AMY GOODMAN: This is Climate Countdown. It’s Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from inside the Bella Center. 

It’s just one day before the COP15 UN climate summit comes to a close. The summit has been described as the biggest gathering on climate change in history. And now, ten days after it started, are the talks on the brink of collapse?

The dispute between rich and poor countries, between the Global North and Global South, on key issues, including greenhouse gas emissions and climate debt, remain unresolved. World leaders from more than 110 countries have begun arriving at the summit and are delivering their addresses to the main plenary as we speak. As for civil society, the only thing worse than the endless lines of thousands of people trying to get into the Bella Center are no lines, because civil society has largely been locked out. 

Well, just before we went to air today, I interviewed Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. He was re-elected in a landslide victory earlier this month. 

On Wednesday, Evo Morales called on world leaders to hold temperature increases over the next century to just one degree Celsius, the most ambitious proposal so far by any head of state. Morales also called on the United States and other wealthy nations to pay an ecological debt to Bolivia and other developing nations. 

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, welcome to Democracy Now!  

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Thank you very much for the invitation. 

AMY GOODMAN: You spoke yesterday here at the Bella Center and said we cannot end global warming without ending capitalism. What did you mean? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity. Capitalism—and I’m speaking about irrational development—policies of unlimited industrialization are what destroys the environment. And that irrational industrialization is capitalism. So as long as we don’t review or revise those policies, it’s impossible to attend to humanity and life.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that? How would you end capitalism? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] It’s changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending the struggle to—or this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment. 

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, what are you calling here—for here at the UN climate summit? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Defense of the rights of Mother Earth. The earth is our life. Nature is our home, our house. Happily, the United Nations have declared a Mother Earth Day. If the mother is recognized as Mother Earth, it’s something that can’t be sold, it’s something that can’t be—it can’t be violated, something sacred. This is nature. This is planet earth. And that’s why I’ve come here, to defend the rights of Mother Earth, to defend the rights to life, to defend humanity and saving Mother Earth. 

AMY GOODMAN: What does climate debt mean, President Morales? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After the destruction of Mother Earth, it’s important to recognize the rights of Mother Earth. And the best way to recognize this is by paying a climate debt. Second, it’s important to recognize the damages that have been done and attend to the people who have been affected by climate change, people who will lose their island homes, for example, people who will remain without water. 

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said today, “We can’t look back; we have to look forward.” 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that’s the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism. 

AMY GOODMAN: The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, also said today that $100 billion would be promised if a deal were arrived at, not just by the United States, per year, but in a public-private partnership with a number of countries around the world, but only if a deal is arrived at. She would not say what the US would contribute to this. What do you say about the US spending on the issue of global warming versus—well, you talked yesterday about war. 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] The best thing would be that all war spending be directed towards climate change, instead of spending it on troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan or the military bases in Latin America. This money would be better directed to attending to the damages that were created by the United States. And, of course, this isn’t just $100 billion; this is probably trillions and trillions of dollars. How are we going to spend money to kill and not save lives? We have to spend money to save lives, not to kill. These are our differences with capitalism. 

AMY GOODMAN: You called the war in Afghanistan terrorist. Are you saying President Obama is a terrorist? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] People who send their troops to kill outside their country, that’s terror. There’s not only civil—terrorists dressed as civilians; they can also be dressed in military uniforms. Worse still if they’re financed with the money from the peoples, from taxes. Of course, every country has the right to defend itself, just as every country can defend itself. But invading another country with uniformed people, that’s state terrorism. 

Moreover, to establish military bases in Latin America with the objective of political control, and where their military base is an empire, that’s not respect for democracy. There is no peace, social peace. There is no development for those countries nor integration in those regions. This is what we’ve lived in South America and Latin America. 

AMY GOODMAN: What is your message to President Obama at these climate talks? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After listening to his speech at the heads of state Summit of the Americas, we were very hopeful that he would be an ally in addressing poverty. Now I’m not so hopeful. Rather, we’re disappointed. If something has changed in the United States, it’s the color of the president. 

So I’ve been called upon, through administrative resolutions, to close unions, or to eliminate unions, when I’m doing exactly the opposite. [translator: “I apologize.”] In the report that was done regarding access to trade preferences under the ATPDEA program, it was charged that the Bolivian government has been involved in suppressing unions, when, in fact, quite the contrary, the government’s been very active in providing infrastructure and support to unions through improving the centers where unions meet, etc. 

Even President Bush did not make any observations about the new clauses in the constitution of Bolivia, whereas under the new administration there have been observations and comments made about the new constitution that’s been drafted, in particular in relation to the management of the gas and oil sectors. This is a clear involvement in Bolivian internal affairs by the Obama administration. At the end of the day, it seems that they’re asking us to change the constitution. This is something that not even Bush did. If we just look at this, this makes Obama seem—look worse than Bush. And the documents are there. 

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to leave. My last question is: you’ve called for a climate tribunal; what do you mean? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Those who do damage to planet earth and those who do damage need to be judged. Those who do not fulfill the terms of the Kyoto Protocol should also be judged. And for those ends, we have to organize a tribunal for climate justice in the United Nations. 

AMY GOODMAN: And one degree Celsius? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] That’s our proposal. 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it could be achieved? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Yes. Yes, otherwise it would be a lack of commitment to humanity. 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there will be a deal that comes out of Copenhagen? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] I doubt it. We’re developing other proposals for my intervention. 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s catastrophic that there’s no deal? 

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] No, it’s a waste of time. And if the leaders of countries cannot arrive in an agreement, why don’t the peoples then decide together? 

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. I thank you very much, President Morales.

AMY GOODMAN: The Bolivian President Evo Morales speaking to us here in Copenhagen. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s Climate Countdown. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to read the transcript of what President Morales had to say and also to see or hear the video podcast.

From Wikipedia:
James C. Scott (born 2 Dec 1936) is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Before being promoted to Sterling Professor, he was the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology. He is also the director of the Program in Agrarian Studies. By training, he is a southeast Asianist.

Scott is one of the most profound critics of high-modernist human development planning. He believes that the process of state-building, leading to what he calls the legibility and standardization of society, fosters control and domination rather than enlightenment and freedom. Scott started his academic career studying small village communities in the forests of Malaysia. When he left the rain forest he took with him a number of vital observations on how nation states organize their society. His monumental book, Seeing Like A State (1998)[1], became the basis for a fundamental and elaborate critique of how governmental planning for the advancement of society can go utterly wrong: compulsory villages in Tanzania, scientific forestry in Prussia, high-modernist Brasilia, industrial agricultural planning in the USSR and its modern day variant the Millennium Development Goals. According to Scott, these are all examples of rational-utopian blueprint thinking that proved fatal.

Erik Gerritsen: How did you reach the conclusion that society cannot be engineered?


James C. Scott:
During my research in South East Asia I was confronted with the dramatic failures of development projects. I found that successful rural communities were all but destroyed in the wake of well- intended development aid and I tried to understand the deeper causes of these failures. It occurred to me that in order to have ambitious plans for a society, to change it and intervene in any way at all, the state had to create a certain kind of society that could then be manipulated. It had to create citizens with identities. It had to create citizens with names that could be recorded, with matching addresses, put down in cadastral surveys. I found myself mesmerized by the fact that part of the struggle of state-making in early modern Europe was to create a legible society that could be understood before it was possible to intervene. And it also occurred to me that in the process of making society legible it changed it radically. They way early-modern states changed the society they governed is very much comparable to the way the World Bank is changing the Third World nowadays.
The example I give in the book is that of scientific forestry. This was a form of transforming the forest so it would produce a single product, neglecting everything else about the forest. It ended up creating a forest that violated the natural processes of forest regeneration. It was an abject failure, but not before becoming the world standard of scientific forestry. I was intrigued by that insight and tried to apply it to the well-intended planning fiasco of Brasilia and compulsory villagization in Tanzania in which seven million people were moved into villages that didn’t work. Finally, I looked into the industrialization and collectivization policies of Soviet agriculture.
I worked out a critique of what I call high- modernist planning. That is, the nineteenth century ideology grounded in the belief that a scientific- technical trained elite could take responsibility for the social planning. The high-modernists claimed to know how parents should bathe their children, how they prepare their food and the design of their houses. The hubris of the high-modernist led them to believe in unitary and singular answers to all social problems and that solutions to them could be either imposed on the public or a public could be persuaded that these schemes were in their own interest.


EG: Since you published Seeing Like a State in 1998, the world seems to have profoundly changed. Making society ‘legible’ through standardization has now been implemented on a global scale. Are we witnessing the building of another, higher level of state? A world state?


JCS: In a way. The World Bank tries to control development processes in the Third World and by doing so is fundamentally changing those societies. This is comparable to what we saw in early modern Europe. The World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank try to implant the institutions of North Atlantic liberal capitalism and liberal democracy throughout the rest of the world. Just look at the massive emphasis on the development of central banks, the creation of private property, the protection of intellectual property, the repatriation of profits, and also what I call ‘cadasterization’ and the collection of statistics according to UN-standards. The wonderfully accurate word they use for this development is harmonization.
It is all a magnificent piece of propaganda. Of course it means making sure that the institutions match one another and comply. What’s interesting to me is that these institutions are the peculiar, odd, vernacular institutions of North Atlantic capitalism around the turn of the century. They are now traveling back to the Third World as a universal standard, being imposed by these large multinational institutions. The logic of their projects is that a businessman from, let’s say, the Netherlands, can get off of a plane in Assuncion or Kinshasa and find a perfectly familiar world of institutions and structures. They are familiar because they are the institutions from the world which this businessman came from in the first place. We must never forget that these are vernacular institutions which represent themselves as universal, but they carry all the cultural baggage of their particular history.
These tendencies may point to an irreversible path towards the global village, very much along the lines I described in my book. Luckily, reality is more complex. For example, a World Bank program of rural development ends up being colonized by the counter- planning of thousands local farmers who find that the scheme doesn’t quite serve their needs. They start deforming it and twist the grand scheme to suit them. Although there’s no way they can resist this conditionality, the actual projects in the Third World often have very little resemblance to their original design. The sad part is that most of the deviation is a con sequence of a particular government’s effort to increase its own power and project it into the countryside.
Another relevant development in this respect is the enormous increase in financial capital and the volume and pace of communication. These techniques make a kind of detailed control possible that was not possible earlier. But it also makes collective failures both instantaneous and widespread; we have just witnessed how the American sub-prime mortgage crisis was instantaneously ramified throughout the world. It seems that the speed and volume of things which can spin out of control is just as fast as the speed with which they are the subject of new forms of control.


EG: From the state to the world to the city. What is your take on big city engineering and the extent to which planners and people can actually bring change to the city?


JCS: It happens that I teach in a city, New Haven, Connecticut, which has the highest per capita government grants for urban renewal in the entire United States. It implemented those plans to the point that they actually destroyed the city. In twenty years of urban planning they’ve moved people two and three times. New Haven is almost a test case of urban government planning gone bad. There was a saying in Victorian times ‘three moves equal a death’. Once you pick people up from a neighborhood where they have roots and friends and routines, even if it’s not the best neighborhood in the world, such a move comes at great social costs. If you move people several times, some react by not putting down roots at all because it’s too painful to pull them up again.
Jane Jacobs wrote a brilliant book on this subject in 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She tried to work out the principles of a successful community: not a community created by urban planners, but a community that over time had created a successful neighborhood that was safe, prosperous and in which people wanted to stay. Jacobs introduced the concept ‘un-slumming’. Rather than ’slum clearance’ the way high-modernist would just bull – doze an area and rebuild it from the ground up, she saw the ‘un-slumming’ capacity of neighborhoods. She argued that if people were permitted to stay in an area where they wanted to stay and made sure there was a stable job environment and credits to improve their homes, this neighborhood would ‘un-slum’ itself. Unfortunately, most communities don’t have the time for slow regeneration.
No city planner has ever created a successful neighborhood. Ever. The best a city planner can hope for is to identify the workings of successful neighborhoods and to preserve them, rather than destroy them by getting in their way.


EG: Your critique on the engineering of society has
been judged as a plea for the free market. Yet you
are a self-acclaimed anarchist. Could you explain?


JCS :Some consider Seeing Like a State a right-wing book because I had an occasional good word to say about people like Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. My answer to that charge is that I’d like to write a book about the ways in which large capitalist firms rely on standardization in exactly the same way as do nation states. Take a look at McDonalds and their tools of management and control. The only difference with a nation state is that they have to make the standardization pay in terms of profit.
On the other hand, there are people who would like to pin me down on anarchism. I’m the kind of anarchist who is very impressed with the anarchist point about mutuality without hierarchy, about the accomplishments of very complex collective coordination over time without any state involvement. Take for example the creation of agricultural terraces all around South-East Asia. Personally, I live by what I once described to students as ‘Scott’s law of anarchist callisthenics’. The idea is that at some point in your life you’re going to be called upon to break a big law and everything will depend on it. In order to be ready for that moment, you have to stay in shape. So I dedicate myself to breaking a law every day or two.


EG: You are currently researching why the state has always been hostile towards non-sedentary people. To what extent can this be seen as a new chapter in research into the limits of social engineering?


JCS: States seem to be completely unequipped to deal with people who’ve chosen alternative lives. Whether the people in question were Berbers, Bedouins, gypsies or homeless, they interfered with the oldest state project sedentarization.
I had a student not so long ago who had broken his leg and decided he would use the time to live as a homeless person in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For two weeks he followed an elderly homeless person who collected things from dumpsters. My student was greatly impressed with life as an urban hunter-gatherer. The homeless man was not just a sad alcoholic living on the streets, but a man with unbelievable survival skills from whom you can learn a tremendous amount about the city.
If you’re interested in successful social engineering, I guess you want to take this approach seriously. If you’re in charge of urban services for the poor and homeless of a city, you ought to do something like this. Live on the street for a few weeks. And have everyone who works at your department do it as well.


EG: You research, you write…and you farm sheep. What do they teach you?


JCS: Sheep are used as a metaphor for mindlessness and obedience. We talk about people being sheep if they do what they’re told, behave in crowds and don’t have any individuality. But anyone who has ever seen a wild sheep in action knows they are unbelievably individualistic by nature. We’ve been breeding sheep for 8000 years and selecting for docility. Now, having accomplished that, we have the nerve to insult sheep for becoming what we turned them into! We get the sheep we deserve!

NOTE:This interview is part of the current Volume issue 16 on ‘Social Engineering’

Bibliography

(Note: excludes edited volumes.)

• The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 2009 ISBN 0-300-15228-0
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998 ISBN 0-300-07016-0
• Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, 1990 ISBN 0-300-04705-3
• Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, 1985 ISBN 0-300-03336-2
• The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 1979 ISBN 0-300-01862-2

“The shift had a lot to do with down-sizing, when corporations grabbed onto it as a means of soothing their disgruntled workforce. The alternative is realism.”

December 15, 2009 

By Barbara Ehrenreich 
and Anis Shivani

Source: In These Times 

Barbara Ehrenreich’s ZSpace Page 
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 “Many people are not getting by. The human species faces dire ecological threats. Pretending everything will be OK helped get us into this mess, and it won’t get us out.”

