Masculinity is associated with opposing gay marriage: Today's debate about gay marriage at Secular Right got me thinking about who, in my experience, seems to have the biggest objection to homosexuality. Of course, many churchgoing people oppose the behavior on religious grounds, but rarely have I personally witnessed animus coming from those kinds of people. Religious people I know talk about love and forgiveness, and tend to have a gentle, even feminine way about them. It often feels quite leftish. Look at Ms. California when she was asked if she had anything to say to Perez Hilton, the gay man who called her a dumb bitch and a c**t after she said publicly that she was against gay marriage. She answered that the first thing she would do is hug him. Yuck, I know, but you can't really say she sounds like a hater. (If someone called me that, my good Christian self would have told him to take his ugly ass and 'do and go f*** himself.)

It doesn't come through on this blog--obvious at the moment--but my personality is pretty damn mild. When I was a devout Christian in college, I had a tough-guy friend who was going on about how sickening homosexuality is. He was of the same faith. I told him that homosexual sex is just sin--the same as if he had premarital sex. Whether we like it or not, I said, God commands that we love everybody and that we separate bad behaviors from the person. He was shocked that I talked like that, but he knew that I was doctrinally correct and so dropped the topic. It seemed to me that his hostility came from his sense of masculinity, not from his belief system. I've personally heard perhaps 10 people say really nasty things about homosexuals. They were all men, and they were all tough guys.

Which leads to my question: Does level of masculinity correlate with opposition to gay marriage? I came up with two different measures: gender and hunting. Gender is an obvious indicator of masculinity, and hunting seems like a good one as well. Using GSS data from 4,146 Americans, I calculated logistic regression coefficients. The dependent variable is, do you agree that homosexuals have the right to marry. The third independent variable is belief in God.


Logistic regression coefficients

Belief in God -.462
Male -.644
Hunts -.687

All are significant at the .01 level with a two-tailed test. So, no not only belief in God, but being a guy and hunting independently predict opposition to gay marriage.

Some of the resistance to homosexuality and same-sex marriage seems to be a discomfort with guys acting like girls. Men seem to be saying, I want absolutely nothing to do with sissies. They are NOT joining my party.

At Secular Right, I was wondering out loud:

It is possible that gay marriage might delay and decrease the percent of men getting married, and it’s connected to modern fatherhood. I’ll try to find data on this, but I’m the kind of dad who’s always pushing strollers, playing with the kids outside, feeding them, changing diapers, etc. I often feel the glare of macho guys and sense that they’re thinking, “Damn homo.” Modern fatherhood, I suspect, is a problem itself in that it is making marriage look less attractive to very masculine men. Now, if these same guys see me pushing strollers with my married gay buddy, chatting away about how Johnny is saying a new word, I can imagine these macho types saying, that does it–I’m not joining the fag club.

UPDATE: Reader SFG makes a good suggestion to add controls for rurality and political views:

Belief in God -.343
Male -.422
Hunts -.673
Population size .000
Conservative politics -.399

All are significant at the .01 level, except for population size which is not significant. Hunting and gender still predict opposition to gay marriage.

Few homosexuals want to get married: The GSS asked: "If the right person came along, would you like to be married?" The sample size is small (N = 288) so I combined gay men and lesbians, and assuming most bisexuals are closer to homosexuals, I included them too. Results? Thirty-two percent answered yes. That means that 1.04% of Americans would like to personally take advantage of gay marriage.

One comment on President Obama's press conference: This argument that you often hear that a person is pro-choice because the woman of all people can be best trusted to make a wise decision is just silly. The majority of abortions are to women and girls 25 and younger. In a typical situation, she's single, she accidentally gets pregnant and she's not in an ideal situation to have a baby. She's scared, she's in a pickle, and faces 18 years of motherhood or a quick trip to the clinic. Most of all she is very young, and very young means stupid, impulsive, and short-sighted. She probably knows next to nothing about what's inside her. She is just about the last person to make an objective, prudent decision.

Durkheim: Reader TGGP suggests I say a word about Emile Durkheim. While many sociologists nowadays loathe Durkheim because of the conservative element in his theory, I like him for the same reason.

To Durkheim, communities are like organisms that naturally gravitate toward order and harmony. Institutions make up the organs, each playing a specalized role that contributes to the smooth functioning of the whole.

Isolated individuals have potentially unlimited appetites, and to maximize their psychological and physical health, they need to be well integrated into various institutions. Being tied into a web of social relationships and the norms that accompany those ties are good for people: they limit, regulate, and guide behaviors and feelings, and they give one meaning and a worldview.

At this point, Durkheim would insert a word of moderation. If insitutions are too controlling, they can lead to destructive behaviors. A good example of this would be cults. On the other hand, if institutions are failing to adequately guide people, dysfunctional behavior will occur.

The problem is that communities exist within ever-changing environments, so communities will inevitably change as well. But any kind of rapid or sudden change--demographic disasters, revolutions, conquests, for example--disrupts this web of relationships and moral structure. Individuals become dislocated, and you consequently see an increase in dysfunctional behavior.

According to Durkheim, optimal health is found in a community that evolves slowly and organically. He doesn't seem to stress this, but his theory implies that a national goverment inposing new policies on local communities tears social fabric and creates anomic conditions. Any powerful, aggressive social movement or institution--say, the federal judiciary--that coerces local communities to change before they have evolved to that point generates chaos. Moral guidelines are delegitimated; people have nothing to turn to but their own cognitive resources; and anomie and dysfunction are a result.

Here's one quick example. The post-war gender and sexual revolution produced a high rate of divorce, cohabitation, and remarriage. All of a sudden, we had new arrangements, like the stepfamily. Well, that arrangement was not institutionalized, so stepfamilies have consequently been conflict-ridden and unstable. Same kind of thing for mother-only families. Durkheim, I imagine, would have predicted the decline and fall of the black community as it was taken over by the sexual revolution, and perhaps by the sudden, devastating loss of manufacturing jobs.

Slow, natural, organic evolution--good. Sudden, externally imposed change--bad.

Can you see why lefties hate him, even though he never whispered the dreaded word "genes"?

(You can see why freedom fetishists wouldn't like him either).

Scarred-for-life born-agains: Some secularists believe that kids brought up in evangelical homes are brainwashed and scarred for life because of the abuses they endure. You know, being given a clear worldview, that sort of thing, as opposed to letting them develop their own. The evil sociologist Emile Durkheim was in cahoots with these cultists when he wrote that grown-ups who are wandering intellectually are in an abormal, anomic state.

Close to half of born-agains accept Jesus when they're kids, so let's see if they're more likely to end up scarred and miserable:


Percent in each category (GSS, N = 10,441)

Born agains
Very happy 35.2
Pretty happy 51.9
Not too happy 12.9

Non-Born agains
Very happy 28.8
Pretty happy 58.8
Not too happy 12.7

Yes, I can see damage of epic proportions. (Also keep in mind that fewer evangelicals earn college degrees, and people with college degrees tend to be happier).

Here I see one aspect of my education I'm grateful for: to not be scared or freaked out by people who are different from me. Religion bashers betray a real narrowness that many of them would condemn in other contexts.

NAM neighbors hang out, whites socialize

Some readers were skeptical of my earlier analysis where I concluded that whites are more neighborly than NAMs. I found another question with more respondents (N = 16,572): how often do you spend an evening with a neighbor. The graphs above shows that NAMs are more likely to hang out with someone almost every night, or never. Whites are more likely to visit once a month or several times a year.

NAMs are more likely to have a neighborhood buddy that they hang out with all the time, while for whites it's more of an occasion. More likely to be a dinner party, I imagine--that sort of thing. (I could be wrong: NAMs might be rotating among several neighbors).

Combined with the post on taking care of plants and pets, whites might be more role-oriented: a neighbor should do such and such.

Hispanic teens have higher rates of drug use: I ran across this 2008 Indiana study of teen drug use. I don't see sample size, but most of the racial/ethnic comparisons are significantly different at the 0.05 level. I compared the first 290 pairs of estimates for whites and Hispanics (then got tired). Hispanic teens had higher prevalence rates 274 times; estimates were the same for the two groups 7 times; and whites were higher 9 times. Almost all the higher rates for whites were for smokeless tobacco. Rednecks who like to chew.

Hispanic teens had higher rates for the following:

Cigarettes
Cigars
Pipes
Alcohol
Marijuana
Cocaine
Crack
Inhalants
Amphetamines
Meth
Ritalin/Adderall
Tranquilizers
Narcotics
Psychodelics
LSD
Others
Heroin
Steroids
Injected drugs
MDMA
Rohypnol
GHB
Over the counter drugs

Well over half of gangbangers are now Hispanic, so perhaps it's not surprising that their involvement with drugs is extensive.

I also compared blacks and Hispanics on all estimates of crack. In all cases, prevalence is higher for Hispanics, and the difference is large. Stereotypically speaking, crackheads are not black, they're brown.

This survey shows that the drug problem among Latinos is not confined to the coasts. It's the same in the heartland.

Race and IQ trends

Whites, N =19,726

Blacks, N = 3,441

As a follow-up to the last post, let's look at IQ trends by race since the GSS vocabulary test was first given in 1974 (WORDSUM). The test is 10 questions. The overall mean for whites is 6.3. Over the 35-year span, the percentage of whites with below-average scores has dropped about 5 points, and the top two categories have shrunk about the same. The average-to-above-average has picked up the slack.

For blacks (bottom graph), the overall mean is 4.9. The share scoring 4 or fewer has dropped over the period from around 45% to 30%. The improvement began in the late 80s. The percent scoring 5 or 6 grew from 38% to 58%. That's the good news. The bad news is that those scoring 7 or higher appears to have shrunk. (It's not easy to tell since few blacks score so high, so there is a lot of year-to-year fluctuation).

So, the main story seems to be that both blacks and whites have expanded their middles at the expense of their extremes. Next, let's look at mean changes by year:

Mean IQ (standard deviation in parentheses)

Whites
1970s 6.2 (2.2)
1980s 6.1 (2.2)
1990s 6.3 (2.0)
2000s 6.4 (2.0)

Blacks
1970s 4.6 (1.9)
1980s 4.7 (2.1)
1990s 5.0 (1.9)
2000s 5.2 (1.9)

The past three or four decades have been good for blacks. Their mean has increased more than whites, and so the IQ gap has narrowed from 1.6 in the 70s to 1.2 in this decade. Another way to look at it is the gap in standard deviation units (SD). The gap fell from .72 SD in the 70s to .60 SD now. The narrowing is significant, but the gap is still large.

It's also important that, while the white mean has gone up a bit since the 70s, the standard deviation is now smaller. This is due to fewer whites having low scores, but it is also due to a smaller share of smart people.

It looks like America's efforts may have raised the scores of the bottom half, while ignoring the high end. As La Griffe has shown, a nation's wealth depends on the fraction of the population that is intelligent. So it makes little sense to obsess about the bottom, but that seems to be what we're doing. (I'm not sure what has brought up low scores. Getting rid of really bad schools still around in the 60s? Nutrition? All that TV watching improving vocabulary?).

What the blog is about: In an earlier post, a reader completely missed my joke and claimed that the main purpose of my blog is to show that NAMs are innately inferior. Because we live in such hysterical times, you have to explain every little thing or people will assume the worst.

My goal is to show that the idea that groups are interchangeable is incorrect. Differences are real and enduring. That's not to say that the differences are necessarily genetic. I hardly talk about genes at all, but I am arguing that whatever the mix of nature and nurture, the data show that: 1) the differences are real, and 2) they are enduring.

Let's use an important example. Even the APA says the black-white IQ gap is real and consequential. Even if it were 100% the result of non-genetic differences, it's a difference that is hundreds of years old. It's not going anywhere. As Steve Sailer emphasizes, social scientists have been studying how to teach children for a century, and we still don't know how to make kids smarter.

So, my focus is not innateness, but am I trying to prove inferiority? I'm skeptical that there is any such thing as instrinsic superiority and inferiority. Religion teaches that there is intrinsic goodness, but I don't think in those terms here.

For the purpose of this blog, I assume that notions of superiority are man-made ideas. If we choose our values, then we can figure out which groups perform the best, but it is a choice. If we place a value on coordination, foot speed, or singing ability, blacks appear to be the best. If a sense of humor and intelligence are thought to be crucial characteristics, it looks like Jews are at the top of the heap. If you value health and live on top of the Andes, large lungs are superior lungs.

The value underlying my analyses is, what helps America thrive? Elites tell us that Hispanic immigrants will help the country succeed. I'm not so sure about that, and, in fact, I'm having a hard time finding any statistics which make Hispanics look good. (Since we're talking about notions of superiority, if we take nature's view and value reproductive success, Hispanics are superior.)

The country is so PC now, looking at how groups differ is just not done, but those differences have a profound effect on what the country is like. I care about the success of the country and don't care what respectable people think.

Buchanan, my man, waxes poetic:

Rooted people love the things of the heart: God, country, family and faith. The weapons of the mind have been given to us, they believe, to defend the things of the heart.

Knowledge follows love; it does not precede it.

Force yourself to watch MSNBC once in a while. He isn't getting any younger, and I doubt anyone will be able to fill his shoes.

Education does not explain the link between atheism and liberalism: At Secular Right, I posted the GSS finding that atheists are about 5 times more likely to be extremely liberal than theists. A commenter asked if the correlation might be due to some other factor. I regressed political views on belief in God and got this:


Unstandardized OLS regression coefficients (N = 12,516)

Belief in God .209**


And when I add level of education:

Belief in God .205**
Level of education -.011**

**p < .01

The belief in God coefficient is reduced very little by the inclusion of education, so the connection between atheism and liberalism is not due to higher levels of education.

