Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.

A good survey of the rise of China

This review of a book on Asia's rise contains an interesting summary of what has been going on with China.   Some things of note:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades....

Rachman links China’s newly aggressive policies to President Xi Jinping, noting that the month after he took office “Chinese military aircraft entered Japanese-controlled airspace for the first time since 1958,” and that in his first eighteen months Xi “paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade.” Xi has paid equal attention to building public support for his newly assertive policies, bolstering decades of Communist Party propaganda that China, at long last, is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation.

This “aggrieved nationalism” coexists with an equally strong feeling of insecurity within the Chinese government—a dangerous mixture. The Communist Party’s legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth, which is slowing. The Party is convinced that the West fomented the string of so-called color revolutions demanding democratic governance that took place during the 2000s—from Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and Iran. It fears and expects similar subversion in China. Outrage at elite corruption was a common feature of these movements, and corruption is rampant in China. So Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against it—conveniently jailing many of his political opponents. The difficulty, as Rachman points out, is that “arresting more than one hundred thousand people…risks creating political instability by another route.”

Scenic Norway

This photo appeared on Reddit recently, noting the unusual and spectacular setting for a soccer field in Norway.   (I am interested in what the buildings on the point beyond the field are, as well.  Looks like a lighthouse keepers house?)   No wonder there seems to be a surge of interest in Norway as a scenic wonderland.

Another rule of thumb

A politician (or political adviser) unduly obsessed with immigration and how it's wrecking the place (and allegedly so unfair on those already here) is never a good sign.

The case in point:  Steve Bannon.

The trouble with wisdom teeth

Forgot to post this last week: an article explaining why so many of us moderns need our wisdom teeth out:

Sarah Zhang: I’d like to begin with where your book ends, which is the modern scourge of impacted wisdom teeth. Our ancestors had wisdom teeth, they did not have dentists, and they did not have so many problems. Aside from possibly being over-diagnosed, why are impacted wisdom teeth a uniquely modern problem?

Peter Ungar: It’s a uniquely modern problem because we don’t grow our jaws long enough to accommodate our teeth. It turns out that nature has selected our jaw length on the basis of what it expects us to be doing during the period of time the jaw is growing. The more frequently you put force on the jaw, the longer the jaw grows. Nature has to guesstimate how long your jaw should be for teeth of a given size. Today we don't achieve that because we’re eating mush as kids.

I don't think my diet was particularly mushy, but these things are relative, I suppose...

Inheritance taxed

Adam Creighton does something relatively useful today (don't worry, he's bound to say something stupid or otherwise objectionable tomorrow) by doing some straight reporting on what a visiting Japanese banker says:

He said Japan’s “40 to 50 per cent inheritance tax (on) wealthy people” helped keep a lid on inequality in Japan, which made politics more stable. It capped house price growth too. “Here people have a strong incentive to buy a house for kids, whereas less so in Japan,” Mr Yoshizawa said.

He also said the financial sector could learn from Japanese banks, which have not been caught up in fraud and mis-selling scandals that have cost major US and European investment banks up to $320bn in fines since the financial crisis.

“In Japanese culture staff have a long-term commitment first of all. And the compensation system is flat,” he explained. “There’s less incentive to make a quick result.”

Colbert should apologise

While it is, of course, ridiculously hypocritical that anyone on the alt.right (or even those who decline to criticise them) should criticise Colbert for using an insult because they say it is politically incorrect, it's still true that Colbert should apologise to his audience for using an insult that no one should use.

There's nothing politically correct about my attitude to this:  I've always disliked the insult because it is juvenile and can be readily be taken by any truly homophobic and violent gay basher to be sympathetic to their attitude.

Update:  reading my link above, which seems to suggest that Colbert should never use any form of gay jibe for the relationship between Trump and Putin, I think that is a step too far.  There are fine lines to be drawn here, to be sure, but I don't really have a problem with a comedian mocking Trump and Putin by pretending they are gay lovers, especially given their reputation as uber heterosexuals (and in Putin's case at least, outright homophobic.)    But an insult based specifically on a homosexual sex act is different - it suggests (as Putin himself presumably thinks) that a particular sex act itself is degrading, but only when done by two men.  By specifying it as being about a homosexual sex act, it is too easily read as either directly or indirectly mocking homosexuality itself.

