonishing coordination process consisting of a remarkable structure of negative feedback processes. Despite its hardy nature, flexibility (if not sabotaged by unions or politicians) and inimitable coordinating capacity, its feedback processes will be distorted if fed false information. This is something efficient-market hypothesis adherents do not recognise. Unfortunately, they are not alone in their ignorance.

Gerard Jackson Brookesnews’ economics editor

We can measure a group’s ability tilt with z-scores.  We take the group’s score, subtract the general population’s mean score, and divide by the standard deviation.  We do this for the verbal and mathematical scores, and then we can calculate the tilt by subtracting the verbal z-score from the mathematical z-score.  A positive number yields a tilt towards mathematical ability; a negative number yields a tilt towards verbal ability.  The size of the number reveals the magnitude of tilt.

Here is a list of some traditional disciplines in the humanities ranked according to fluid g.  The mean verbal score is 465, the quantitative is 584; the standard deviations are 117 and 149, respectively.

The  z-scores are:

English places first with the greatest tilt towards verbal ability.  Next is history, philosophy tied with art history, foreign languages, religion, and finally performance and studio art.  Philosophy’s placement might be surprising considering they trounce the rest of the humanities in verbal ability; but they also trounce them in mathematical ability, which explains the magnitude of the verbal tilt.

What does all of this mean?  Well, I’m not sure; but perhaps one of you will find this useful.