The Greediness of America

Liberals like to indict America as being uniquely money-obsessed. Sociologists claim it is a fundamental feature of the country (unlike most other countries). The World Values Survey asked respondents if the statement "wanting to get rich" sounds like them. Here are the percentages who answered "very much like me" or "like me" (N = 71,288):

Country	% Agree
Ghana	62.2
Mali	57.4
South Africa	48.5
Morocco	47.3
Ethiopia	42.7
Zambia	41.6
Rwanda	36.2
Jordan	35.8
Burkina Faso	35.2
India	31.0
Iran	29.8
Malaysia	29.1
Turk	28.5
Vietnam	23.6
China	23.1
Indonesia	20.7
Egypt	19.6
Ukraine	19.6
Russia	18.9
Moldova	17.5
Cyprus	16.9
Trinidad	16.8
Chile	16.7
Serbia	16.6
Georgia	16.5
Romania	14.2
Thailand	13.7
Germany	12.1
Poland	10.4
Bulgaria	10.0
South Korea	10.0
Taiwan	10.0
England/Wales	7.5
Scotland	7.5
Canada	7.4
Mexico	7.1
Netherlands	7.1
Slovenia	6.7
Spain	6.5
Australia	6.0
USA	5.9
Uruguay	5.7
Andorra	5.6
Finland	5.4
France	5.4
Peru	4.9
Sweden	4.3
Switzerland	4.2
Argentina	4.1
Brazil	4.0
Norway	2.8
Japan	2.3

Out of a sample of 52 countries, the United States ranks 41st in greediness.

Church attendance, alcohol, divorce, and suicide

Here are a number of additional cross-national correlations that are supportive of a socially conservative orientation (the church data is from here and the divorce data from here):


Pearson Correlations

Alcohol consumption--crude divorce rate .61 (strong relationship)
Crude divorce rate--suicide rate .49 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--alcohol consumption -.40 (medium)
Weely church attendance--suicide -.42 (medium)
Weekly church attendance--crude divorce rate -.34 (medium)

Percent black, inequality, and national homicide rates

Using CIA data on race (admittedly crude), I calculated the Pearson correlation between percent black and national homicide rates. For 180 countries, it is .50--a strong association. More blacks means more homicide. Percent black is as predictive as mean IQ or the GINI measure of income inequality. While we're at it, the black-inequality correlation is .45. Bigger gaps between the wealthy and the poor go hand in hand with more blacks. 

Alcohol and suicide

Using WHO data, I calculated the cross-national correlation between annual alcohol consumption and suicide rates. For 101 countries, it is .58--a strong assocation. Countries with high levels of consumption have much more suicide. Eastern Europe illustrates this well. The average person there drinks roughly 15 liters of (pure) alcohol per year, and suicide rates are two or three times the average.

Such a finding supports the socially conservative view that drinking immoderately (or at all) needs to be discouraged.

The cross-national relationship between percent Muslim and homicide

Continuing my focus on cross-national homicide, I correlated rates with the percent of the population that is Muslim. For a sample of 181 countries, the correlation is -.17 which means that countries with more Muslims tend to have less murder. This is striking when one considers that Muslim-dominated countries tend to be poor and some of them are sub-Saharan African. After adjusting for per capita GDP and percent black, the correlation is likely to be stronger.

One note: I'm going to try to get a better idea of how relilable the homicide data are. I chose coroner's data over criminal justice data simply because I trust public health institutions more, and they tend to report more counts of homicide (suggesting that criminal justice agencies are not reporting some cases). The two systems seem to be pretty consistent in high-income countries, but just eyeballing the data, the counts from the two sources can be very different in poor countries. I suspect that politically-motivated killings in unstable countries complicate things.   

Cross-national IQ, inequality, and homicide

Using data from Richard Lynn and the recent WHO study, the correlation between national level IQ and the homicide rate across 181 countries is -.51. This is a strong association, so smarter countries are much less violent. The only cross-national correlate of homicide that is this strong is income inequality (more unequal countries are more violent). In my data set, the correlation between the GINI inequality index and homicide is .48.

UPDATE: Since I mentioned inequality, any thoughts on how to explain the correlation? The inequality-homicide link is reliable in macrolevel research. Sociologists claim that a large gap between the wealthy and the poor generates anger and resentment which low-status people take out on convenient, low-risk targets. It doesn't seem plausible to me that Bill Gates is an important cause of black-on-black ghetto violence. Compared to Europe, the US has a fairly high level of inequality, but racial diversity probably explains its inequality-homicide correlation. As for the cross-national link, is it that poorly endowed populations are both violent and unlikely to create more equal arrangements? I'll have to see how much the inequality-homicide link is reduced when adjusted for mean IQ.

Back to the US question: if American liberals are so concerned about large gaps between the wealthy and the poor, why would they invite large numbers of both Chinese and Mexican immigrants? At least the immigrants of a century ago were similar (with the exception of Jews).

Guns and homicide

I am currently putting together a large cross-national data set and will report interesting correlations. Let me begin with the relationship between civilian gun availability and homicide. I calculated the Pearson correlation between the two rates using data from the Small Arms Survey and WHO's recent study of homicide. For a sample of 181 countries, the correlation is -.25. That means that countries with more guns tend to have less lethal violence.

Gun ownership is strongly related to per capita GDP (.48). Countries with many guns like the United States (which is the world's leader with 88 firearms per 100 people) are typically wealthy. We Americans usually think of Europe as being practically gun free, but they have significantly higher levels than many poor countries. And two of the poorest regions are also the most violent--Latin America and especailly Sub-Saharan Africa. An African country might have less than one gun per 100 people, but that doesn't stop it from having a homicide rate many times the global average. I might get different results when I conduct a multivariate analysis--gun availability might lead to more violence when GDP is controlled, for example--but guns are not a serious enough factor to overwhelm more important causes of homicide.  

Low crime rate in Malaysia

I'm looking at self-report and victim data (which I can't give details on) that shows that crimes of all types are much more common in the U.S. than Malaysia. Why such a huge difference? The sociologist would expect the poor country to be the criminogenic one, but he's an idiot so we'll leave him aside. The HBD-er might answer that Malaysia is an Asian country, and Asians are law-abiding.

I wanted to see if Islam and sharia might have something to do with it. I looked up the most recent homicide counts (WHO) for Malaysia and Thailand--a contiguous, non-Islamic Asian country--and calculated rates. The rate for Malaysia is .5 victims per 100,000 total population. For Thailand, it's 6.2--12 times the Malaysian rate. This is consistent with the view that crime levels are lower in societies with intense religious cultures.

UPDATE: The plot thickens: I see Wikipedia lists homicide rates. While its data shows that Thailand is worse than Malaysia, Indonesia has a high rate. Also--rates are below average in the the Near East/Middle East/SW Asian region.

Correlates of crime

In Handbook of Crime Correlates, Lee Ellis and colleagues review hundreds of studies and summarize the results. Here are some interesting findings:

1. Thirty-two studies fail to find a clear difference between males and females in partner violence. Evidently women hit just as often; men just hit harder.

2. While police data show higher arrest rates for Hispanics and especially blacks compared to whites, self-reported crime differences are not consistent (322 studies). This is not really a problem. Self-report studies capture minor crime while arrest data taps more serious crime. Similar to the gender gap, whites, blacks, and Hispanics don't differ much on minor offenses. Clear differences emerge as crimes become more serious.

3. Seventy-eight self-report and arrest studies show unequivocally that American Indians (AIs) have higher crime rates than whites. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that since AIs have not lived under violence-suppressing states for as many centuries as other populations, they have not been "tamed" to the same extent.

4. Whites are more criminal than East Asians--at least according to police data (37 studies).

5. Crime rates of whites and South Asians do not differ signficantly (16 studies).

6. Oceanic Islanders are more criminal than whites (25 studies).

7. Areas with more taverns, liquor stores, and alcohol consumption have higher crime rates (26 studies).

8. Crime rates are higher in areas with more gambling and tourism establishments (11 studies).

9. Crime rates are higher in areas where religious membership is low (12 studies).

10. Regions closer to the equator have more crime (35 studies).

11. Later-borns are more criminal than first-borns (12 studies).

12. People with more friends are less criminal (25 studies).

13. Employed teens are more delinquent (19 studies).

14. Religious people are less criminal (112 studies).

15. People with orthodox religious beliefs are less criminal (18 studies).

16. Jews are less criminal than non-Jews (28 studies).

17. People with more sex partners are more criminal (39 studies).

18. Teens who have sex for the first time at younger ages are more delinquent (23 studies).

19. People who have more tolerant attitudes toward crime and drugs are more criminal (34 studies).

20.  People with defiant and rebellious attitudes are more criminal (46 studies).


Many of these findings make perfect sense to a social conservative.

Hispanic and white working-class voters

Would someone explain why the national media goes on endlessly about the critical importance of the Latino vote? According to this 538 table, Hispanic might is really only felt in states that are clearly blue (ie., California) or clearly red (i.e., Texas). Very small percentages of voting Hispanics in 2008 were in swing states. Focusing on this year's key states, the share of all Hispanic voters was one percent in Nevada and North Carolina. It was two percent of all Hispanic voters in Ohio and Virginia. It was only three percent in Colorado. The share is large only in Florida, but the state is not filled with Mexican Americans demanding amnesty for their illegal co-ethnics. Plus, come hell or high water, Latinos vote 2-to-1 for Democrats, so they are not swing voters but part of the Democrat base.

I watch the polls very closely, and Romney is doing surprisingly well in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan (or more precisely, Obama is doing surprisingly badly, especially when one considers the auto bailout). All the Hispandering, in addition to pandering to homosexuals and women who want free birth control, seems to be causing a reaction among working-class whites in the Rust Belt. Blue-collar whites vote in much larger numbers than Latinos in swing states, but Big Media doesn't give a shit about them.

Pew: Asians now the largest group of new immigrants

According to Pew Research:

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. The educational credentials of these recent arrivals are striking. More than six-in-ten (61%) adults ages 25 to 64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history.

Compared with the educational attainment of the population in their country of origin, recent Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group. For example, about 27% of adults ages 25 to 64 in South Korea and 25% in Japan have a bachelor’s degree or more. In contrast, nearly 70% of comparably aged recent immigrants from these two countries have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Recent Asian immigrants are also about three times as likely as recent immigrants from other parts of the world to receive their green cards—or permanent resident status—on the basis of employer rather than family sponsorship (though family reunification remains the most common legal gateway to the U.S. for Asian immigrants, as it is for all immigrants).

The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans—foreign born and U.S born, adults and children—to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8% of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1% in 1965. By comparison, non-Hispanic whites are 197.5 million and 63.3%, Hispanics 52.0 million and 16.7% and non-Hispanic blacks 38.3 million and 12.3%.

Asian Americans trace their roots to any of dozens of countries in the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Each country of origin subgroup has its own unique history, culture, language, religious beliefs, economic and demographic traits, social and political values, and pathways into America.

But despite often sizable subgroup differences, Asian Americans are distinctive as a whole, especially when compared with all U.S. adults, whom they exceed not just in the share with a college degree (49% vs. 28%), but also in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800) and median household wealth ($83,500 vs. $68,529).

Immigration and median incomes

Here's a DHS report of the number of U.S. naturalizations in 2011. I've listed below the top twenty sending countries. Next to the country, I show the median personal income for people born in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 64 whose family came from the respective country (ACS data) . The overall median American income is $45,149.

Median personal income
1. Mexico 29,076
2. India 50,000
3. Philippines 39,460
4. China 51,921
5. Colombia 38,422
6. Cuba 40,000
7. Vietnam 39,910
8. Dominican Republic 30,000
9. Jamaica 30,969
10. Haiti 32,036
11. El Salvador 30,000
12. S. Korea 41,701
13. Pakistan 41,537
14. Peru 38,000
15. Brazil 39,460
16. Nigeria 34,300
17. Canada 37,376
18. Iran 41,537
19. United Kingdom 45,559
20. Poland 41,537

People from Mexico dwarf all other countries in numbers of 2011 U.S. naturalized citizens (95,000 Mexicans vs. 46,000 Indians--the next largest group) but the median income of Mexican-Americans is only a fraction of the average. It is the poorest group on the list, even lower than black groups. But the news is worse than that. Of the 20 countries listed, only Asian Indians, Chinese, and those whose families came from the UK earn above-average incomes. Americans with ancestors from the other 17 countries are below-average. And Dominicans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, and Nigerians are really low. Immigration from these countries is leading to more low-income Americans. And I'm focusing on native-born Americans, not their immigrant parents. (The reality is probably a little better since the average age of the native-born of many of these groups is lower than the overall American average, and income, of course, is related to age.)

The only bright spot is that two of the large immigration groups--Indians and Chinese--earn a lot of money.

Back to the bad news: not only do the poor groups tend to vote Democrat, their better off members do too, and even wealthy immigrant groups like Indian and Chinese Americans lean Left.

Another look at Muslim fertility

In the comments of the recent post on Muslim fertility, Dr. Charlton expresses skepticism about the validity of the study reported. He writes that we should assume that a peer-reviewed study has been conducted by someone who is dishonest or incompetent. I've been reading and conducting research for almost 20 years and agree with his view. That doesn't mean that every study is actually bad, but the publication process in the social sciences is sufficiently corrupt to cause one to be skeptical. This is one reason that I go to the original data if I can.

Let's do that now with fertility data. I went to the Population Reference Bureau and obtained 2011 total fertility rates (TFR) for Muslim-majority countries. TFR is an estimate of the total number of children the average woman will have based on current birth rates.


2011 Total Fertility Rate

Niger 7.0
Mali 6.4
Somalia 6.4
Afghanistan 6.3
Chad 6.0
Burkina Faso 5.8
Nigeria 5.7
Guinea 5.3
Yemen 5.3
Gambia 5.0
Sierra Leone 5.0
Comoros 4.8
Iraq 4.7
Senegal 4.7
Palestinian territory 4.6
Sudan 4.5
Mauritania 4.4
Western Sahara 4.3
Mayotte 4.2
Jordan 3.8
Djibouti 3.7
Pakistan 3.6
Tajikistan 3.4
Oman 3.3
Syria 3.2
Kyrgyzstan 3.0
Egypt 2.9
Saudi Arabia 2.9
Kazakhstan 2.7
Uzbekistan 2.7
Malaysia 2.6
Kosovo 2.5
Libya 2.5
Bangladesh 2.4
Maldives 2.4
Turkmenistan 2.4
Azerbaijan 2.3
Indonesia 2.3
Kuwait 2.3
Algeria 2.3
Morocco 2.2
Lebanon 2.1
Qatar 2.1
Tunisia 2.1
Turkey 2.1

USA 2.0

Bahrain 1.9
Iran 1.9
United Arab Emirates 1.8
Brunei 1.7
Albania 1.4

While the rates are impressively low in some countries--Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia jump out at me--Dr. Charlton is right: the picture is not as rosy as Eberstadt (the author) suggests. While Eberstadt does write that he is focusing on countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa, there are still many countries with high TFRs. Just focusing on the large countries, we could mention Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (which has 180 million people). And Eberstadt does say that, "Throughout the Ummah, fertility levels are falling dramatically." That makes it sounds like things are getting good globally, but look at those sub-Saharan numbers. Nigeria alone has 75 milllion people. With a TFR of 5.7, the country will double in size in a generation. (Nigeria's annual growth rate is 2.27 percent, so using the rule of 72, the country should double in size in  31.7 years.)

Robert Wright on evolutionists vs. creationists

From the Atlantic:

A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone. The deal worked. I went to a public high school in a pretty religious part of the country--south-central Texas--and I don't remember anyone complaining about sophomores being taught natural selection. It just wasn't an issue.

A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact. [Which isn't to say the violation was wholly unprovoked; see my update below.] I don't just mean they professed atheism--many Darwinians had long done that; I mean they started proselytizing, ridiculing the faithful, and talking as if religion was an inherently pernicious thing. They not only highlighted the previously subdued tension between Darwinism and creationism but depicted Darwinism as the enemy of religion more broadly.

If the only thing this Darwinian assault did was amp up resistance to teaching evolution in public schools, the damage, though regrettable, would be limited. My fear is that the damage is broader--that fundamentalist Christians, upon being maligned by know-it-all Darwinians, are starting to see secular scientists more broadly as the enemy; Darwinians, climate scientists, and stem cell researchers start to seem like a single, menacing blur.

I'm not saying that the new, militant Darwinian atheists are the only cause of what is called (with perhaps some hyperbole) "science denialism." But I do think that if somebody wants to convince a fundamentalist Christian that climate scientists aren't to be trusted, the Christian's prior association of scientists like Dawkins with evil makes that job easier.

I reiterate that this theory is conjectural--so conjectural that "hypothesis" is a better word for it than "theory". The jury may remain out on it forever.

Meanwhile, some data to keep your eye on: Check out the extreme right of the graph above. Over the past two years, the portion of respondents who don't believe in evolution has grown by six percentage points. Where did those people come from? The graph suggests they're people who had previously believed in an evolution guided by God--a group whose size dropped by a corresponding six percentage points. It's as if people who had previously seen evolution and religion as compatible were told by the new militant Darwinians, "No, you must choose: Which is it, evolution or religion?"--and pretty much all of them chose religion.

The amazing decline in Muslim fertility

According to this study, fertility in much of the Ummah--the worldwide community of followers of Islam--has fallen in the past 20 years to levels comparable to the United States. If that isn't amazing enough, the data indicate that increased use of birth control and socioeconomic development have had little to do with it. (And the article doesn't even mention abortion as an explanation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but abortion is illegal and rare in many Muslim countries.)

By contrast, the correlation between desired and actual family size is extremely high in these countries. According to the author, the revolutionary change has been due to changes in individual family size preferences. He doesn't use the world culture, but that's what I would call it when people's preferences change collectively.

This dramatic worldwide decline should reduce immigration numbers and ease the assimilation problems in the developed world.

Data on gay marriage

This article shows, that based on extensive European experience, there is less enthusiasm for marriage and more enthusiasm for divorce among homosexuals (especially lesbians) compared to straights.

And this article describes a new study which improves on the methods of previous research and finds that kids in same-sex families turn out worse as a adults than children raised in two-parent biological families (perhaps because their childhoods were less stable).

The devout gay Mormon therapist with a wife and three kids

This is fascinating. It is the story of a devout gay Mormon therapist who has been happily married to a lovely (and understanding) woman for 10 years. He told her he was gay on a date when he was 16. Their sex is intimate, not a sexual turn-on for him, and they have three beautiful daughters. The girls, in turn, have what is their birthright--a mother and a father.

White teens and drunk driving

FBI data shows that if you're the parent of a black teenager, your child is disproportionately likely to commit just about any type of crime. But are there crimes that white parents need to be particularly concerned about? The answer is yes. Roughly 90 percent of juvenile arrestees for drunkenness, liquor law violations, and driving under the influence are white (or Hispanic).

Just last Saturday night I overheard my teenage neighbors say they were going to get "white girl trashed."

Pakistani immigration to Norway increasing the incidence of progressive encephalopathy

Here's a recent study from The European Journal of Paediatric Neurology:

Progressive encephalopathy (PE) in children is a heterogeneous group of individually rare diseases with a cumulative incidence which compares to that of neural tube defects and infantile hydrocephalus. The main cause of PE is metabolic disease, but neurodegenerative disorders lacking known metabolic or other causes also exist. PE poses a challenge to our health care system due to difficulties in its diagnosis and management, 4–6 and a high case fatality. For example, in a cohort study we showed that the case fatality of PE was 36.9%. In the same cohort, the incidence rate was 6.4 per 100,000 person years at risk, and the cumulative incidence was 0.6 per 1000 live births, comparable to that of other reports.

Using data from this cohort combined with outstandingly detailed national-wide population statistics we wanted to pin point the increased risk of PE associated with consanguinity. Over the past 20 years there has been a six-fold increase in non-Western immigration to Norway (the nomenclature regarding non-Western has recently been suggested revised). In 2006, non-Western immigrants accounted for 18.6% of Oslo’s total population of 538,411 inhabitants. The largest non-Western group is from Pakistan. In Pakistan, approximately 60% of marriages are consanguineous and unions occur primarily between first cousins. Norway is the only country in the world collecting data on consanguinity for its entire population at birth. Approximately 50% of children of Pakistani origin born in Norway are the result of consanguineous unions, defined as parents who are second cousins or more closely related. Of first generation Pakistani immigrants, 43.9% were first cousins. In Norway, parental consanguinity in the Pakistani population is associated with an increased risk of stillbirth, congenital malformations, and infant death, all considered complex genetic conditions.

When autosomal recessive gene defects are rare, the likelihood of unrelated parents being carriers for the same defect is small. The less frequent the recessive gene, the stronger the likelihood that an affected individual is the product of a consanguineous mating. Since many of the diseases causing PE are determined by single mutant genes, for example in autosomal recessive inborn errors of metabolism, it was reasonable to assume that children of consanguineous unions had a higher risk of PE, and that PE consequently would be more common in children of Pakistani origin. However, the degree of increased risk of PE caused by consanguinity has not been precisely assessed in previous studies. Here we report an approximately seven-fold increased risk of PE in children of Pakistani origin and an eleven-fold increased risk when consanguineous Pakistanis were compared to the general Norwegian population. We also estimated that avoidance of consanguinity in the Pakistani population would result in 50% reduction of PE in this group.

Do people choose spouses who are like their parents?

New from the Journal of Research in Personality:

Both psychoanalytic views of attachment and evolutionary theories of imprinting suggest that mates may be preferentially chosen to resemble one’s parents. Using data from a large Dutch study of twins and their families, we tested these hypotheses with regard to personality traits from the Five-Factor Model. Little evidence of parent/spouse similarity was found, although women did tend to select a husband who resembled their parents with regard to Openness to Experience. This effect may be due to the influence of Openness on their social worlds, rather than to their experiences in early childhood.

Barone predicts America's demographic future

Michael Barone on U.S. demographic trends:

Since 1990, Americans have been moving out of California to other states in large numbers. The Golden State's population growth in the last two decades has reached the national average only because of Latin and Asian immigration.

That immigration, to California and elsewhere, is one of the two big demographic trends that have reshaped the country over the last 40 years. The other is the movement of vast numbers of people from high-tax states in the Northeast and industrial Midwest to lower-tax and more economically vibrant states elsewhere.

Both these movements have halted, at least temporarily. American mobility is near an all-time low. As in the Depression of the 1930s, people tend to stay put in hard times. You don't want to sell your house if you're underwater on your mortgage.

And immigration has plunged. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that from 2005 to 2010, more people have moved from the United States to Mexico than the other way around. I suspect that reverse migration is still going on.

The question is whether those trends will resume when -- if? -- good times return.

My prediction is that we won't ever again see the heavy Latin immigration we saw between 1983 and 2007, which averaged 300,000 legal immigrants and perhaps as many illegals annually.

Mexican and other Latin birthrates fell more than two decades ago. And Mexico, source of 60 percent of Latin immigrants, is now a majority-middle-class country.

Asian immigration may continue, primarily from China and India, especially if we have the good sense to change our laws to let in more high-skill immigrants.

But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya.

Continued domestic out-migration from high-tax states? Certainly from California, where Gov. Jerry Brown wants to raise taxes even higher. With foreign immigration down, California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population.

Fortunately, governors of some other high-tax states are itching to cut taxes. The shale oil and natural gas boom has job-seekers streaming to hitherto unlikely spots like North Dakota and northeast Ohio. Great Plains cities like Omaha and Des Moines are looking pretty healthy, too.

It's not clear whether Atlanta and its smaller kin -- Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville, Jacksonville -- will resume their robust growth. They've suffered high unemployment lately.

But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you've just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America.

Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter century. One in 12 Americans lives there.

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that's one trend that I hope continues.

Laziness and job status among blacks

In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele argues that few blacks excel in high status jobs because they lack the required skills. From childhood they are told that failure is not their fault, so they never learn that they are responsible for their lack of skills. While other people are working hard to become competent to avoid feeling like failures, blacks don't fear failure; after all, it's not their doing, it's the system.

GSS data can give us some idea if a work ethic among blacks is as important as Steele thinks. Respondents were asked:  "To what extent do you agree or disagree that you see yourself as someone who tends to be lazy." Answers ranged from "strongly agree" (1) to "strongly disagree" (5). I calculated the means for those with low job prestige and those with high prestige. The mean work ethic score is 4.19 for the low-status group (n = 115) and 4.03 for the high-status group (n = 66). The two means are not signficantly different. According to these data, higher class blacks are no more hard working than their lower class counterparts. (The means indicate a bias toward thinking that one is not lazy, but this is not really a problem when comparing the two groups unless the bias is systematically stronger in one group than the other.)

Helmuth Nyborg interviews Richard Lynn

The current issue of Personality and Individual Differences is a tribute to Richard Lynn at age 80. Here is a portion of his conversation with Helmuth Nyborg that reviews his career:

HN: So then you needed a job.

RL: Yes, and I obtained a lectureship at the University of Exeter. I was now to enter the wilderness years and did not succeed in doing anything that I considered significant for the next twelve years. In 1959 I published a paper Environmental Conditions Affecting intelligence, in which I said that it was now established that genetic factors are the major determinant of intelligence, but that environmental factors are also involved. I proposed that these consisted of the quality and quantity of cognitive stimulation from others in the family. I suggested that this explained the tendency for only children to have the highest IQs, and for IQs to decline with increasing family size, and also that eldest and youngest children have higher average IQs than those in the middle of the family. I sent the paper to Sir Cyril Burt, who replied with a friendly letter saying that he agreed with me. After this, I corresponded with Sir Cyril from time to time and I always found him very friendly and helpful.

Prussian Americans most likely to serve in the U.S. military

Memorial Day is a good day to look at military data, and it happens to be an opportunity to echo Razib's call to mend, not end, the American Community Survey. The survey asked respondents their ancestry, and if they are now serving or ever served in the military. I limited the sample to native-born Americans and to people ages 20 to 39 in order to focus on a single cohort. I list the percentages who answered yes by their ancestry (sample size = 1.74 million) and since there are as many categories as countries in the world I only list groups with the highest and lowest numbers. The mediocre middle is left out.


Percent serving in the military now or in the past

Above-average groups

Prussian 12.7
South African 12.3
Guamanian 12.2
Germans from Russia 11.4
Okinawan 11.1
Panamanian 10.2
West Indian 9.9
Belizean 9.8
Indonesian 9.8
Scottish 9.4
Dutch West Indies 8.7
Pacific Islander 8.6
Sicilian 8.6
Scots Irish 8.1
Australian 8.0
African 8.0


Below-average groups

Haitian 3.8
Turkish 3.7
Arab 3.4
Egyptian 3.3
Vietnamese 3.0
Israeli 3.0
Iranian 3.0
Armenian 2.8
Palestinian 2.6
Chinese 2.4
Hmong 2.0
Asian Indian 1.9
Taiwanese 1.8
Pakistani 1.3
Macedonian 1.2
Iraqi 0.0

It's great that Prussians come out on top, but I suspect that some military folks are being selective in which part of their ancestry they identify with. The high-serving groups are an interesting assortment. Using GSS data, I reported in an earlier post that West Indians like Colin Powell are more likely to serve than most groups. Pacific Islanders have high numbers as do your well-known tough guys: the Scots Irish and Sicilians.

On the low end, you have Asians and Middle-Easterners. It looks like Muslims (and Israelis for that matter) don't like to serve, but does anyone know the religion of most American Indonesians?  Are they Muslims?

Also--Mexican-Americans, contrary to the claims of some, do not serve in high numbers. Between 4.4 and 5.3 percent serve or have served (depending on whether you focus on the "Mexican" or "Mexican-American" category). That's below the national average of 6.3 percent.

Predictors of support for gay marriage

Audacious Epigone has a great post on attitudes toward gay marriage. It made me wonder what best predicts support (sample size = 3,399, GSS, blacks and whites):

OLS standardized regression coefficients

Age -.11*
Sex .14*
Race -.02
Size of place .02
IQ .08*
Education .18*
Income -.01
Church attendance -.30*

*statistically significant

Irreligiosity is clearly the stongest predictor of support. Education, being young, and being female are in the middle, and a high IQ is the weakest significant predictor. Race, the size of your town, and income don't matter.

UPDATE: If I add political orientation to the model, there are two noteworthy changes: 1) being liberal becomes the strongest predictor of support, and 2) race becomes significant. When you remove the influence of liberalism, blacks become signficantly less supportive of gay marriage than whites.

Gender nonconformity and homosexuality

In the comments of an earlier post, someone wrote that there is very little relationship between masculine or feminine behavior and sexual orientation. From a 2003 review:

There are two main correlates of sexual orientation that point to an early developmental genesis. The first is the relationship between childhood gender nonconformity and adult sexual orientation (Bailey and Zucker 1995), which is generally considered one of the strongest of all developmental associations in humans (Bem, 1996). Homosexual men typically recall having been feminine boys, whilst homosexual females were masculine girls. Prospective work confirms this relationship for men (Green, 1987; Zucker and Bailey, 1995). In their meta-analysis, Bailey and Zucker (1995) report large effect sizes for the degree of this association (d=1.31 for men, d=0.96 for women). The gender nonconforming behaviours appear to be specific to childhood sex-typed activities and interests, rather than playmate preferences. Given evidence for an early formative role for androgens in the development of such behaviours, these data are consistent with neurohormonal differentiation theory (Berenbaum and Hines, 1992; Berenbaum and Snyder, 1995). These large heterosexual–homosexual differences in childhood sex atypicality also extend to adulthood, when assessed by “gender-diagnosticity” measures (the extent of male versus female typicality of interests). On these measures (as well as on traditional masculinity–femininity scales; Haslam 1997) gay men are typically more feminine and lesbian women more masculine in adulthood than their same-sex heterosexual peers (Lippa, 2000; Lippa and Arad, 1997).

IQ and religiosity

In the comments of the last post, it was stated that smart people are less religious. Let's remind everyone what the GSS says (sample size = 4,784, surveys 2000-2010, whites):

Scoring six out of ten on the vocabulary test is the mean. Whites in the highest IQ category are slighly more religious than average. Another way of looking at the question is the Pearson correlation. It is .01--overall the two variables are unrelated. (GSS is not able to isolate really smart people, so we can't talk about those folks.)

On the other hand, I know I've got some readers who think of religiosity in terms of belief rather than attendance. If this is what you have in mind, there is a weak negative relationship between intelligence (as measured by the vocab test) and confidence in the existence of God: it is -.14 (p < .01, sample size = 6,849 whites).

Atheism and crime

In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett claims that atheists are as law-abiding as believers.

The MIDUS study asked people their religious affiliation and if they had ever been in jail. The results (sample size = 2,183):


Percent ever in jail

Atheist 0.0
Agnostic 17.4*
No preference 13.0*
Spiritual 17.6*
Has a religion 4.8

*significantly higher than people with a religion


Zero of 18 atheists report any jail time. By contrast, agnostics, spiritual people, and those with no religion have significantly higher rates of incarceration. On the various measures of functioning that I've studied, the squishy middle categories often have the worst numbers.

UPDATE: Keep in mind that the current trend is toward more people having no religious preference (but still believing in God) or saying they are spiritual rather than having a religion.

While we're at it, MIDUS gives us another estimate of the percent of Americans who are atheist. The survey asked people to describe their religious affiliation, and "atheist" is one option. Only .8 percent of participants gave that answer. (The study was conducted 2004-2006.)

Vitamin B12 and infant brain development

In a new study in the European Journal of Paediatric Neurology, cranial MRI images were taken of 15 infants with vitamin B12 deficiency.

In our study, thinning of the corpus callosum was detected in 6 (40%), cortical atrophy in 5 (33.3%), ventricular dilatation in 3 (20%), large sylvian fissures in 5 (33.3%), hydrocephalus in 3 (20%), asymetric large lateral ventricule in 2 (13.3%) and retardation in myelination in 2 (13.3%) patients and 4 infants had normal MRI findings, respectively.

In conclusion, vitamin B₁₂ is important for development of brain. Severe and various neurological and neuroradiological findings may be seen in infants due to vitamin B₁₂ deficiency. Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency should be considered in infants with hypotonia or neurodevelopmental retardation and with neuroradiological findings such as thinning of the corpus callosum, cortical atrophy and retardation in myelination. The early diagnosis and treatment of vitamin B₁₂ deficiency is crucial for significant neurological impairment and long-term prognosis. Vitamin B₁₂ supplementation of pregnant women may prevent neurological and neuroradiological findings of the infants.

It is infants breastfed by vegetarian mothers who are most at risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. This is true in both undeveloped and developed countries.

Fertility among educated, never-married white women

In the recent post on the fertility of never-married women, Audacious Epigone suggested I look at trends over time. I calculated the mean number of offspring for white women ages 40 to 59 who completed at least 16 years of education:


Mean number of offspring

Fifties .00
Sixties .00
Seventies .00
Eighties .14
Nineties .16
Aughts .14
This decade .18

From the 50s through the 70s, educated, never-married white women had no children. Since that time, perhaps one out of six has a single child. The trend suggests that if all educated white women never got married, the numbers of educated white Americans would dwindle rapidly.

This graph shows trends in marital status among educated white women:

Singlehood among educated white women has been increasing for several decades but is still short of twenty percent.