In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.

 Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership.

 This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders — assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers — made very bad decisions.

In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism.

Anis Shivani: Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance?

 Barbara Ehrenreich: If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.”

 It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.

 AS: So this picks up more in the early ’80s and even more so in the ’90s when globalization really took off?

 BE: I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the ’80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people.

 AS: Couldn’t this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational?

 BE: That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, “It’s got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line.” Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis.

 But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is “leadership.” The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there’s no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on “vision quests” to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for.

 AS: The same things are happening in foreign policy. We’ve abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire?

 BE: In the ’80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God’s chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader — which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security.

 AS: Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief?

 BE: I haven’t sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I’d rather not hear about “hope,” I’d rather hear about “plans.” Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives.

 AS: You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It’s amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students.

 BE: That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country — courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn’t matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don’t think that’s what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.

 AS: You have written a lot about Calvinism. Is it correct to say you have a deep problem with Calvinism?

 BE: In exploring why America became the birthplace of positive thinking, I come up with an explanation that is quite sympathetic to the early positive thinkers. Positive thinking initially represented a revolt against the dominant Calvinist stream of Protestantism in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That kind of Calvinism was driving people crazy, literally. To think that you were a sinner, that your entire existence for all eternity would be one of torment in hell. It caused depression. It caused physical ailments. It was a nightmare. So you got some people in the early- and mid- 19th century that said, “Wait a minute, things aren’t so bad.” Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably be the best known example.

 AS: Couldn’t you go back farther to the Enlightenment — the ultimate optimistic philosophy? Our founding fathers were very informed by that. Is that a kind of optimism that you endorse? And ultimately what’s different between the pursuit of happiness as a manifestation of optimism and the current optimism that you’re talking about?

 BE: When the founding fathers undertook the Revolutionary War, they didn’t say, “We are going to win because we are visualizing victory.” They knew perfectly well that they could lose and be hanged as traitors. It took existential courage to say: “We are going to undertake this struggle without knowing whether we will win, but we’re just going to damn well die trying.”

 AS: So, where does this shift come from?

 BE: The shift had a lot to do with down-sizing, when corporations grabbed onto it as a means of soothing their disgruntled workforce. The alternative is realism. Let’s think about what’s actually going on: let’s get all the data we can; see what our options are; and figure out how to solve this problem. It sounds so trite and simple-minded, but that’s not how the thinking has been.

 AS: Is the progressive movement infected by bright-sidedness?

 BE: Progressives are not immune to this. I remember Mike Harrington [a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America] as a public speaker and he always, always ended on an upbeat note. No matter what was going on, he would end by saying there was a huge opening for the left. Today, I don’t know if we can do it. But we have no choice but to try.

 AS: You mean we need to have optimism, but grounded in reality?

 BE: I don’t call it optimism. I call it determination. One of the things I’ve devoted so much time to has had to do with poverty, class and inequality. Those things are not going to go away in my lifetime, but it won’t be for my lack of trying. And that’s a different kind of spirit than optimism.

 AS: Some will say your approach is rational, incremental and just not exciting. How would you respond to that?

 BE: I don’t think mine is an arid, overly intellectual approach. Consider what we’re up against on the economic and environmental front. Huge numbers of people are not getting by. There are the ecological threats to the human species. Let’s do something about it. What could be more irresponsible than to say, “If we just think it’s going to be alright, it’s going to be alright.”

Obama’s Big Sellout

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM

 Watch Matt Taibbi discuss “The Big Sellout” in a video on his blog, Taibblog.

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

‘Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal,” says one leading Democratic consultant. “Just look at it. It’s fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it.”

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election.

That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama’s chief advisers during the campaign, didn’t make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama’s policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party’s platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive “a Nobel Prize — for evil.”

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama’s inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president’s new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama’s economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, who happens to be Bob Rubin’s son. At the time, Jamie’s dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. It’s three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush — still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O’Doul’s portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama’s economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama’s transition team that same month.

So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin’s messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that’s just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It’s the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin’s fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. “If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street,” former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, “your doubts should be laid to rest.”

It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin’s former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary!

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government’s bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. “Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he’s already co-managing what’s happening now,” observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.

Left unnoticed, however, was the fact that Geithner had been hired by a sitting Citigroup executive who still had a big bonus coming despite his proximity to Obama. In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.

The irony of Bob Rubin: He’s an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.

As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year’s financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don’t call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi’s board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more,” he said.

Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year’s crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.

There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation. The team Obama put in place to run his economic policy after his inauguration was dominated by people who boasted connections to at least one of these four institutions — so much so that the White House now looks like a backstage party for an episode of Bob Rubin, This Is Your Life!

At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner’s “counselor” — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner “counselors” — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.

As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin’s protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story” — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them,” Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. “The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement,” U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.

The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be “as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so.”

Joining Summers, Furman and Farrell at the NEC is Froman, who by then had been formally appointed to a unique position: He is not only Obama’s international finance adviser at the National Economic Council, he simultaneously serves as deputy national security adviser at the National Security Council. The twin posts give Froman a direct line to the president, putting him in a position to coordinate Obama’s international economic policy during a crisis. He’ll have help from David Lipton, another joint appointee to the economics and security councils who worked with Rubin at Treasury and Citigroup, and from Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin’s whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance.

Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented regulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. Orszag once succinctly summed up the project’s ideology as a sort of liberal spin on trickle-down Reaganomics: “Market competition and globalization generate significant economic benefits.”

Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. “Rather than having a team of rivals, they’ve got a team of Rubins,” says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street.”

While Rubin’s allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama’s meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America’s never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel “Siberia.”

Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had “excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system.” That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn’t even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.

The significance of all of these appointments isn’t that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It’s that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. “Bob Rubin, these guys, they’re classic limousine liberals,” says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. “These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.”

Even the members of Obama’s economic team who have spent most of their lives in public office have managed to make small fortunes on Wall Street. The president’s economic czar, Larry Summers, was paid more than $5.2 million in 2008 alone as a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and pocketed an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from a smorgasbord of future bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. At Treasury, Geithner’s aide Gene Sperling earned a staggering $887,727 from Goldman Sachs last year for performing the punch-line-worthy service of “advice on charitable giving.” Sperling’s fellow Treasury appointee, Mark Patterson, received $637,492 as a full-time lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and another top Geithner aide, Lee Sachs, made more than $3 million working for a New York hedge fund called Mariner Investment Group. The list goes on and on. Even Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has been out of government for only 30 months of his adult life, managed to collect $18 million during his private-sector stint with a Wall Street firm called Wasserstein-Perella.

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. “You can’t expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street,” says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama’s first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. “Credit is the lifeblood of the economy,” he declared, pledging “the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money.” A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.

Obama hasn’t always toed the Rubin line when it comes to economic policy. Despite being surrounded by a team that is powerfully opposed to deficit spending — balanced budgets and deficit reduction have always been central to the Rubin way of thinking — Obama came out of the gate with a huge stimulus plan designed to kick-start the economy and address the job losses brought on by the 2008 crisis. “You have to give him credit there,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders, an advocate of using government resources to address unemployment. “It’s a very significant piece of legislation, and $787 billion is a lot of money.”

But whatever jobs the stimulus has created or preserved so far — 640,329, according to an absurdly precise and already debunked calculation by the White House — the aid that Obama has provided to real people has been dwarfed in size and scope by the taxpayer money that has been handed over to America’s financial giants. “They spent $75 billion on mortgage relief, but come on — look at how much they gave Wall Street,” says a leading Democratic strategist. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion. And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team of Rubinites have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place.

The push for reform seemed to get off to a promising start. In the House, the charge was led by Rep. Barney Frank, the outspoken chair of the House Financial Services Committee, who emerged during last year’s Bush bailouts as a sharp-tongued critic of Wall Street. Back when Obama was still a senator, he and Frank even worked together to introduce a populist bill targeting executive compensation. Last spring, with the economy shattered, Frank began to hold hearings on a host of reforms, crafted with significant input from the White House, that initially contained some very good elements. There were measures to curb abusive credit-card lending, prevent banks from charging excessive fees, force publicly traded firms to conduct meaningful risk assessment and allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation. There were even measures to crack down on risky derivatives and to bar firms like AIG from picking their own regulators.

Then the committee went to work — and the loopholes started to appear.

 The most notable of these came in the proposal to regulate derivatives like credit-default swaps. Even Gary Gensler, the former Goldmanite whom Obama put in charge of commodities regulation, was pushing to make these normally obscure investments more transparent, enabling regulators and investors to identify speculative bubbles sooner. But in August, a month after Gensler came out in favor of reform, Geithner slapped him down by issuing a 115-page paper called “Improvements to Regulation of Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets” that called for a series of exemptions for “end users” — i.e., almost all of the clients who buy derivatives from banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Even more stunning, Frank’s bill included a blanket exception to the rules for currency swaps traded on foreign exchanges — the very instruments that had triggered the Long-Term Capital Management meltdown in the late 1990s.

Given that derivatives were at the heart of the financial meltdown last year, the decision to gut derivatives reform sent some legislators howling with disgust. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of all derivatives could remain unregulated under the new rules, went so far as to say the new laws would make things worse. “Current law with its loopholes might actually be better than these loopholes,” she said.

An even bigger loophole could do far worse damage to the economy. Under the original bill, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were granted the power to ban any credit swaps deemed to be “detrimental to the stability of a financial market or of participants in a financial market.” By the time Frank’s committee was done with the bill, however, the SEC and the CFTC were left with no authority to do anything about abusive derivatives other than to send a report to Congress. The move, in effect, would leave the kind of credit-default swaps that brought down AIG largely unregulated.

Why would leading congressional Democrats, working closely with the Obama administration, agree to leave one of the riskiest of all financial instruments unregulated, even before the issue could be debated by the House? “There was concern that a broad grant to ban abusive swaps would be unsettling,” Frank explained.

Unsettling to whom? Certainly not to you and me — but then again, actual people are not really part of the calculus when it comes to finance reform. According to those close to the markup process, Frank’s committee inserted loopholes under pressure from “constituents” — by which they mean anyone “who can afford a lobbyist,” says Michael Greenberger, the former head of trading at the CFTC under Clinton.

This pattern would repeat itself over and over again throughout the fall. Take the centerpiece of Obama’s reform proposal: the much-ballyhooed creation of a Consumer Finance Protection Agency to protect the little guy from abusive bank practices. Like the derivatives bill, the debate over the CFPA ended up being dominated by horse-trading for loopholes. In the end, Frank not only agreed to exempt some 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks from oversight by the castrated-in-advance agency, leaving most consumers unprotected, he allowed the committee to pass the exemption by voice vote, meaning that congressmen could side with the banks without actually attaching their name to their “Aye.”

To win the support of conservative Democrats, Frank also backed down on another issue that seemed like a slam-dunk: a requirement that all banks offer so-called “plain vanilla” products, such as no-frills mortgages, to give consumers an alternative to deceptive, “fully loaded” deals like adjustable-rate loans. Frank’s last-minute reversal — made in consultation with Geithner — was such a transparent giveaway to the banks that even an economics writer for Reuters, hardly a far-left source, called it “the beginning of the end of meaningful regulatory reform.”

But the real kicker came when Frank’s committee took up what is known as “resolution authority” — government-speak for “Who the hell is in charge the next time somebody at AIG or Lehman Brothers decides to vaporize the economy?” What the committee initially introduced bore a striking resemblance to a proposal written by Geithner earlier in the summer. A masterpiece of legislative chicanery, the measure would have given the White House permanent and unlimited authority to execute future bailouts of megaconglomerates like Citigroup and Bear Stearns.

Democrats pushed the move as politically uncontroversial, claiming that the bill will force Wall Street to pay for any future bailouts and “doesn’t use taxpayer money.” In reality, that was complete bullshit. The way the bill was written, the FDIC would basically borrow money from the Treasury — i.e., from ordinary taxpayers — to bail out any of the nation’s two dozen or so largest financial companies that the president deems in need of government assistance. After the bailout is executed, the president would then levy a tax on financial firms with assets of more than $10 billion to repay the Treasury within 60 months — unless, that is, the president decides he doesn’t want to! “They can wait indefinitely to repay,” says Rep. Brad Sherman of California, who dubbed the early version of the bill “TARP on steroids.”

The new bailout authority also mandated that future bailouts would not include an exchange of equity “in any form” — meaning that taxpayers would get nothing in return for underwriting Wall Street’s mistakes. Even more outrageous, it specifically prohibited Congress from rejecting tax giveaways to Wall Street, as it did last year, by removing all congressional oversight of future bailouts. In fact, the resolution authority proposed by Frank was such a slurpingly obvious blow job of Wall Street that it provoked a revolt among his own committee members, with junior Democrats waging a spirited fight that restored congressional oversight to future bailouts, requires equity for taxpayer money and caps assistance to troubled firms at $150 billion. Another amendment to force companies with more than $50 billion in assets to pay into a rainy-day fund for bailouts passed by a resounding vote of 52 to 17 — with the “Nays” all coming from Frank and other senior Democrats loyal to the administration.

Even as amended, however, resolution authority still has the potential to be truly revolutionary legislation. The Senate version still grants the president unlimited power over equity-free bailouts, and the amended House bill still institutionalizes a system of taxpayer support for the 20 to 25 biggest banks in the country. It would essentially grant economic immortality to those top few megafirms, who will continually gobble up greater and greater slices of market share as money becomes cheaper and cheaper for them to borrow (after all, who wouldn’t lend to a company permanently backstopped by the federal government?). It would also formalize the government’s role in the global economy and turn the presidential-appointment process into an important part of every big firm’s business strategy. “If this passes, the very first thing these companies are going to do in the future is ask themselves, ‘How do we make sure that one of our executives becomes assistant Treasury secretary?’” says Sherman.

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On the Senate side, finance reform has yet to make it through the markup process, but there’s every reason to believe that its final bill will be as watered down as the House version by the time it comes to a vote. The original measure, drafted by chairman Christopher Dodd of the Senate Banking Committee, is surprisingly tough on Wall Street — a fact that almost everyone in town chalks up to Dodd’s desperation to shake the bad publicity he incurred by accepting a sweetheart mortgage from the notorious lender Countrywide. “He’s got to do the shake-his-fist-at-Wall Street thing because of his, you know, problems,” says a Democratic Senate aide. “So that’s why the bill is starting out kind of tough.”

The aide pauses. “The question is, though, what will it end up looking like?”

He’s right — that is the question. Because the way it works is that all of these great-sounding reforms get whittled down bit by bit as they move through the committee markup process, until finally there’s nothing left but the exceptions. In one example, a measure that would have forced financial companies to be more accountable to shareholders by holding elections for their entire boards every year has already been watered down to preserve the current system of staggered votes. In other cases, this being the Senate, loopholes were inserted before the debate even began: The Dodd bill included the exemption for foreign-currency swaps — a gift to Wall Street that only appeared in the Frank bill during the course of hearings — from the very outset.

The White House’s refusal to push for real reform stands in stark contrast to what it should be doing. It was left to Rep. Paul Kanjorski in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate to propose bills to break up the so-called “too big to fail” banks. Both measures would give Congress the power to dismantle those pseudomonopolies controlling almost the entire derivatives market (Goldman, Citi, Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America control 95 percent of the $290 trillion over-the-counter market) and the consumer-lending market (Citi, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo issue one of every two mortgages, and two of every three credit cards). On November 18th, in a move that demonstrates just how nervous Democrats are getting about the growing outrage over taxpayer giveaways, Barney Frank’s committee actually passed Kanjorski’s measure. “It’s a beginning,” Kanjorski says hopefully. “We’re on our way.” But even if the Senate follows suit, big banks could well survive — depending on whom the president appoints to sit on the new regulatory board mandated by the measure. An oversight body filled with executives of the type Obama has favored to date from Citi and Goldman Sachs hardly seems like a strong bet to start taking an ax to concentrated wealth. And given the new bailout provisions that provide these megafirms a market advantage over smaller banks (those Paul Volcker calls “too small to save”), the failure to break them up qualifies as a major policy decision with potentially disastrous consequences.

“They should be doing what Teddy Roosevelt did,” says Sanders. “They should be busting the trusts.”

That probably won’t happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary’s fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he’s a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — “he almost has to,” says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.

Morning, the National Mall, November 5th. A year to the day after Obama named Michael Froman to his transition team, his political “opposition” has descended upon the city. Republican teabaggers from all 50 states have showed up, a vast horde of frowning, pissed-off middle-aged white people with their idiot placards in hand, ready to do cultural battle. They are here to protest Obama’s “socialist” health care bill — you know, the one that even a bloodsucking capitalist interest group like Big Pharma spent $150 million to get passed.

These teabaggers don’t know that, however. All they know is that a big government program might end up using tax dollars to pay the medical bills of rapidly breeding Dominican immigrants. So they hate it. They’re also in a groove, knowing that at the polls a few days earlier, people like themselves had a big hand in ousting several Obama-allied Democrats, including a governor of New Jersey who just happened to be the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. A sign held up by New Jersey protesters bears the warning, “If You Vote For Obamacare, We Will Corzine You.”

I approach a woman named Pat Defillipis from Toms River, New Jersey, and ask her why she’s here. “To protest health care,” she answers. “And then amnesty. You know, immigration amnesty.”

I ask her if she’s aware that there’s a big hearing going on in the House today, where Barney Frank’s committee is marking up a bill to reform the financial regulatory system. She recognizes Frank’s name, wincing, but the rest of my question leaves her staring at me like I’m an alien.

“Do you care at all about economic regulation?” I ask. “There was sort of a big economic collapse last year. Do you have any ideas about how that whole deal should be fixed?”

“We got to slow down on spending,” she says. “We can’t afford it.”

“But what do we do about the rules governing Wall Street . . .”

She walks away. She doesn’t give a fuck. People like Pat aren’t aware of it, but they’re the best friends Obama has. They hate him, sure, but they don’t hate him for any reasons that make sense. When it comes down to it, most of them hate the president for all the usual reasons they hate “liberals” — because he uses big words, doesn’t believe in hell and doesn’t flip out at the sight of gay people holding hands. Additionally, of course, he’s black, and wasn’t born in America, and is married to a woman who secretly hates our country.

These are the kinds of voters whom Obama’s gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots. People whose votes depend not on whether the party in power delivers them jobs or protects them from economic villains, but on what cultural markers the candidate flashes on TV. Finance reform has become to Obama what Iraq War coffins were to Bush: something to be tucked safely out of sight.

Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds.

“The investment community feels very put-upon,” Fass explained. “They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.”

Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?

This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we’re getting no real reform of the finance industry. There’s no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America’s racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a “moral hazard” creeping over his administration.

“The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted,” Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank’s bill. “Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase.”

What’s most troubling is that we don’t know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it’s our fault, for thinking he was different.

Correction: Due to an editing error, the original version of this story incorrectly identified Jamie Rubin, Bob Rubin’s son, as a former diplomat in the Clinton administration.

Watch Matt Taibbi discuss “The Big Sellout” in a video on his blog, Taibblog.

[From Issue 1093 — December 10, 2009]

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0.Wall Street’s Naked Swindle

0.Barack Obama So Far

0.The Great American Bubble Machine

“Chronic” overachiever: Interview with Jonathan Lethem

The writer talks about his new novel’s ambivalent take on New York, and how cultural obsession can lead to madness

By Kerry Lauerman

Oct. 23, 2009 |

As Jonathan Lethem grew into what critics like to call one of our most important novelists, he became increasingly difficult to pigeonhole; fluid across genres, Lethem’s biggest books (“Motherless Brooklyn,” “Fortress of Solitude”) can feel like sparkling new works from a new author rather than someone you’ve enjoyed before. His latest, “Chronic City,” with its flashes of pot-fueled magic realism and ripped-from-the-tabloid-headline riffs again reads as something completely different from Lethem, but no less enthralling.

“Chronic City” features one hapless Chase Insteadman, a former child actor adrift in New York as his fiancée, an astronaut, hovers above, prevented from returning to Earth by an orbital minefield. He soon falls under the mad spell of Perkus Tooth, a writer and inveterate cultural critic-obsessive, who becomes friend and Svengali, sharing with him his love of all things Brando and an increasing paranoia.

Lethem stopped by the Salon New York office to discuss his new novel, his Brooklynite  critique of Manhattan, his MacArthur “genius” grant and the dark side of cultural obsession.

Most anyone with a deep love of film, books, movies has had a Perkus Tooth in their lives at some point, sort of tutoring them on the good stuff. I read that Paul Nelson was an inspiration.

Sure, Paul Nelson was part of that image for me. I mean, Paul Nelson was not frantic, actually. And he wasn’t a dandy, and he wasn’t a pot smoker, so there’s a lot of ways in which if you knew Paul Nelson you’d never associate the two. But something about Chase’s innocence meeting Perkus’ cultural worldliness comes from the fact that as a 20-something — 21, 22 — I kind of fell into Paul’s sphere for a little while and he gave me this instant education in his version of American vernacular culture. Ross Macdonald, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Chet Baker. And it was this flood of references for me to sort out and absorb and he became very important. A lot of the things that Paul taught me to value are still really the center of my sensibility.Ch

But there was also something poignant about the amount that Paul depended on the power of his cultural searches and what they unearthed for his sustenance. It was like they were his oxygen, and I adored it and I think I identified with it at the same time as it can’t help but serve as a kind of warning … just so many people I know who have at some point become voracious about cultural collecting, cultural searching — their identification tips over. I’ve done it. And it’s, to me, so human and so poignant and so compelling and also terrifying to go into that place. And you know, at the same time it’s just finally a metaphor for what anyone does, which is search for meaning, constantly trying to ask yourself if you can find in the environment somewhere, the natural world, your family tree, some version of politics or culture or in this case pop culture, a description that makes you understand why you’re here. So in that sense it’s not culturally specific at all.

What do you mean by a “warning”?

Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia — finding patterns that don’t exist — collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence … You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he’s begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who’d come out of some session and say, “Well, yeah sure, you heard ‘Blind Willie McTell’ because you’ve got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did.” And it’s sort of like, “Well, if that song’s even better than ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn’t play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!” It’s a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.

What’s fascinating about a character like Perkus is there’s no echo chamber, it’s all in his head. He’s coming up with his own fictions, really, without any enablers.

In that way it relates really strongly to a book like “The Fortress of Solitude,” which is overtly nostalgic. I mean, Perkus is his own fortress of solitude. He’s trying to keep a diorama of the version of New York City that means the most to him alive. And for him the Tompkins Square riots are still fresh news and Tom Verlaine breaking up Television is like a fresh tragedy. It’s all at the edge of his nerves, the world that means the most to him, and he’s trying to bring other people into that system of values.

Chase Insteadman is such an unformed thinker about culture, the world. Do you think you were like that at 21?

I probably wasn’t very like Chase Insteadman when I was 20 — I might be more like him now in a funny way. Or let’s say that the ways in which I identify with Chase as a character have to do with the peculiar fate of being slightly known, and an author is by definition not a famous person. In our culture, where fame is a currency and we see it awarded on television in all sorts of strange ways, authors never register, they’re not even a blip. But in a tiny kind of weird, subjective version of my own experience, the world I wander through, in a bookstore or just now going into the offices of the New York Times Book Review, people are like [looking over his shoulder in surprise ] — and I’m about to be on tour and play this part inevitably. Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, “Book touring is like being an employee of your former self.” But it’s an acting role, you have to authenticate — yes, I’m the writer who wrote that book — nightly for people, and it’s kind of silly and I’m not an actor, I’m no good in any sense except that I have backed into by necessity the ability to play myself. And the moment you do that, you develop this very obscure, uncomfortable double sense of self and that can be very haunting. And that’s what I wanted to capture when I wrote about Chase’s sort of mediocre celebrity. The way he’s still remembered for something he himself can barely remember doing is something I feel a strange degree of identification with.

You feel like you’re acting?

There are times when someone wants to talk to me about Tourette’s syndrome — well, “Motherless Brooklyn” was published 10 years ago. It means I wrote it 12, 13 years ago, I conceived it longer ago. The person who got excited about that isn’t very close to the surface for me anymore. So I have to do this strange, polite kind of acting bit where I reinhabit the role of the author of “Motherless Brooklyn.”

You’ve said “Chronic City” came from your distinctly Brooklyn point of view. What kind of critique, do you think, is it of Manhattan?

Of course I shudder if I think I made a deliberate social critique, because it’s not mostly a great path for a storyteller to take. But rather than a social critique or especially one of any particular present moment, I felt what I was doing was exploring some of the ambivalent power of Manhattan. And I think it’s always resided there, as long as I’ve been alive and lived next door to Manhattan — it is a kind of virtual reality. There’s something unreal about Manhattan, it’s a creation of will and aspiration and money. And unlike most places on earth it’s not rooted in its past, it’s rooted in its possibilities and its future, and it’s always being remade and revamped.

Now, having said that, what makes Manhattan, what makes NYC, what makes the world more complicated than any description, than the one I’ve just offered, is that it’s also real — people go on living their lives in buildings, eating food, wearing clothes, trying to pay the rent. And I wanted to find a way to put this doubleness into the book. This fact that a place can be a virtual reality and still be so stuck in our world, our real world, that’s what I really cared to say about Manhattan.

When I first moved to Manhattan “Motherless Brooklyn” had just come out. In that book, Brooklyn is grounded in this kind of firmament, whereas Manhattan is much more sketchy, changing, fast-paced …

The compression you’ve made, I’ve offered a similar description a few times, and I always look from the Brooklyn point of view that what I find so nourishing of Brooklyn is that it wants to be the big city, but it falls short — it’s always half-renovated, and half-gentrified. So you see these lumps of the future lying alongside the past, the recalcitrant chunks of the past that won’t go. And they’re just side by side and everyone has to just live with this kind of awkwardness. And whereas Manhattan often tries to remake itself and succeeds, startlingly this crazy new building will come up or crazy new neighborhood will exist and everyone seems to believe in it and move in right away, and it’s like, OK, now TriBeCa is a good place to go for food. What? Yes? Really? OK.

Back to Perkus, I kept thinking that, especially in the current climate, what a dying breed that sort of cultural critic is.

You’re right, it’s always a dying breed. One of the things I’m very devoted to in Perkus is the joke, seems like just a running joke, “I am not a rock critic.” In the end he kind of makes this tormented confession: “I am a rock critic!” I feel like there’s something very moving to me about the pioneer generation — [Robert] Christgau, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Greg Shaw — who by force of will said, “We’re going to write seriously about this thing that everyone thinks is a joke.” It was like founding a school of criticism on bubblegum wrappers. The culture did not believe that rock ‘n’ roll could sustain analysis. The records were supposed to blow away and disappear after they fell off the charts, no one was even supposed to care who made them after awhile. They were just pop. And they located the connection between this material and American culture at large, between this material and art. And by doing so they created a language for themselves — that was an act of bravery. I really think it was as bold a gesture as a lot of art making itself. They made something that now of course can be quite complacent and automatic.

We all feel almost that there’s a wearisome familiarity with the inside language of music criticism, at least when it’s used in a received way. But that didn’t exist, so I think of Perkus as — of course the dates are off, he couldn’t have been one of the founders — but he conveys some of that spirit of trying to say something that no one thinks you’re even allowed to try to say. This book is partly about the emotion that accompanies trying to name unnamable things that you see in sets around you. Whether it’s conspiracies or facts about the city that somehow are inexpressible facts. It’s tormenting not to have the language to put it across and Perkus is tormented by that. But he’s also very dedicated. To look at him very generously he’s very dedicated to the idea of secret knowledge, to the mastery of secret knowledge. And the Internet and the reissue age is one that is very humbling to masters of secret knowledge — everyone’s a master of secret knowledge now.

You know, when I met Paul Nelson, this can be very hard I think for someone younger than me to understand anymore — if you get curious about Howard Hawks, if you hear someone saying “Oh, god, you don’t know what you’re missing,” you can go and see “Red River” tomorrow. You can see 30 Howard Hawks movies tomorrow. When Paul Nelson said to me, “You need to know about this,” what he then did was pull out of his apartment, which was an archive, these VHS tapes with his hand-lettered labels on them all recorded off PBS or “The Million Dollar Movie,” commercials intact, with him fixing the vertical hold in the middle of the big scene — all recorded for posterity — that was how this meaning was transmitted to me. It was something rarefied and almost impossible to explore. He wanted me to see obscure Orson Welles movies — “F for Fake” or “Mr. Arkadin.” There’s no Criterion Collection, there’s no way to get from here to there unless Paul Nelson was up that night recording it with his television. But that’s all gone. We’re drowning in archival culture.

Are we richer or poorer for that?

I think it’s OK. I’d rather have it around.

Have everything available rather than relying on these kind of guides …

Yeah, I guess in a way there is that sense in which Perkus Tooth is a commemorative character. I had to make these guys naive about the Internet — you know, the joke about them not even knowing how to bid on eBay, and still having a dial-up computer — because a lot of the meaning that is so precious and so fragile for them evaporates in the instantaneity of Internet communication.

So what was it like creating after you got the genius grant?

Well, the first thing to say is that I’ve been a very lucky writer, a very lucky artist, and the luck began before the MacArthur. The MacArthur didn’t arrive in the hands of someone sleeping on couches. I found my way mercifully to very, very — I have a very, very good editor at a very strong publishing house who supports me brilliantly and has now for more than a decade. So, that’s something — forget the MacArthur — that’s something any writer should dream of. I had a lot of opportunities that came with being capably published, brilliantly published. The MacArthur did free me, especially given that it came at a moment when I was — you know, I’m 45 now, I’m married now, I have a 2-year-old — I was starting to not want to live the scrappy, year-to-year, no health insurance kind of life. I needed to outfit myself with a few more middle-class amenities just to be able to look my wife in the eye. So it was kind of a perfect time.

