Prometheus 6

"Obviates the need for the entire article" of note:

Digging deeper, they found that their overall results did not change significantly when they examined all of a student's friends, regardless of race.

This is the sort of crap that gives economics a bad name and justifies the derision with which the "physics envy" pejorative is delivered.

The Price of Acting White
By Richard Morin
Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B05

" Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
-- Barack Obama, keynote speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention

It may be even worse than Obama imagined: It's not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of "acting white" appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades.

At least that's the claim of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, who have mined an unusually detailed data set on teenage students to study the relationship between performance and popularity in public and private schools.

Can someone make this mutha fukka shut up? Check how they calculate popularity: