Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Ethnic power II: Reader Jim Bowery didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to look at the ethnic power question again, this time assuming that the three factors--size, IQ, and ethnocentricity--operate multiplicatively instead of additively. I converted the size and ethnocentricity scores so that their means are set at 100 and the standard deviations at 15, the same as IQ. Next, I multiplied the three scores, and listed them below:


Ethnic power index

Asians 1,246,039
Non-Jewish whites 1,142,643
Jews 996,456
Blacks 974,059
Hispanics 945,257
American Indians 761,674


Same story. Keep in mind that my approach assumes that the three factors are of equal importance.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:09 AM

    it's certainly interesting, but i'm not sure that thinking of ethnicity first when considering political issues means the same thing to non-black minorities in the US.

    to wield influence, u need to vote. look at the exit polls, whites votes overrepresented their population level and black votes approximately equalled their population level.

    asians voted at 45% of their population level and hispanics voted at 60%.

    u also need to run for office. i would guess that asians run for office less frequently than other races, but i have no stats for that.

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  2. Does it make sense to treat Asians as one moderately big and therefore powerful ethnic group when (as you note) they act as several different groups with no collective loyalty as Asians?

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  3. Anonymous7:14 PM

    I wonder how inter-marriage rates effect power? I'm thinking that inter-marriage could be a way to transfer between groups and the ease or otherwise of that transfer might undermine/enhance the power of a group.

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  4. Thanks but if I'd known you were going to take another run at it I would have suggested you take a different approach that would have been more difficult but would have been more worthy of induction:

    Look at the ecological correlation between racial demography and and actual occupation of positions of trust and authority. I suspect Jews would come out higher relative to non-Jewish whites due to two effects:

    1) Stronger extended phenotypic effects of group behavior (not the same as "thinking" behavior measured by your "ethnocentrism") of blacks and Jews on the human ecology. Whites and East Asians tending to lose out and south Asians tending to hold their own.

    2) The fact that IQ is a bell-shaped curve, so increasing population linearly does not help as much as you might think. East Asians and Jews tending to win with blacks tending to lose out.

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  5. Anonymous5:57 AM

    Jim has got it. You're empirical (an 'inductivist'), no? Don't look at who should gain power, look at who does have power. Go through the usual calculations of what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are Jewish, etc.

    But you have to make sure they're not German; Hitler's chief of anti-semitism was named Alfred Rosenberg. You wonder what people would have thought of him if he came here. I knew one girl with a German name who was constantly getting pestered by Jewish groups... ;)

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  6. Why are we even discussing IQs? We all know that sixty percent of the people who voted for the left-wing illuminati can't be too bright.

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