But also I saw it as a kind of vote that I should do more of what I’d already been doing, but do it even better, do it more passionately, do it more deeply. I really do feel that this book is connected to the MacArthur in the sense that it’s an ambitious book and a big book, but it’s also, I’m not trying to please anyone but myself. It’s a very willful, very personal, I would agree if you said very eccentric book in a lot of ways. And that was what the MacArthur told me I should do. I believe I was right to take it as that kind of message.

The book dropped this week, reviews are coming up, the book tour’s going to start. Does the money free you from really having to worry about the stuff –

Let’s not exaggerate the good fortune. My MacArthur runs out in a year, and the really tragic thing about getting the MacArthur award is that the only person in the entire universe who will never get a MacArthur is someone who already got one. I’m on my own. It made the last few years so much easier, and it’s hard to know how I could have gotten this book done without it.

From The Sunday Times

November 29, 2009

Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory by Lois Rogers

 SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

The result was sticky muscle tissue that requires exercise, like human muscles, to turn it into a tougher steak-like consistency.

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research.

Post and his colleagues have so far managed to develop a soggy form of pork and are seeking to improve its texture. “What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” Post said.

“We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”

At present there is a question mark over the taste as laboratory rules prevent the scientists eating the fruits of their labour.

The Dutch experiments follow the creation of “fish fillets” derived from goldfish muscle cells in New York and pave the way for laboratory-grown chicken, beef and lamb.

The project, which is backed by a sausage manufacturer and has received £2m from the Dutch government, is seeking additional public funds to improve the technology.

Global meat and dairy product consumption is expected to double by 2050, according to the United Nations. This could have an unprecedented impact on climate change because the warming effect on the atmosphere of methane, a digestive by-product from farm animals, is 23 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. The UN has attributed 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases to livestock.

The Vegetarian Society reacted cautiously yesterday, saying: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.” Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

Additional reporting: Georgia Warren

Mega Questions for Renowned Psychologist Dr._Arthur R. Jensen

- Interview by Christopher Michael Langan and Dr. Gina LoSasso and

members of the Mega Foundation, Mega Society East and Ultranet

_________________________

[4]Arthur R. Jensen is a prominent educational psychologist who

received his PhD from Columbia in 1956. He did his postdoctoral

research in London with [5]Hans J. Eysenck, author of the absorbing

HIQ must-read, [6]Genius: The Natural History of Creativity. Jensen

is best known for a very controversial essay on genetic heritage that

was first published in the February 1969 issue of the Harvard

Educational Review. His research work on individual differences in

intelligence led him to conclude that intelligence is 80% due to

heredity and 20% due to environmental influences. Even more

controversial were his findings regarding robust and replicable ethnic

differences in fluid intelligence. The publication of the extremely

well-conceived and executed research findings reported in [7]The g

Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998) on the heels of

Herrstein & Murray’s very controversial work, [8]The Bell Curve, moved

the heritability debate into an arena where it could finally be

satisfactorily explored and challenged.

We contacted Dr. Jensen in May and introduced him to the Mega

Foundation, our work and our communities. We asked him if we might

forward to him a few member questions on the topic of intelligence.

Although he is in the process of writing a new book, Dr. Jensen very

kindly took the time out of his busy schedule to answer all 31 of our

member questions, edited by Christopher Langan. Many thanks to Bob

Seitz, Andrea Lobel, Garth Zeitsman, and others who took the time to

submit questions and a special thanks to Mega Foundation’s Coordinator

of Volunteer Services, Kelly Self, for help with transcription. This

extensive and fascinating interview will be serialized in Noesis-E,

beginning with the current issue.

Question #1:

Christopher Langan for the Mega Foundation: It is reported that one of

this centurys greatest physicists, Nobelist Richard Feynman, had an IQ

of 125 or so. Yet, a careful reading of his work reveals amazing

powers of concentration and analysispowers of thought far in excess of

those suggested by a z score of well under two standard deviations

above the population mean. Could this be evidence that something might

be wrong with the way intelligence is tested? Could it mean that early

crystallization of intelligence, or specialization of intelligence in

a specific set of (sub-g) factors i.e., a narrow investment of g based

on a lopsided combination of opportunity and proclivity – might put it

beyond the reach of g-loaded tests weak in those specific factors,

leading to deceptive results?

Arthur Jensen: I dont take anecdotal report of the IQs of famous

persons at all seriously. They are often fictitious and are used to

make a point – typically a put-down of IQ test and the whole idea that

individual differences in intelligence can be ranked or measured.

James Watson once claimed an IQ of 115; the daughter of another very

famous Nobelist claimed that her father would absolutely flunk any IQ

test. Its all ridiculous. Furthermore, the outstanding feature of

any famous and accomplished person, especially a reputed genius, such

as Feynman, is never their level of g (or their IQ), but some special

talent and some other traits (e.g., zeal, persistence). Outstanding

achievements(s) depend on these other qualities besides high

intelligence. The special talents, such as mathematical musical,

artistic, literary, or any other of the various multiple intelligences

that have been mentioned by Howard Gardner and others are more salient

in the achievements of geniuses than is their typically high level of

g. Most very high-IQ people, of course, are not recognized as

geniuses, because they havent any very outstanding creative

achievements to their credit. However, there is a threshold property

of IQ, or g, below which few if any individuals are even able to

develop high-level complex talents or become known for socially

significant intellectual or artistic achievements. This bare minimum

threshold is probably somewhere between about +1.5 sigma and +2 sigma

from the population mean on highly g-loaded tests. Childhood IQs that

are at least above this threshold can also be misleading. There are

two famous scientific geniuses, both Nobelists in physics, whose

childhood IQs are very well authenticated to have been in the

mid-130s. They are on record and were tested by none other than Lewis

Terman himself, in his search for subjects in his well-known study of

gifted children with IQs of 140 or above on the Stanford-Binet

intelligence test. Although these two boys were brought to Termans

attention because they were mathematical prodigies, they failed by a

few IQ points to meet the one and only criterion (IQ>139) for

inclusion in Termans study. Although Terman was impressed by them, as

a good scientist he had to exclude them from his sample of high-IQ

kids. Yet none of the 1,500+ subjects in the study ever won a Nobel

Prize or has a biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica as these two

fellows did. Not only were they gifted mathematically, they had a

combination of other traits without which they probably would not have

become generally recognized as scientific and inventive geniuses.

So-called intelligence tests, or IQ, are not intended to assess these

special abilities unrelated to IQ or any other traits involved in

outstanding achievement. It would be undesirable for IQ tests to

attempt to do so, as it would be undesirable for a clinical

thermometer to measure not just temperature but some combination of

temperature, blood count, metabolic rate, etc. A good IQ test

attempts to estimate the g factor, which isnt a mixture, but a

distillate of the one factor (i.e., a unitary source of individual

differences variance) that is common to all cognitive tests, however

diverse.

I have had personal encounters with three Nobelists in

science, including Feynman, who attended a lecture I gave at Cal Tech

and later discussed it with me. He, like the other two Nobelists Ive

known (Francis Crick and William Shockley), not only came across as

extremely sharp, especially in mathematical reasoning, but they were

also rather obsessive about making sure they thoroughly understood the

topic under immediate discussion. They at times transformed my verbal

statements into graphical or mathematical forms and relationships.

Two of these men knew each other very well and often discussed

problems with each other. Each thought the other was very smart. I

got a chance to test one of these Nobelists with Termans Concept

Mastery Test, which was developed to test the Terman gifted group as

adults, and he obtained an exceptionally high score even compared to

the Terman group all with IQ>139 and a mean of 152.

I have written an essay relevant to this whole

question: Giftedness and genius: Crucial differences. In C. P. Benbow

& D. Lubinski (Eds.)[9] Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social

Issues, pp. 393-411. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Question #2:

Chris Langan: For practical purposes, psychologists define

intelligence as problem-solving ability. But there are many kinds of

problem, and some of them appear to involve factors not measured by

standard IQ tests. For example, the problem of how to execute a

complex series of dance steps or athletic maneuvers clearly involves a

cerebellar factor. Some experts would object that intelligence implies

a level of abstraction not required to solve kinesthetic problems. But

if problems must be abstract in order to qualify for inclusion in

intelligence tests, why the correlation of IQ with chronometric

indices involving sensorimotor components and virtually no

abstraction, e.g. simple reaction time?

Arthur Jensen: This is the trouble with defining intelligence. If IQ

tries to estimate g, its not going to estimate every particular

ability, because g is a factor common to all mental abilities. Mental

abilities is a more useful term and the various mental abilities

measured by all sorts of tests can classified hierarchically by means

of factor analysis in terms of their generality, that is, the amount

of variance they have in common with other tests and other factors.

The factor called g (for general) is at the top of the hierarchy only

because it is the one factor that all other mental abilities have in

common (this is explained in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 of my book The

g Factor).

The g loading of a given test or of some lower-order

factor in the factor hierarchy isnt a measure of importance of the

given ability but of its generality. Pitch discrimination is an

ability with a low g loading i.e., (it is correlated only about .30

with), but it is a crucially important ability for a musician and is

totally unimportant for a mathematician. The ability to discriminate

hues also has a g loading of about .30 and it is very important for an

artist, but not at all for a musician or a mathematician. Various

abilities differ markedly in g loading, but one of the interesting

things about g that cant be said about other ability factors, is that

to succeed in almost any kind of intellectual pursuit, some minimum

threshold level of g ability is necessary, though it may not be

sufficient. A high level of some special ability combined with very

low g describes an idiot savant, but not a mathematician, musician, or

artist in any socially important sense. For many types of subject

matter and intellectual skills, achieving a high level of facility or

mastery depends upon a fairly high g threshold. Abstract types of

problems are usually included in IQ tests because they tend to be more

highly g loaded than simpler or less abstract problems, and it is more

efficient in terms of test length to include high-g items in IQ tests

that are intended to estimate an individuals standing on g in some

reference population. However, it is possible to measure g without

using abstract test items or even anything that seems very cognitive.

The inspection time (IT) paradigm is a good example. IT is the

average the speed (visual or auditory exposure time) with which a

person can correctly make an exceedingly simple discrimination. This

measure correlates about + .50 with IQ as measured by complex and

abstract test items. A combination of several such sensory-speed

tests will rank-order people about the same as does the conventional

IQ. But these chronometric tests are less efficient for most

practical purposes, because they require individual testing with

special laboratory equipment and require a longer testing session.

One can get essentially the same result with a 15-minute

paper-and-pencil test that can be administered to a large number of

people at the same time. Psychometrics has two main aspects: (1)

theoretical and research-oriented, and (2) practical and applied.

They are related, of course, but often look very different and are

usually engaged in by different personnel.

The key question is why are reaction times and simple

sensory-motor types of performance correlated at all with IQ derived

from tests composed entirely of complex, abstract problems. The

simple answer is that such different types of tests are correlated

because they all reflect g to some extent. It is the next question to

which we still have no good answer: What is this g? There are

theories and hypotheses, but none that has proved entirely convincing,

empirically proved, or generally accepted by experts in the field. It

has to be some property (or properties) of the brain that enters into

every kind of behavior that involves a conscious discrimination,

choice, or decision. The main focus of present-day research on

intelligence is the discovery of the nature of this property of the

brain that accounts for the empirical fact of g. It is already known

that a number of different physically measured brain variables are

correlated with g; but how they work together to cause individual

differences in abilities and their intercorrelations is still

mysterious. Several chapters of The g Factor are devoted to this

subject. Another recent book devoted entirely to this question is

excellent, but quite technical: Deary, I. J (2000). [10]Looking down

on human intelligence: From psychometrics to the brain. Oxford

University Press.

Question #3:

Chris Langan: As already observed, intelligence is the ability to

solve problems. But while one psychologist talks about fluid g, a

general intelligence factor that affects the solution of any problem

at all, another talks about multiple intelligences applying to

different kinds of problem. To some extent, the distinction between

intelligence factors and multiple intelligences appears to be

semantic; as you have observed, it is easy to overlook with regard to

the kinds of problem found on IQ tests, e.g. verbal problems, spatial

problems and quantitative problems. So aside from the fact that the

multiple-intelligences school effectively expands the meaning of

intelligence by expanding the meaning of problem to include those

encountered by (e.g.) athletes and dancers, what (if any) is the

difference between the two approacheswhich, as you point out in The g

Factor (p. 128), rely equally on the threshold nature of g? In your

conversations or correspondences with Gardner, has he ever explicitly

repudiated the mathematics of factor analysis?

Arthur Jensen: It would be better to call multiple intelligences

multiple factors. Some of the multiple intelligences named by Howard

Gardner havent yet been included along with a variety of other tests

in any large-scale factor analyses, so we dont know if they would show

up on already establishes factors or would add new factors to the

overall map of the factor structure of human abilities. In any case,

several of Gardners multiple intelligences would at best qualify as

lower-order factors (most probably first-order factors) in the well

establishes 3-stratum hierarchy of human ability factors (Carroll, J.

B [1993] [11]Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic

studies. Cambridge University Press). They are not measured by IQ

tests (although they may have low correlations with IQ) because IQ

tests are intended to assess the g factor and therefore they include

mainly test items that best reflect g. Theres something to be said

for measuring g in as pure a form as possible and using other tests to

measure various other factors as purely as possible, although it turns

out that no tests known so far exclude some degree of correlation with

g. The g factor, however can be mathematically regressed out of a

measure of some other factor that one wishes to measure independently

of g. Because the basic musical aptitudes (e.g., discrimination of

pitch, duration of tones, timbres, and memory for rhythms) are all

correlated with g, one may be interested in measuring these

independently of an individuals level of g. This would be done, for

example, in a study of the heritability of musical aptitudes. Because

g is highly heritable, the investigator would want to know if the

musical aptitude variable are heritable independently of g and would

use the statistical techniques of regression or partial correlation to

answer this question. As far as I know, Gardner doesnt measure his

proposed multiple intelligences in any psychometric fashion, but I

would bet that the development of any of them to a degree that would

make for expert or professional levels of performance requires an

above-average threshold level of g. The children who attended Yehudi

Menuhins school for musically talented students and had been selected

solely on the basis of their demonstrated musical talent on some

musical instrument, for example, had an average IQ of 127. Does

anyone want to bet that you could find a concert violinist or pianist

with a low IQ? The talent without the g ingredient to go with it

results at best in an idiot savant kind of performance, not a

musically intelligent performance. The same goes for art, and most

probably dance, although that has not been tested, to my knowledge.

I have taken part in two symposia with Howard Gardner

and have also had correspondence with him regarding g. His position

at that time (and also probably today) is that although he believes in

the existence of psychometric g, he simply doesnt think it is very

interesting or important. I, and many others, on the other hand,

think that discovering the nature of g is one of the scientifically

most interesting and important subjects in the quest to understand

human nature. Others, such as Professor Linda Gottfredson are

especially interested in the sociology of intelligence, or the effects

of individual and group differences on educational, social, and

economic aspects of the human condition.

I should add that I do enjoy reading Gardners books.

I especially recommend [12]Creating Minds (1993) as of special

interest to members of the Mega Foundation. This book also reinforces

my view that eminence depends very much on other factors besides g.

