Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Who has the higher rate of bias crimes against Jews--whites or blacks?

The mainstream Media finds every opportunity to push the story that hate comes from the Right. Even when Black Hebrew Israelites kill three Jews in a kosher market in Jersey City, it's somehow caused by MAGA-wearing Trump supporters.

Unlike the Media, this blog relies on data. The FBI puts out annual hate crime statistics--2018 is the most recent.

There were 228 anti-Jewish incidents in which the race of a single-race offender is known. In 179 or 79% incidents, the offender was white or Hispanic. (The US government tends to lump us together.) Blacks committed 41 or 18% of the anti-Jewish crimes. The Census tells us that 77% of US residents are white (if Hispanics are included) while blacks are 13% of the population. Based on these numbers, the rate of anti-Jewish incidents for blacks is 1.4 times that of whites. Blacks--not famous for being right-wingers--are significantly more likely to commit bias crimes against Jews.

While I'm at it, look at the total numbers. There were 228 incidents--896 if we include all incidents in 2018, even those where the race of the perpetrator is unknown. According to the Census, the US has 6.9 million Jews, so the annual rate of anti-Semitic incidents is 12.9 per 100,000. To give some context, the annual US homicide rate hovers around 5 per 100,000 total population, so these incidents are not much more common than homicide--a very rare type of crime.

Moreover, of the 372 incidents against Jews where the type of crime was recorded, the most common category by far is intimidation--243 incidents or 65% of all incidents. There were only 24 aggravated assaults and 11 murders. While any attack is serious, the US has roughly 15,000 murders per year. Hate crimes are a minuscule part of the problem.

UPDATE: The hate crime laws were written with evil whites in mind--our elites assume the worst of whites and the best of non-whites--so I suspect that prosecutors are prone to interpret incidents by whites as hate, while incidents committed by blacks are likely to be seen as common crimes.

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Among the greatest movie directors, will you find more women or gay men?

Why have almost all of the greatest movie directors been men?  Don't women like movies just as much as men?

Feminists, of course, would blame the patriarchy: Men have mysteriously gotten control of the world and will not let the helpless women do fun things like make movies.

But if discrimination has been so pervasive in the film industry, why in the world have we seen so many top homosexual directors?  I'm not convinced that men before the 1970s were that dead set against women occupying important positions. Just the other night, I watched an old film titled, "Kansas City Confidential" (1952), and the lead female was studying to take the bar, and none of the male characters cared in the least.

Now, imagine the same story, but the romantic interest is a gay man preparing for the bar.  Do we see movies like that for most of the 20th century?  Hell no. Off the top of my head, I know that Clark Gable did not want George Cukor--known to be a homosexual--to direct "Gone With the Wind" and was influential in having him replaced by Victor Fleming. While there were plenty of homosexuals in Hollywood, people loathed it.  No matter--gay men thrived in Hollywood and Europe as well. Perhaps you doubt this.

I went to the website "They Shoot Movies, Don't They? and looked at their list of the top 250 directors of all time. The ranking is based on such factors as voting by directors and critics. I categorized a director as gay or bisexual if Wikipedia indicated they were. I put together the following list:

Gay Directors (from top 250)

Pedro Almodóvar
Lindsay Anderson
Kenneth Anger
Marcel Carné
Jean Cocteau
George Cukor
Terence Davies
Jacques Demy
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (bisexual)
Robert Hamer
Todd Haynes
Vincente Minnelli (bisexual)
F. W. Murnau
Pier Paolo Pasolini
John Schlesinger
Gus Van Sant
Luchino Visconti
Lana Wachowski (male-to-female transgender)
Lilly Wachowski (male-to-female transgender)
James Whale

I included the transgender Wachowski brothers since transgenders should face discrimination, if it is indeed such a profound problem.

That's 20 gay, bisexual, or transgender directors or 8% of the total. Keep in mind that sexual minorities are less than 8% of men, so they are over-represented among the greatest directors.

How about women?

Female Directors (from top 250)

Kathryn Bigelow
Jane Campion
Claire Denis
Danièle Huillet (co-director with her husband Jean-Marie Straub)
Leni Riefenstahl
Agnes Varda

That's 6 or 2.4% of the total, and let's not forget that if women we're punching at their weight, they would be half of the best directors. Their numbers are abysmal.

You might counter that discrimination was intense through 1970, but things have changed and that is why we see that all top women are from the past few decades. Again, I would argue that if bias was intense prior to 1970 for women, it should be even more so for gay men--a hated minority if I've ever seen one--yet easily half of them worked prior to 1970.

The facts suggest that men are simply better at making movies. If a studio exec wanted to make the best "Little Women" possible in 1933, he needed to hire George Cukor and not give a damn about his "quirks." If a woman would have done it better, I submit that the studio execs would have swallowed hard and given her the job, even in 1933. A lot of money was on the line.

What qualities do men possess that give them such an advantage? Well, I'm no expert on directing, but I know that these are incredibly talented people at the highest percentiles of all relevant traits. These would include: intelligence, leadership, charisma, confidence, decisiveness, technical mastery, visual skills, writing skills (plot, character, dialogue, mood, humor), effective criticism, and ability to deal calmly through all the drama that comes with managing creative types. There is evidence that at the highest levels, men surpass women on these traits. And, by the way, the traits are all rooted in biology.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Which is more important for education attainment: your IQ or your dad's social class?

While I am convinced that genes are a strong influence over people's lives and that the impact of the parenting is wildly exaggerated, I am open to data on these questions--I call myself Inductivist after all.

This meta-analysis of 15 heritability studies conducted in a variety of countries and decades found that shared environment explained a sizable portion of the variation in educational attainment; to be specific, almost 40%. That's a much higher average than typically seen in heritability studies.  The authors also found that shared environment was stronger for women and for people studied prior to 1950, suggesting that factors like family financial support have mattered more for women and for people in the past.

We can use General Social Survey data to answer a related question: Is educational attainment due to IQ or dad's socioeconomic status (SES)?  First, let's see how strongly each predicts years of education completed (I limited the analysis to data from 2010-2018, sample size = 947):

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Model with Father's SES only
Father's SES  .37***

Model with Child's IQ only
Child's IQ   .45***

IQ is the stronger of the two predictors, but nurturists might argue that father's SES causes child's IQ which, in turn, determines educational attainment. We can address this question by entering both into the model as predictors. By doing so, we can see if the link between IQ and education shrinks to nothing once we've accounted for the influence of dad's SES.

Model with Father's SES and Child's IQ
Father's SES   .24***
Child's IQ  .44***

When both predictors are entered into the same equation, the father's SES/child education correlation is reduced, but the impact of IQ on schooling is basically unaffected. We can interpret these findings this way: How far you go in school is influenced by your dad's social class (consistent with the meta-analysis), but your own IQ is much more important. The strong correlation between IQ and schooling is not at all due to the tendency of high-status men to both have smart kids and to help them continue in school.

By contrast, part of the reason why father's SES is linked to child's educational level is because high status men have smart kids, and smart people naturally go further educationally. Once you take into account the pathway from dad's status through offspring IQ to completed education, the link between dad's class and child's educational attainment is weakened substantially. In other words, factors beyond the kid's IQ, like family financial support, are not as strong important as they look.

I looked at females only and got the standardized coefficients of .23 (dad's SES) and .43 (child's IQ), so the process works the same for girls as well as boys.

I also looked at mom's SES, and I found very similar results.

***p < .001, two-tailed test

UPDATE: The strong correlation between IQ and years of education reminds me of Taleb's anti-IQ argument: IQ-type tests get you into college, so there is a built-in correlation. There might be a link between test score and which college you get into, but there is no such circularity with how many years of school you complete. Regardless of your test score, you can get admitted to some college.

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

The 2010s were a disaster for social conservatives and eugenicists

Whether you are a social conservative or a eugenicist (let me know if there is a less loaded term), we have experienced an unmitigated disaster in the 2010s.  Both camps want healthy married parents having lots of healthy kids that are raised in a safe home.  Here are a series of graphs to document trends away from this:
















The percent married has dropped from 68% in the 1970s to 44% in the 2010s. And look at the trend in never-marrieds: the rate doubled over the past five decades from 14 to 28%.
















The trend is sharper if we only look at young people (ages 18-34). Among this group, the percent married has plummeted from 61% to 30% while the percent never-marrieds jumped from only 30% to 64%. In a word, early marriage is collapsing.
















Accompanying the decline in the institution of marriage is fertility among intelligent women. This graph shows the number of kids for women ages 40-59 with IQs of 118 or higher.

We see a collapse in the number of these women having four children, a strong increase in the percentage having two kids, and most disturbingly, a doubling of childless women--from 15 to 31%.
















A current priority of elites is to get women as educated as possible so they can have the type of careers that give them maximum autonomy.

The social conservative and the eugenicist, by contrast, know that prioritizing female education kills fertility among intelligent women and renders a society incapable of replacing itself with talented people. Maybe there is no necessary connection between education and fertility, but under current conditions, the link is very strong.

The above graph shows the tremendous growth in four-year and advanced degrees among American women. The number of intelligent women like my mom who finished high school, got married, and had four healthy children has become a rarity.
















The success of the gay marriage movement might be the most visible family-related loss that we social conservatives experienced in the past decade. The graph above shows the complete reversal of attitudes among young people (ages 18-34) concerning gay sex. (The General Social Survey doesn't have a question about gay marriage that spans the decades.)

The popularity of same-sex marriage is an important indication that Americans are replacing the belief that an important life purpose is to have a large biological family with the belief that the purpose of life is self-fulfillment and that being married or having one or two kids (biological or not) might work toward fulfillment for some people.

I suspect over the long-term that reproductively-oriented people tend to inherit the earth. Muslims and Africans might eventually displace Western Europeans. More virile people might eventually displace sterile Americans as well.


Saturday, December 21, 2019

Racial identity as revealed by the GenForward Survey

A reader at Reddit pointed me to this table from GenForward, an online survey of young Americans (ages 18-34). It's associated with the University of Chicago. You can see the question they asked about identity and the results by race:
















The results are consistent with my analysis GSS data of adults of all ages, but the identity politics is seen more sharply here among young Americans.

Race is most important for nonwhites. Race (probably some of it ethnicity) is 3rd most important for whites. Religion is not important in any group except for Hispanics, perhaps. It's 5th for whites. Class and gender are important. Sexuality ranks highest among blacks which supports the stereotype of blacks being more obsessed with sex than the rest of us (which is saying a lot).

The one thing that could unite us--American nationality--is one of the least important identities. It reaches its peak--4th--among whites. The future looks like identity politics.

The one type of identity that will probably be considered illegitimate by elites for the foreseeable future is whiteness. Every other interest group will push, but when whites qua whites push, they will likely be crushed by the powers that be. I could be wrong, but I don't see a time when elites will ever see whites as simply another normal interest group.

UPDATE: One problem with the question is that it seems to be designed to emphasize the kinds of identity that are closely linked with politics. While the sample is of young adults, some people will be married and have kids by their early thirties, but 'marriage' or 'parenthood' (or something like 'family' which can be important at any age) are not included. These identities are important to many people, and I suspect the popularity of gender might be linked in people's minds to family roles.

Also--since the question asks about identities that "have the most impact on your life." some liberals whites might be want to choose race since they feel their white privilege is so consequential. I'm thinking of a new Inductivist slogan: "The definition of white privilege (or Jewish or Asian privilege) is the accident of being part of a social network that has more people who have their shit together."

What's most important for identity--race or religion?


The view of many human biodiversity (HBD) people is that genes are a critical determinant of human behavior and culture, and the power of genes gets expressed at the individual, family and ethnic/racial levels. The contention that race as a genetic reality is a tremendous social force is, of course, the most controversial.

In a recent piece published at Unz.com, E. Michael Jones challenges this view by arguing that the key distinction among Americans is religion, not race.  While some HBD-ers contend that the fundamental conflict is racial, and old-time Marxists would argue that it's class, Jones sees the central struggle between the alliance of Protestants and Catholic versus Jews. He would update his view to include the growing presence of Muslims, but he sees people with no religion as lacking an identity, as being social nobodies, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the irreligious are drawn to identity politics. So it sounds like Jones is acknowledging the growing power of non-religious identities like feminist, gay, racialist, etc.

One way to measure identity is to look at marriage: If religion is really important to you, you will probably marry someone of the same faith.  Using General Social Survey data, I looked at the percentage of people who marry inside their group. I include ethnicity (i.e., where your family originally came from) as well as current religious affiliation. Religious denomination is shown in bold.

Percent who married within their own group 

Blacks  90.4
American Indian  87.5
Asian Indian  86.4
Protestant  86.3
Southern Baptist  83.6
Lutheran Missouri Synod  82.8
American Lutheran  81.9
Chinese  80.8
Orthodox Christian  80.0
Mexican  79.7
Jewish  79.5
United Methodist 79.1
American Baptist  77.8
Catholic  76.8
United Presbyterian  73.4
Episcopalian  73.2
Japanese  68.8
Puerto Rican  67.6
Filipino  66.7
No religion  42.9
Greek  38.9
German  37.6
Dutch  34.4
English/Welsh  34.0
Russian  32.1
French Canadian  31.5
Spanish  29.8
Irish  27.6
Polish  27.3
Norwegian  21.6
Czech  18.5
Austrian  14.8
Danish  12.5
Scottish  12.5
Swedish  11.7
French  9.4
Swiss  8.3

Keep in mind that many of these people got married a long time ago, so with the recent decline in religiosity, the numbers for religion shown here are probably high.

Having said that, the most endogamous groups tend to be non-whites followed by religious denominations. White ethnicities, even those of a putatively ethnocentric bent (e.g., Greeks, Irish), are the least likely to marry within the group. As sociologists predicted some time ago, white ethnics are simply becoming whites. But the intermarriage rates of whites with Asians and Hispanics (about 60% of inter-racial marriages are between whites and Hispanics or whites and Asians) and the lack of voting as a bloc suggest that white consciousness is pretty weak.

Even though the Protestant endogamous rate is high, I'm skeptical that this is as meaningful as Jones thinks. As a Catholic, he may think they're all the same, but who really identifies as a Protestant? As a Southern Baptist, yes. As a Mormon, yes. There is very little common identity and unity among Protestants. For one thing, there is a major divide between conservative Evangelicals and liberal Christians.

Jones makes a good point that religion is an important source of identity for many Americans, but he overstates the case. Non-whites are growing in number in the US, and for them race is important.  As religion declines, people are developing political identities--progressive, feminist, sexual minority, or racialist. Jones says that "Logos is Rising"--that Catholicism is growing.  According to the data, "Raza is Rising."

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Are Mexican immigrants less tidy than others?

The debate continues on Twitter about whether Hispanic immigrants tend to litter more.

On a related issue, General Social Survey interviewers rated the homes of respondents in terms of cleanliness from 'very clean' (1) to 'dirty' (5).  I calculated the means for those born in the US and those who were not (sample size = 7,062). The mean for native-borns is 1.96, the mean for immigrants is 1.86, so immigrants are not messier, they're cleaner.

What if we look by ethnic group and immigrant status? Let's limit the analysis to groups with at least 100 respondents. I'll put immigrant means in parentheses.

Mean unclean house score

Blacks 2.17  (2.02)
Mexican  2.00 (2.05)
Irish  1.98 (1.60)
Scottish  1.95 (1.89)
German  1.88 (1.68)
English/Welsh  1.84 (1.68)
Polish  1.84 (1.55)
Italian  1.77 (1.89)

Immigrants tend to be cleaner than native-borns. Mexican and Italian immigrants are the exceptions with slightly higher means than their American-born counterparts. On the question of Mexican immigrants, their score is only surpassed by blacks.

UPDATE: As I indicated, the debate actually focuses on Hispanics, not just Mexicans. The mean for all Hispanic immigrants is 1.90. For native-born Latinos, it's 2.03--a mean that is very close to that of Mex-Ams, and is only surpassed by blacks.





Friday, December 13, 2019

Which city has the most litter?

Call it a peculiarity, but I loathe, hate, and abominate litter. The crying Indian ad campaign must have really worked on me when I was a kid.

The 2015 American Housing Survey asked people from ten cities if they have litter on the streets within half of a black of their residence. Here are the percentages who answered yes:

Percent with litter on their block

Memphis  12.3
New Orleans  10.7
Milwaukee  10.3
Pittsburgh  10.0
Portland  10.0
Cleveland  9.3

All Cities  8.9

Cincinnati  8.6
Denver  7.6
Kansas City  7.2
Raleigh  3.7

Residents of Memphis are 3.3 times more likely to report trash than people in Raleigh. Sorry Elvis, I'll take Raleigh. One difference between the cities is that Memphis has twice the percentage of blacks.

As much as I hate litter, it does serve a social function: it signals there are low-quality people around. Greater risk of getting mugged.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Do Hispanics litter more than whites?

Steve Sailer was debating yesterday with some immigration researcher about whether Hispanics litter more than whites. The American Housing Survey asks respondents if there is trash within half a block of their residence (sample size = 21,720). I show below the percentage of people by race who say there is a little or a lot:

Percent with litter within half a block

Blacks  15.9
American Indians  10.2
Hispanics  9.6
Whites  6.2
Asians  5.2

This is a racial/ethnic pattern that pops again and again with respect to all kinds of antisocial behavior: blacks and Native Americans are at the top, Hispanics are higher than whites, and Asians are better than everyone else. On the specific issue of Hispanics vs. whites, the percentage saying yes about trash is 1 1/2 times higher for Hispanics.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Who's smarter--Trump or Hillary voters?

This new article from Medium.com concludes that Trump voters are 3-5 points dumber than Clinton voters. Wrong.

The General Social Survey asked respondents whom they voted for in 2016. I'll exclude immigrants since the IQ test is biased against people who aren't good at English (sample size = 891). The mean IQ for Hillary voters is 99.20. For Trump supporters, mean IQ is 99.32--slightly higher. 

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Are smart people not athletic?

A commenter on Twitter claimed that we HBD folks have a tacit belief that intelligence and athletic ability are inversely related. I've never read anyone make that hypothesis. If anything, HBD types would probably say that the two tend to run together since they are both reflections of health-promoting genes (or the absence of deleterious mutations).

I suppose this is getting pieced together from certain HBD-emphasized facts: West Africans tend to be fast sprinters, but have low average IQ scores; Jews, on average, are smart but you have to go back 100 years to see them thrive in the NBA. That kind of thing.

I looked at General Social Survey data, and found the following correlations between IQ and self-reported athleticism:

Correlation between IQ and athletic ability (sample size = 1,130)

Total sample  .05
Whites  .02
Blacks  .15
Asians  -.09

We see a very weak positive link for the full sample, but it varies by race: It's basically non-existent for whites, noticeably positive for blacks, and negative for Asian Americans. Perhaps smart blacks look at sports as an opportunity for scholarships, while smart Asians see sports as a distraction.

Sunday, December 08, 2019

What is the strongest correlation I've ever estimated?

Everyone who does social research knows that correlations about people are typically weak. You suspect that IQ predicts criminality, but then the data tell you the association is a mere .2. This is the rule rather than the exception. People are complicated. You can't reduce their behavior to a single factor. Plus, measurements are far from precise.

But on rare occasion, connections can be strong. The correlation between your education and your spouse's is .6 or .7.  The link between number of delinquent friends and one's own involvement in delinquency--about .6. Pretty good.

The largest individual-level correlate I've ever calculated (macrolevel correlations tend to be bigger) deals with sexual attraction: Using data I collected myself on 330 people, the point biserial correlation between being male and level of attraction to females is .82. For women being attracted to men, it's .84. Those are huge numbers.

Another way of describing it is in terms of standard deviations: the gap between male and female attraction toward females is 3.6 standard deviations. The difference between the two sexes on liking males is just as big--3.6 sds. You've probably heard that the black-white IQ gap is big. It is, at ONE standard deviation. The attraction gap is enormous.

Now you might be saying, duh, we would expect men to like women and women to like men.

Well, you might expect that, but then again you don't have a PhD in Gender Studies. Many years after the idiot Kinsey claimed that sexual attraction is a continuum, not categorical, researchers are still making similar claims.

With a continuum, one assumes that males will range from being strongly attracted to females to being strongly attracted to males, but most men will be somewhere in the middle with various levels of attraction for both sexes. The same for women. Most of them will have a mix of attractions. If this were the case, being male would not be a strong predictor of level of attraction to females. But common sense and my data predict the outcome very well: what do you know, men like women! And women like men!

I'm afraid a great deal of social research makes us dumber, not smarter. I'd love to see a great deal of it scrapped.

UPDATE: The latest sex theory I've come across claims that our ancestors were indiscriminate copulators: They would hump anything that moves. So males and females being attracted to each other was not the original system. With its de-privileging heterosexual sex, I predict the theory will be wildly popular.

Thursday, December 05, 2019

Do blacks perceive more discrimination in high-black or low-black regions?

I don't know if anyone has put forward the hypothesis in some formal way, but I have run across the idea that while mistreatment by whites is common among blacks generally, it's REALLY bad in areas with few blacks. The reasoning seems to be that whites are very racist everywhere, but concentrations of blacks are able to push back and suppress the discrimination to some extent. By contrast, isolated blacks are more powerless and consequently have it really bad.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked blacks, "How much discrimination is there that hurts the chances of blacks to get good-paying jobs?" Since there were only 152 respondents, I took the nine regions used by GSS and collapsed them into two: one high-black and one low-black category.
I also divided up the country into North vs. South under the assumption that the South is more racist.

Answers ranged from "a lot of discrimination" (4) to "none at all" (1) so higher numbers indicate greater perceived discrimination. Here are the means:

Mean perceived job discrimination

North High Black  3.56
North Low Black   3.38
South  3.29

The region with the greatest perceived discrimination is made up of parts in the north that have the most blacks. Contrary to the stereotype, there is no evidence here that the South is more racist--it scores the lowest. In the middle are low-black areas in the north. When I say north, I mean the mountain states and the west coast as well as the north proper. (You don't see a low-black southern region because there is no such place in GSS data.)

So GSS data contradict the view that black communities that are small, isolated, and surrounded by many whites have it really bad. Blacks think they have it better when their numbers are small.

My guess would be that perceived discrimination is affected a great deal by exaggeration, a phenomenon that gets magnified among large concentrations of blacks.

UPDATE: This hypothesis of large numbers magnifying the perception of discrimination doesn't work for the South which has many blacks but scores the lowest on discrimination. A reader suggested that progressives encourage blacks to see mistreatment, but some low-black areas contain many liberals: the West Coast, New England, Minnesota. I wonder if the perception of bias depends on how one is treated when applying for a job. Southerners and perhaps many people in low-black areas might have a softer touch than employers in places like Chicago or Detroit. Discrimination is typically an ambiguous thing. People are not going to admit that they're not hiring you because they don't like blacks, so people have to rely on cues. A brusque manner could be interpreted as bias.


Monday, November 25, 2019

How much dumber are big families?

We know that dumb people tend to have larger families, so I was curious about how much IQ drops with each additional child. Here's the mean IQ by family size (sample size = 26,388, immigrants excluded):

Mean offspring IQ by number of children

1    101.4
2    101.2
3    100.2
4      98.4
5      97.1
6      95.2
7      94.2
8      93.0
9      91.7
10    90.8
11    89.6
12+  88.8

If we do an OLS regression, we see that for each additional child, the predicted drop in IQ is 1.13 points. This doesn't mean, of course, that having more kids causes IQs to fall. It simply means that the dumber the couple, the bigger the number of children. As shown in the movie "Idiocracy," smart people see every reason to delay having kids, while the dull ones do what comes naturally.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Do high-income men marry younger wives? What about men with a history of many sex partners?

