Left-handed people are stupid (and everyone who worries about immigration is a bigot)

Thoroughly cheering news emerged this week that left-handed people are likely to earn between 10 and 12 per cent less than their right-handed colleagues. (So 11 per cent less, then). Good. I have never cared for left-handed people, considering them arrogant and possessed of unsavoury personal habits — and were I an employer I would not give jobs to any of them. I would let them moulder on benefits, and laugh and point as I passed them waiting at the bus stop on their way to the dole office. Awful people. The most famous left-handers from history were Gerald Ford, Fidel Castro, the spoon-bending self-publicist Uri Geller and the controversially sexist Victorian Jack the Ripper. I think that tells you all you need to know.

This latest survey was carried out at Harvard University and suggested that one of the reasons left-handers do badly is that they are thick — or slower at accomplishing cognitive tasks, as the researchers put it. I knew this all along, but it is heartening to have my suspicions verified by a brilliant piece of research at one of the world’s most prestigious learning institutes. Even if, a few years ago, I read a different piece of research from Imperial College London and Bristol University which suggested that these epicene, cack-handed bastards actually earn 5 per cent more than their right-handed fellow humans. This is, it was argued, because they are perceived as being ‘more creative’ and also have a larger corpus callosum — the large white-matter part of the brain which connects the two cerebral hemispheres via the conduit of between 200 and 250 million contralateral axonal projections. ‘That’s as maybe,’ I thought, reading the study back then, ‘but they’re still scum in my book.’

It might occur to you, bearing these two studies in mind, that there is probably no difference whatsoever between the earning capacities of left- and right-handed people and that the two conflicting results are a consequence of false correlations arising from the samples chosen.