Science and Racism, Again

The story of Jason Richwine and his racist PhD thesis is fascinating on many levels.  To summarize the facts, Richwine was a co-author of a Heritage Foundation study that estimated the costs of immigration reform to be $6.3 trillion, so high that even many Republicans dismissed it as incredible. In the controversy over this report, someone noted that Richwine's 2009 Harvard PhD thesis (in Public Policy) was a racist argument that immigrants should not be allowed into the US because of their low IQ scores. You can find a Slate story here, a The Nation view here, and a shrill defense of Richwine by Michelle Malkin in the National Review here.  After a few days of controversy, Richwine resigned from the Heritage Foundation.

You can also read his thesis; it is here. It is only 134 pages of text, and here is its Conclusion:

As the previous six chapters have discussed, today's immigrants are not as intelligent on average as white natives. The IQ difference between the two groups is large enough to have substantial negative effects on the economy and on American society. The deficit cannot be dismissed as meaningless or transient. It is transferred across generations--whether via genes, environment, or both--in a manner that we do not yet know how to prevent. Although this is a depressing conclusion, it does help us focus on a new opportunity. In trying to reverse the cognitive decline of immigrants, we could begin to seek out underprivileged people  who have the raw mental ability to achieve personal success, while still helping ourselves at the same time.

For anthropologists, it is stunning that in 2009, one could graduate with such a thesis. To just touch on some of the problems, the IQ test claims to measure "intelligence" but we know that this concept is culturally constructed (i.e. each culture has a culturally specific definition of what it means to be intelligent). For the IQ test, people familiar with test-taking will do better. We therefore cannot say that, say, Mexican peasants with little schooling who score lower on the IQ test are necessarily less intelligent that Indiana residents. "Race" itself is also a social, not biological, fact. "Hispanics" is especially problematic, as members of that group come from many continents and exhibit many different phenotypes.

Right wing apologists like Matlin claim that this is a witch hunt, and that Richwine has just been "crucified" because race and intelligence is a taboo topic in the US. Many in Asia might be tempted to agree. Many East Asians believe that Asians are biologically more intelligent than other "races," and believe that liberal Americans are just in denial. (Eugenics has no negative connotations in China.) But they are just not aware of all the research that shows the problems of measuring intelligence, and the little or no correlation between "race" and almost everything else. Franz Boas, one of the founders of American anthropology, became famous for his studies showing that the smaller brains of immigrants (which was the basis of "scientific" racism in the early 20th century) was only the product of poor diet in the Old Country; he showed children of immigrants had brain sizes comparable to those of other Americans. The reason racism appears to be taboo is because there is so much evidence against it. One has to question the intelligence of people who continue to peddle these ideas.

The real issue is how one could graduate with such a thesis from Harvard in 2009. This is especially  surprising because one of Richwine's committee members, Christopher Jencks, is considered a liberal/leftist. The fact that he approved the thesis is being cited by Rush Limbaugh as evidence that Richwine is being treated unfairly. When Jon Wiener of The Nation asked Jencks for a comment, he declined.

I have a theory of how this could happen. Over the years, I've noticed that some committee members in some universities do not really read the theses they are asked to read. At least, they do not read it as closely as they should. Richwine's thesis was not that long, only 158 pages in all (134 of text, plus appendices and references). And several lines that have been quoted, including the very end of the thesis quoted above, should have raised red flags. But if Jencks had not read the thesis before it was submitted, and if Richwine had a job lined up after graduation, then it would have been very difficult to insist on changes. Criticism at that point could even have been taken as a criticism of the thesis supervisor.

To avoid this problem, our Anthro department requires students show a near final draft to all committee members before the student submits the copy for the oral defense and for the external examiner. That gives teachers a chance to flag major problems. Furthermore, we would never allow a student to begin such an unsound and unscientific project. But in a place like Harvard, everyone is too busy with their own research. Most students at Harvard are very smart and can do a good thesis on their own (which is good, because at most elite schools you are on your own). But "Public Policy" is not the elite part of Harvard; it is on the applied side, in the Kennedy School, not one of the traditional disciplines like economics, political science, or sociology.  Students should think of this when they choose where to study.

It is a bit discouraging that racist ideas are so powerful and seem so naturally correct to many people. It is surprising that these ideas need to be repeatedly and constantly addressed, and that despite all the science and all the research and teaching that anthropologists and other scholars do on race, they live on. It looks like the AAA's Race Project will need to be extended for many more years.

