Monthly Archives: March 2013

Unz on China: Debating the “Clark-Unz Model”

As an individual who often regrets his decades-old defection from the academic community, I was remarkably pleased to see anthropologist Peter Frost very generously discuss my recent China article under the rubric “the Clark-Unz Model.”  The senior researcher identified is obviously economist … Continue reading

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Unz on China: Chinese Eugenics?

In modern American society, few terms carry the negative and socially disreputable ring of “eugenics,” first coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton and later widely advocated by Margaret Sanger, America’s founding mother of birth control and abortion.  Denouncing one’s opponents … Continue reading

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A Minimum Wage Hike as Amnesty-Killer?

My Friday Aspen Institute panel in DC on raising the minimum wage went well, though the discussion underscored the somewhat insular thinking of many of the policy elites who dominate life in our capital city. As an example, although the audience … Continue reading

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Unz on Meritocracy: Dangerous Cancer Statistics

About the only detailed public criticism of my Meritocracy article by an academic has come from Prof. Janet Mertz, a Wisconsin cancer researcher.  Since her analysis draws so heavily upon her own 2008 academic paper on top performing math students, I … Continue reading

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How Social Darwinism Made Modern China

How Social Darwinism Made Modern China The American Conservative, March/April 2013 During the three decades following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, China achieved the fastest sustained rate of economic growth in human history, with the resulting 40-fold rise in the size … Continue reading

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Unz on Meritocracy: Almost as Wrong as Larry Summers

Several years ago, Harvard President Larry Summers spoke at an academic conference on diversity issues, and casually speculated that one of the possible reasons there were relatively few female mathematics professors might be that men were just a bit better … Continue reading

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Resurrecting Our Intellectual Past

As many may know, I have spent most of the last decade or more producing a content-archiving website that provides convenient, readable access to over 500,000 print articles from the 19th and 20th centuries, together with hundreds of thousands of … Continue reading

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Unz on Meritocracy: Gelman’s Sixth Column

For reasons best known to himself, Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman has now seen fit to publish his sixth(!)  lengthy blogsite column discussing or sharply critiquing my analysis of Ivy League university admissions.  Just like most of his previous ones, … Continue reading

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