I suspect Colbert will apologise.

Ketamine and depression

It's pretty surprising how people use drugs for their hedonistic pleasure, but it takes so much effort for scientists to properly understand what said drug is doing in the brain. 

Not very funny

Here's another thought that I choose to speak in the open here:   there seems to me to be a disproportionate number of gay people in stand up comedy in Australia at the moment.

I could be completely wrong - stand up comedy has never been my thing, really.   The modern version is too crude, and (with few exceptions) involves too much self disclosure and seems too much of an attempt at self therapy. 

But on the ABC, you get to see comedians on panel shows and that's where I have the impression there seem to be a lot of gay stand up comedy.

And the trouble is, I don't find any of them particularly witty or funny.  I don't think it's a gay bias thing - I've always found Stephen Fry can be funny and witty, although I think some people do go over the top in their admiration of him.  Ellen Degeneres - well, I think she is a bit over rated, but she can be witty and a basic likeability is undeniable.  

But Tom Ballard - I find him hard to warm to.  Rhys Nicholson - can't see the wit there.  Josh Thomas - maybe he doesn't count as a stand up comic, but I was very underwhelmed by what I saw of his dramedy TV show.  Hannah Gadsby - surely a case of attempted public therapy, lasting years and years now.   Seems uncomfortable in anything I see her on.

But perhaps I should warm more to Gadsby, as she has decided to give up stand up and actually sounds as if she has reached a sensible position about gay identity:

The knotty complexities of the contemporary identity conundrum has been one of the thoughts weighing heaviest on Gadsby.

"I've come to realise I don't like the word queer, for myself at least, because it takes that concept of identity beyond sexuality, in my mind. I guess I was born under the star of Nanna. I realise at the moment there's quite a lot of pressure to declare how you identify, particularly in the LGBT community, so to be totally honest, I probably identify as 'Grandma'," she reveals. "The idea of Queerness - with a capital Q - is about making a statement, so I don't identify as that because I never set out to go, 'Oh I want to be different.' When I was a kid, being not normal was incredibly dangerous and unsafe, but I was powerless to change that, so I was just, y'know, not normal, in a sort of generic, none specified way. I desperately didn't want to stand out. I think that's why I've always been friends with old ladies - even though I'm not that old."

 To be fair, I should point out that I have no idea whether I would find stand up by many of our straight comedians very satisfying, either.  But I did watch some of a Kitty Flanagan stage show on Stan, and she was OK.   I like Tom Gleeson's comic persona of the moment, too.  

Not sure why so much of the younger set seems to be gay, though...

Lukewarming danger

I liked this article at New Republic, making it clear that scientists have been warning of the disingenuousness (and therefore danger to good policy) of the lukewarmer argument on climate change for years.   It is right that should be an outcry against the New York Times hiring one.  

Modern thoughts in Mongolia

I enjoyed last night's Foreign Correspondent - Mongolia - The Last Eagle Hunters. 

Apart from making me wonder, yet again, at how humans have this remarkable ability to learn to love the landscape and lifestyle in some of the most desolate looking places on Earth, the thing that really caught my attention was how these isolated people were expressing thoughts that were more modern than what you'll spot on some Western conservative websites.

The two examples of that - the 55 year old who said he remembered childhood winters were snowier and colder than they are now, and he thought that global warming probably meant that winters there would not be like that again.   Yes - global warming accepted as true by a nomadic, dirt poor Muslim who has probably never been on the internet.    Way to go, internet, to enable the conning of large slabs of the population of the West.   (I think I have read that you similarly won't get any arguments about global warming from the Inuit in Canada.)

The second example - the 12 year old girl (well, around that age anyway) who was learning to be an eagle hunter, expressing the view that girls who apply themselves can do anything a boy can do. This is location where most women are married off by about 19 and become homekeepers.  

Modernity is indeed spreading.

