hard to think why anyone would want to go into pharmaceuticals when you will be demonized for trying to cure people.

China does have a malinvestment problem. Not a catastrophic one, though. India's best bet is to set up a charter area which only those over 100 IQ could enter. Even if that's 5-10%, that's 50-100 million potential residents. They are sort of doing this already on a small scale with the office parks and the overseas travel, but we need some industrial scale sifting and separation. Then suddenly you have at least a mid level European power and possibly a new Japan. New India could provide a missile shield for its coethnics and relatives out of nostalgia, but could not be democratic for fear of a debauched immigration policy. What products would characterize New India? Probably software, pharmaceuticals, medicine, and engineering services. It would need several flagship companies, like Honda is to Japan or Mercedes is to Germany. Tata and Reliance are ok but are old economy and don't make sexy consumer goods. The person to pull this off would have to be ballsy about finding new land, maybe with seasteading, and would have to be an Ataturk, Lee Kuan Yew, Theodor Herzl level guy in terms of his ability to lead. A religious spin would be interesting as well. Any ideas for how one would found an Indian Israel, Razib?

I think everyone is now realizing just how big an obstacle the FDA is going to present for sequencing. Tabarrok has put together a huge review of the literature at fdareview.org. Drug delays cause about 1000X more deaths than bad drugs. What is happening now (and being documented on genomicslawreport.com among other places) is that the FDA is going to start jailing and fining you if you invent a sequencing machine but don't spend five years getting it through premarket review. Situation is even worse for any software that operates on a genome sequence, even if all it is doing is looking up rs numbers. Wish this was a joke.

Wow, Ned Block making sense. Just don't let him near any of the recent Nature papers on the missing heritability. He "debunked" heritability back in 1995 dontchaknow :)

gene berman:  
 
I agree. I think the will to power is an extremely important factor in predicting success *after controlling for IQ*.  
 
I also think that kind of ambition is inversely correlated with happiness and contentment, at the neurophysiological level (e.g. less ambient dopamine, higher concentrations required to provoke a bliss response, etc.) 
 
In particular, a hypothesis: many otherwise negative predictors of success change their sign at a certain extremely high level of intelligence.  
 
Extremely intelligent people with borderline sociopathic tendencies -- glibness, aggressiveness, vengefulness, an amoral drive -- these are basically what you need to carve something of significance out of the sheer rock face with little more than your bare hands.

The people who read the New York Times are (like everyone) keenly interested in genetics and heritability, even if they don't realize it or want to admit it.

Regarding the use of physical deterrent as a potentially healthy factor in a relationship, see this clip first before responding: 
 
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/great-scenes-of-game-in-the-movies-4/ 
 
That's mufuggin Cary Grant, who was synonymous with debonair and everything that a woman could want in a man. Yet you would never see something like that today as a model behavior for middle class men. 
 
Instead you get the bizarre superimposition of Conor Friedersdorf like milquetoast emasculinity (huge woman repellent) AND the strutting animalistic masculinity of rap videos, which (to say the least) advise no restraint in how one treats a woman. 
 
The funny or sad thing is that the same group of college grads who grew up on rap also spout feminist passivity doctrine. Yet they also understand at a primal level that given the choice between the man who could NEVER hit a woman and the charismatic thug who wouldn't think twice about it, that the latter is bound to be more successful in our modern debauched sexual marketplace. 
 
In other words -- drive out controlled masculinity and uncontrolled masculinity (and emasculinity) is all you have left. Exeunt Main Street, enter Yale flanked by Jail.

One thing I find interesting is the absence of intermediates in a lot of intellectual discussion. Either you are enlightened and completely hands off or you are a child abuser. Never mind that many spanked kids love their parents. And, more controversially, either you are enlightened and completely hands off or you are a wife beater. Again, never mind how many such women swear up and down how much they love their husbands. 
 
What's interesting is that the leftist intellectual endorses the use of extreme impersonal force to achieve the ends he wants (e.g. cops with guns enforcing various social worker edicts) but attacks the legitimacy of personal, calibrated force. 
 