Gardner admits, however, that just on the basis of IQ alone at least

90% of the general population would be excluded from the category of

the creative geniuses he writes about in his book. To then try to

minimize the importance of g and its critical threshold property is, I

think, a serious mistake. That is my chief complaint with Gardner,

along with his disregard for any form of quantitative treatment of the

variables he discusses but which is necessary if his claims are to be

objectively tested by himself or by other researchers.

Question #4:

Chris Langan: Given that intelligence is problem-solving ability,

scant attention is paid to perhaps the most important problem of all:

selecting a problem worthy of ones time. Historically, the term genius

has been associated with people who have solved this problem, and

having solved it, went on to solve the very urgent, very complex

problem(s) they had chosen. Indeed, many of our best minds consider

themselves too busy with important problems to bother with the

relatively trivial items in IQ tests. This suggests that a more

realistic measure of genius might be obtained by studying a brilliant

subject in his or her natural habitat, analyzing the importance and

computational complexity of the real-world problems that he or she has

solved or failed to solve (and with further research, perhaps even the

intelligence factors required). What do you think of this alternative?

Arthur Jensen: This is a very important point and it is most

important in the up bringing and development of intellectually gifted

children. I know of true prodigies – children with IQs in the 170-190

range – who were able to graduate from major universities, with majors

in math and science, when most children their age are in junior high

school, yet their early adult lives have been spent in trivial, but

often quite lucrative, activities. It is interesting to note that not

one of the four financially most successful adults who as children had

been selected for Termans study of gifted children (IQs>139) ever went

to college. The moral of this story seems to be that if you are

really very bright and your main aim in life is to make loads of

money, you should get started early and dont wasted your time going to

college. But I surely wouldnt say that J. D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford,

Bill Gates, and their lives are not of great value to society. They

are geniuses in their way, and they have made great contributions to

the society.

No one really know why some children never acquire or

develop the important kinds of values, ambitions, and goals that we

consider laudable and most beneficial to society, while others of

comparable or even lesser intelligences may do so. And those who do

so in the extreme (e.g., Beethoven, Darwin, Gandhi, Einstein, and

other stars of the last millennium) are an exceptionally rare minority

among any cohorts with a comparable level of sheer cognitive ability.

It is known that interests and values, as assessed by

questionnaires and inventories, have considerably high heritability,

as shown by the high correlations between parents and their biological

as compared with the lower correlations between adoptive parents and

their adopted children, and by comparing the correlations between full

siblings with the correlations between unrelated children reared

together. Most of us feel disappointed to see individuals with

conspicuously high innate abilities accompanied by a set of interest

and values that scarcely correspond to what we would deem the best

fulfillment of the individuals potential for achievement. The issue

boils down to the question of to what degree interests and values can

be inculcated in young people. It may well be that what we would

consider greatness is such a unique constellation of abilities and

traits that it would be virtually impossible to inculcate all the

necessary qualities of the particular constellation in any given

individual picked on the basis of just one of these qualities, such as

a high IQ, or special ability such as musical talent. This is example

of what behavioral geneticists now refer to as emergenesis: the

exceptional achievement results from a particular constellation of

traits (including interests and values), and does not emerge if any

one of them is lacking. Thus, for example, the difference between

Richard Wagner and his son Siegfried Wagner (also a composer and

conductor, though light-years from his fathers level of creativity)

could have been Siegfrieds lack of one or two traits in the rare

constellation that permitted Richard Wagner to become recognized as

one of the world’s great geniuses. It might well have been Richard

Wagners notably high level of the trait psychoticism, which was not

evident in his sons relatively normal, low-key, mild-mannered, and

modest character (see the reference in my answer to Question #1 and my

answer to Question #11). The kind of study you propose is, in

effect, the biographical analysis of persons of great accomplishment.

There are a number of such biographical studies in the literature.

The leading researcher on this topic is Professor Dean K. Simonton in

his three fascinating books [13]Scientific Genius, [14]Greatness, and

[15]Origins of Genius (also of interest: [16]Genius, Creativity, and

Leadership: Histriometric Inquiry – Editors). The subject is treated

in a much more biographical and anecdotal, though very insightful, way

in Howard Gardners [17]Creating Minds (1993).

Question #5:

Chris Langan: The study of neural networks suggests that as soon as

we can explore the microscopic structure of the human brain and its

sensory pathways, including neural connectivity and neurotransmitter

concentrations, in vivo e.g., through new medical scanning procedures

we can achieve what amounts to a purely biological measure of

intelligence. Do you think that such a measure will ever be wholly

sufficient, or do you think that refinement by performance-based tests

will always be necessary?

Arthur Jensen: Im not at all sure about intelligence, which is a

poorly defined term, but the g factor, I believe, will eventually be

explainable completely in terms of brain physiology along the lines

suggested in your question. Given the present technology and with a

concerted effort this could probably be accomplished within the next

two or three decades. And it will be possible to measure g physically

in terms of brain variables. The practical measurement of abilities,

however, may remain at the psychometric level, because of its

demonstrated practical validity and ease of obtaining measures, as

compared with MRI brain scans, PET scans, evoked potentials,

laboratory tests of brain chemistry, etc. Performance-based tests

will always be necessary for assessing learned skills and achievements

(for which the rate and depth of acquisition will inevitably be

related to g as well as to motivational and personality variables and

environmental circumstances). But much of what is now under the

purview of psychometric assessment will be taken over by chronometric

measurement, which will have more scientifically meaningful links to

brain physiology than do conventional psychometric tests (see my

answer to Question #31).

Question #6:

Chris Langan: Certain high-ceiling intelligence tests, generically

called power tests, are composed of extremely difficult items

requiring higher levels of problem-solving ability than the items on

ordinary IQ tests. Since these items usually have no known algorithms,

their solutions cannot be looked up in a textbook, and where subjects

do not know each other, one must rely on intrinsic problem solving

ability. However, by virtue of their difficulty, these problems take

longer to solve sometimes days or even weeks. Accordingly, power tests

are untimed and unsupervised. This opens the door to factors like

motivation and persistence, which are not among the factors primarily

measured by standard IQ tests. On the other hand, virtually every

significant intellectual achievement of mankind has involved these

factors in great measure. So why does the psychometric community still

pay no attention to power tests or the statistics derived from them?

Arthur Jensen: There are many power tests (i.e., non-speeded or

untimed tests) in psychometrics, although not of the kind described in

this question. Such tests would have little practical use, although

they could be of scientific interest in studying the nature of

high-level problem solving. But people even capable of taking such

tests could be identified with some conventional tests, such as a

combination of the Advanced Raven Matrices and Termans Concept Mastery

Test. People with high scores on such tests can demonstrate their

problem solving ability in their careers. What is the need for prior

selection? They can make it into college and graduate school if

theyve got high IQs, and it will be their virtually unique

constellation of traits (g + special abilities + motivation +

character, etc.) that will determine whether the will, first of all,

identify important problems, and secondly, be able to sole them or at

least materially contribute to their eventual solution. Solving

problems, or even thinking up problems, for which there are presently

no algorithms, takes us into the realm of the nature of creativity.

There are as yet no psychometric tests for creativity in a nontrivial

sense. We cant (yet) predict creativity or measure it as an

individual trait, but can only examine its products after the fact.

At present, there are much more tractable problems for research in the

realm of human abilities, the most important of which, I believe, is

discovering the physical basis of g.

References

4. http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/jensen.html

5. http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/eysenck.html

6. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961036/megafoundation

7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961036/megafoundation

8. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684824299/megafoundation

9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801853028/megafoundation

10. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019852417X/megafoundation

11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521382750/megafoundation

12. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465014542/megafoundation

13. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521352878/megafoundation

14. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898622018/megafoundation

15. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195128796/megafoundation

16. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583484388/megafoundation

17. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465014542/megafoundation

http://www.megasociety.net/NoesisNov/JensenPartII.htm

Question #7:

Christopher Langan for the Mega Foundation: In science, theories and

the definitions comprising them are required to have models, and these

models are required to fit into an overall model of reality. For

example, in physics, the predicate velocity must be semantically

connected to real physical objects in relative motion, which must in

turn be embedded in a model of space and time supporting a

mathematical definition of motion (e.g. the analytic geometry of

classical mechanics). But this becomes problematic with respect to

psychological predicates with subjective components for which we lack

objective models, e.g. consciousness, qualia and emotions.

Intelligence, which is studied strictly in terms of its effectual

correlates, is to some extent such a predicate. Can we achieve a true

understanding of intelligence without a model of reality transcending

the absolute separation of mind and body associated with Cartesian

dualism?

Arthur Jensen: This is a profound question and gets right at the

heart of many of the problems of psychology and making it truly a

natural science. Of the important variables in psychology,

intelligence is one of the few that may lend itself to being

researched strictly as a natural science. Much of present-day

psychology is, at best, a kind of applied technology, some of it

highly useful. But even more of psychology is a kind of shamanism,

which will always be here in one form or another, with a relationship

to science much like that of alchemy and astrology. Unfortunately

this pseudo-scientific kind of psychology, is the only side of

psychology known to the general public, and it is something of an

embarrassment to those who are striving to advance psychology as a

natural science.

A Serious part of the problem is the importance of measurement in the

sense of measuring the behavioral phenomena of interest by means of

true physical scales, i.e., a ratio scale that is standardized to be

invariant across earthly time and space, so that something measured

in, say, Bombay in the year 2001 can be directly compared with

something measured in New York in the year 2050, just as we can say

that the average height of 18-year old male U.S. Army recruits in 1916

was, say, 59 and in 2000 was 510. There are almost no psychological

variables that can be measured on such a true scale on which values

can be expressed as ratios or on which nominally equal differences

between pairs of values in different ranges of the scale can be

treated as truly equal intervals. The mathematical and statistical

treatment of data without these true scale properties is thereby

seriously handicapped.. The most natural scale of true measurement

for some psychological variables, e.g. mental abilities, is in units

of time. It is now well established that certain kinds of timed

performance, measured in seconds or milliseconds, are correlated with

scores on psychometric tests, which are best ordinal (i.e.,

rank-order) scales of performance. I believe further developments in

the use of time-measured psychological variables, such as various

reaction time and inspection time paradigms (see Chapter 8 in The g

Factor), can help to advance truly scientific research on individual

differences in mental abilities. (See my answer to Question #31.) Of

course, psychology as a natural science can have no use for mind-body

dualism. I think I was born opposed to that notion.

Question #8:

Chris Langan: As academic performance falls, there is a growing

tendency among educational theorists to claim that there is no such

thing as a bad student, only bad teachers (common sense, of course,

says that there are both). Learning theory, currently the vogue among

educators, distinguishes the different learning styles of students and

offers various prescriptions for helping students perform up to

capacity. I was recently told by several graduating teachers that (1)

IQ is rapidly becoming a forbidden topic in educational curricula, and

(2) the current vogue is a combination of brain-based learning

(inspired by the Multiple Intelligences model) and cooperative

learning, in which students with different learning styles (e.g.

graphic, visual, auditory or kinesthetic) contribute to each others

learning process. What is your take on these strains of learning

theory? Do they constitute a valid approach to the problem of

declining scholastic achievement?

Arthur Jensen: The purported decline in academic performance in

schools and colleges is a terribly complex phenomenon to get a handle

on for serious discussion. It undoubtedly has many causes, mainly

associated with the very concept of universal education and the

difficult transition from different kinds and levels of education for

different segments of society and an increasing uniformity of

education for the entire population. Individual differences in

abilities are largely ignored by the educational system and the

conspicuously continuing effects of their presence in the educational

process therefore has given rise to forms of denial that blames

teachers, curricula, and institutions. It has also given currency to

theories that deny or minimize the reality of individual differences

or attributes their causes to supposed faults of the schools and of

society in general. The now known scientific facts about individual

differences ( and I emphasize the word individual here) have to be

faced and dealt with in the design of education. (Group differences

basically are simply aggregated individual differences.) In general,

a much more highly diversified educational system is call for. It is

still too early to give up trying different approaches to discover

just how the required diversity can be accomplished. But each of the

proposed approaches must be clearly described and its results assessed

in the nature of a true experiment. Educational practices tend to be

a parade of fads and we see new ones come around every year to replace

last years. Few if nay of these trial balloons face the real problems

confronting public education. In the whole scene, I believe the

individual classroom teachers are the least deserving of blames.

Question #9:

Chris Langan: The founders of Mensa, regarded by many as the original

high IQ club, complained that the group had forsaken its original

purposethat instead of pooling its intellectual talent to solve the

most urgent problems of society, it had fallen into aimless

socializing and dilettantism. Since then, a small number of more

rarified groups, known collectively as the UltraHIQ Community, have

advocated a return to the original vision. What is your opinion

regarding the concept of a pool of intellectual talent based strictly

on high levels of g and dedicated to finding solutions for some of

societys more urgent problems?

Arthur Jensen: Its hard to imagine how a group of high-IQ people with

little else in common besides their IQ and probably differing in many

other ways perhaps even more than a random sample of the population

can do much to effect social change or carry out and large project

with a unified aim. On the other hand, a group of persons with a wide

range of IQs from average to very high who have come together as a

group because they all have a similar philosophy and some realistic

goal based on it could be a force for some concerted kind of

achievement. If there were a subgroup of UltraHIQ individuals all

with a similar vision, aim, and dedication to achieve their common

purpose, that would be something!

But I wouldnt apologize in the least for any High-IQ society that was

intended as a purely social organization that qualified people could

join simply because the find each others company more congenial than

that of most of the people they would be apt to meet in other social

groups. I suspect that the zone of tolerance for the intelligence

levels of ones friends and spouses is probably, at the outside, about

ones own IQ +/- 20. People in the upper-half of the IQ distribution

are more closely assortative in this respect than are those in the

lower half. In the general population, spouse similarity in IQ is

about the same as full-sibling similarity. Assortative mating for a

given trait has the effect of increasing the genetic variance in that

trait in the offspring generation. It is estimated that some 15 to 20

percent of the population variance in IQ is attributable to the effect

of assortative mating.

Question #10:

Chris Langan: Intelligence is about solving problems. Because

problems consist of constraints to be satisfied by their solutions,

those with high IQs are good at working within the bounds of more or

less complex constraints. Yet some problems, especially those

involving lateral thinking, require creativitythe ability to break

free of apparent constraints. So to some extent, attributes like

creativity, novelty and originality seem paradoxically related to

intelligence. Have we had any success in relating creativity to IQ,

and specifically to g?

Arthur Jensen: About all I can say on this is that the level of g

acts as threshold for the possibility of creativity and that this

threshold differs somewhat for different fields of creativity,

particularly to the extent that the filed calls for a special talent

that somewhat outweighs the relative importance of g. The main reason

that a fairly high level of g acts as a threshold is that to be

creative in most fields, one has to master the basic knowledge,

techniques, and skills needed just to be able to work in the field, to

say nothing of being creative in it. The cognitive demands on

achieving the essential level of mastery of the working tools are

typically considerable and are often highly g-loaded. Hence you dont

find truly creative scientists, writers, musicians, etc., with low or

even average IQs. A music composer, for example, must master such

abstract and complex subjects as harmony, counterpoint,

orchestrations, and so on — all g-loaded subjects. Plus an

incredible amount of assiduous practice, so that much of this

knowledge and skill repertoire becomes automatized, thereby freeing

the individual for creative expression. Read the biographies of any

of the importantly creative people in history and youll find that the

prerequisites and necessary personal conditions for creativity are

above-average g plus an unusual capacity for work and persistence in

the face of difficulty or adversity.