In praise of LED lights

Every time I use LED lights, I'm pretty amazed.   Use the torch app on a mobile phone on a really dark path - it seems ridiculously bright for such a tiny source.   Put a bulb in a lamp and leave it on overnight - it's still just a little bit warm to the touch in the morning.   Take a modern torch using 3 or 4 LEDs - impressively brilliant beam with quite long battery life.

It bothers me a little that, like the computing power and location finding utility in a mobile phone costing even only one or two hundred bucks, LEDs are a technological marvel that people just instantly get used to without thinking about the stunning results science and engineering have delivered literally into their  hands.

Think about your LEDs when you use them, and encourage your children to do so, too.  And get unimpressed responses from them if they are teenagers.  But you have to try...

More than you needed to know

The BBC is running an article originally from The Conversation - all about the physics of defecation.  (There's a phrase you don't hear often in a lifetime.)  A highlight (if that's the appropriate word):

What else did we learn? Bigger animals have longer feces. And bigger animals also defecate at higher speed. For instance, an elephant defecates at a speed of six centimeters per second, nearly six times as fast as a dog. The speed of defecation for humans is in between: two centimeters per second.

Together, this meant that defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It's a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters. How can big animals defecate at such high speed?

The answer, we found, was in the properties of an ultra-thin layer of mucus lining the walls of the large intestine. The mucus layer is as thin as human hair, so thin that we could measure it only by weighing feces as the mucus evaporated. Despite being thin, the mucus is very slippery, more than 100 times less viscous than feces.

During defecation, feces moves like a solid plug. Therefore, in ideal conditions, the combined length and diameter of feces is simply determined by the shape of one's rectum and large intestine. One of the big findings of our study was that feces extend halfway up the length of the colon from the rectum.

Putting the length of feces together with the properties of mucus, we now have a cohesive physics story for how defecation happens. Bigger animals have longer feces, but also thicker mucus, enabling them to achieve high speeds with the same pressure. Without this mucus layer, defecation might not be possible. Alterations in mucus can contribute to several ailments, including chronic constipation and even infections by bacteria such as C. difficile in the gastrointestinal tract.

Guardians 2 noted

I went off to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 yesterday.

Unfortunately, I have to say I was pretty underwhelmed.   I didn't think the story had much narrative push to it, and was a bit silly even for a silly, not to be taken seriously, comic book story;  there was one sequence which reminded me a little too much of Tarantino trying to make mass slaughter cool;  baby Groot was too transparently cute; and the look of the film really moved into CGI overload, if you ask me. 

It's not terrible, but in a way it reminded me of the second Men in Black film - not a great story, and not enough original elements to make it feel like it wasn't just trying to get more money from its audience.  (Although I think MIB2 was more enjoyable than this film.)

Perhaps number 3 will have a better story and script?  MIB3 did...

The extremely broad brush of Philippa Martyr

I think Philippa Martyr is an interesting character: conservative in her Catholicism, but with an interest in spiritualism and mental illness; a fan of Evelyn Waugh; prone to exaggeration and likely more fragile underneath than her cheery on line persona indicates.  (She is, or was, a smoker:  I've often noticed over the years that this is a sign of underlying nervousness.) 

She's turned up again in Quadrant, that hoary, next to unreadable, magazine with her take on the findings of the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse (with respect to the Catholic Church), and her piece seems to show some genuine shock and regret at the extent of the abuse revealed.  (She also seems to be particularly down on the bureaucracy within the Church at the moment, given her own knowledge - as a witness - of a recent investigation into a priest having an affair with an adult woman.)

But, being who she is, she does go on to try to pin as much of it as she can on there being too many homosexuals in the priesthood.   And in doing so, she makes some pretty broad, dubious, statements.  The prime example:

The first uncomfortable fact is that since ancient Greece, countless texts demonstrate that the culture of male homosexual activity in the West largely revolves around adult men sexually enjoying boys and adolescent males. There are novels, non-fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, histories, documentaries, interviews, and other texts in abundance, the most recent example being that which caused Milo Yiannopolous’s very public downfall.[22] They all provide a very similar picture: close-knit communities with their own rules of sexual engagement which are often at odds with those of the dominant culture; initiation, secrecy, substance abuse and violence. Male youth has always been the most powerful and desirable currency in this sexual world, and the younger, the better.[23]

Well,  that seems to me to be convenient exaggeration:  that last line "the younger, the better" in particular.