It boils down to the idea that individual humans don't know how to manage their own affairs and that intellectuals should figure it out for them and then mass produce the solution. Doubtless this is true for things that involve abstract science, like scoliosis testing or fluoridated water. I question whether we currently know more about small group interaction, though, than we can glean from human common sense (= built in instinct). We didn't evolve to understand the physics of DNA, but we did evolve to understand physical deterrents.

Lorax is dumb. You don't start interpreting those lists (the data) till you make them and gather the data in the first place.  
 
And it's not a choice between 1 big science project and 10 small ones. It's a choice between 1 big science project and 0 big science projects. Economies of scale, winner-take-all, etc. apply even more surely in this area.

The GSS is probably the first thing to consult on a given issue re: demographics. 
However, if you want to survey a parameter across a population with substructure the GSS is suboptimal. Eg if you wanted to know the percentage of Asian or Jewish people who believe X with equal confidence intervals to the percentage of whites who believe X you would need to oversample Asians/Jews and undersample whites. This is because Conf intervals are proportional to 1/sqrt(N), while the ratio of whites to Asians in a representative sample is say 60:4. 
 
Now you can't blame the GSS for not doing stratified sampling as it is a general survey. Stratifying by ethnicity means not stratifying by class or education. There's a tradeoff in the parameter estimation.  
 
Still when GSS figs are quoted it would be good to put N and the CIs by the side esp. for conclusions about rare minorities.

Home prices has nothing to do with the political stance they had and would most likely keep for the rest of their lives.  
 
For sure it does. There's a feedback loop there. If you can't buy a home till you're in your late 20's or early 30's, you marry later or not at all.  
Incentives really do matter. White women do not want to raise kids in an apartment. And once they have kids and a husband, suddenly they aren't so enthusiastic about massive taxes and public schools.

you know those leftist posters which say "it'll be a great day when teachers get all the money they need and the airforce has to run a bake sale to buy a bomber"?  
 
well, it'll be a great day when Steve Sailer is in the New York Times and Ross Douthat is reposting his stuff on a blog, rather than the other way around.

Steve really is a treasure. Good on him for getting some more exposure.  
 
He'll blush, but I think Steve may be America's greatest living journalist. The only one I can think of today who consistently breaks huge stories of the same importance is Seymour Hersh -- I don't like Hersh or his agenda, but I give props where it's due to just journalist resourcefulness.  
 
All the Douthats and Yglesii of the world are careful partisan hacks by comparison (and even without comparison). In an earlier age they would be called Trimmers:  
 
http://books.google.com/books?id=DO4LAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA39&dq=trimmers&client=firefox-a#PPA41,M1 
 
Sort of like frontrunners, except the front they run to is the mealy mouthed safe middle.

jesse shapiro at harvard did an experiment showing that higher IQ people were closer to homo economicus in terms of rational decision making re: finances. That's certainly one component of behavioral rationality.

Just to throw in something else here. I think it'd be really interesting to try to quantify the pleasure people take in different works of art. What's their brain activity look like? What about their biochemistry, their heart rate?  
 
It'd be really interesting if there was a waist-hip ratio equivalent for musical beauty. I know nothing about music theory and for all I know such measures may be out there.

 
B - (A and B) = average (non-economist) social scientist who is intimidated by math but can see economists are making crazy assumptions.  
 
You forgot 
 
(not A and not B) = socialist who understands neither math nor basic human psychology

Irv weissman has been doing similar stuff with rats for some time as I recall and got rat/human neural chimeras past IRB

If so, could someone tell me why there's an odd confluence of overlap in virtually every single physical and psychological trait among every ethnic group across the globe  
 
Overlap is not equality.

RHS is not *bad*, but LHS is hot. it's the jaw that does it...funny how stark that is during comparison, but how subtle it is in real life.

in the breasts? might not be the best place.  
 
but a hard disk somewhere on your body, along with a mini-mike in your lip, a speaker in your earlobe, and a set of sensors in your mouth which records what you're eating?  
 
a personal cell phone/music player/pda/diet counter/etc. which interfaces with all your other hardware  
 
...and takes care of scheduling/communication and so on  
 
...while being powered by the temperature gradient differential between your core and the air?  
 
now you're talking.