Course Textbooks

Four years ago, students the introductory anthropology course I teach, ANTH1010 Humans and Culture, said that they would have preferred having a textbook rather than individual weekly readings. So I've used a textbook the past few times I've taught the course. The book I've used, by Haviland, is a bit "textbooky"; it now has four co-authors and looks like it was written by committee. It touches on all the main topics, but to fit it all in, it says very little about everything so seems to make little sense.

I've been looking for and alternative, so was happy to receive a review copy of Cultural Anthropology by Serena Nanda and Rchard L. Warms (11th edition). It seems more coherent, and to have a more consistent political economy theme. The publisher Cengage can make that book available in an International Edition here for HK$307 (about US$44).

I was shocked to see that the book sells on Amazon in the US for US$183.49. One of the comments on the Amazon site says:

This is a perfectly fine cultural anthropology textbook. It is well-organized and reasonably well-written

The problem with this book as that that it is extremely overpriced. The issue is that editions 9E, 8E, 7E,... are equally good. They publish a new edition with an inflated price ($150) every year and the differences in editions are negligible, The publisher and the authors (Nanda and Warms) should be ashamed of themselves.

 This is actually a good point. How can a textbook cost that much? Is anthropology really advancing that rapidly that we need new editions every 3 years?

The international edition has cheaper paper (both thinner and a bit more grey), but that does make it more portable. But even at HK$307, few students will buy the book. Last time I taught the course, I think only about 10 students in a class of 50 or so bought the book (the rest copy it from the library copy). 

I looked at using a different book, but it does not come in an "international edition" so the publisher would not even tell me what the price would be. I guess the sales rep was too embarrassed.  So perhaps publishers do have some shame after all.

University as a Business Seeking Patents

Economists are great at finding an economic aspect to almost anything. Gary Becker famously even studied the economic incentives in families. It would be impossible to deny that economic factors do not affect the number of children born in almost any culture, though there are, of course, many other factors at work. But I find the dominance of economism and the creeping of business logic into the university to be quite annoying. There is no doubt that costs and benefits of education need to be considered (students with a humanities degree from third rate schools who cannot find a job and are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans did not sufficiently consider cost/benefit). But there is a lot more to an education than the cost benefit calculation.

But it is the idea that the university should "make money" that makes me very angry. Universities, whether private (non-profit) or public (subsidized by the state, i.e. the people), should operate for the public good. They should be doing the research that will help society, and will help business and industry but that is too advanced (e.g. theoretical) or expensive for individuals or companies to do on their own. Usually it is fundamental research in the sciences, or it can be public policy research which informs the public. Or it can be research in the arts and humanities that makes life better for those who enjoy and want to understand these works.

At my university, I am periodically asked what patents I have obtained. There is increasing emphasis not only on making discoveries, but on cashing in. We are increasingly evaluated on how much money we can generate for the university, be it in grants received or patents that produce an income stream. This is fundamentally wrong, in my view. University professors are not given labs and offices so that they can generate patents that make money for the university. Indeed, businesses should complain that the universities have an unfair advantage when doing patentable research. Universities get funds from the public, and then turn around and patent their discoveries for the benefit of the universities. But the sponsors of that research were "the people", i.e., the taxpayers. Why should the benefits go to the university and not to the public? Granted, the universities do not pay "shareholders", so one could say that the money goes back to "the public" when the university gets that income. But that is not true. The extra money in fact goes in part to administrators who have been earning increasingly large salaries (especially in the US). These administrators are then like CEOs, and they set up more incentives for professors to do research that can lead to more "profits."  The money also pays for things like a "Research Administration Office" and a "Knowledge Transfer Office" that has staff to promote the idea of making money off of discoveries.

Most infuriating is that the idea has taken hold that if you do not incentivize researchers and professors, they won't produce innovation. This widely-accepted nonsense ignores the long history technological and biomedical progress that did not produce patents or profit the inventors directly. Louis Pasteur did not get a patent and become rich from his discovery of the germ theory of disease and his development of a vaccine for rabies and anthrax. Nor did Watson and Crick get a patent for their discovery of DNA.  In fact, James Watson has been a vocal opponent of the patenting of genes. But now Myriad Genetics has attempted to do just that for normal human genes, in a case that has made its way to the US Supreme Court.