I'm no expert, but my impression is that in all of the cultures where homosexual interactions between adults and youth have been more or less accepted, none extended to viewing prepubescent boys as being an appropriate target for adults.*   In fact, Philippa earlier in the article says she is concentrating mainly on the 30 to 40% of victims who were teenagers, not boys, as being ones targeted by homosexual priests.   Why then, in that sloppy paragraph quoted above, talk as if gay men have always aimed at the very youngest possible targets, which is (obviously) boys?

If her point is simply that post pubescent teenagers have always been a target of homosexual attention, well, there is an element of truth in that, but it's a case of a generalisation too far.  True, she can cite the Greek pederasty/mentoring system (also seen in cultures such as Japan), the history of sex tourism of older white men to Europe in past centuries (or South East Asia more recently) for youthful males, even the "rent boy" reputation of The Wall in Sydney, and so on.    There's no doubt that those activities show the attraction of some gay men to youth.    

But on the other hand, what proportion of total sexual encounters in history between men have been with partners of roughly equal age, or at least, with both clearly adults?  Really, who would know?  And anyway, let's face it - heterosexual sex tourism, and use of prostitutes and pornography has a strong bias towards youth, too.  

Certainly, Philippa cites a surprisingly useless study to support her case - one in which a mere 192 adults had to rank the sexual attractiveness of 15 facial photos of various ages.  Big deal.  (She does encourage the reader to look at a particular table in the paper, which apparently "speaks volumes".  What it shows is a mystery, as there appears to be no version on line.)

In any event, I would take a guess that, if anything, the social normalisation of homosexuality in the West has led to significantly less targeting of youth by older men than previously.   There are so many more outlets for sexual gratification now that there is little need to exploit a youth to satisfy it.   And surely it's clear that the pro-pederasty organisations that, a few decades back, used to seek sympathy and understanding via media appearances have pretty much given up on that undertaking now.  Acceptance of homosexuality between adults has not translated into any slippery slope acceptance of relationships between men and young teenagers.

Philippa, after claiming that homosexual men are invariably attracted to youth,  notes that some seminaries in Australia in the late 60's to the 80's did become known for an unusually high proportion of gay seminarians and staff.  I don't actually dispute that this was true - we even have Tony Abbott's experience in a seminary seems to back that up!  So, the argument goes, get rid of the homosexual priest and you get rid of (some) child abuse.

While there is a sense in which that is obvious (a priesthood of pure, 100% heterosexuals - if there was any way of objectively assessing them as such - may presumably result in a lesser proportion of sexual abuse of teenage guys), it still smacks of scapegoating for a few reasons:

a.   I would bet that the age of many of the abuser priests of the 70's and 80's was such that they went through seminaries prior in the 50's and early 60's, before the apparent increase in gay seminarians post Vatican 2;

b.  it ignores what might have attracted a man with same sex attraction to the seminary in the first place, and that the then conservative views against homosexuality may have contributed to it.  For example, young men who were fearful of their same sex  attraction , and thought institutional celibacy would keep it under control;  or those resigned to their sexual feelings but seeing that the priesthood was one way in which they could attain a certain social status despite of it.  A third possibility (and one I think quite likely):  young men who had not resolved their sexual feelings via much experience at all at the time they entered the seminary, and only later identified they were indeed attracted to men.   (Perhaps because of opportunistic encounters, which they then went on to repeat.)

c.  Philippa explicitly says that homosexual men are not suited to the priesthood; no ifs, no buts.  (Of course, she is supported by Pope Benedict's policy introduced in 2005.)   Her statement:

As to same-sex attraction, I wish I could say that men in this situation would make fine priests, but I can’t. The psychological strain placed upon a priest makes him vulnerable, and he cannot afford to have to struggle with a deep-seated sexual attraction to other men in addition to everything else. I think many people personally know priests who are in this situation, and their priesthood is rarely a happy one. The Church’s ruling on ineligibility for ordination is a sound and compassionate one, not just for the men themselves, but for those who may be at risk of being exploited by them covertly in the future when they can’t cope.