Infant testosterone predicts toddler behavior

A new study from Hormones and Behavior:

The testes are active during gestation, as well as during early infancy. Testosterone elevation during fetal development has been shown to play a role in human neurobehavioral sexual differentiation. The role of early postnatal gonadal activation in human psychosexual development is largely unknown, however. We measured testosterone in 48 full term infants (22 boys, 26 girls) by monthly urinary sampling from day 7 postnatal to age 6 months, and related the area under the curve (AUC) for testosterone during the first 6 months postnatal to subsequent sex-typed behavior, at the age of 14 months, using the Pre-School Activities Inventory (PSAI), and playroom observation of toy choices. In boys, testosterone AUC correlated significantly with PSAI scores (Spearman's rho = 0.54, p = 0.04). In addition, play with a train and with a baby doll showed the anticipated sex differences, and play with the train correlated significantly and positively with testosterone AUC in girls (Spearman's rho = 0.43, p = 0.05), while play with the doll correlated significantly and negatively with testosterone AUC in boys (Spearman's rho = − 0.48, p < 0.03). These results may support a role for testosterone during early infancy in human neurobehavioral sexual differentiation.

Increases in suicide by sex

These graphs show 1999-2009 suicide trends for U.S. men (top) and women (bottom) separately (CDC) :

Both sexes ages 45-64 show large increases over the past decade.

Head Start does not work

A comprehensive study by DHHS shows that Head Start does not work:

Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1960s. And so it was "taken to scale," as the wonks say, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.  

It is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work. 

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

More suicide among people in 40s and 50s

The graph below shows 1999-2009 suicide rates by age group (CDC data):

Rates (not shown) are stable for children, adolescents, and younger adults, but suicides have been increasing for middle-aged people. By contrast, they have been dropping among those 75 and over.

How do we explain these trends?  Have advancements in medical care improved the quality of life for the elderly? Are people in their 40s and 50s increasingly feeling like failures at work?  More relationship, marriage and family disintegration?

Rushton on the skin color/behavior correlation

Phil Rushton and colleagues at the journal Personality and Individual Differences continue to push the the theory that genes explain the worldwide correlation between skin tone and important behaviors:

Pigmentation of the hair, skin, cuticle, feather and eye is one of the most salient and variable attributes of vertebrates. In many species, melanin-based coloration is found to be pleiotropically linked to behavior. We review animal studies that have found darker pigmented individuals average higher amounts of aggression and sexual activity than lighter pigmented individuals. We hypothesize that similar relationships between pigmentation, aggression, and sexuality occur in humans. We first review the literature on non-human animals and then review some of the correlates of melanin in people, including aggression and sexual activity. Both within human populations (e.g., siblings), and between populations (e.g., races, nations, states), studies find that darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity (and also lower IQ). We conceptualize skin color as a multigenerational adaptation to differences in climate over the last 70,000 years as a result of “cold winters theory” and the “Out-of-Africa” model of human origins. We propose life history theory to explain the covariation found between human (and non-human) pigmentation and variables such as birth rate, infant mortality, longevity, rate of HIV/AIDS, and violent crime.

As Razib Khan has explained on this blog, pleiotropy as the explanation of these correlations simply does not work. So what plausible theories remain? Any ideas?

Marital status and fertility among blacks

As a follow-up to the recent post on marital status and fertility, I used 2000-2010 GSS data to calculate the mean number of offspring for black women ages 40-59 by marital status. I looked at the low- and high-educated separately.


Mean number of offspring

Women with less than four-year degree (sample size = 440)
Married 2.65
Separated/Divorced 2.55
Never-Married 2.34

Women with four-year degree or more (sample size = 111)
Married 2.00
Separated/Divorced 1.62
Never-Married .71*

*significantly lower than corresponding married or separated/divorced groups


In the earlier post, we saw that white never-married women have fewer kids than married or separated/divorced women whether they are more or less educated. For black women, this is true only for educated women. Among less educated blacks, never getting married is not associated with significantly fewer kids.

If marriage disappears completely among blacks, its population will not drop dramatically as we see with whites; by contrast, only fertility among educated blacks--a comparatively small group--will shrink. Let's look on the bright side: the disappearance of your smart people is better than the disappearance of your race. 

Black rate of hate crimes against Hispanics is higher than for whites

Using FBI statistics, Audacious Epigone shows that blacks are much more likely than whites to commit an anti-gay hate crime. From the same table, I can calculate the difference for hate crimes involving Hispanic victims. The population-adjusted rate is 1.6 times higher for blacks than whites. This is another indication that blacks have a more serious problem with hate violence than whites. (The rate difference might be inflated some since the "white" numbers include Hispanics who are less likely to commit hates crimes against their own. On the other hand, keep in mind that "Hispanics" include many national groups, members of whom might not like each other.)

This FBI webpage lists the percentage of offenders of any type of hate crime by race. The population-adjusted rate for blacks is 1.8 times that of whites for 2010--the latest year available.

Marital status and fertility

In a chapter of the Meaning of Marriage, Roger Scruton claims that the move away from marriage reduces fertility below replacement level. Using GSS data since 2000, I calculated the mean number of offspring for white women ages 40-59 by marital status. If Scruton is right, married women will have the most kids, never-married will have the least, and separated/divorced women should be in the middle. Let's look at less and more educated women separately:


Mean number of offspring

Women with less than four-year degree (sample size = 1,759)
Married 2.23
Separated/Divorced 2.14
Never-Married .46*

Women with four-year degree or more (sample size = 866)
Married 1.88
Separated/Divorced 1.63
Never-Married .15*

*significantly lower than corresponding married or separated/divorced groups


Never-married women have fewer kids than married or separated/divorced women whether they are more or less educated. Educated single women have hardly any children at all. A society made up of these type of women would pretty much disappear in a historically short period of time. Next, I'll look at black women.

Growing support for gun rights

This Pew graph shows recent growth in support for private gun ownership. I suspect this is part of larger trend that favors maximum individual lifestyle freedom. Other examples include more people favoring legalization of marijuana and gay marriage. How nice it would be to see the acid of individualism attack minority race-loyalty.