Question #11:

Chris Langan: Many people believe that genius and insanity are

closely related. Indeed, history provides numerous examples of

creativity and insanity or (near-insanity) in close conjunction.

Statistically, does intelligence correlate either positively or

negatively with any kind of insanity or mental instability?

Arthur Jensen: The supposed relationship between creativity and

mental disorder has been well researched and is proven to be a fact.

Depression and bipolar disorder have a high incidence among creative

writers and artists than in the general population; schizothymic

characteristics are somewhat more frequent among philosophers,

mathematicians, and scientists. The late Professor Hans J. Eysenck

hypothesized a trait he called psychoticism which he thought is an

essential ingredient in major-league creativity. Psychoticism is not

itself a psychiatric disorder or disabling condition (although it is

associated with a proneness for such), but a constellation of

intercorrelated personality traits, most of which I have found in

virtually every famous creative genius Ive read about. Eysencks

theory and the evidence for it is the most interesting I have come

across in this field. This is a complex subject and I couldnt

possibly do it justice by trying to explain it all here, but I will

recommend the following two books, which are the best Ive come across

on this topic:

[8]H. J. Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity. 1995,

Cambridge University Press.

[9]M.A. Runco & R. Richards (Eds.), Eminent Creativity, Everyday

Creativity, and Health. 1998, Ablex.

References

8. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521485088/megafoundation

9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567501753/megafoundation

http://www.megasociety.net/NoesisJan02/JensenPartIII.htm

Question #12

Chris Langan: Even IQ tests with moderate ceilings can be upwardly

extrapolated, and there exist experimental high-ceiling tests that

appear to have much higher ranges than standard IQ tests when

anchor-normed on those same standard tests. Indeed, whatever the

limitations on its measurement, there would seem to be no a priori

ceiling on intelligence itself. Yet, some claim that the very idea of

an IQ in excess of +4s is meaningless. In your opinion, can it be

fruitful to consider IQs in excess of +4s? What, if any, is the

absolute upper limit on the measurement of IQ?

Arthur Jensen: I believe we have no means at present of determining a

ceiling for intelligence or for extrapolating existing scales to a

theoretically derived ceiling. Im not even sure if the idea of a

ceiling for intelligence is a meaningful concept. An upper limit for

the measurement of g may be more meaningful and +4s (IQ of 160) may

well be the highest level in which we can have much confidence that it

is g that is being measured. It has long been known that various tests

become less g loaded the higher one goes in the IQ distribution. That

is, if we gave a large battery of diverse tests to people with IQs

above, say, 120 (i.e., the top 10% of the population) and to people

with IQs below IQ 80 (the bottom 10%), we will find that the

correlations among the tests are considerably smaller in the high IQ

group than in the low IQ groups, and consequently the tests have less

in common (i.e., their general factor g) and hence lower g loadings in

the high than in the low group. This appears to be quite a linear

effect as we move up the IQ scale. If the IQ scale were a true

interval scale (we only assume it to be such), we could extrapolate

the linear trend to the point at which g loadings = 0. That, then,

would be the ceiling of the g factor. High IQ persons abilities become

more highly differentiated and specialized, hence are less correlated

with one another and afford a weaker basis of prediction of any

particular ability from a knowledge of the individuals standing on

some other ability. Yet this diverse or differential development of

mental abilities itself seems dependent on the possession of a fairly

high level of g, in the sense of superior performance on the kinds of

tests that are the most g loaded.

The problem in researching the uppermost region of human abilities is

that the further we go above the mean IQ, the smaller is the

proportion of the population that we can obtain as research subjects,

and, since research in this field depends a lot on statistical

inference, we would find it exceedingly difficult, or even impossible,

to obtain large enough subject samples to permit statistically

significant conclusions. The more highly selected the subject sample,

the smaller is the variance of the test scores and their reliability.

There are more tractable and scientifically more important things to

be researched at present. Because there is little if any practical

value in measuring ability levels above the 99th percentile in the

general population, hardly anyone, least of all the producers of

mental tests, is interested in doing so. The only interest I have ever

seen has been among some members of the high IQ clubs that are

offshoots of Mensa. I once tested a group of some 20 to 30 volunteers

from Mensa. On a standard psychometric test they averaged about 20 IQ

points or so above the average of U. C., Berkeley, undergraduates. I

was interested in whether the Mensa subjects would also show faster

reaction time (RT) than Berkeley undergrads, who on our RT averaged

about +1 s above the general population mean on such tests. The Mensa

subjects averaged considerably faster RT than the Berkeley students.

The fact that RT is monotonically related to IQ throughout an

80-points IQ range, from about IQ 60 to at least IQ 140, suggests that

it might be a useful tool in studying the upper reaches of ability,

strange as that may seem. But of course there is a physiological limit

to RT, determined in part by the limits on time for sensory

transduction of the stimulus and afferent and efferent nerve

conductive velocity. But RT has the advantages of measurement on a

ratio scale and also of being based on the very same test at all

levels of IQ (beginning at a mental age of about 3 years, below which

subjects typically have difficulty in performing the RT tasks without

training).

Question #13

Chris Langan: Intelligence is the ability to reason, i.e. to solve

problems. Problems are solved according to procedural schemata called

algorithms. Algorithms can be learned. Ergo, intelligence can to some

extent be learned. Equivalently, a mathematician specializing in

neural networks might say that since the intelligence which becomes

crystallized in synaptic weighting patterns is algorithmic in both

form and content, neural nets can be trained for intelligence. The

brains of children undergo structural development, and even adult

brains retain a certain amount of neural plasticity. So even though

statistics indicate that IQ tends to be stable throughout the human

lifespan, does it remain possible that under the proper conditions, IQ

can to some extent be learnedthat a protean set of high-level

algorithms can be burned into cerebral synapses? Would such an IQ

boost necessarily be hollow with respect to g?

Arthur Jensen: Yes, certainly. Various thinking or problem-solving

algorithms can be trained and even automatized through extensive

practice. These phenomena are associated with neural plasticity and

the innate capacity for learning. It is individual differences in

these brain attributes, rather than the acquisition of specific

algorithms for thinking and problem-solving per se, that are the basis

of the g factor. Algorithmic training is remarkably specific to a

particular subject-matter and has surprisingly little transfer beyond

the material on which it has been trained. This is one of the problems

with most conventional IQ tests, verbal and nonverbal tests alike: two

things are being measured: g + learned algorithmic thinking and

problem-solving skills, and these are completely confounded in the

total score on the test. Chapter 10 in [9]The g Factor deals with just

this problem, which is described as the confounding of the vehicle

(e.g., the knowledge and skill demands of a particular test) for

measuring a given construct and the construct itself (e.g., the g

factor). This is a big problem, often insufficiently recognized by the

users mental ability tests. It is much less a problem in explicit

achievement tests. A test in algebra, for example, may be a poor way

of assessing g, but a good way to find out where a person stands in

knowledge and use of algebra. If everyone tested had taken equivalent

courses in algebra, the scores on the algebra test would also be quite

highly g-loaded (i.e., correlated with g). For persons who have

completed high school, tests of reading comprehension measure g about

as well as most IQ tests, except for true dyslexics. One of the

potential advantages of chronometric tests (e.g., reaction time and

inspection time) is that they have some g loading yet have virtually

no intellectual or algorithmic content. Their disadvantage is that

they also measure, besides g, a large component of purely

sensory-motor abilities that fall entirely outside the domain of

mental abilities (as shown by their lack of correlation with any other

kinds of cognitive tests).

The learning of problem-solving and other algorithms is crucial in

most realms of intellectual work and it can be inculcated to a

considerable degree through training. It may even improve certain test

scores to some extent. But this is not the same as improving whatever

it is that makes for g. In fact, the level of algorithmic complexity

that can be acquired is limited by an individuals level of g. Before

children are exposed to any kind of maths, for example, one can make

fairly good predictions on the basis if IQ of which ones will or will

not top out in various levels of higher abstract mathematics,

regardless of educational opportunity, effort, and the like. Only

persons in the top 15% of the IQ distribution are employed as

mathematicians; that seem to be the absolute minimum threshold for

this occupation. Many students entering college whose ambitions are to

be rocket scientists or engineers soon discover they cant make the

math requirements despite their most earnest efforts to do so.

Question #14

Chris Langan: In [10]The g Factor, you state (regarding the Flynn

Effect) that Whatever causes the rise in IQ, it has its greatest

effect on those at the lower end of the scale, with a corresponding

shrinkage of the standard deviation. However, since it is unclear how

adult IQ scores above 100 were normed on older IQ tests that relied on

mental age, it is unclear whether the distribution to which you refer

is that characterizing ratio IQ or deviation IQ, where ratio IQ is

thought by some theorists to be lognormally rather than normally

distributed (e.g. Vernon Sare, University of London, 1951). Can you

clarify this point?

Arthur Jensen: The Mental Age/Chronological Age, or 100(MA/CA) = IQ,

has been virtually defunct since the 1940s. All professionally

constructed and published IQ tests today are based on deviation IQ

[i.e., z = (Raw Score - Mean )/SD, and IQ = 15z + 100]. The ratio IQ

becomes increasingly suspect as children get older. It is based on the

presumed (or demonstrated) linear relationship of the tests raw scores

to CA. But this relationship begins to depart from linear at around 12

to 13 years of age, and after age 15 (it used to be 16) it is so

nonlinear that the MA/CA ratio becomes increasingly meaningless with

increasing age. Often the raw scores on a test are converted to

normalized z scores and then converted to IQs, ensuring that the IQs

are normally distributed; at least in the standardization sample. If

we assume that intelligence should be normally distributed, and if the

IQ distribution is made perfectly normal (i.e., Gaussian), then we can

claim that IQ is an interval scale. But the assumptions are the

critical joker in this line of reasoning. There is nothing that

actually compels these assumptions; they are merely plausible and

statistically convenient.

The best single study of the Flynn Effect (i.e., the secular rise in

IQ over the past several decades) was done in Denmark with military

conscripts. The lower portion of the IQ distribution showed larger

gains than the higher end, probably because in the more recent decades

more of the lower portion under the bell curve received more

educational attention and better education, and also probably better

pre-and post-natal health care and nutrition.

As raw scores on mental tests are based simply on number of correct

answers (a function of item difficulty, i.e., percent of population

passing an item), which constitutes only an ordinal (rank-order) scale

of ability on the given test, any transformation of the scale –

normal, lognormal, hypergeometric, or whatever — really has the same

status as an ordinal scale, i.e., the raw scores or any transformation

of them could just as well be treated as ranks. These can be converted

to percentile ranks, a given percentile simply indicating the percent

of persons in the standardization group that fall below a given raw

score (number right). These percentiles can also be transformed to

normalized or lognormalized scores (or any other transformation) if

one wants to make assumptions about the form of the distribution of

the latent trait (e.g. intelligence) in the population; but not an

iota more of real information in conveyed by these transformed scores

than is present in the ranked scores. Now if our measure were true

physical measures (i.e., a ratio scale) but were expressed as ranks,

their rank order would covey less information than the raw scores

themselves. A true ratio scale (e.g., height, weight, reaction time)

is a necessary and sufficient condition for describing the form of

their distribution in a given population or random sample of some

specified population. Thats why the Flynn Effect for the increase in

the average height in the population has not created any controversy

as it has in the case of IQ. By having a ratio scale, the phenomenon

and its magnitude are clearly established by the raw measurements,

whatever may be their cause. But no one argues, Is it really height

that has increased? That is the whole argument about the Flynn Effect

and IQ — is it really intelligence that has increased, or only test

scores? When we get true ratio scales of mental abilities, we will be

able to answer the kind of question you are asking. The scientific

study of developmental trends in mental growth is greatly handicapped

by our lack of true ratio scales, without which the shape of the

growth curve of mental test scores is almost meaningless beyond saying

it is positively monotonic between any two points on the scale of

chronological ages, up to about age 20.

Question #15

Chris Langan: Why are IQ’s measured on relative scales rather than in

absolute terms? Saying that someone is brighter than than 99% of the

population is no more meaningful than saying that someone is taller

than 99% of the population. While raw scores on tests containing items

of low to moderate complexity provide an absolute measure of sorts,

they seem only indirectly related to intellectual speed and power. The

solution times of various problems, or the most complex problems

solvable without time constraints, would be more direct measures of

speed and power and thus more acceptable as absolute metrics. Are

there other absolute measures of intelligence, and if so, how do they

relate to IQ?

Arthur Jensen: This is a continuation of the previous question. I

think it quite informative to know a person’s percentile score

(assuming it as accurate), as it tells you where that person stands

with reference to some “normative” group on the trait in question. A

pediatrician can rather precisely measure an infant’s head

circumference with a tape measure (a ratio scale), but to interpret

this measurement he needs to look it up in a table of norms giving the

percentile equivalent of that measurement (and its standard deviation)

for the average infant of the same age. The only absolute measures of

intelligence I know of that are behavioral are various forms of

reaction time (RT) and inspection time (IT) measures, which we know,

are related to IQ because of their significant correlations with IQ.

Interestingly, the longer the average RT for a task beyond about 1

second (for young adults), the less it correlates with IQ. In more

complex tasks that take much more than 1 second to perform, other,

noncognitive factors enter in and “dilute” the RT measure with sources

of variance that do not represent whatever we mean by general

intelligence. Physiological measurements, which are a true scale, such

as latency and amplitude of the evoked brain potentials and rate of

glucose uptake by the brain while solving a problem (measure by PET

scan), and (in one study) the brain’s pH level, are all correlated not

just with IQ, but with the g factor per se. A combination of such

chronometric and physical variables will one day yield ratio-scale

measures of mental ability that are scientifically more meaningful

than those obtained from conventional IQ tests. The details of this

topic form, in part, my answer to [11]Question #31.

Question #16

Chris Langan: On most IQ tests, ceiling effects begin to occur above

the two-sigma level. Thus, ceiling effects can occur before deviations

from a Gaussian distribution become significant, effectively obscuring

the deviations. But for (e.g.) blacks, the ceilings are high enough

(in standard deviations) that significant differences ought to be

apparent and measurable. E.g., if the SD for blacks were 12.75 (85/100

X 15), the 5 SD level would come at IQ 149 and the 4.75 SD level (one

in a million) would be IQ 145.56. So blacks should be ideal for

studying the differences between ratio IQs and adult deviation IQs,

which seem to approximate lognormal and normal distributions

respectively. However, this raises some questions: is the black IQ

distribution normal, lognormal or Pearson Type IV, i.e. “abnormal”?

How has the Flynn Effect acted upon the black IQ distribution (where

insulated from the heterotic effects of miscegenation)?