And I don't even need to look at IQ (although I did) because IQ is unrelated to political orientation.


UPDATE: Trust in science explains more:

Belief in God .168**
Trust in science -.164**

Whites are more neighborly than NAMs

It's funny how accusations of racism always make me want to look at statistics. After the Church Ladies over at TPM predictably called Steve Sailer a racist--and thus conveniently passed over his insights--I felt like looking at racial stats. I'll grow tired of posting hatefacts the day the hysteria ceases. When hell freezes over, in other words.

The General Social Survey asked 2,069 respondents how often they looked after a person's plant or a pet in the past year. The graph shows that whites help out much more often. Sixty-six percent of blacks and 54 percent of "others" never did it, compared to only 36 percent of whites. Fifty-nine percent of Mex-Ams never did it (graph not shown).

Of course, the Big Bad White Man made them unneighborly.


Variables: RACE, ETHNIC, HELPAWAY

NAMs don't bother to show up for a rally unless it's racist

As a follow-up to my post about NAMs not attending tea party rallies, reader Robert Hume suggested I look at GSS data to see if politically active people in general are mostly white. The above graph shows that whites have disproportionately attended political meetings or rallies sometime in the past. At the same time, the differences are not huge: more than 20% of NAMs have participated at some time. (I looked at the variable HISPANIC and found that their numbers are the same as "other" shown above).

Garafalo claims that whites go to rallies because they're racists, but the racist protests are NAM rallies. The Million Man March was a manifestation of black solidarity. The illegal immigration protests were Latino solidarity. NAMs don't bother to show up unless the event is racist.

Presidents and the economy

Audacious' post on immigration and unemployment got me thinking about the connection between the president and the condition of the economy. I've put a graph up of the trend in unemployment since 1948. Maybe my approach is too simple, but I looked to see if unemployment fell or was flat during each president's tenure, paying less attention to their first year or two because conditions don't change overnight. (I also paid attention to the year following their exit). I rated each president as good, mixed or bad:

Rating on the economy

Bush II mixed

Clinton good

Bush I mixed

Reagan good

Carter bad

Ford good

Nixon mixed

Johnson good

Kennedy good

Eisenhower mixed

Truman mixed

Like any good conservative, I would assume that the economy would perform better under a Republican administration. But it doesn't seem clear to me at all. Three out of the five good presidents were Democrats (and I'm tempted to throw out Ford since his tenure was so short). In fact, it's not clear that Reagan was better than Clinton. Four out of five of the so-so presidents have been Republicans. Carter is the only Democrat stinker.

To be honest, economics and foreign policy are not my top priorities. Centrist elites control foreign policy, and to be honest I don't see black and white differences in results on economic issues. I get worked up most about other issues like immigration. Am I wrong?

Income and church attendance: High-income people pooh-pooh religion, right? It's food for peasants. The GSS asks about income and church attendance. Those who never attend were scored as 1, and the most frequent attenders--more than weekly--were given an 8. Here are mean scores by personal, annual income (N = 7,062):


Church attendance by annual income category (in thousands)

10-12.5 3.53
20-22.5 3.48
30-35 3.60
40-50 3.54
50-60 3.54
60-75 3.58
75-90 3.38
90-110 3.41
110+ 3.64

The GSS cannot isolate really rich people, but there is no evidence here that church is only for Joe Six Pack.

Me and Janeane: Let's look at how conservatives and liberals reason differently. Janeane Garofalo recently noticed that the people who showed up for the anti-tax rallies on April 15th were basically white. Therefore, she said, the Republican Party is filled with racists. I noticed the same racial pattern and took it to mean that the anti-tax and spend sentiment is generally not attractive to minorities. I'll leave it to you to decide who draws more valid conclusions from observed patterns.

Religious folks give more blood

N = 2,688

I was invited to witness the baptism and chrismation of an Antiochian Orthodox family this weekend and had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with members of their parish. Like I've noticed with so many Mormons over the years, many religious people come across as very nice and kindhearted. I'm pretty good at sniffing out insincerity, but my cynical side always wonders if this tendency is simply a cultural affectation. It also struck me that both genders seem to be more feminine. (This is an important reason why I find religious women more attractive). For their sexes, both men and women appear above average in gentleness.

One way to test the hearts of people is to see how often they do things for others for little to no reward. Donating blood is a good measure because there is no compensation for it (unless you count cookies and juice), and it generally isn't even helping someone you know who might reciprocate in the future. It's helping the abstract other. Do religious people do this more? They do. The table above displays the GSS results. Frequent churchgoers are almost twice as likely to donate blood.

In some ways I might consider it a bad thing, but religion, in America anyway, seems to encourage universal benevolence.

I'll be out of town this weekend. Happy Orthodox Easter.

No bias in the criminal justice system: In the last post's comments, readers debated whether the criminal justice system is racially biased or not. At one time, I assumed it was true. When I was 18 and gullible. Hollywood, the news, and my pot-smoking, pony-tailed sociology professor all claimed the system was rife with it.

The funny thing is that research conducted by very liberal criminologists--the best in the world--shows that, while there are episodes of racism, there are also episodes of paternalism, but there is no systemic or intentional bias.

From Heather MacDonald's piece in the City Journal:

In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.

Another criminologist—easily as liberal as Sampson—reached the same conclusion in 1995: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Michael Tonry wrote in Malign Neglect. (Tonry did go on to impute malign racial motives to drug enforcement, however.) The media’s favorite criminologist, Alfred Blumstein, found in 1993 that blacks were significantly underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their presence in arrest.

Sampson, Tonry, and Blumstein are surpassed by perhaps only James Q. Wilson in their status among criminologists. The more ignorant the commenter, the more one is likely to say the system is rigged. Community college instructors who never read anything but their assigned textbooks just KNOW the system is designed to ruin the lives of blacks.

Sure there are bad apples, but there are way too many safeguards for them to have their way. Plus, like the famous Crip Kody Scott said, cops just want to catch the bad guys. But liberals LOVE to believe that under the badge of every cop lies a hateful heart.

Hispanics are soft on crime: Continuing the theme of the liberalism of Hispanics, I wondered how they feel about the criminal justice system. Looking at GSS data, I've listed the percent who: 1) think that there are occasions when it is okay for a police officer to hit a suspect, and 2) think the courts are too harsh on criminals.


Percent who think that there are occasions when it is okay for a police officer to hit a suspect (N = 23,320)

English/Welsh 82.9
Irish 80.3
German 79.4

All Americans 73.1

American Indian 71.9
Black 53.4
Mexican 48.1


Percent who think the courts are too harsh on criminals (N = 34,606)

Blacks 13.9
Mexican 12.2
American Indian 6.8

All Americans 5.5

Irish 4.4
Italian 4.0
English/Welsh 3.4
German 3.2

As you can see, Mexican Americans resemble blacks in their toughness on criminals. Real conservatives, just like Tamar Jacoby tells us. Real law and order types.