Conservatives should be angry at universities claiming patents because they should see it as the expansion of the state into private enterprise; state money is going into research and competing with business for innovation and its resultant profits. Liberals and radicals should see this as a business takeover of the public interest, as commercially motivated research projects gradually crowd out and replace projects that might be of broader public interest. So whereas we once would have expected universities to do research on public health problems like malaria, the same commercial pressures that lead drug companies to concentrate on the illnesses of the wealthy are going to drive research in universities away from malaria research.

When I got the above message in an email, I initially thought it was a parody. The University is inviting me to attend a meeting with biomedical scientists so I can learn "best practices in business development and commercialization"! How is this different from a meeting I might attend if I were working for Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY)? Why is a university so concerned about "business development and commercialization"? What has happened to universities doing research for the public good? Is income earned the only way we can measure what is "good"? What about numbers of lives saved (even poor people's lives)? 

I had the fleeting idea of going to the meeting and asking all these "embarrassing" questions. Then I noticed I have a departmental meeting that day and cannot attend. Probably all for the better. When I once raised similar issues (arguing against allowing a thesis to be kept secret so a patent application could be made) I think I was the only one who was embarrassed. This commercialized thinking is rapidly becoming the norm. And when you try to argue that the emperor has no clothes, they look at you like you are naked.

Pseudoscience and the Beauty Complex in Advertizing Dove Soap

Dove soap has an online commercial that has gone viral, with over 11 million views in the 7 days since it has been released. It is discussed in the New York Times here. The crux of the commercial campaign is that only 4 percent of women consider themselves to be beautiful. Dove hired a "forensic composite artist" (the artists who draw faces of criminals for the law enforcement) to draw pictures of women in an experiment. First, and without seeing the women, he drew a portrait just from the a woman's own description. Then he mad another drawing based on another women's description of the first woman. All the while, the women were behind a screen, and not visible to the artist. The point of the ads is that the portraits are much more attractive when they are based on the description of others than when based on women's own descriptions.

The ad has obviously struck a nerve. Many women have low self-esteem. You hear women in the ad saying "My mother says I have a big jaw." And apparently women mentioned moles and scars more than others did. One woman in the commercial is teary-eyed when she realizes that a stranger described her as more beautiful than she had described herself.

(Full disclosure: I use Dove soap, having been recommended it as a milder "superfatted" soap by a doctor).

It is clear from the Dove videos that this was not really an experiment. The artist himself says he wants to change the way women see themselves. He, subconsciously if not consciously, most certainly made the second portrait more attractive. The artist says in the video that he was interested in doing the project for the sake of his two daughters: he obviously also sees the burden that women carry to be "beautiful," so it is clear that his drawings were not simply "objective" or neutral. Several women in the ads say they did not know what was going on, but that is irrelevant. The artist needed to be "blinded" or kept from knowing what the point of the experiment was, just as much as the women. In a controlled experiment, both the subjects and those running the experiment must be "blinded" (i.e. double-blind). The temptation for the artist to make the second portrait more beautiful, so as to fit his preconception, would have been very strong.

In addition, the women (and a few men) who described a woman were talking about someone they had just met. In the video, we see them say things like "cute nose" and "very nice blue eyes." But of course these people will be complementary. It is not realistic to expect strangers to describe someone they just met in a friendly social encounter with any negative language. Again, the experimental set-up is not designed to really create "objective" descriptions of a woman's looks. Even if the artist could be objective in his drawing, it would not be surprising that the second drawing would be, as one woman says about her own second portrait, "more open and friendly and ... happy."

In one of the videos, Melinda says "I think there's kind of a stigma around the word beautiful, feeling confident and using that word about yourself. We should put more energy on the things that we do like about ourself as opposed to the things that we don't." At first it sounds like good advice. But it also reflects contemporary infatuation with "self-esteem". When one thinks about this in terms of pre-WWII values, or Amish values, the notion of speaking of oneself as beautiful sounds vain and lacking in suitable humility. I don't think that the problem is that people don't say they are beautiful. They would be obnoxious if they did say that about themselves. The issue is, on the contrary, the fact that women are made to feel inadequate. And though it is common to blame one's mother, she is not the source of the pressure: it is the beauty industry.