Way to tell homosexuals that they just aren't capable of keeping it in their pants, so to speak, the way all righteous heterosexual priests can.  Isn't this line a bit odd coming from a woman who just went through an investigation of a straight priest breaking his vow of celibacy?

The thing is, if it isn't already abundantly clear - conservative Catholics have an investment in defending the matter of clerical celibacy, despite it being not a doctrinal matter at all.  Why?  Because "conservative".   It's reminiscent of the numbskullery of a crusty surgeon who complain that he (it's usually a he) went through hellish, ridiculous and objectively unsafe work hours and personal abuse when he went through training 40 years ago - and so trainees today should just toughen up and face the same.  Evidence that it just doesn't make sense anymore (such a high suicide rate) is, as far as possible, ignored, in favour of blaming someone else for just not being tough enough. 

In any event, one suspects that the overall loss of credibility of the Catholic Church on all matters pertaining to sex likely means that there are now few same sex attracted young men who would even consider becoming a priest, whether or not Benedict had made his rule.    They likely no longer feel any guilt about it, can have a good career in virtually any field while being openly gay, and so the motivations they formerly might have had to consider an all male career path have gone.   

Philippa, and other conservative Catholics who blame gay priests for child abuse are ignoring the bigger picture re the whole issue of celibacy its harmful effects on disencouraging good people from considering the priesthood, not to mention the widespread rejection of the entire way the Church thinks about sexuality.

Back to MKR

Of course I watched last night's grand final of My Kitchen Rules.  I now have to update my recent commentary about the show:

*  My big oversight on what this year's recipes indicate is "in":   PICKLING.   Did an episode go by in which at least one contestant wasn't pickling some vegetable or other as an accompaniment ?  Oh. Actually, now that I think of it - last night's grand finale might have given it a well earned rest.   And perhaps the cooking on board ship episodes?   Alright, let's just say that approximately 95% of episodes featured pickled something.  It seemed a tad excessive, to me.

* I've been meaning to complain about this for years:  isn't it obvious to every contestant that to get not only nutty carnivore Pete Evans on side in a big way, but every other chef judge, is to get a dirt cheap big bone, bake it and bung it on the plate as marrow.   They always gush about how delicious that is, yet it takes absolutely no technique to speak of, and for me, the idea of eating marrow alone is just unpleasant.   (I suspect it is what gives pressure cooked osso bucco a delicious sauce, as often the marrow has melted out into the liquid, but still, the gelatinous fatty look of it by itself just puts me off.)   The power of marrow on this show's judges, however, just seems ridiculously out of proportion to what it is.   Last night's winning team had probably worked this out, but their main course of veal, marrow and hardly any vegetables didn't look particularly attractive to me.   Of course, it won raves from the judges.  .

*  As for last night's final:  everyone liked the Indian mother and daughter as people, but I get the feeling that the intense India-centric aspect of every single dish they could cook perhaps put them behind.   (Yes, I know, last year's winners were those Indonesian sisters who did everything Asian, as did the "hashtag" team  - who advertisers seemed to absolutely adore - this year.  But if I were to assess South East Asian cooking versus Indian cooking, I would say that the SE Asian cuisine has at least some more variation  in flavour profiles and techniques than does Indian.)

And as for Amy and Tyson, the winners:   poor old Tyson gave the impression of being a socially challenged shut in who puts all his pent up energy into thinking up odd flavour combinations and innovative ways with offal.   If he has a job, I would guess it's as a backroom public servant (they likely don't trust him with direct interaction with the public.)* So it felt like letting him win was somehow right in the big picture:  he has the potential anger profile of a new Gordon Ramsay and seems perfectly suited to the unsocial hours and isolation of being a chef.

But, despite all of that - many of the dishes he and his sister put up were basically unappealing to the average person, I reckon.   Sweetbreads last night!  Didn't they do brains early on?   Putting pickles on dessert?  No, sorry, give me the good curry from the other team, any day.


