What kind of person thinks cheating on taxes is okay?

What's the profile of someone who thinks cheating on one's taxes is okay?

Using a General Social Survey question, this is what I found:

Thinking cheating on taxes is okay (sample size = 2,348, standardized coefficients)

Age  -.05*
Male  .07***
Non-white  .08***
City size   .05*
Immigrant  -.04
Education  -.08*** 
Church attendance   -.12***
Liberalism   .10***

So people who think cheating on taxes is not wrong are likely to be (from strongest to weakest): not religious, liberal, non-white, less educated, male, young, and living in a big city. Pretty close to a profile of a street criminal.

The clannishness of white Americans (or the lack of it) mirrors that of Europe

I recently presented evidence that non-whites tend to be clannish because they are non-white, not because they are outnumbered. But I also mentioned that there is variation among whites. This is consistent with bloggers hbd chick  and JayMan who stress that not all Europeans are the same, and that the Hajnal line divides them.

Using the General Social survey question ("When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very) I calculated the mean score for various white groups:

Mean clannishness score (N = 2,173)

Orthodox Jew  3.50

Conservative Jew  3.43

White Mexican  3.38

Greek  3.20

White Puerto Rican  3.15

Reform Jew  3.09

White Spanish  3.08

Czech  2.89

Austrian  2.70

Italian  2.61

Russian  2.59

Swedish  2.56

Irish  2.55

All whites  2.54

Norwegian  2.51

Hungarian  2.50

Polish  2.48

Dutch  2.48

Scottish  2.47

Jew--no affiliation  2.46

German  2.44

English/Welsh  2.39

Danish  2.38

Finnish  2.29

French   2.23

French Canadian  2.19

To get a sense of the variation, the difference between Orthodox Jews and French Canadians is over one standard deviation--a very large difference. 

Following hbd chick, I categorized white Americans as Western Europe (=3, 53.1%), Mixed (=2, 22.5%), or Eastern Europe (=1, 24.4%). Next, I conducted OLS regression to see if this measure, along with several others, predicts clannishness:

Clannishness (standardized coefficients)

Age  .13***

Male  .01

Education  -.03

Conservatism  .09*  

Church attendance  .04

Westernness  -.07*

So whites are more ethnocentric if they are: older, politically conservative, and if their families came from outside these lines: 

 

 It's pretty amazing that Americans whose families left Europe a long time ago still show some of the clannishness found in the Old Country.

"Europe's dead cross may bud and blossom there"

All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,
My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
Sailing the deep, or journeying the land for Thee;
Intentions, purports, aspirations mine—leaving results to Thee.
O I am sure they really come from Thee!
The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,
The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
A message from the Heavens, whispering to me even in sleep,
These sped me on.
By me, and these, the work so far accomplish’d (for what has been, has been;)
By me Earth’s elder, cloy’d and stifled lands, uncloy’d, unloos’d;
By me the hemispheres rounded and tied—the unknown to the known.
The end I know not—it is all in Thee;
Or small, or great, I know not—haply, what broad fields, what lands;
Haply, the brutish, measureless human undergrowth I know,
Transplanted there, may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee;
Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping-tools;
Haply the lifeless cross I know—Europe’s dead cross—may bud and blossom there.

                                                       --from "Prayer of Columbus,"  Walt Whitman, 1871
                                                     

Non-whites are clannish because they are non-whites, not because they are outnumbered

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.

Our elites are sick

Our elites are sick.

I made the mistake of watching a CBS News story of how Gala apples are now passing Red Delicious as America's number 1 apple. I was pleased because Gala's are great, and I've always hated Red Delicious -- mealy and too sweet.

Then like an OCD patient who has to wash his hands 100 times a day, the journalist had to turn this amusing story into a moral message: Red Delicious represents 1950s White America where only one uniform color was valued. Galas represent 2018 America where a variety of colors -- read: fewer whites -- makes a superior apple.

Our elites need Zoloft, and I need some Pepto-Bismol.

Aristotle and Darwin tell you how to live

Few things have frustrated me more than the modern philosophical view that there is a gulf between facts and values. While hypotheses can be tested against the empirical world and rejected if not supported, there is no similar way to test claims about right and wrong. Morality only exists in our imaginations, we're told. I don't know about you, but that is completely unsatisfactory.

Only one man has offered a way out of this mess: Aristotle. According to him, your design dictates your morality. A knife is a good knife if it does well what it is intended to do -- cut stuff.

Aristotle used this approach to develop an ethics for man, which was further refined by Thomas Aquinas centuries later. But neither man, of course, knew the works of another genius, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection centuries later.

What is man's design, according to Darwin? Simple -- to propagate. To turn the world into copies of yourself.

It just so happens that this is roughly what Aristotle and Aquinas argued.

Three geniuses from three very different eras agree more or less about what you are.  So what is right for you?  To go forth and propagate.

What Frederick Douglass said when asked what must be done for former slaves

When former slave Frederick Douglass was asked what must be done for former slaves, his answer was, "Do nothing for us... Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall."