I have no view on SCHIP; the commenter who assumes I oppose it because I am a reactionary beast does not have an accurate fix on my political views. I am not familiar with the particulars of SCHIP, but I would be inclined to favor free health insurance for all children (up to age 18), financed by means-testing Medicare and social security, because careful attention to the health of children will reduce their health problems and health expense in later life. Government spends much too much on the elderly relative to the young, presumably because children don't vote.
Also, my blog post did not mention Rumsfeld or the Hoover Institution, which has appointed him to a temporary visiting lectureship. I am far more critical of Rumsfeld than my fellow blogger Becker is. The Iraq war has been a fiasco, and much of the responsibility must be borne by Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense throughout most of the war. But should that disqualify him from a quasi-academic appointment, if he is otherwise qualified, as he surely is? I shouldn't think so.
I accept correction for having described Larry Summers's controversial talk as stating that female IQs are "flatter" than male IQs. What I meant and I hope the context made clearer than the term I used is that there is more variance in male IQs than in female ones--the distribution of male IQs has longer tails than the distribution of female IQs. So assuming the same mean IQ for the two genders, there are more male geniuses and male morons than there are female geniuses and female morons. That is an arguable proposition with some support in evolutionary biology.
It is important though highly controversial to explore the genetic causes of differences in human achievement or behavior in order to avoid an inaccurate sense of how much discrimination is responsible for differences across races, genders, etc., in behavior and achievement. For example, the female crime rate is grossly lower than the male crime rate. Is it plausible that the difference is wholly unrelated to genetic differences between men and women?
One commenter asks: could it not be that the reason that university faculties are disproportionately left leaning is that leftist policies are more intelligent than conservative policies, so that university faculty, being of above-average intelligence, are naturally more likely to support leftist policies? There are two objections to this suggestion. The first is that political opinion in faculties is not uniform across disciplines. Economists, for example, are more conservative on average than teachers in the humanities, but they are not less intelligent. Second, while today there is a widespread feeling that conservatives have lost their way, in the past the left has frequently supported policies that we know in retrospect were mistaken, such as communism, socialism, highly progressive taxation, urban renewal, rent control, populist theories of antitrust, heavy-handed public utility and common carrier regulation, progressive education, unilateral disarmament, pacifism, syndicalism, and anarchism. Both Left and Right have much to be embarrassed about.
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10/14/2007
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