Evolutionary theory claims that men value physically attractive partners while women desire partners with high status. Normally, we think of status in terms of income, but we can divide men in terms of their sexual success with women. Physical attractiveness is correlated with youth, so I calculated the age difference for married couples. The following is the average number of years that the husband is older than the wife (General Social Survey, sample size = 338):

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by husband's income

Low-income      2.93
Middle-income  2.23
High-income     1.66

This is the opposite of what we predicted: the age gap is smallest for the high-income. Evidently, wealthy men and their wives are more egalitarian, while poor couples are more traditional.

And by number of sex partners since age 18?

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by sex partners since 18

0-3       1.81
4-6       2.86
7-9       2.08
10-19   2.48
20+      4.54

The mean bounces around for the lower numbers, but the men with 20 or more sexual partners have the youngest wives by far.

Sexually successful men seem to be trading their appeal for more youthful wives, but this does not seem to be the case for men with lots of money.

Friday, November 22, 2019

How often are the highly intelligent found among the poorest people?

In the last post, it was mentioned that high IQ people are VERY diverse in terms of income. Many are not particularly interested in pursuing lots of money. But let's look at the other end: Few people would want to be poor, so does IQ keep one out of poverty?

Using General Social Survey data, I looked to see how many people in the highest IQ category (125+) are found in the lowest 10% of income earners (sample size = 16,626). For men, it's 3.4%. So smart guys have a low rate of poverty, but not all escape it. I imagine these men have serious physical or mental health issues.

For smart women, it's 8.0%. Their rate is lower than average, but not by that much. In addition to the health issues that men might face, some intelligent woman are likely to be stay-at-home moms who don't earn much.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Does IQ do a better job of predicting income among younger or older adults?

We know that IQ only has a moderate correlation with income, and it looks like much of this is due to the fact that intelligent people are very diverse in terms of earnings: some are super rich but many aren't very interested in money and pursue other things. I, for example, don't make more than my dad who was a maintenance man and belonged to a union. I could have pursued high-paying business jobs like my brothers, but I was drawn to academics (unfortunately!).

But does the correlation vary with age? Perhaps the earning capacity that comes with IQ becomes more and more evident with the accumulation of years.

Using General Social Survey data, I calculated Pearson correlations between IQ and personal income. Here are the correlations by age group and gender:

Correlation between IQ and income

Men
Ages  18-24  -.03
          25-34   .14
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .26
          55-64   .27

Smart men ages 18 to 24 actually make slightly less than their less intelligent counterparts. Smarter guys are more likely to be in college and thus not earning much money. But we can see the correlation grows with older age groups, and it peaks only in the decade before retirement age.

Women
Ages  18-24   .03
          25-34   .20
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .22
          55-64   .24

We see the same basic trend with women.

These findings are consistent with individual difference research in general: Traits matter more over the long-term and less in any particular situation.

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Who's more likely to sex and labor traffic--Americans or immigrants?

Recently, I posted on which races are most likely to engage in sex trafficking.  What about immigrants? Compared to Americans, are they more likely to be criminals of this type?

They sure are. Immigrants are 14% of people living in America, but they are 33% of convicted sex traffickers. That's three times the rate of native-borns. Even more striking, immigrants are 69% of those who enslave workers. That's almost 14 times the rate of Americans.

Sex and labor trafficking: work that Americans are unwilling to do.




Tuesday, November 12, 2019

What kind of people think that having kids increases one's social standing?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked American adults if they agreed with the following: "Having children increases people's social standing in society." Answers ranged from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The answers looked like this (sample size = 1,248):

Percent distribution

Strongly Agree  3.7
Agree  29.4
Neither  30.5
Disagree  31.3
Strongly Disagree  5.0

Answers are pretty normally distributed. People simply disagree on this issue.

I looked at a list of variables to see what predicted agreement--age, sex, race, city size, South v. North, income, education, IQ, church attendance, and political orientation.

The only three variables that matter are sex, income, and education: 39.6% of men agree or strongly agree that children increase one's social standing compared to only 27.7% of women. Perhaps women are more likely to see kids as obstacles to status since conventional status comes from education and work; activities that, for women anyway, conflict with raising children.

43.2% of people who dropped out of school agree or strongly agree that children give status, while only 31.8% of people with advanced educations feel the same.

Income is similar: 34.7% of low-income but only 25.2% of high-income people agree or strongly agree with the statement.

Since there is some tension between energy devoted to kids versus education and work, it looks like people who have earned lots of education and income status tend to devalue children, while the opposite is true for people with little conventional status.

I once discussed this issue with my physician brother-in-law. I told him that the most accomplished people are having the fewest children and that he and I were exceptions with our large families. I added that in an evolutionary sense, all these successful people were losers but didn't realize they were losers. My brother-in-law then responded, "That's right. We've got them right where we want them."

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Police officers of which race are most likely to use deadly force?

The Media constantly do stories of white officers who seem trigger happy, especially if the suspect is black. Is such a portrayal accurate?

No. This study analyzes data on 291 officers involved in 106 shootings in New York City. Shooting officers were compared to non-shooting officers at the same scene. The authors found that black officers were 3.1 times more likely to shoot suspects than officers of other races. That's a big difference.

New research has reported that officers with high scores on impulsivity are quicker to pull the trigger than highly-controlled officers. Impulsivity is a major cause of criminality, too, and has been used to explain the black/non-black gap in crime.

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

"Do the Right Thing" 30 Years Later

I avoid angry black movies because they're so boring. The recent "Blackkklansman" by Spike Lee was unbearable.

That was not always the case. When I was in college, I went to see "Do The Right Thing" and was sympathetic. I felt the same when I watched the LA Riots and "Malcolm X" three years later.

Since that time I got a real education on racial issues, but I wondered how I would react to seeing "Do The Right Thing" after 30 years.

It struck me as a fairly realistic portrayal of a black urban neighborhood minus its menace and criminality. (I lived in Brooklyn in the mid-80s and wouldn't be caught dead in a poor black neighborhood.)

The only black person working is Spike Lee's character--the protagonist--and he must be the slowest pizza delivery guy in the history of the world. The guy has no real plans and doesn't support his girlfriend (Rosie Perez) and son much.

Nobody seems to be employed (okay, Lee's sister works), but everyone is good at bitching about whatever, and people talk and talk as if they're going to accomplish something.