Counting heads on television: I sometimes like to keep the TV on just for the noise, and today I noticed that Glenn Beck was doing his show at one of these tea parties at the Alamo in San Antonio. Aha, I said--an opportunity for empiricism. I spent the last 30 minutes counting heads as the camera panned the crowd of perhaps a thousand. Results? I found women in the crowd, I even saw a few black guys. Who could I not find? At a rally for limited goverment and patriotism, I could not find a single Hispanic man or woman.

Well maybe San Antonio just doesn't have any Hispanics.

Weird: Atheist Sam Harris places a premium on a pro-science culture. Even though the focus of his writings is atheism, he seems to think that if society were scientific, belief in God would naturally wither away and human rights would be secured.

So, do countries that value science enjoy high levels of civil liberties? The World Values Survey asked thousands of people in many countries, "In the long run, do you think the scientific advances we are making will help or harm mankind?" For 43 countries, I calculated the correlation between the percent who said advances will help us with Freedom House's 2008 ratings of a lack of civil liberties. I was surprised: it is .54. In other words, countries with lots of faith in science have low levels of human rights.

What is going on here? It looks like people in developed countries have come to take the benefits of science for granted and are more focused on its perceived costs. Anyway, the data here do not support in any straightforward way Harris' idea that faith in science eliminates injustice.

John McCain is a dick, and I'm happy he lost. He sold out ordinary Americans by pandering to Hispanics, and now he tells them they're on their own since they screwed him in November. After three decades of opening the door to illegals, he had it coming.

Now, he gives a mile long list of prospective Republican leaders on Leno, and he leaves Palin off the list. Typical greasy player. Uses a woman, tosses her in the dumpster when he's done, and makes her look the fool. Man of honor, my ass. And I don't care that she knew what she was getting herself into. He's a skunk.

"You Catholic girls start much too late": Another observation from "Adventureland": Where does this stereotype of the Catholic girl who won't put out come from? It must be old. I looked at GSS numbers for single white girls 18-22.


Percent not having sex in past year (N = 459)

Protestant 25.3
Catholic 17.4
Jewish 8.3
None 15.2

Compared to Protestants, Catholic girls are putting out. Was the stereotype developed by Jewish Hollywood types who had an easier time with Jewish girls (look at their numbers)? Speaking of that, I thought Jewish women were uptight about sex. Another stereotype from frustrated Jewish men?

She is a bigot because she is a gentile: Yesterday, I saw "Adventureland" and was struck by this scene: Jewish guy and Catholic girl make out. Later, the guy asks her to go see a movie and she apologizes, saying that her parents found out and won't let her date someone who's not Catholic. A Jewish female co-worker hears about it, the guy tells her worse things have happened to the Jews. She is very angry and tells the Catholic girl that she is not good enough to date the guy and that they are not friends.

So, let's see if I can figure this out. A gentile is a bigot if she doesn't want to marry someone from another faith. She is a bigot if she tries to persuade the Jew to become a Christian so she can marry him. And she is a bigot if she marries him, which leads to the death of Jewry through assimilation. Perhaps she can escape bigotry by converting to Judaism. So, to summarize, she is a bigot because she is a gentile.

Extreme liberals think sociology is more scientific than economics!

Continuing the theme of the retarded liberal, GSS respondents answered questions about how scientific they thought certain disciplines were. Look at the two charts. Extreme liberals think sociology is more scientific than economics! Extreme conservatives, by contrast, know better.

OMG, so many Americans are morons (and most are Democrats): From Rasmussen:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

Hmmm, what d'ya bet the morons are Democrats?

There is a partisan gap as well. Republicans - by an 11-to-1 margin - favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided: Just 39% say capitalism is better while 30% prefer socialism. As for those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% say capitalism is best, and 21% opt for socialism.

Atheism and fertility: Using World Values Survey and World Factbook data, I calculated the correlation for 59 countries between the percent who don't believe in God and: 1) the total fertility rate (TFR), and 2) the closeness of the TFR to 2. I computed the first for those concerned about Western countries with below-replacement fertility and the second for those concerned with population stability or over-population.

The Pearson correlation coefficient for the first pair is -.40; for the second pair, it's .25. So, atheism is moderately correlated with subreplacement, but only weakly correlated with population stability.

(If I get time later, I'll control for socioeconomic level since doing so might erase these correlations.)

NAMs and financial troubles: Steve Sailer has made a strong case that the practice of giving minorities home mortgages they couldn't pay back was an important cause of the current economic crisis. If you're like me, your anger is directed mostly at the elites who exploit political correctness for personal gain. Unfortunately, I can't document their greed with surveys, so this blog is typically left with the next best thing: showing that the political correctness is lies and bullshit.

The General Social Survey asked people a number of questions about financial troubles. Here are the percentages who answered yes by ethnic group (N = 1,873):


Percent who have been pressured to pay bills in the past year

Black 27.3
Mexican 24.7
American Indian 24.4

All Americans 15.0

Irish 14.1
German 13.3
Italian 11.9
English/Welsh 11.8


Percent who have had car repossessed in the past year

American Indian 5.6
Black 2.4
Mexican 1.1

All Americans 1.0

Italian 0.9
Irish 0.4
German 0.4
English/Welsh 0.4


Percent who had to pawn stuff in the past year

Mexican 10.1
American Indian 8.9
Black 7.3
German 6.2
English/Welsh 5.5

All Americans 5.4

Irish 3.3
Italian 2.8

As we've seen with posts dealing with many different indicators, NAMs by their own admission have higher rates of social problems than others. They are not simply whites or Asians in cockeyed baseball hats, and they're not marionettes to the white puppet master.

This exchange was too much fun to leave in the comments.

Jewish Atheist said...
Thank God conservatives still have gay marriage to oppose. What will they do in the next generation, when everybody already accepts gay marriage?

Ron Guhname said...
JA: I'm not sure what your post has to do with white racialism, but I'll bite: The next fad we'll be opposing is up to folks like you. Like pyromaniacs, you always have to torch something.

After reading that Foucault thought that a little girl jerking off a mildly retarded man was perfectly harmless, my guess is that the next issue will be lowering the age of consent. Or perhaps it will be Justice Ginsberg's argument that prostitution and bigamy are protected by the Constitution.

Hey, I just noticed something: Steve Sailer has argued that Obama was a black racialist when he wrote Dreams of My Father in 1995. Since at least 2004, he seems to be just a liberal, and Sailer wonders if Obama's loss to Bobby Rush in the Congressional race in 2001 might have changed his orientation. The idea is that Obama was not black enough to win in a black district, so he went for Plan B--becoming a white-friendly black politician.