Thus, the problem with these commercials is not only that they are bad "experiments" and bad social science. It is also that they whitewash the advertizing industry's and cosmetics industry's roles in creating this feeling of inadequacy in women. Everyone has to balance a feeling of being beauty with a more humble sense that being proud is obnoxious. But ads and magazines, with their impossible images of "beauty", create an unattainable standard for what is beautiful, impossible for 99.9 percent of women to achieve. It is not surprising, then, that women feel inadequate. Mothers may say things that reflect that standard and say hurtful things like "You have a big jaw," but they are only reflecting the standard created by industry. It is thus ironic, and a sad joke, that Dove tries to sell more soap by associating itself with a critique of what it (and its parent company, Unilever) have created with their relentless beauty advertizing. The ads suggest that this pressure on women, and the consequent loss of self-esteem, are simply caused by "society," or by mothers. They ignore the role that advertizing and cosmetics companies have played in emphasizing the dominant standard of beauty that torments the women in the commercials. The good news is that the millions of hits suggest people want something different. But if we don't see the role that advertizing plays in creating this unhappiness and low self-esteem, we will never free ourselves from the tyranny of the beauty complex.

Rugby Commercial Analyzed

This year's Cathay Pacific ad video for the Hong Kong Sevens, Always Game, has several themes that I've noticed over the years. Obviously, the ad highlights the flight attendants' beauty. Their approach is not as crass as that of Nok Air, but they are still selling the women's looks (pretty face, shapely bodies, and friendly smile). This has been a long-standing theme for Cathay Pacific. It seems that 80% of their flight attendants are female, and they still are able to impose strict standards on the colors of the make-up, to hire based on good looks, and to force older attendants to retire.

The ad also is a "feel good" ad about Hong Kong. It has local allusions that many non-locals might not get. There is the double-decker bus, the Star Ferry, and of course the skyscrapers. The dim sum steamers also are a local touch, and the flying dumplings are like rugby balls being kicked, trying to link Hong Kong with rugby. The flight attendants' numbers on their backs, the lifting of a flight attendant like in a lineout, and the running with the bag (think ball) all refer to rugby.

Other parts of the commercial refer back to the popular 2011 Cathay ad (which was so popular it was recycled for 2012, which was a bit disappointing). The ad agency was McGann Worldgroup, and according to CulturePub, the title was "Mind vs Muscles" (but their video and caption seems to miss the point that the ad was for the Hong Kong Sevens, and the players in black are not the All Blacks, but anyway. It is not really clear why the players--several of whom are recognizable HK Sevens team players, are dressed in black.)  In case you were not sure about it, they show parts of the video on a screen in the background, as the flight attendants walk around. The girl brushes off the boy's chest, just like in the old commercial. And the high heeled cleats refer to the amusing ending of the 2011 commercial.

There is one comment by a fan on the Cathay website that sums up the many people's views of the ad:

I LOVE this commercial! I can't understand it but then its got everything. great music, hong kong elements, gorgeous girls, rugby

As an aside, when the flight attendants were threatenting to work to rule over the 2012 Christmas holidays if they did not get a better deal from Cathay management, a certain C. Anderson wrote to the SCMP saying:

Where is the 'care' Cathay crew pledged?
Do Cathay Pacific flight attendants have a death wish for their company?
I am no fan of incompetent management and have no idea if Cathay is run well or not, but I do take exception to a union whose members have claimed to care about their passengers, but who seemingly care more about what lines their pockets than their travelling customers or the Hong Kong institution that employs them.

See the rest of the letter here [subscription required]. This letter is hilarious in its ignorance. It seems to believe that the ads are put out by the flight attendants' union, rather than by management that is selling its flight attendants under the guise of "good service." While it is true that service on Cathay Pacific is far superior to that on United, for example, it is also true that Cathay is a allowed to set rules that would not be legal in the US.

Pharma Spam as Informal Economy

I have long been interested in the informal economy (the businesses that avoid some taxes, but offer legitimate services), so I found a Planet Money story about the companies that sell drugs via SPAM to be fascinating. See story here. Two companies got into a dispute so released each other's records (I'm not sure what they were doing with the other company's records in the first place, but anyway) giving a trove of data for researchers. Brian Krebs is one of the researchers who used this data, and like a historian or anthropologist (because anthropologists also only see a small part of the story, even when they live it), he has reconstructed how these companies that sell Viagra and Accutane operate. Among the interesting tidbits: profit margins for drug sellers is about 20% (less than Apple), and most customers are actually satisfied (ie the companies mostly sell the real pharmaceuticals, not poisons or fakes). And the spammers are different companies, who work on a commission of about 30-40%.  Not mentioned in the story is that this informal economy exists because of irrationalities in our global patent system. This is the real globalization from below.