Sal, played well by Danny Aiello, is an Italian who owns and runs a pizzeria in the middle of the black neighborhood. He and the Korean shop owners across the street are the only industrious people around.

The martyr of the story, a young black man who gets accidentally killed by the police, is a narcissist who ticks off much of the neighborhood by constantly blasting Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" from his boom box.

How does the neighborhood respond to excessive use of force by the police? Do they organize in order to get police reforms? Do they donate money so the young man's family can sue the police department and the city?  Do they teach their youngsters to comply with police demands, and if they're mistreated to file a complaint at the department?  No, Lee knows his people. They burn down the best restaurant in the neighborhood.

But then we have the true race realism moment:


What a great scene. Sometimes Leftist movies accidentally spill the truth.


P.S. Some might see Lee's movie as prescient since it focuses on police violence. It is better described as influential. The elite college students from my generation absorbed a vision of the world held by people like Spike Lee, and they now run organizations like the New York Times. The police have been killing blacks for a very long time, but only now it's The End of the World.

Sunday, November 03, 2019

Are kids with gay parents more likely to turn out gay?

During the gay marriage debates, the claim was frequently made that children from gay families are not more likely than others to develop a same-sex orientation.

I was always skeptical of the claim because: 1) gay parents should at least make kids feel more comfortable about going with a gay identity; and 2) if the kids were biological offspring, they would probably face a higher risk of homosexual orientation via genes from a parent. In addition, I didn't rule out the possibility that gay parents might provide a more permissive environment for kids so they are more likely to have pleasant same-sex experiences when they are young and impressionable.

This new study shows that the claim about gay families was false. 76 adult biological offspring of a woman with a lesbian partner were matched demographically with 76 controls. Women from these families were: 1.5 times to be sexually attracted to other women; 2.4 times more likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual; and 1.4 times as likely to have same-sex experiences.

Compared to controls, men from lesbian families were: 3.1 times more likely to be sexually attracted to men; 4.3 times more likely to identify as gay or bisexual; and 3.8 times more likely to have had same-sex experiences.

There is no evidence here that lesbian parents have more impact on girls than boys, either by passing on genes that raise the risk of same-sex attractions for daughters but not sons, or by gender-specific socializing. In fact, the parent-child link seems to be stronger for males. (This could be due to the very high rates of same-sex attraction, identification, and experiences among the female controls. How do I make sense of this? I suspect women in their 20s in the past decade have lived in a pro-lesbianism culture which makes their numbers not that dissimilar from female peers from lesbian families.)

My guess would be that moms are passing on mutations on to sons and daughters that tend to disrupt heterosexual brain development.  I suppose an encouraging environment could convince someone with same-sex attractions to pursue and embrace the identity, but I doubt this would explain such large differences. And I doubt that lesbians are providing a perinatal environment that raises the risk of the kind of infection posited by gay germ theory.

UPDATE: tantum (@QuasLacrimas) over at Twitter made a good point that these results do not support sexually antagonistic selection. According to the theory, genes that make a daughter more feminine and attractive and thus more reproductively successful will raise the risk that a son will develop a homosexual orientation. The daughter's success compensates for the son's reproductive failure so the genes are not weeded out. The logic is the same for lesbianism, with the advantage/disadvantage reversed.

Such a theory would predict that lesbians would be likely to have masculine, straight boys, but this study found that lesbians are much more likely to have gay sons. 

Saturday, November 02, 2019

Members of which race are most likely to be victims of inter-racial violence?

What are the patterns of inter-racial violence?

This report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics is an analysis of 2012-15 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data based on hundreds of thousands of American households. Victims of any kind of violence (assault/battery, robbery, rape) are asked about the specifics of the crimes committed, including the race and Hispanic status of offenders. Of course, we don't have data on homicides since "dead men tell no tales."

Adjusting for group size, I calculated the ratio of black-on-white crimes versus white-on-black crimes. Blacks are 6.3 times more likely to attack whites than the reverse.

Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely to commit some kind of violence against whites than whites against Hispanics.

Finally, blacks are 4.8 times more likely to assault Hispanics than vice-versa.

Elites always portray whites as the victimizers, but when it comes to rape, robbery, and assault (and murder which shows the same patterns) whites are most likely to be the victims, and blacks the perpetrators.

UPDATE: Looking at the numbers, what drives the large black-white difference is that despite the large numbers of whites in the population, their share of all black victimizers is small. Whites rarely attack non-whites. Their violence is confined mostly to other whites. 


Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Quick thoughts on polyamory

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote a piece for Quillette that sees polyamory becoming a mainstream part of modern society.

Assuming that he is right that openness to polyamory is growing, I suspect this is part of a larger trend toward greater cultural libertarianism: pursue your desires as long as you don't aggress against others. It's another step in the move away from institutions and roles and toward contracts. It's the view that there there is no proper way but your way (as long as you don't harm anyone).

I'm surprised that Miller doesn't see this trend as getting close to as a society that is purely a reflection of biology.  Many traditional institutions seem to be designed to check human nature. "I want all attractive women." "Sorry, you get one." "My old wife isn't sexy anymore. I want to trade in her in for a younger model." "Sorry, you get one, for good."

What does a cultural libertarian society look like?  What does nature look like? Miller should know. Women are picky and want a high-status partner who reliably gives his abundant resources to her. Those men are in short supply. Men want many partners but so do other men, and they find themselves in a competitive situation with limited resources. High mate value men tend to win by getting the most attractive women, and getting the most women. Low mate value men tend to get a partner by devoting resources only to her, but some of these men get no one.

Isn't this what we'll get if polyamory grows? There will be no institutional constraints on alphas. They will focus on being players, and many women will respond to their attention. Men of low mate value will have a harder time winning over a partner, and their offer of monogamy will be worth less in a society that does not value it. Like the alphas, they will long more strongly for multiple partners since there are no dominant institutions telling them monogamy is the right way, but many of them will get no women, forget about many. A large population of young men with no access to partners is not good for the stability of society.