Obama's older daughter, Malia, was born in 1998. Malia is Swahili for queen and sounds like a name that an Afrocentrist would give his first daughter. Move forward to June 2001 when his second daughter is born. That's like three months after Obama's defeat. He and Michelle name their second daughter Natasha. That name sounds very white or at least Russian, which brings political leftism to mind. Just a coincidence?

Four good movies you probably have not watched: I've had such a streak of good Netflix films lately, I thought I'd recommend them. Two of them were religious, so you'll probably only appreciate them if that's your thing. Ostrov (The Island) is a Russian movie that does a good job of capturing the feel of Orthodoxy. The Gospel of John is no work of art, but I like how Christopher Plummer's narration follows the last gospel almost word for word. Plus, Henry Ian Kusick gives a joyous quality to Jesus' words, in contrast to, say, the heaviness of Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told .

Religious folks and great literature fans alike should enjoy two movies based on novels by my favorite author, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first one is a BBC miniseries, Crime and Punishment starring John Hurt. And my favorite of the bunch is a 2003 Russian production, The Idiot. The movie is based on a less well-known Dostoevsky novel. When guys like Mel Brooks call someone Prince Myshkin, they're referring to the main character in the story.

Dostoevsky's stories are probably more meaningful to Christians, but you can't be one point behind Tolstoy in the Western Literature ratings by appealing only to people of faith (Human Accomplishment). Godless Freud claimed that The Brothers Karamazov was the best novel ever written.

The actors really stand out in this production. One inconsequential note: this is a mini-series that takes up four DVDs.

Disappearing white racialism

The top graph shows a four decade decline in the share of whites who favor a law against black-white marriages (GSS data).

The bottom graph shows how much white attitudes have changed just since I finished high school. In 1990 almost 70 percent of whites would oppose a close relative marrying a black person. (I'm sure if we had data from two decades before, the number against it would be even higher). The number dropped dramatically in the 90s, and even in the past two years fewer whites have a problem with it. In fact, in 2008, more than a quarter of whites can't wait for a family member to cross the racial line. Such enthusiasm! We can consider this question a measure of white racial consciousness; it has gone from the norm to something uncommon.

This has been a self-imposed change in the hearts of white Americans. They've given up their racialism. Most are willing to walk their daughters down the aisle and leave her with a man from a different race.

Whites didn't have to do this, but they did. And what have they gotten for their efforts? The Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the NAACP, La Raza, LULAC, the National Association of Black Journalists, BET, Univision, Georgetown professors calling on all black jurors to send guilty black defendants home, large percentages of NAMs who think of themselves as racialists first and Americans second--need I go on?

As for myself, in the abstract I would answer this question "neutral"--it wouldn't matter to me one way or the other. My ideal is neither racial consciousness or SWPL posturing. My son would be fortunate indeed to marry Sasha Obama. (I would be the unlucky one who would have to put up with all the in-laws' liberal and racialist bullshit).

But I'm not going to close my eyes to the statistics either. I dated a black women who was a fine girl, but there would have been a good chance that our kids would have gotten sucked into her lower-class family's culture and the wider dysfunctional black culture as well. Even middle-class black guys from the suburbs get sucked into black street life. And the thought of my kids or grandkids adopting all that victimhood, fight the power stuff would make me lose me mind.

Some freshman orientation worker will no doubt ask, "Don't you want your kids to be white to save them from all the discrimination they'll face in life?" My answer is, "Ha!! That God would curse us with the burden of black skin!"

Hedonism and happiness: Looking back, I'd have to say that the writer that has had more influence on me than anyone is Bertrand Russell. Reading him as a college student, I quickly went from a devout Christian to a a scientific-minded atheist. But it went further. Following the utilitarians, he argued that: 1) goodness can be reduced to pleasure and badness to pain; 2) pleasure and happiness are the same thing; and 3) a society should maximize pleasure (happiness) for the most people. Like many of his ideas, I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

So are pleasure and happiness linked so intimately? The Longitudinal Study of Violence Against Women asked male college students how much they were in low spirits in the past month, and whether they agreed that they were pleasure seekers. I calculated the mean sadness score and list it by the answer to the hedonism question (N = 646):


Mean sadness score

Strongly disagrees that he's a pleasure seeker 1.97
Disagrees that he's a pleasure seeker 2.16
Neither 2.18
Agrees he's a pleasure seeker 2.28
Strongly agrees he's a pleasure seeker 2.31

Being in low spirits increases with one's hedonism. The difference between the two extremes is not huge--about three-tenths of a standard deviation--but it completely contradicts Russell's idea.

Also, keep in mind that these questions were asked at the same time. Getting pleasure right now does not bring happiness even right now--forget about the accumulating sense of pointlessness that comes from living to feel good.

Gay marriage and Republican prospects

Do decisions like Iowa's State Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriages provide the Republican Party with an issue that will appeal to moderates in future elections? According to the 2008 General Social Survey, the answer is yes. The top graphs shows attitudes on the issue by political orientation for white Americans; the bottom one is for Hispanics--folks who are supposedly swing voters (I'm holding back the laughter).

First, look how strong the relationship is for whites. Close to 70 percent of those who are extremely conservative strongly disagree that gay people should be able to marry, compared to only 14 percent of extremely liberal Americans.

But the issue is moderates. They are 37% of whites in this sample--a very big group. Only 29% of them agree or strongly agree with granting the right. When economic concerns die down, and that's a big when, judicial assertiveness might help Republicans.

But look at Hispanics. You know, the rock solid social conservative group that they are. The moderates among them are pretty much split on the marriage issue. Friggin' waste of time.

Race and attitudes toward crime

The stacked bar charts show attitudes toward various types of crime for college-age males who are white, black, or some other race (Longitudinal Study of Violence Against Women). Across the board, blacks and those of some other race think crime is more acceptable and are more likely to say they would commit a crime if they knew they could get away with it. (I threw in infidelity as well).

In a society with large numbers of blacks and Latinos (most of the "other race") there is greater need for a punitive criminal justice system since there are fewer people who would not commit crimes in the absence of punishment.

Mainline denominations are worthless

These results from this Gallup poll are pathetic. Look at how Catholics are either more or equally accepting of behaviors the Church teaches are sinful. This, in spite of the fact that non-Catholics include many who claim no religion! And this isn't even behavior, just values. Mainline denominations are worthless.

Love that hip hop: My neighbors are moving furniture as I write this, and they're playing at about 120 decibels hip hop music that appeals to someone who was dropped on his head as a child. Obviously black folks, right? Wrong. Mex-Ams. I'm not surprised. People of similar IQs gravitate to the same music, and as Steve Sailer reported recently, young immigrants from Mexico weigh in at 82. We're stuck with our lower-class blacks and whites: do we have to import another problem population? Welcome to America the Future. I need a Corona to numb the pain.

