From the New York Times: For some reason, that strikes me as the funniest Conquistador-American name yet that I've seen among diversity hires. I'm waiting for José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia IV, Duke of Primo Rivera to show up on the New York Times list of its new vibrantly diverse employees,... Read More

It's widely believed that racial gaps in test scores are just class gaps. And, if that's not true, then it's assumed that race is fading away in importance relative to class. But an important study shows that in multiracial California, race is becoming more influential in recent years. THE GROWING CORRELATION BETWEEN RACE AND SAT... Read More

Let's count the word choices in this huge New York Times feature article: California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth The state’s history as a frontier of prosperity and glamour faces an uncertain future as the fourth year of severe shortages prompts Gov. Jerry Brown to mandate a 25 percent reduction in non-agricultural water use.... Read More

Long time readers know I've been interested in the question of school test scores in the two biggest states, California and Texas. In the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, Texas routinely beats California across all racial groups. But the NAEP is low stakes to students, which makes it easier for state officials to... Read More

The feds' National Assessment of Educational Progress has a table of 4th and 8th grade vocabulary and reading comprehension scores by state. Sample size issues are of concern for smaller states which tend to bounce around, but we can state with a high degree of statistical confidence that the future of the state of California,... Read More

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:Read the whole thing there. My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

In the new July-August Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest volume of Kevin Starr's history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963. It makes me nostalgic for what once was. Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:It was... Read More

California's top political columnist, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, writes: Memo to Californians from everyone else in the world: You folks out there in sunshine land caused this historic global recession, and it's time for you to mend your ways.Farfetched? Not really.A very good case can be made that California's developers, mortgage lenders and... Read More

George Will writes:But the rest of his column doesn't acheive that level of insight.I think there could be a case made that a high level of Mexican immigration is only manageable under a Texas Republican-style system of low government spending, low taxes, and low environmental regulation. But there are a couple of problems with that.... Read More

An almost-forgotten incident in American economic history was the pyramid scheme that swept Southern California during the stagflation of May 1980. Yet, now that we know that about 2/3rds of the Housing Bubble of 2000-2007 took place just in California, it's worth reviewing incidents from California's long history of financial manias.I missed out on the... Read More

Yes, that's what it looked like Monday. Granted, I wasn't sitting on my yacht at the marina, but that's the same general view I had from my minivan on the Santa Monica freeway.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

From the NYT:This whole bet-the-country-on-diversity experiment is being prototyped in California, which is about four decades ahead of the rest of the country demographically. How's it working out?By the way, keep in mind that it's been 15 years since a very destructive earthquake in California. (By my count, the big destructive ones were in 1906,... Read More

Every year in California, we get to vote on about a dozen initiatives, most of which we voters are completely clueless about. I'm not talking about the much publicized gay marriage one -- everybody is entitled to an opinion on that. It's all the bond issues. Shall we issue $10 billion in bonds for a... Read More

Judging from this poll of 60,000 Americans conducted by Travel & Leisure of visitors' and residents' attitudes toward 25 American cities to find "America's Favorite City," Los Angeles has to be America's Least Favorite City.Consider the subsets of the "People" category. Seattle came in first in "Most Intelligent People," while Los Angeles came in dead... Read More

Why did the housing bubble reach the most ridiculous heights in California? Here are several theories and I'd like to hear your ideas:1. Californians are too lazy and/or stupid to do some arithmetic before signing gigantic contracts for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. (As a native-born Californian, I'd have to say that this sounds... Read More

In the California primary, Hillary won big among Latinos in California by running as a tax and spend Democrat, while Obama ran as a pro-illegal immigrant. The LA Times article says:Yes, Obama is from the Midwest not the Northeast, but in California, everything beyond Las Vegas is considered "back East."The thing that people back East... Read More

The weather conditions out here in LA are identical to those of exactly four years ago: a drought year and hot winds off the desert. So, the whole place is on fire once more. The end is nigh, which tends to make a lot of people, many of them Southern Californians, rather pleased. Here's a... Read More

IQs by State, 1960 -- You probably remember the notorious "Democratic states have higher IQs" hoax from last May. Well, here, thanks to Prof. Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah anthropology dept., might be the closest thing to a national sample of IQ scores ever: the Project Talent database of 366,000 9th-12th grade students.... Read More

The future looks dumberer -- Looking at the NAEP scores for public school 8th graders by state (see below), it struck me that California is a going to be, on average, a much dumber state in the future than it is now. I always thought of it as a pretty smart state, what with Silicon... Read More