Arthur Jensen: This is a clever thought, although it has become

increasingly difficult to get IQ data on blacks, at least in

sufficient numbers to study the top-level percentile in the black

population. In light of what I said in my answers regarding scales and

distributions, I don’t think it would be fruitful to pursue this issue

with conventional tests. I have looked at a great many distributions

of both white and black IQs in whole school populations. The black

distributions generally resemble the Pearson Type IV Distribution; it

is considerably skewed to the right. Not as much, if any, theoretical

significance can be attached to this observation as would be possible

if the mental measurements were a ratio scale.

Question #17

Chris Langan: It has been argued that the deviations from a normal

curve that occur among child IQs are simply a function of varying

rates of mental maturation. Thus, while the distribution of childhood

ratio IQs looks closer to lognormal than normal, and while the

distribution of some adult indices like AGCT-derived IQ scores shows a

frequency pattern agreeing closely with childhood ratio-IQ

distributions, the distribution of adult IQs is Gaussian. Now, if

specific individuals tend to regress toward the mean as they mature

but the overall distribution remains the same as it is for children,

then there must be “late bloomers” who rise to take their places in

order to keep the upper ranges of the distribution populated. Has this

phenomenon been studied? Do very high adult ratio IQ’s appear with

greater-than-Gaussian frequency as they do with children, or are the

distributions different?

Arthur Jensen: Yes, the variation in IQ (or relative standing in some

normative group) as individuals grow up from about age 2 (when IQs are

first reliably measured) to maturity has been studied quite

thoroughly. (The subject is treated at length in my book [12]Bias in

Mental Testing, Chapter 7, 1980 Free Press). (Also see [13]The g

Factor, pp. 316-318.) Individuals’ IQs fluctuate rather randomly up

and down throughout their development, but become increasingly stable

with each successive year. This has been studied by looking at the

matrix of correlations betweeen IQs measured every year from age 2 to

age 18 or so. The correlations are increasingly higher as a function

of age. Many early bloomers and late bloomers exchange their positions

in the IQ distribution, and in about equal numbers. Hence the overall

distribution of IQs remains fairly constant throughout the entire

developmental period.

Question #18

Chris Langan: It seems that research on the profoundly gifted has not

only been very limited, but that virtually none of it addresses the

question of how society can bring out the best in its brightest

members. One of our members, Bob Seitz, asks: During my years with

NASA and Georgia Tech, I casually wondered why there didn’t seem to be

a national registry of the very brightest, with attention to their

needs and their encouragement. But when, two years ago, I finally

discovered the ragged state of affairs vis-a-vis our brightest, I was

shocked.

It seems that as IQ’s rise from 75 to 125, dramatic changes occur in

life outcomes and socioeconomic statuses. But once intelligence

exceeds the upper part of that range, there seems to be little

correlation between IQ and success in even the most demanding

intellectual pursuits. This raises the possibility that high-IQ types

are being neither allowed to fully utilize their potential nor

rewarded in proportion to their abilities. One might expect this to

detract from their enthusiasm and level of performance. But even

though the costs to society may be immeasurable, no one seems to be

addressing or investigating the situation. Do you have any opinions on

this matter?

Arthur Jensen: This all goes back again to the fact that achievement

in a multiplicative (not additive) function of a number of critical

traits, of which g is only one, though a very important one. Given a

range of IQs sufficient for everyone within that range to be able to

learn the “tools of the trade”, then other personal factors become

more critical determinants of achievement. The more unusual the

achievement, the greater the number of different factors that have

acted multiplicatively to produce it. People do not tend to undervalue

intelligence so much as they undervalue the other multiplicative

traits that enter into achievement. Our expectations for achievement

are weighted too much for then effect of IQ and not enough for other

valuable traits. Because of its threshold nature, however, a low IQ is

a handicap, and even more so in our modern technological society than

in the more agrarian past. Higher IQ is always an advantage in the

multiplicative combination of factors required for outstanding

achievement. One of the things most lacking in education, and often

also in parental upbringing today, is inculcation of the kind of

values, including self-discipline, that are among of the essential

ingredients in the multiplicative formula involved in outstanding

achievement.

Question #19

Chris Langan: Aside from social ineptitude, perhaps the trait most

often associated with IQ > +4s is being a multimillionaire (Bill Gates

is a frequently-cited example). It seems that when the hyper-gifted

turn their hands to making money, they succeed in spades. But with

respect to social utility, this is often a waste. We need cures for

cancer, better ways to relate to each other, cures for Alzheimer’s and

Parkinson’s Diseases, a marriage between general relativity and quantum

mechanics. In short, we need real works of genius. But even though

society has a vested interest in fully utilizing the talents of its

geniuses, it continues to let itself be vastly outbid for their

services. We encourage real geniuses to squander their potential on

what often turns out to be pointless, inflationary acceleration of the

financial treadmill while discouraging those without academic

credentials from participating in the social and intellectual

mainstream, relying on the survivors of academic bureaucracy to solve

our most urgent problems. Unfortunately, academic politics is not a

valid test of intelligence. Is there any effort to understand what’s

going wrong in this area?

Arthur Jensen: I believe that, generally, multi-billionaires do have

plenty of “social utility” –the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie,

Sloane-Kettering, and Mellon foundations, for example, not to mention

the industries, jobs, and their products that have benefited the whole

society are indeed a boon to the whole society. These foundations

built on the fortunes of these billionaires are responsible for many

of the grants made to researchers working on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,

caners, AIDS, and a great many other medical and humanitarian

enterprises. The industrial and financial achievements on the scale of

Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Etc., it seems to me, are highly worthy of

our admiration.

I do agree that in today’s world, especially in the United States, the

job market places too much emphasis on academic credentials, and not

enough on the assessment of actual abilities. If I had to choose

between knowing a job applicant’s IQ or level of education, I’d pick

the IQ, assuming the job doesn’t require some specialized skills that

can only be acquired in college or graduate school. In today’s world,

however, one has to wonder about a high IQ individual who has not

finished high school or gone to college; one would want to know about

other achievements as well as their personality traits. In personnel

selection it is most valuable to have objective test scores both on g

and on subjects most relevant to the job as well as formal educational

credentials. They are usually in fair agreement, but when not, they

bear further looking into.

Question #20

Chris Langan: In working with some of the profoundly gifted, I’ve

encountered a few hints about how their extraordinary potentialities

become derailed. There seem to be major problems with the extremely

gifted in a society that isn’t geared to them, like the plight of an

eight-footer in a house with six-foot ceilings. How much attention has

been given to the social and emotional problems of the highly gifted

population?

Arthur Jensen: I know other psychologists who are better able to

answer this than I can, for example Professors Julian Stanley (John

Hopkins), David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow (Vanderbilt). It is true

that most super-gifted children, especially as they approach

adolescence, are not as challenged or as happy about going to school

with their age-mates as they would be if they were entered into a

regular 4-year college with classmates who are six or seven years

older. The channeling that takes place in college and thereafter in

the world of work is such that people generally find themselves in the

company of others who are not all that different from themselves in

abilities, interests, and the like. The super-ability types usually

come to realize that people differ greatly in abilities, and that they

have to learn to live with this fact gracefully. Those who don’t learn

this lesson pay a price. I haven’t yet seen a good case made for the

idea that people become maladjusted simply because of their having a

very high IQ. Although IQ and mental health have only a slight

positive correlation with each other, it’s not in the least surprising

to come across high IQ persons with emotional and inter-personal

problems. But I doubt that any disability can be blamed on a person’s

having a high IQ per se.

I do feel sorry for those children whose parents have been told that

their child is gifted and never let their child forget it for one

minute. (The singled-out child’s siblings suffer as well in this

case.) It’s interesting to read the later volumes of Terman’s Genetic

Studies of Genius (based on subjects selected as school-age children

with Stanford-Binet IQ>139). A large majority of these “Termanites”

became fairly ordinary adults and some were less successful in life

than are many persons of average IQ. I have heard some educators

express concern that something must have gone terribly wrong in the

upbringing or education of many of the Terman group to cause the

average level of their apparent achievements as adults to be so

considerably less impressive than their IQ. But this IQ-achievement

discrepancy is exactly what one should expect in terms of the

multiplicative theory of achievement I have described in my answers to

some of the previous questions.

References

8. http://www.megasociety.net/MegaPress/index.html

9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961036/megafoundation

10. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961036/megafoundation

11. http://www.megasociety.net/NoesisJan02/JensenPartIII.htm#Q31

12. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029164303/megafoundation

13. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961036/megafoundation

http://www.megasociety.net/NoesisJan02/JensenPartIV.htm

Question #21

Chris Langan: As students, doctors and lawyers take tests like the

LSAT, their average IQs are found to be around 127, while in contrast,

mathematicians average around 140. Has any research been done relating

test scores to minimally acceptable professional performance in (e.g.)

medicine and law, as gauged by (e.g.) deaths attributable to

diagnostic error, cases lost, or judgments overturned? Since certain

studies have found that IQ is a better predictor of job performance

than educational credentials, shouldnt we (and our licensing bureaus)

be paying more attention to it? Is our failure to do so attributable

to affirmative action or other minority preference programs?

Arthur Jensen: Excellent question. Probably the answer to it might be

too politically incorrect for anyone to be able to risk the research

that could answer it, or to even obtain a grant to do such research.

There are plenty of anecdotes that one hears of, but I haven’t come

across any bona fide research studies that investigated the

relationship between test scores and performance catastrophes at a

professional level such as you mention. But it is hard to imagine that

such a relationship does not exist, since such a relationship has been

amply demonstrated by research on personnel selection in hundreds of

jobs in which test validity has been determined in terms of actual job

performance. The U.S. Employment Service, using the General Aptitude

Test Battery (GATB), has published the results of literally hundreds

of such test validation studies for predicting success or failure in

various job categories, not including doctors or lawyers or other

high-level professionals. And it is the g factor of the GATB that

carries most of the predictive power of this battery composed of

eleven diverse tests. It would be a safe bet that doctors (or other

professionals) who are fired because their performance is at a sub

threshold level of competence have a lower average IQ than the

competent majority of their profession. I intend to circulate this

question among some colleagues who are more expert on this topic than

I and will let you know if there are any studies that can provide a

more definite answer to your question. But the issue is so

contaminated by the need for political correctness that it may be

virtually impossible to obtain a valid answer in the present climate.

Question #22

Chris Langan: The generality of g reflects the fact that g is found in

conjunction with every other intelligence factor that, as you posit in

[3]The g Factor, it represents a combination of all of the

distributive criteria that contribute to intellectual processing

everywhere in the brain. Some of these criteria clearly have a genetic

basis, e.g. neural and synaptic density, neural conduction velocity,

neurotransmitter abundances and control mechanisms, glial density,

degree of axon myelinization and so on. Just as genetics dictates that

a rat is more intelligent than an insect and a man is more intelligent

than a rat, human beings differ in genetic constitution and may

therefore differ in these criteria. So g is biologically plausible as

well as empirically confirmed. But with the advent of the politically

correct Multiple Intelligences theory, it has fallen into disrepute

among educators and been rendered prematurely obsolescent. What is

your opinion of those who, being more enamored of political

correctness than common sense, deny the existence of g despite its

scientific basis? Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

Arthur Jensen: My answer to this question must already be obvious. The

“light at the end of the tunnel” is simply objective empirical

science. Those who would belittle the role of g in human cognition

could prove their case simply by showing that their tests, or

measures, or assessments of “multiple intelligences” are more highly

correlated with any important “real-life” criteria independently of g

than those criteria are correlated with g alone. But most researchers

of “multiple intelligences” don’t actually measure anything at all.

Their claims are based on purely literary, armchair psychology. So

there is no means of putting their theories to an empirical test. It

is simply non-science and just a part of the passing parade of

untested notions that so frequently attract educators and dilettantes.

That some of these fads are also perceived as PC, of course, adds to

their popular attraction.

Question #23

Chris Langan: With each passing year, it seems that popular culture

places a lower value on high intelligence. Intelligent or studious

children are called geeks, while intellectual mediocrity is regarded

as cool. So shamelessly do the popular media encourage this perception

that it sometimes seems as though the human race is being

systematically lulled into a state of intellectual degeneracy. In your

opinion, will this trend ever be successfully counteracted? If not,

what do you foresee as the long-term effect on the distribution of

intelligence in the general population?

Arthur Jensen: The trend you describe will be (or is already being)

successfully counteracted in some other countries, and as a result,

unless we soon get our own house in order, we’ll be the

losers–scientifically, culturally, and economically. There is nothing

in the Book of Nature that says the USA is automatically immune to the

possibility of devolving towards the conditions of Third World

countries. The advancing front of future civilization may well

gravitate eastwardly. I can’t say I ever really understood Oswald

Spengler, but the title of his famous book (Decline of the West, Ed.)

seems prophetic. But I don’t worry about it as long as civilization

will be preserved and developed somewhere on earth.

Question #24

Chris Langan: There is a certain amount of evidence supporting the

hypothesis that intelligent people, being better able to fill their

lives without raising families, are having fewer children.

Unfortunately, for every socially responsible, intelligent person who

decides to postpone or forego childbearing, ten others, many with

lesser genetic endowments, stand ready to fill his or her place in the

gene pool with their own progeny. Insofar as the net result would

appear to be dysgenic, is it ethical to continue to let this happen?

Arthur Jensen: Yes, it is likely that there is a dysgenic trend in g

level, at least in the USA. A plausible case can be garnered from U.S.

Census data over the last 3 decades. I don’t know whether it is or

isn’t ethical to neglect seriously investigating the possibility of a

dysgenic trend or, if it indeed exists, to do nothing about it. But a

dysgenic trend that affects the overall level of g in the society

would have ill-fated consequences for this country’s future welfare,

to say the least. Three facts have to be much more generally

understood: (1) There is a g factor, (2) the distribution and overall

level of g in the population is causally related to the level of

civilization and the quality of life in a modern society, and (3) g is

highly heritable (i.e., influenced by genetic factors). Given these

facts, a conclusion regarding dysgenics would depend on examining

birth rates in different segments of the distribution of the g factor

in the nation’s population. Depending on the conclusions from this

examination, it will be up to informed public opinion and the public

will need to decide what, if anything, should be done, or could be

done, about it in our free society.

Question #25

Chris Langan: Modern civilization grows increasingly dependent on

complex technology, and thus on people with the intelligence to

design, implement and maintain it. This places a higher level of

social utility on high intelligence, and thus on highly intelligent

people. This brings to mind a rather depressing joke: The problem with

the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard! Would intellectual

eugenics necessarily be a bad thing for humanity? Is there a danger

that this would lead to a Brave New World scenario?

Arthur Jensen: Right on target! “Brave New World” is of course pure

science fiction, which is invariably based on the science of the past

and rarely imagines anything like the actual scientific and

technological developments of the future. But there are even worse

scenarios – dysgenic ones – than are portrayed in Huxley’s novel. The

lower one-fourth (perhaps even the lower one-third) of the IQ

distribution, as we know its mental capabilities today, will have a

hard time finding gainful employment of the kinds that are needed in a

largely technological, information-intensive society. The USA is

already having to import workers, mostly from Asia, to fill these

kinds of positions, which would otherwise have to go begging for

applicants.