Present and future Democrat strategy: In spite of a black man in the White House, it looks like Democrat strategists will continue to use claims of widespread racism among whites to demonize Republicans and their policies. And they will probably do it forever.

In the Political Brain, Drew Westin argues that Democrats must reveal the Right's very effective metanarrative for the racist ideology it is. While Republicans talk about limited government, low taxes, controlled immigration, states rights, etc., it is actually code for, "Join us and stick it to the Black Man."

Westin uses neuroscience research to show that people have conscious and unconscious motivational networks, and then links what Republicans say about race, and what they really feel about it deep down. In order to win elections, Democrats have to always bring this hatred to light. When Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond, for example, he revealed his true feelings for blacks.

Westin says that this sort of revelation must be exploited mercilessly. According to the author, Republican strategists are such geniuses, they have been decades ahead of the science, and have been activating racist unconscious networks since Nixon. He uses the 2006 Harold Ford race to claim that Republican mad scientists knew exactly what they were doing when they ran an ad with the words, "He's just not right." The strategists knew that the phrase would activate neural networks, causing whites to interpret the phrase as "He's just not white."

With all the recent science showing that that racial bias is hardwired, we can expect Democrats to find hatred in every meaningless thing Republicans do or say. Their message will be that all conservatives are haters--fallen men, in fact--and the only way to redemption is to, say, support universal health care.

Guys like Westin want his party to use this strategy much more, not less in the future. I think they will--we saw plenty of it in 2008--and all I can hope is that it backfires in the long run. If many whites are like me, being browbeaten long enough will turn a person of good will into a rebel.

Faith in science and social conservatism: In the comments of the first post on evolution and barbarism, Jason Malloy reported his analysis of GSS data which showed that faith in science is correlated with favoring abortion, independent of the influence of a liberal political orientation.

That made me wonder if social liberalism in general is common among those who really trust in science. I found six GSS questions concerning social issues:


Logistic Regression Coefficients, IV = Faith in science

Dependent variable
Prayer in schools -.872**
Suicide if disease is incurable .387**
Favors gun permit law .179
Marijuana should be legalized .416*
Homosexual sex is wrong -1.687**
Courts are not tough enough -.260

** p < .01, two-tailed test
* p < .05, two-tailed test

Except for crime and gun control, faith in science is associated with socially liberal positions. For guns and crime, the direction of the relationship is liberal, but the relationships are not statistically significant.

It looks like there is a strong tension between faith in science on the one hand and traditional morality on the other. Guns and crime are perhaps seen as practical matters, but the rest of these are morally tinged. Perhaps secularists are drawn to science while being turned off by religion.

Of course, we could focus on the religious side of the coin. Ever since Scopes, evangelicals have felt assaulted by science. When told by elites that you must make a choice, science or superstition, religious folks will throw the former overboard. It looks like Dawkins is doing the same thing to Muslims that Mencken did to evangelicals.

Atheism, evolution, and the death penalty: Speaking of the last post, I'll concede that I picked a conservative version of a barbarism. Let's pick a liberal one this time: the death penalty. The argument was made in the documentary Expelled that belief in atheism and evolution tend to reduce the value of humans, especially unproductive ones. The whole question becomes, does a person improve the population or not? People become economic units, and the door is opened to eliminate those who are a drag on society.

Murderers are certainly undesirable, so do atheism and acceptance of Darwin make us want to get rid of them? I followed the same strategy as in the last post and included a liberal outlook as a control.


Logistic regression coefficients

Acceptance of evolution -.042
Atheism .045
Liberalism -.252**

p < .01, two-tailed test

In analyes not shown, both atheism and acceptance of evolution are significantly related to being against the death penalty, but you can see in the results above that when liberalism is entered in the model, the effects of the other two fall to non-significance. So atheists and Darwinists tend to be against executing criminals, but only because they tend to be liberals. No whiff of Hitler here.

Atheism, acceptance of evolution, and atrocity: When it was in the theaters, I wasn't interested enough in Ben Stein's Expelled to go see it, but I saw that it was available online at Netflix.com. It was more stimulating than I expected, and it made me wonder if there was something to the idea that atheism and belief in Darwin were associated with various forms of barbarism. My sense of the historical record would lead me to say no--I mean, haven't elites in all developed countries accepted the science--but you folks know I like data.

The General Social Survey asked the following questions: 1) confidence in the existence of God, 2) likelihood that humans evolved from animals, 3) political orientation, and 4) favoring abortion for any reason. I chose the last one because it is an attitude in favor of a barbarism. To approve of abortion at any time for any reason would include killing a baby right before birth because at the last minute Mom decided she couldn't afford an iPhone if she had to buy diapers.

I doubted that mere adoption of atheism or acceptance of evolution would lead one to accept any kind of abortion; I suspected that a liberal worldview might explain any correlation. To assess this, I estimated a logistic regression model with abortion attitude as the dependent variable and the other measures as predictors:


Logistic Regression Coefficients, DV = Favoring abortion for any reason

Liberalism .302**
Skepticism about God .294**
Acceptance of evolution .383**

**p < .01, two-tailed test

Atheism and belief in evolution both significantly predict favoring abortion on demand, independent of the influence of a liberal worldview. I don't like to admit it, but some of the people who seem to be most devoted to Darwinism and atheism are neo-Nazis, and many of them have adopted barbaric attitudes. When, in an online debate forum, I was told that an autistic family member of mine should be euthanized, I wanted to reach through the Internet with a switchblade and slit the guy's throat. Some readers, I'm sure, will suggest that I examine the correlates of a real atrocity like denying racial preferences to less qualified minorities--the American equivalent of gassing Jews.

Blacks think they are the smartest

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health asked 310 teens to rate their intelligence. You can see in the graph that blacks are more likely than any other group to say they are moderately or extremely above average. By contrast, no Asians put themselves in the smartest category. Here are the means:

Mean self-perceived intelligence

White 3.74

Blacks 4.19

American Indian 3.52

Asians 3.79

Other 3.60

The black mean is four-tenths of a standard deviation higher than the Asian mean. As I showed with levels of national pride and national achievement, self-assessed IQ seems to be inversely related to actual IQ.

Religion and intermarriage: Reader Desmond Jones asks an interesting question: "Are the religious more or less likely to marry outside their ethnic/racial group?" Church is a common way for marriage-minded people to meet, and it is certainly true that people of different races often belong to the same religion. On the other hand, churches are quite segregated. In my town for instance, Catholic Hispanics gravitate toward the same parishes while whites do the same.

The Houston Area Study asked 809 people about the race of themselves and their spouses, and asked how important religion was to the respondent.


Percent who are married to someone outside their ethnic/racial group

Whites
Religion is not very important 10.0
Somewhat important 6.7
Very important 11.3

Hispanics
Religion is not very important 44.4
Somewhat important 14.6
Very important 13.7

(The black sample is not large enough). Church doesn't matter for whites, but look at Hispanics--huge differences. It looks like religious involvement keeps Latinos from assimilating.