Evolutionary biology teaches that humans tend to follow one of two strategies: high mating effort or high parenting effort. One tends to happen at the expense of the other. Under polyamory, interest will be shifted toward pursuing mates. Parental effort will suffer. That means fewer children--as if we don't already have a problem replacing ourselves--and the care given to children will be of lower quality.

It looks like such a system would select in evolutionary terms for dominant and slick men rather than solid, steady men. Society benefits from more steady men and fewer con artists.

More promiscuity leads to more jealousy which is a major cause of homicide. The US already has the highest rate of homicide among wealthy countries.

From what I can see, we need more monogamy, not less.

UPDATE: This pro-polyamory position taken by Miller seems to be another case of privileged people advocating lifestyles that can work for them but that wreak havoc on vulnerable populations. I suspect that people like Hugh Hefner bear some responsibility for present-day Black America.

Monday, October 28, 2019

Some facts about transgenderism

Archer's Father (@DoctorOcelot) from Twitter directed me to this recent analysis of transgenderism based on data from 90k Californians. Let's go over noteworthy findings.

The study finds that .35% of adults identify as transgender. While this rate is much higher than in the past, the only reason why so much public concern is devoted to such a small group of people is that liberals always need a fresh crusade. 

Demographically, transgenderism is largely a white thing. While the percentages of transgenders that are black or Asian are about what you'd expect from the racial composition of California, the white rate is much higher, and the rate for Hispanics is much lower. To be specific, whites are 4.8 times more likely to be transgender than Latinos. You tell me why the gap is so big.

Slightly more than half of transgenders start out as life as males. The plurality (46%) now say their gender identity is transgender. The next largest group (32%) identify as female, so this shows a tendency for male-to-females (MtF) to be the clearest about who they are.

Compared to cisgenders, transgenders have much higher numbers of gays and lesbians (20%) and bisexuals (45%), so in terms of sexual orientation, transgenders are a very messy group.

Other stats not specified here indicate that transgenders are more likely to be: poor, less educated, and psychologically and physically unhealthy. They suffer from high rates of emotional disturbance, depression, disability, and positive HIV status.

This reminds me of the recent study of homosexuals which showed genetic correlations with psychological difficulties and substance use.

The picture that emerges is of people who perhaps have a high number of mutations that disrupt the type of development that aligns one's anatomical sex with his gender identity and his sexual orientation--an alignment which makes an individual likely to be reproductively successful. In addition to this, other brain systems responsible for psychological health are also disrupted. 





Saturday, October 26, 2019

Are men funnier than women?

This new meta-analysis of 28 studies finds that men are funnier than women. The gap, however, is not large (Cohen's d = .32).  To get specific, 63% of males get more laughter than the average female. 

The authors explain the difference in evolutionary terms: Women are choosier than men when selecting mates, and humor serves as an indicator of mental fitness that is not easy to fake. You're funny or you're not. This pressure has supposedly selected for men who can make people laugh.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Does sexual abuse of children lead them to identify as homosexual?

It is the position of this blogger that biology has a very strong impact on overall patterns of human behavior. That said, I don't dismiss the role of the environment. Add to that the fact that liberal scholars (redundant) bring all their bias into their research, so I instinctively want to check out what they are horrified to think might be true.

Case in point is the social influence on the development of homosexuality.  I have presented evidence previously on this blog that homosexuals are more likely than others to have been sexually abused as children. But it could be that in a cross-sectional study that adult homosexuals, trying to make sense of their orientation, will look back at their childhood and "discover" abuse. Or it might be that they are gender non-conforming as children and are thought to be homosexual, and are thus targeted by older people with same-sex attractions.

I found a study which responds to the issue of looking back and "finding" abuse by examining the relationship prospectively. Kids were identified as abused and followed over the years until they were around age 40. People who were sexually abused as kids were significantly more likely to report ever having had a same-sex partner.

Concerning the question of what comes first--orientation/nonconformity or abuse--this study of almost 36,000 people uses an instrumental variable technique to determine whether abuse is causing orientation or vice-versa. The authors conclude that abuse is causing (really, contributing to) orientation.

Males are usually the abusers, and it might be that abusers of boys are closer to them in age so it might be less aversive than with girls and might encourage boys to identify as gay while abuse of girls might be by older males (or perhaps more likely to be family members) and is more likely to be experienced as aversive which encourages a lesbian orientation. (The authors also mention a twin study in which approximately 65% of the variation in sexual orientation is due to unique environment.)

Friday, October 18, 2019

Is IQ just a measure of social class?

A common claim by IQ skeptics is that the test simply measures social class.  If an IQ score is simply a proxy of social status, then the two variables should be very highly correlated. The statisticians tell us that a good proxy should correlate with the original variable at no less than 0.8. 

An excellent example of a worthless proxy that is used all the time in social science research is opposition to racial preferences. It is used for whites as a proxy of racism.  The correlation between opposing preferences and feeling cool toward blacks is a whopping 0.1--a trivial relationship.

So what's the correlation between your class and IQ score?  I'll be generous to the skeptics and choose the measure of social class that correlates most strongly with intelligence; namely, father's educational level. Using the General Social Survey (GSS), I exclude immigrants since they are likely to have a disadvantage on the test (which is an English vocabulary quiz).  Here is a visual of the relationship (sample size = 20,533):

















Sure, IQ rises with dad's highest degree earned, but the connection is not strong. To be specific, the correlation is only .27.

This is a typical problem for sociological explanations. In this instance, the privilege of one's class is supposed to determine one IQ's score. The mechanism should work in lockstep fashion with few exceptions, so the correlation should be almost perfect.  But in sociological research, most observed correlations are weak.  The world is much messier than the sociologist predicts.

The geneticist does not face this problem. Since each sibling is genetically unique (and there is also developmental noise), he expects lots of IQ diversity within a family. And that's exactly what we get: two randomly selected full siblings are expected to differ in IQ by 12 points. That's a lot. 

The sociologist predicts siblings (at least same-sex siblings) will have the same IQs. That's way off.  Since parents and offspring differ genetically, the geneticist predicts only a modest link between social class and IQ, and that is exactly what we get.

Again, biology trumps sociology.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Does IQ explain crime among blacks and Hispanics?