*  my usual disclaimer:  this impression of his personality outside of the TV show could, of course, be completely wrong.   (Although any 20 something year old who does no social media of any type whatsoever is, well, unusual.)

Successfully smoking fish

Given how much I like eating smoked fish (or smoked anything, really), it's a wonder that I haven't previously tried hot smoking trout in the Weber kettle barbecue.

I think the reason was that the only curing recipe in the Weber official cookbook I have involved a dry cure in lots of salt.  That always seemed to me to be unduly wasteful (even though salt is pretty cheap), and I have never given it a try.

But today, I googled around and found this American guy's* straight forward recipe, involving a salt and sugar curing brine, and gave it a try tonight on rainbow trout fillets.   (Two trout, filleted, gives a satisfying one big smoked fillet per person.) 

It worked a treat.

For my future reference:

One quart of water is close enough to 950 ml.   The brine of 2 tablespoons of salt, and a 1/4 cup of brown sugar, worked fine.  I had the fish in it for about 4 hours, but I suspect longer might have been better.  (The saltiness was OK, but could have perhaps gone longer.)

For cooking - used about 22 pieces of charcoal (I think), and two good handfuls of soaked hickory chips.  One handful still only smokes for about 15 minutes, so I put second handful on after that.  Total cooking time was 45 minutes.

.*  it seems he is particularly fond of pressure cookers, like I am, so I should read his site more. 

Back to Laffer

Quartz magazine succinctly describes what's wrong with the Laffer curve:

The problem is, this tidy arc of cause and consequence doesn’t exist in the real world. Sure, extremely high tax rates douse economic activity. But there’s no reason to assume the relationship between tax revenue and tax rates is perfectly U-shaped. And the equilibrium point at which a government collects the most revenue possible without dragging down the economy is impossible to know—and varies by country. There was no reason in 1974—or, for that matter, now—to think the US was on the curve’s “prohibitive” half (many economists put the inflection point for the highest marginal tax rate at around 70%). In fact, without detailed data, you can’t tell where on Laffer’s curve (or non-curve) you are at all.

Laffer’s general idea of supply-side stimulus can sometimes work. Cutting tax rates that primarily benefit rich people shifts wealth from the middle classes to the rich. That might sound unfair, but in developing countries where there’s not enough money to fund the investment needed to spur growth, a Laffer-style policy could (temporarily) help stimulate economic expansion by channelling wealth to potential investors.

But this scenario is not applicable to the US. Private investment tends to ebb and flow with the business cycle; when demand is feeble, so is investment. Cutting taxes on America’s rich isn’t going to encourage them to invest more—they already have plenty to spend and aren’t spending it. Worse, by shifting wealth from middle class families to the moneyed few—a group that is able to consume far less than the working masses—this sort of policy suffocates demand even more. Slowing demand drags on growth, causing debt and unemployment to rise.

A classic of the romantic deception genre

Wow.  As stories of romantic deception by compulsive liars go, the confessional, true life account of Stephanie Wood in today's Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald is a great one.

I can't quite work out, though, whether I should feel just a little bit guilty over enjoying it so much.    But I suppose it's the same as reading about a serial killer husband who kept his secret from his wife - it's the curiosity about how the deception was exposed, and how extensive it turned out to be, that is the hook. 

Looking on the bright(er) side

A couple of weeks back, I wondered out loud whether we really have the right impression about how the black American population is doing economically. 

Well, here's an article in the New York Times that shows that, at least, the black upper middle class is acting doing better and better.   And the education trends aren't looking bad, too:

The most important trend driving African-American gains at the top can be found in the data on higher education. Between 1980 and 2016, the percentage of African Americans over the age of 25 who had completed a four-year college education tripled from 7.9 percent to 23.9 percent.

Top-flight colleges and universities have played a crucial role in the growth of a black upper middle class.

According to a January 2016 report in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, eight highly selective universities (Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Emory, Vanderbilt, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania) and five highly selective colleges (Amherst, Pomona, Barnard, Wesleyan and Williams) had freshmen classes with 10 percent or more African-Americans in them. Many of these selective schools had notably high black graduation rates, ranging from 83 to 96 percent.