Race and accidental infant deaths: Blacks and whites are identical, except for whites being racists and blacks suffering from it, right? Well, whites must also differ in being evil geniuses, because they have figured out some way to cause black babies to die accidentally at much higher rates than whites.

According to the CDC, non-automobile accidental death rates for infants are 39.8 per 100k for blacks and only 16.8 for whites. The difference is due to the following specific kinds of accidents: smothering, electrocution, being left in a hot car, contact with something hot, and consuming poisonous substances. These accidental deaths are obviously caused by factors like lack of supervision and judgment. Did white people suck common sense out of the heads of black folks?

Women and marriage: Doesn't it seem that never-married women get grumpier as they get older? The stereotype of the mean nun comes to mind. My wife tells me that life hardens a woman but a good man softens her. Let's look at GSS data to see if there is a difference among women of various marital statuses as they age. Respondents were asked how happy they are in general, and the possible answers are "very happy" (1), "pretty happy" (2), and "not very happy" (3). I calculated the means, and what we actually have here is a scale of unhappiness.


Mean sadness scale--women


Ages 18-24
Married 1.72
Divorced 2.01
Separated 2.24
Never married 1.88

Even at these very young ages, married women are the happiest group. On the other hand, young women in a failed relationship are not as happy as those who did not marry.

Ages 25-29
Married 1.65
Divorced 2.00
Separated 2.17
Never married 1.91

At this age range, married women have gotten a bit happier. The other groups are about the same. The mean sadness for the married group is about four-tenths of a standard deviation lower than for the never-marrieds.


Ages 30-34
Married 1.65
Divorced 1.99
Separated 2.02
Never married 1.98

Never-marrieds are now as unhappy as women who have been through the trauma of a broken marriage. The married/never-married gap is now one-half a standard deviation. I'll dispense with the older ages since the pattern holds.

So, marriage and happiness for a female go hand-in-hand starting at the earliest ages. Don't say that marriage is risky because it might not work out and then you'll be miserable. You'll be miserable anyway.

A whole country of little girls: We live in a bad age. President Obama is prostrating himself after comparing his bowling to the Special Olympics, and everybody is jumping on him for it, including so-called conservatives like Sarah Palin who is supposed to be so tough she wrestles bears in her free time.

I get to weigh in here--as if I needed a reason--because I have a close family member who is special needs. It was a joke, people. Lighten up, bitches. I'm sick of living in a time when a person gets scolded for every tiny little thing, and then he follows up with a tearful apology and probably some huge financial commitment to a special interest.

Religious people are less hedonistic: When I became an atheist in my early 20s, I saw a change in my general outlook. Before, I had always thought in terms of doing the right thing. Even though my family was conservative, I was convinced by liberalism because it seemed the most moral.

After losing my faith, I began to see life not as a place to be good, but as a place offering nothing valuable but pleasure. If I had an ambitious personality or a strong need for money, I might have seen achievement or economic success as the goal to live for. But for me, a life of simple comfort was the best you could do. Instead of respecting some principle, it made sense to me for the atheist to follow his personality, even if his personality sucked.

Of course, it's not rational to be a short-term pleasure seeker, because if you were in every way, your life would quickly be ruined. But I could never convince myself to be a perfect long-term hedonist. The psychology of "take it easy" was too powerful. It would be easy to argue that much of my train of thought described above was not rational; much of it, indeed, was driven by the interaction between thinking and personality.

But was this experience limited to just me? I have been called an oddball more than once, I assure you.

The Longitudinal Study of Violence Against Women asked male college students how much they agreed with, "I often do whatever brings me pleasure here and now, even at the cost of some distant goal." Answers ranged from 1 for "strongly disagree" to 4 for "strongly agree." Students were also asked how much influence religion has on them.


Mean instant gratification score by influence of religion

None 2.17
Some 2.09
Fair amount 1.93
Great deal 1.56

The difference between the "nones" and the "great deals" is two-thirds of a standard deviation. Looks like I'm not alone.

To the extent that outlook and values matter, I can think of few things more valuable than a culture of self-discipline. But the plot thickens: the other one that immediately popped into my head was devotion to the pursuit of truth, a commitment I think atheists can make a strong claim to.

Americans with a religion have more self-worth

In God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that since man gives God every positive quality, he becomes the embodiment of everything low. God's possession of all value leaves man worthless. The restoration of our self-worth, therefore, requires rejection of belief in the divine.

So is it true that the irreligious have more self-esteem? GSS respondents were asked if they sometimes feel like they are no good (N = 2,184). Answers ranged from "strongly agree" (=1) to "strongly disagree" (=4). A question about belief would be ideal, but we'll have to use affiliation instead. The graphs shows that Americans with no religion value themselves less than people with a church.

To get another angle on it, I calculated means:

Mean self-esteem score

Protestant 3.24

Catholic 3.26

Jewish 3.16

None 3.10

The no religion/Christian gap is about two-tenths of a standard deviation.

From Rasmussen:

Seventy-three percent (73%) of U.S. voters believe that a police officer should automatically check to see if someone is in this country legally when the officer pulls that person over for a traffic violation. Only 21% disagree, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of voters also say that if law enforcement officers know of places where immigrants gather to find work, they should sometimes conduct surprise raids to identify and deport illegal immigrants. Twenty-four percent (24%) oppose surprise raids.

The Republican Party should capitalize on the strong anti-illegal immigration sentiment that is still felt in the country, and that should grow as long as the economy is in the tank. Steele sounds okay here--I don't see why a black Republican would have any special reason to take the open borders view--but so far, my overall impression of him is mildly negative.

It's the Irish with no religion who drink too much: In honor of St. Patrick's Day, let's test the stereotype that the Irish drink more than they should. GSS respondents were asked if there are occasions when they drink too much.


Percent who drink too much

Catholic Irish 41.6
Protestant Irish 40.6
Irish with no religion 54.8
All white Americans 37.8

So, compared to other whites, Irish Americans are more likely to overdo it, but the difference is large only for those with no church. Maybe the stereotype comes from a comparison with WASPs: only 33.5 percent of them say they drink too much.

While we're at it, I see that 49.6 percent of all white Americans with no religion say they drink more than they should. That's significantly higher than everyone else: Protestants (37.6), Catholics (36.1), Jews (26.4), and others (34.5).

Indian American IQ? Not to get into all the specifics, Steve Sailer reported a study that put the mean IQ of young, recent Indian American (IA) immigrants at 112. I calculated it for the GSS's 20 IA's born in the United States. It is 95.2 (!), nowhere close to this other figure that, by the way, was calculated using a backward digit span test. Chinese Americans born here, by contrast, averaged an IQ of 105.0, according to GSS data.

