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Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow 
July 19, 2011
Why The Chinese Aren’t Good At Basketball
With the retirement of 7′6″ Yao Ming from the NBA, the Chinese are wondering why there aren’t many other world-class Chinese basketball players. From the NYT:
While the United States develops players through an almost Darwinian process of natural selection in youth leagues, high school teams and colleges, China has a rigid, Soviet-inspired state network of athletic schools, coaches and bureaucrats that selects players as early as age 4.
Yao, the son of exceptionally tall basketball players,
Yao was, more or less, the result of a successful government breeding experiment at creating a basketball player. His 6′-7″ father on the Chinese men’s basketball team and 6′-3″ mother on the Chinese women’s basketball team were repeatedly encouraged to get together by Chinese basketball officials.
was a 5-foot-7 third grader when he was plucked by a local sports school for a life of endless drills geared entirely toward molding him into Olympic material. Every professional Chinese player has a similar body and biography. And yet, before and during the 30-year-old Yao’s reign, China has managed to reach only the Olympic quarterfinals.
The Chinese government likes to win a lot of different Olympic medals, so they don’t invest hugely in winning an expensive basketball medal.
Dr. Norm Matloff Goes To A Labor Market Conference
Dr. Norm Matloff writes to his e-newsletter mailing list
I was in DC this past Monday, July 11–very briefly, as usual–for a one-day workshop held at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation. I’ll omit the rather uninformative title, and instead give you the blurb:
The purpose of this workshop is to review projections of the demand for and supply of science and engineering (S&E) workers, regulations governing the admission of foreign S&E workers and employers, and hiring patterns in S&E labor markets. The workshop will discuss how projections are made and evaluated; current OPT, H-1B and PERM regulations and proposed changes; S&E employer hiring patterns and S&E worker experience over the business cycle. We plan another workshop on the impacts of foreign S&E students and workers.
The attendees (by invitation only) could be described as the Who’s Who of DC policymakers related to the above issues. While I won’t name them individually (no, they weren’t wearing bags over their heads, but I’ll keep them anonymous for reasons given below), I’ll state that they were from agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and the “shadow-governmental” National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences. There were also several of us from academia, as well as several professional advocates–one from organized labor, one from the business community who specializes in matters such as H-1B, and one from a think tank allied with the immigration lawyers. There was even a student intern who is working with a presidential council on STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) matters.
The workshop was conducted under Chatham House Rules, meaning that one may report what was said but not who said it. And I’m going to err on the side of being a bit more circumspect than I probably need to be under those rules, by not listing the names of the participants. Otherwise some cognoscenti readers of this e-newsletter might be able to deduce the identities of those who made statements I mention here.
(On the other hand, several longtime readers were present at the workshop, and a couple of new ones. I’ve also cc-ed one of the organizers. So if I misreport something, please let me know, and I will post a correction, again without attribution.)
I have posted an updated version of the full paper I wrote for the workshop here.
Humberto Leal Dies, A New Propaganda Ploy ("Mexican National") Is Born
The London Economist has announced that a lopsided majority of its readers in a just-concluded online poll think that the recent execution of Humberto Leal Garcia should have been delayed because "American authorities never informed Mr Leal of his right to contact the Mexican consulate, as required under international treaty obligations" [