Cooking meat without heat

Our department had a "Turkish night" yesterday, with members of a Turkish cultural association called "Anatolia Cultural and Dialog Centre" (or ACDC), which is like a British Council office for Turkey (but with better food). They demonstrated a number of food specialties, and Turkish tea. We had exchange students from NYU in the US (themselves, of course, of various ethnic backgrounds), and our mix of students, plus volunteers from ACDC, hosted by the CUHK school of hotel management in their wonderful teaching kitchen--one of the few examples in CUHK of collaboration across different faculties. A fun night for all.

I had two anthropological observations. One was of how "Turkish cuisine" was being constructed by the ACDC speaker. He began by saying that Turkish cuisine is one of the great cuisines of the world. I'm not a foodie or a food expert, so am perhaps ignorant, but I found this surprising. It made me wonder how many "world cuisines" there are, and if soon every nation-state will have its "traditional cuisine." He mentioned that Turkish cuisine is based on Ottoman cuisine, and that it is "rich" because it is "not just one taste" but incorporated many dishes and specialties from different parts of the Ottoman empire: the Balkans, Mediterranean, and the Middle East. He then stumbled slightly, and it became clear that, well, these dishes were not originally from Turkey, and are still eaten in Armenia, Syria, etc., so he added that though they are originally from different places, "they are still Turkish cuisine." It is not that the Turks "invented them, but they became Turkish." Everything he said was unobjectionable, but it does show the constructed nature of "Turkish cuisine," especially as it later turned out that not only are many "Turkish" dishes originally from non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman empire, but even within modern Turkey, there is great variation in cuisine. Southeaster cuisine is much spicier, for example. So what, really, is "Turkish"? It is clearly pointless to deny there is something called "Turkish cuisine," and yet, the variation in origins and in current forms makes it difficult to pin down. This is so typical of culture generally, that it could be the topic for a treatise on the nature (and ambiguity) of culture.

The second observation came as I discussed one of the dishes we saw prepared. This was çiğ köfte, a dish made with raw beef or lamb and eaten wrapped in a salad leaf. We had a vegetarian version, made with potato instead of the usual beef. As part of the preparation, they had explained that it needs to be mixed, kneaded really, and we had a strong young man demonstrating the heavy work that is required. We were also told that this tends to be a "male" dish, something men make when they get together, as opposed to sarma, which is more commonly made by women. So far so good; we know about gendered foods (in fact, when I tell Chinese that I like "sesame oil chicken", they usually laugh, because that is a food prepared for women in the month after childbirth, so not something men usually eat, or like).

In talking to some Turkish friends afterwards, they mentioned that it is supposed to be much spicier than the version we got, and that one recipe even calls for a proportion of 2 kg of meat (and they said the meat had to be special, high quality and lean, with no fat or tendons), 1 kg of bulgur wheat, and 300 to 400 gr of peppers. Then they said you need to knead the meat to cook it.  I said, "Cook it? But there is no heat." "Yes." Start over. Why do you knead it? Another friend tries to help explain this, and he says you need to "kill the meat."  What? The meat may be fresh, but once it is ground up, it is surely quite dead! After some further exploration, they explained that in Turkish, the word is literally to "cook" the meat, even though it does not involve heat. What changes in the meat, however, is that it no longer tastes like meat. I wondered if Turks thought beef tastes bad, as some Italians do (which is why they prefer veal, and why they often fry it or put lemon on it, I suppose). But they confirmed that Turks like the taste of meat, and that it is not to mask an unpleasant taste. In this case, however, it is raw (though very fresh), and so perhaps there is something in the taste of raw beef that needs to be hidden. I'm not entirely sure why raw beef that has been mixed with bulgur wheat and peppers is considered "cooked." But I found it fascinating that, in speaking in English, they borrowed words like "kill" and "cook" which made no sense to me, but that capture the idea of making the beef edible. And that was exactly how they explained the term: they said they needed a term to describe making it edible, and so chose those terms. Levis-Strauss (author of The Raw and The Cooked) must be smiling. He long ago described how the term "cooked" was used to describe making something edible, and here we have another example.