Gender reversal on career goals

These two Pew graphs show how young women are now more ambitious than men. Sixty-six percent of females ages 18 to 34 say career success is "one of the most important things" or very important" in their lives. The corresponding figure for young men (seen below) is only 59 percent.

I expect this new gap will further weaken the institution of marriage. I'm not sure if the Girl Power crowd is aware of this consequence. Radical feminists, of course, are cheerleading the decline. If a man does not earn more than a woman, he is less attractive as a partner. Most women want a husband, but they are less likely to enter marriage and are quicker to exit it if the man offers fewer positives. Marriage is still comparatively strong among high status people, but economic incentives matter.

I watched Senator Lieberman on Fox News Sunday. Am I off-base here, or is he the reincarnation of Droopy the Dog?

Are women catching up to men at being unfaithful?

According to this Huffington Post columnist, women are smarter than men at infidelity, and they are catching up to men in prevelance.

The GSS asked respondents if they ever strayed. I divided answers into two periods: 1991-1998 and 2000-2010. In the first period, 23.0 perent of men and 13.1 percent of women cheated (sample size = 8,103). The difference is statistically significant.

In the second period, the figures are 23.4 and 14.5 percent (sample size = 9,304). Again, men are significantly more likely to be unfaithful than women, but the latter estimates for both sexes are not significantly higher than their respective numbers from period 1. The GSS does not support the view that women are catching up with men. And I don't have any data concerning the cleverness of female cheating.

Are stay-at-home moms unhappy?

This Time columnist thinks that homemakers are so unhappy (and angry), social change is called for. What does the GSS say about their level of unhappiness?

I included mothers since the 2000 survey to maximize sample size. Respondents were asked how happy they are these days. Answers range from "very happy" (1) to "pretty happy" (2) to "not too happy" (3). I calculated means for mothers of all work statuses. Higher means indicate more sadness (sample size = 5,286).


Mean sadness score

Full-time 1.82
Part-time 1.78
Temporarily not working 1.90
Laid off 2.05*
Retired 1.82
School 1.83
Keeping house 1.83

*significantly sadder than full-timers


According to GSS data, there is no difference in mean level of happiness between mothers working full-time and homemakers.

People prefer male politicians with lower voices

Here's a new study from Evolution and Human Behavior:

It may be adaptive for voters to recognize good leadership qualities among politicians. Men with lower-pitched voices are found to be more dominant and attractive than are men with higher-pitched voices. Candidate attractiveness and vocal quality relate to voting behavior, but no study has tested the influence of voice pitch on voting-related perceptions. We tested whether voice pitch influenced perceptions of politicians and how these perceptions related to voting behavior. In Study 1, we manipulated voice pitch of recordings of US presidents and asked participants to attribute personality traits to the voices and to choose the voice they preferred to vote for. We found that lower-pitched voices were associated with favorable personality traits more often than were higher-pitched voices and that people preferred to vote for politicians with lower-pitched rather than higher-pitched voices. Furthermore, lower voice pitch was more strongly associated with physical prowess than with integrity in a wartime voting scenario. Thus, sensitivity to vocal cues to dominance was heightened during wartime. In Study 2, we found that participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice when given the choice between two unfamiliar men's voices speaking a neutral sentence. Taken together, our results suggest that candidates' voice pitch has an important influence on voting behavior and that men with lower-pitched voices may have an advantage in political elections.

I remember being annoyed in 2008 with McCain's Bruce Dern-like voice. Romney and Cain had the best voices during the recent primaries. Romney might have a slight advantage over Obama. Cain and Obama are definitely better singers.

The voting behavior of housewives

How do housewives vote?  According to the GSS, 63 percent voted for Obama (sample size = 131). Among married women (sample size = 73), 49 percent voted for him. One hundred percent of never-married stay-at-home women went for Obama (sample size = 19). Sixty percent of homemakers say they are political moderates. How large is the demographic? They are 16 percent of voting women.

Lesbianism among Jewish women

The question came up over at Steve Sailer's blog if Jewish women are more likely than other women to be lesbian. It wouldn't surprise me since data reported on this blog indicate that lesbians tend to be smarter than average, and they are more likely to come from wealthy homes. According to GSS data, here are the percentages of women by religion who say they are lesbian (sample size = 10,981):


Percent lesbian

Protestant 1.8*
Catholic 1.6*
Jewish 1.4
No religion 4.0

*significantly less than the no religion group


No evidence here for more Jewish lesbians.

From what I hear, straight Jewish women are plenty good at denying men sex.

The link between intelligence and cooperativeness

In a sample of almost 4,500 men, a positive correlation (.23) was observed between general intelligence and the general factor of personality (GFP). GFP captures one's ability to work well with others. According to the authors, general intelligence evolved to generate more resources while GFP evolved to secure a larger share of group resources.

The positive correlation suggests four types of people, two of which are more common and two of which are less uncommon. The more frequent types are smart-cooperative and dull-uncooperative people. Less common are smart-uncooperative and dull-cooperative folks.   

Disliking races might be a personality trait

The GSS asked respondents how warmly they feel about: 1) whites, 2) blacks, 3) Hispanics, and 4) Asians. Answers ranged from very cool to very warm. I correlated answers for whites. The mean correlation is .63. While there is substantial range--from .45 for white-white to .81 for Asian-Hispanic--the main story here is that if a person dislikes one group, he tends to have comparatively cool feelings for all groups, even his own. I found the same basic results when I limited the analysis to the black sample or a sample of those of some other race.

We can construct a typology here for all races. Roughly half feel warmly toward all races. Thirty percent or so are neutral toward everyone. Fifteen percent like their group but dislike everyone else, and five percent can't stand anybody. The consistent attitude for various groups leads me to think one's disposition toward groups is a personality trait. It's probably related to one's attitude toward people in general: trusting and warm versus suspicious and hostile.