A serious question that is hardly ever put up for discussion is

whether a society should design itself in terms of the level of

ability (largely g) and work demands that could accommodate the vast

majority of its existing population or work toward raising the overall

level of ability to accommodate the increasing ability demands of our

trend toward a more technological and information-intensive society. A

number of symposia could be organized about this theme.

Question #26

Chris Langan: For some time now, Robert Plomin has been locating genes

associated with high IQ. The evolution of the human genome project

raises the possibility that even more of these genes will soon be

located. Meanwhile, genetic testing and engineering technology

promises to let people select their mates for complementary genetic

characteristics, and even to upgrade the DNA of their offspring in

vitro. Do you see this as harmful or beneficial to society?

Arthur Jensen: American behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin (now a

professor in the Behavioral Genetics Research Unit at the Institute of

Psychiatry in London, England), working with a large team of

colleagues specializing in genetic research, has already identified

several different sections of DNA (on chromosome #6) which reliably

differ between large groups of person of average IQ and of very high

IQ. This research is progressing at an accelerating rate as the

technology for identifying differences in specific sections of DNA

(not necessarily genes per se) is advancing rapidly. Inevitably many

more “IQ genes” will be identified within the very near future. No one

in the field is really surprised by Plomin’s findings, because the

heritability of IQ and of psychometric g (which is the main basis of

IQ heritability) has long been well established by the methods of

quantitative genetics based on the correlations of various kinships

reared together and reared apart. The importance of Plomin’s research

is that it yields specific information that will be used to trace the

pathways of genetic expression, i.e., discovering just how the

identified genes chemically affect the development of the brain

variables that cause individual differences in g. It is a necessary

complement to the approaches based on direct studies of brain

physiology, affording clues that narrow the search for the key causal

variables. Knowing precisely what a gene does and how it does it is a

major step toward understanding the workings of brain-behavior

phenomena. The history of such advances in scientific knowledge

strongly indicates that they most usually prove beneficial to

humanity. Plomin’s effort, I believe, is one of the most worthwhile

pursuits in present-day behavioral science.

Question #27

Chris Langan: It was suggested some time ago that pharmacological

methods, e.g. neurotransmitter loading, could boost mental

performance. More recently, the initial phase of the Human Genome

Project has begun to give way to the secondary proteomic phase, i.e.

tracing the biochemical pathways of genetic expression. As some of the

involved proteins are implicated in mental performance, new

IQ-boosting drug therapies may be discovered. Is there any reason to

be interested in genetic intellectual endowment when it may soon be

possible for the under-endowed to swallow higher intelligence in the

form of a pill?

Arthur Jensen: One important advantage of the purely genetic effects

on the development of intellectual functions, in contrast to

chemically induced effects in individuals, is obviously that the

genetic effects can be transmitted naturally from generation to

generation, whereas the chemical effects must be continually

reinstated anew in every generation. In a period of large-scale

catastrophe many of those who were dependent on the chemical treatment

would be deprived. I think it essential that the genetic mechanisms

involved in mental abilities to be further researched, because even

the discovery of effective chemical interventions for improving a

person’s level of g will depend in large part on an understanding of

the chemical pathways through which the genes affect individual

differences in g or other ability factors that may also be under

genetic influence.

Question #28

Chris Langan: Because genetic testing and engineering costs money,

only the wealthy can easily afford it. This raises the possibility

that intelligence will become increasingly correlated with

socioeconomic status that the central thesis of the controversial

bestseller The Bell Curve will be artificially amplified by genetic

tampering. Do you see this as a potential threat to social stability?

Arthur Jensen: This question raises serious concerns about the extent

to which, in a democratic society, the government should be involved

in control over science, its applications, and the lives of its

citizens in general. The thesis of The Bell Curve was met with

paroxysms of denial and it is doubtful whether the problem posed in

this question will, in the present political atmosphere, receive the

kind of serious discussion it deserves. The gap between the “haves”

and “have nots” in this country, to say nothing of the world at large,

is, I fear, already great enough to be “a potential threat to social

stability.”

Question #29

Chris Langan: Just as the human brain excels at certain intellectual

tasks, computers excel at solving other kinds of problem. Hence, the

idea of creating a superior intelligence by wiring together brain and

machine. Do you regard as ethical this potentially dehumanizing cyborg

approach to intellectual augmentation, which some regard as

inevitable?

Arthur Jensen: This still looks to me like science fiction. Many of us

are already quite tied to computers (I am in that condition at this

very moment!), although not through any direct line into the brain’s

circuitry. That possibility sounds a bit awful to me, but as a matter

of principle I won’t stop it if it became a reality. In my personal

philosophy I tend to be “pro-choice” all the way, and I only hope we

can preserve and promote that freedom!

Question #30

Chris Langan: As far as the evidence is concerned, the existence of g

is scientifically indisputable. But lets face it: this poses a problem

for minorities possessing statistically less of it per capita. After

all, if it is simply accepted that the mean IQs for colored people and

pure blacks are respectively one and two standard deviations below the

mean white IQ, employers and educators may be tempted to apply these

statistics in vocational and academic contexts, effectively leading to

discriminatory outcomes in which the minorities in question are

underrepresented. Accordingly, certain remedial principles of social

engineering are assigned a higher priority than the psychometric

findings themselves, resulting in reverse discrimination against

qualified people of European and Asian ancestry. Given that this

country is run by those with backgrounds in the social sciences rather

than in psychometrics, do you foresee any changes?

Arthur Jensen: I sense a growing tendency in our society in favor of

treating all persons as individuals, and I believe that increasingly

individual rights will trump group rights. The government itself

should not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, national

origin, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. I believe the same

policy should be inculcated in the personal belief system of all

citizens. But of course this is one person’s ethical philosophy (and I

hope also that of a vast majority of Americans), although it has

nothing to do with scientific evidence. I believe that any kind of

quotas or discrimination in education or employment opportunities

based on an individual’s group membership rather than on that

individuals own characteristics only promote social conflict and

instability. A just society can help people in need without resorting

to discrimination on the basis of irrelevant criteria involving

group-membership. It also promotes ill will and social unrest if

members of minority groups have the perceptions that the majority is

not making a very real effort to shun group discrimination and to

treat people strictly as so-called “America’s race problem.”

Question #31

Chris Langan: Youre working on a new book. Can you please tell us

briefly what the working title is and what it will cover?

Arthur Jensen: The working title of the book I am presently writing is

“Mental Chronometry and Individual Differences.” It is not conceived

as a “trade book” in the least, but will be a highly specialized and

technical treatise for advanced students and professional doing

research in this field, or wanting to learn more about it. Mental

chronometry bridges the interface of brain and behavior and can

benefit both of these subjects of inquiry. To get a better hold on

brain-behavior connections, we need better behavioral measures of

individual differences than are provided by our present psychometric

tests that have no true scale and can only rank-order individuals. As

mentioned several times in response to previous question regarding

measurement problems, I believe we must measure individual differences

in mental abilities by means of true ratio scales, and these can be

made possible with mental chronometry. Models of brain activity built

on the time taken by various mental functions are already a venerable

area of research in experimental psychology and can provide a basis

for exploring the nature and dimensions of individual differences. The

burgeoning research literature on this is already surprisingly vast,

and it is a big job just getting it under control, even though I have

been working in this area for some 20 years. This research requires

very special instrumentation (now greatly aided by computers), and

individual testing of subjects under highly controlled laboratory

conditions. The time measurements obtained make much more sense in

relation to physiological and electro-physiological brain measurements

than do the ordinal-scale scores on psychometric tests. We are dealing

here with measurements in milliseconds, mostly in the range below one

or two seconds. These chronometric methods are of interest not only in

experimental and differential psychology, but are being increasingly

used in medical diagnosis and treatment. Chronometric variables are

fare more sensitive to subtle drug effects than are any psychometric

tests. Chronometric methods also can detect insidious brain conditions

long before they can be recognized through subjective self-awareness,

gross behavioral observations, or conventional psychological testing.

However, as a useful tool for studying individual differences in both

their normal and abnormal aspects, mental chronometry is still in its

bare infancy. I believe it should become a major branch of behavioral

science, and I hope my projected book will help it along this path.

Here is a link to one of the more difficult I.Q. tests, Ronald Hoeflin’s ‘Titan Test’  

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html

_________________________

From Wikipedia

James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division. He has held this position since 1981. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

By JAMES HANSEN

Published: December 6, 2009

AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.

Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

Yet cap-and-trade schemes are still being pursued in Copenhagen and Washington. (Though I head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I’m speaking only for myself.)

To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage “offsets” — alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere.

Once again, lobbyists are providing the real leadership on climate change legislation. Under the proposed law, some permits to pollute would be handed out free; and much of the money actually collected from permits would be used to pay for boondoggles like “clean coal” research. The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.

If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives. All the profits of this pollution trading system would be extracted from the public via increased energy prices.

There is a better alternative, one that would be more efficient and less costly than cap and trade: “fee and dividend.” Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.

Still need more convincing? Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country’s. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. — because the total emissions are set by the cap.

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

The plans in Copenhagen and Washington have not been finalized. It is not too late to trade cap and trade for an approach that actually works.

James Hansen is the author of the forthcoming “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.”

Unhelpful Hansen by Paul Krugman

James Hansen is a great climate scientist. He was the first to warn about the climate crisis; I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously.

Unfortunately, while I defer to him on all matters climate, today’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable.

What the basic economic analysis says is that an emissions tax of the form Hansen wants and a system of tradable emission permits, aka cap and trade, are essentially equivalent in their effects. The picture looks like this:

A tax puts a price on emissions, leading to less pollution. Cap and trade puts a quantitative limit on emissions, but from the point of view of any individual, emitting requires that you buy more permits (or forgo the sale of permits, if you have an excess), so the incentives are the same as if you faced a tax. Contrary to what Hansen seems to believe, the incentives for individual action to reduce emissions are the same under the two systems.

This is true even if some emitters are “grandfathered” with free allocations of permits, as will surely be the case. They still have an incentive to cut their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to others.

The only difference is the nature of uncertainty over the aggregate outcome. If you use a tax, you know what the price of emissions will be, but you don’t know the quantity of emissions; if you use a cap, you know the quantity but not the price. Yes, this means that if some people do more than expected to reduce emissions, they’ll just free up permits for others — which worries Hansen. But it also means that if some people do less to reduce emissions than expected, someone else will have to make up the shortfall. It’s symmetric; there’s no reason to emphasize only one side of the story.

And as far as I can see, the question about uncertainty is secondary; the fact is that cap and trade works. Hansen admits that the sulfur dioxide cap has reduced pollution, but argues that it didn’t do enough; well, it did as much as it was designed to do. If Hansen thinks it should have done more, he should be campaigning for a lower cap, not trashing the whole program.

Oh, and the argument that if you create a market, you’re opening the door for Wall Street evildoers, is bizarre. Emissions permits aren’t subprime mortgages, let alone complex derivatives based on subprime; they’re straightforward rights to do a specific thing. It will truly be a tragedy if people generalize from the financial crisis to block crucially needed environmental policy.

Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different.

For here’s the way it is: we have a real chance of getting a serious cap and trade program in place within a year or two. We have no chance of getting a carbon tax for the foreseeable future. It’s just destructive to denounce the program we can actually get — a program that won’t be perfect, won’t be enough, but can be made increasingly effective over time — in favor of something that can’t possibly happen in time to avoid disaster.

Robert Storr: Most theory has little bearing on art

The critic and curator speaks to The Art Newspaper

By Helen Stoilas | From Frieze daily edition, 16 Oct 09
Published online 16 Oct 09

Robert Storr, US critic, curator and dean of the Yale School of Art, is visiting Frieze Art Fair for the first time, to take part in “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?”, a panel discussion today at 12pm with artist Barbara Bloom and philosophy professor Simon Critchley. He spoke to The Art Newspaper about the role of art theory, and what advice he is giving to his students in today’s artistic climate.

The Art Newspaper: The topic of the Frieze panel is “Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” What are your thoughts?

Robert Storr: I’m not sure that art and theory were ever that close to begin with. There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many. And some of the theoretical writing that was done about artists was very important, but what people now call theory is a vast field and a relatively small amount of it bears directly on art, or at least on art production.

We’re in a very strange situation where some artists have derived a lot from their theoretical reading but never as systematically as people are inclined to think. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who I know read theory carefully, nonetheless made a point of saying that it was not to be read in a kind of rigorous, academic way, but to help unblock thoughts and open up questions.

A lot of artists don’t want to tip their hands and show how selective and shallow their understanding is; a lot of people who do theory full time don’t really want to acknowledge that the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory. And, therefore, even though you may share a vocabulary, you don’t share at all the same kind of generative process or goals.

TAN: What do you think the future of art theory is?

RS: I think the future of all kinds of philosophical discourse depends on their utility, their accuracy and description. Having been partially educated in France I was aware that a lot of French theory is conditioned by specifically French situations. The decline of a unified left in French politics, the death of existentialism as a movement…those terms are not applicable to America in a direct way, so you can read French theory in an American context but you also ought to read American history to counterbalance it. Thirty years ago everyone read Wittgenstein—how many read him today? If you want to talk about Jasper Johns, if you want to talk about Bruce Nauman, you should read Wittgenstein. People who have real theoretical minds read widely, they read selectively and they read for use.

TAN: Are there any new projects you’re working on?

RS: I am finishing a new Gerhard Richter book on a painting he’s giving to MoMA about 9/11, and I’ve finished at long last my big book on Louise Bourgeois. I’m running an art school and I’m trying to give good and reasonable criticism to young artists who are entering into an art world not at all like the one they imagined.

TAN: What kind of advice are you giving art students now?

RS: I’m telling them that this is actually a fine time to be in art school because, when I was in art school, when a lot of people I admire were in art school in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no money. If you go into it knowing that you will probably not be rewarded lavishly, but you can in fact continue to work, you’re on a much better footing than if you go into it trying to make a huge impact when you’re 23 or 24, and then maintain that for the next 60 years. You know John Baldessari is someone whom everyone admires, but people by and large forget that he destroyed all of his “successful work” and started all over again. I’m interested in people who make good art, whenever they make it, and I think a lot of the best artists today are late bloomers. I’m a big fan of both Raoul De Keyser and Tom Nozkowski, who I put in the Venice Biennale [2007]. Tom is 65 and Raoul is 78 and neither one of them really hit it until they were way past the age when most people think it would be the end of your career.

TAN: Maybe there’s less of a focus on the cult of youth.

RS: There isn’t less of a focus yet, but it’s going to dawn on people that it’s not working. It’s always nice to be a coming attraction, but it’s murder to be a has-been. If it hasn’t happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might. It’s a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you’ve never really thought about what you’re going to do when you go out of fashion because you’ve never been out of fashion, it’s much harder to take than if you’ve gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive.

TAN: Do you think the recent economic problems will make artists stronger?

RS: I’m not a believer that hardship makes people stronger, but I do think that too much of certain things can make them weaker. Strong people can be distracted by things that come too easy. Maintaining a career nowadays is extraordinarily complicated, even if you’re just doing your work and showing up for required occasions. You can waste an amazing amount of energy, time and goodwill by chasing after stuff that’s not worth chasing after. Really wise artists know how to make dramatic appearances and how to make dramatic disappearances.