Update: The GSS estimate of IA's match up with Rushton's summary.

Cleanliness is next to godliness

Men

Women

Since atheists are non-conformists, I suspected that they would more often reject the convention that a home should be kept clean. A GSS interviewer judged the cleanliness of the homes of respondents. The graphs above summarize the data for men (top) and for women (bottom).

Along with those squishy people who believe sometimes, it looks like atheists are messier, but the small sample size doesn't help. If we look at means instead and combine sexes, we get:

Mean messiness score

Atheists 2.14

Agnostics 1.64

Some higher power 1.72

Sometimes believes 2.27

Believes but doubts 1.82

Knows God exists 1.78

Same story here. The gap between believers and atheists is four-tenths of a standard deviation.

Atheists, gays, and depression: I finally got around to seeing the movie Milk. One theme that emerged is that many homosexuals are suicidal. Mr. Milk said that most of his lovers had thoughts of killing themselves because of how society rejects gay men.

Reader Jason Malloy suggested in the comments section of previous post that atheists might be more depressed than believers. I'm a relatively happy person, but my dreariest times were certainly the years when I was an atheist. Anyway, let's tackle the depression issue for both of these groups at the same time.

GSS respondents were asked how much they felt down and blue in the past month. Answers ranged from "all of the time" (=1) to "none of the time" (=6) so the higher the score, the more depression-free the person.


Mean lack of depression score

Straight men 5.04
Gay men 4.86

Doesn't believe in God 4.91
No way of knowing 4.86
Some higher power 4.92
Believes sometimes 4.54
Believes but has doubts 4.95
Knows there is a God 4.90

Gay men do suffer from more depression than straights, although the two-tenths of a standard deviation difference is not large. Milk probably exaggerated the problem, although there was more homophobia in the 70s than in 2000 when these survey questions were asked.

Belief, on the other hand, seems to be unrelated to depression. The only group reporting greater sadness is "believes sometimes." We saw in the last post that atheists suffer less from mental health problems overall; it is probably the case, as readers have suggested, that it takes a strong mind to be an atheist, so there might be few non-believing psychotics. Some of those folks even think they are God, right?

Belief in God and mental health: In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton argued that atheism is associated with mental illness. Is it? There are two relevant questions from the General Social Survey: 1) How confident are you in the existence of God? 2) In the past month, how many days was your mental health not good?


Mean days of bad mental health in past month (N = 1,703)

Doesn't believe 1.88
No way to find out 3.44
Some higher power 4.86
Believes sometimes 2.95
Believes but doubts 3.01
Knows God exists 2.67

As I've shown in several other posts on wellness, it seems like it's healthiest to be confident, one way or the other. And Chesterton, as much as I like the guy, is wrong.

Religion and gay sex don't get along

This graph from Gallup shows a universal tension between religion and homosexual sex. The disapproval does vary--Hindus, for example, don't feel as strongly as Muslims--but if homosexual rights were a high priority for me, I'd wish for a secular world.

Even non-Abrahamic religions are less tolerant than secularists. This across-the-board opposition to gay sex suggests a biological basis, doesn't it? Could it be as simple as the widespread revulsion that heteros feel at the thought of this type of sex? Sexual scenarios of all sorts generate strong emotional reactions: how many times have you heard people say "gross" at this or that image?

Are country folks happier?

Any guy like me who spends time in both rural and urban areas can't help but notice that people in the cities look less happy. Now, it could be nothing more than "city face": the look that lets other people know that you are not to be bothered. Or it could be the need to detach to avoid stimulation overload.

Myself, I've always been a city hater. I lived in NYC for a couple years. Hated it. To my eyes, cities are ugly unless hidden by the night. If areas are run down, my mood follows. The noise, the bad air. We were made to live in small groups. And I'm a bit of a misanthropist--I can only handle a few humans at a time. I realize that cities are essential. Somebody's got to live there, just not me.

Anyway, according to the GSS, small town folks are happier. Just look at the graph. I thought the lives of hicks were supposed to be so dull and meaningless that they'd be one step away from a shotgun in the mouth. The pro-city bias starts when we're kids. Everybody knows that everything cool and fun is in the city. Never trust a teenager.

People do not age out of their secularism: Recently, Razib and I both used GSS data to show what other surveys have been showing: compared to older Americans, the young are less religious. But it is possible that this is due to an aging effect. One might tend to grow more religious as one gets older and finds a secular life unrewarding. I have seen research before (don't recall where) that found support for this.

I did not. Taking 18-22 year olds in 1990-1994, I followed them up until 2008 when they would have been in their mid-30s:


Percent who never go to church

1990-94 14.7
1995-99 21.1
2000-04 17.4
2005-08 21.0

Any changes just look like noise to me. It's possible that religiosity might develop in one's forties or older, but I doubt it. If the current cohort of twenty-somethings stay consistent like this older group has, their share staying completely away from the pews will be almost 30%.

Nietzsche and Christianity

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claimed that Christianity accomplished two things. First, it gave solace and dignity to the poor. They might have to spend their lives cleaning toilets, but they do so knowing they are sons of God just like the boss. Second, and more importantly for the author, Christianity neutered the men at the top of society. Nietzsche's antipathy for the faith seems to stem from this.

But the question is, how manly did he need European men to be? Looking across the centuries when Christianity dominated the continent, do those guys seem womanly to you?

Christianity is useful precisely because it can restrain the alpha males. If Nietzsche is right that the world is divided into two types--master and slave--then all the rest of us benefit if we can convince the masters to go easy on us.

I used GSS data to see if religion makes low-status people happier. Limiting to sample to whites with jobs no higher than working-class, the graph above shows that more frequent church attendance is associated with greater happiness (N = 3,585).

Emergency: The Idiocracy begins

The graphs show the trend in scores on a ten question vocabulary test (WORDSUM) given by the General Social Survey (N = 24,196). This test is a good measure of IQ, and you can see how the share of the country in the highest IQ bracket has fallen. In 1990, it was 7.4%, and by 2008 it was almost half that--3.8%. The area of gain has been with the middle scores of 6 and 7.

Suspecting that the shrinking of the smartest group might be due to a larger number of immigrants--a group with a poorer English vocabulary--I removed them, but found the same trend. It looks like we're seeing Idiocracy in action.

Then there's the moral recession

The General Social Survey has put up its 2008 data. When it provides new stuff, I like to look at the latest trends among young people in order to give us a glimpse of the future. Looking at the graphs above for 18-29 year olds, you can see that everything is moving in the wrong direction (at least if you think like I do). Sample sizes are between 6,300 and 11,300.

The first half of the decade made me think things were getting better (you can see that in the graphs) but trends reversed, and 2008 data are supporting the view that more young Americans approve of homosexual sex, abortion-on-demand, and never go to church. Throwing in Congress and Obama, the Left is kicking our asses at the moment.