Criminological research usually finds that crime is most common among people with IQ's around 90.  Samples, however, are predominantly white.  Does the IQ finding hold for non-whites?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asks respondents (American adults) if they have ever been arrested, and it also gives a vocabulary quiz that can be used to measure IQ. 

Since the sample size for Hispanics was small (92) I created only three IQ levels: 1) less than 83 (low), 2) 83-97 (low-medium), and 3) over 97 (above average).  The graphs show the percent ever arrested by IQ level:

Whites (n = 3,100)
















For whites, involvement in crime is highest among the low-medium group (16.9% arrested). This is what studies usually find.

Blacks (n = 699)
For blacks, roughly 17% of respondents at all IQ levels report having been arrested. (Keep in mind that blacks tend to under-report contact with police. I don't know if this tendency varies across IQ levels).

Hispanics (n = 92)













The low-medium IQ group has the lowest arrest rate among Hispanics.  Around 25% of the low and high groups report an arrest.

In sum, IQ helps explain crime among whites, but it does not predict crime like you'd expect among blacks and Latinos. Above-average individuals are at least as likely as the unintelligent to be involved in crime. 

Sunday, October 06, 2019

Which race is most likely to enslave workers and to make sex slaves out of children?


In the last post, I showed that whites have a much lower rate of sex trafficking compared to other racial groups.  Now let's look specifically at child sex and labor trafficking.

The numbers shown below compare the rates of child sex trafficking by non-whites to that of whites:

Times more likely to engage in child sex trafficking than whites

Blacks   14.6
Hispanics   5.3
Asians   3.1
Others   2.9

While the racial differences are not as large here as they were with all sex trafficking, they are still striking.  All groups, especially blacks, are much more likely to traffic children.

Here are the differences for labor trafficking:

Times more likely to enslave workers than whites

Blacks   2.0
Hispanics   5.7
Asians   40.0
Others   83.0

The Asian/white gap is enormous and shouldn't surprise anyone. It's ironic that blacks are now two times more likely to enslave workers than whites. And look at "Others"--American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and persons of two or more races--the gap is giant.

White folks are just awful, aren't they?

Saturday, October 05, 2019

Guess which race has the highest rate of sex trafficking

The traditional way of looking at prostitution is being changed.  Academics and criminal justice officials are moving to the concept of "sex trafficking" which stresses that the pimps (men) are the villains while the prostitutes (women) are the victims.  Grown women, as well as underage girls, are assumed to be exploited.  Criminal justice policy is also shifting toward greater punishment for Johns (men). The old pimp/prostitute understanding was insufficiently feminist.

Some police departments are devoting considerable resources to convict traffickers who could easily get 10 years behind bars for sex trafficking.

So who are the traffickers?  Is the stereotype of the black pimp based in reality?

This Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report gives the breakdown:

Percent of all trafficker suspects by race

Blacks   43.7
Hispanics   29.2
Asians   13.2
Whites   12.8
Other    1.2

I'll assume many of the "others" are American Indians.  Of course, we need to adjust for group size.  Since whites have the lowest rate, we'll make them the comparison group.  The list below shows how many times a member of a given group is more likely to be a pimp than a white person:

Blacks   16.8
Hispanics   8.1
Asians   16.5
Others   6.0

Compared to whites, blacks are 16.8 times more likely to be pimps. That's a huge difference, but the difference is about as large for Asians. (I treated "Other" as Native Americans, but that is probably an inflated number since the category will include non-Natives).

Asians usually have the lowest crime rates (by far) but not here.  My guess is that white men are much less likely to be pimps because they are more decent to women generally.  In the next post, I'll look specifically at child and labor trafficking.

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Data suggests Hispanic criminality is similar to that of blacks

Over the years, people like me have disagreed with Ron Unz that the rate of serious crime by Hispanics is not much different than that of whites.

Analysts typically rely on police or imprisonment data to estimate Hispanic/White differences, but Hispanics are significantly less likely than whites to report crimes to the police. Since Latinos are typically victimized by other Latinos (crime is typically intra-ethnic), there is an undercount of crime committed by Hispanics.

Using victim data is a method around this problem.  The National Crime Victimization Survey contacts tens of thousands of people each year to ask them about being victimized.  We can use these statistics as proxies of crime rates for various races/ethnicities. I took the estimates for 2014-2018 and averaged them since there is quite a bit of annual error, especially in a group as small as Asians.  Here are the percentages of people who were victimized by serious crime in the past year:

Percent victimized
Blacks  2.1
Hispanics  2.1
Whites  1.6
Asians  1.0
Other  3.1

See how the rates for Hispanics and blacks are the same. Prevalences for whites and especially Asians are significantly lower.

I doubt serious criminality among Latinos is exactly the same as blacks. While most crimes are intra-racial, some of the victimizations of whites, Latinos, and Asians are by blacks committing robbery or assault.

By the way, I assume that the "Other" category is mostly American Indians. Their very high prevalence is consistent with Cochran and Harpending's hypothesis that racial groups with deep histories of agriculture and powerful states experienced selection for docile and self-disciplined individuals.  Criminological research has found that criminals tend to be impulsive and disagreeable.  As people with shorter histories under agrarian states, Native Americans might have a higher percentage of these types.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Compared to other Americans, do Jews identify as 'citizens of the world'?

This year is the 15th anniversary of the publication of The Jewish Century, a very honest and insightful book by Jewish scholar Yuri Slezkine. Among many other things, Slezkine claims that the Jewish diaspora, compared with majority national groups, has identified more with the tribe and the international community and less with the nation-state.  According to him, when Jews tried to become nationalists, they dominated the highest rungs but, in the end, were rejected as interlopers. 

So, what's the situation in the US now?  Compared to other Americans, do Jews identify more as global citizens and less as Americans?  In 2014, General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked, "How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I feel more like a citizen of the world than of any country."  I excluded immigrants (sample size = 1,065).  Answers ranged from "strongly disagree" (scored as a 1) to "strongly agree" (scored as a 5).  Here are the means by religious affiliation:

Mean "Citizen of the World" Score

Buddhist   3.00
No affiliation   2.81
Catholic  2.67

Total Sample  2.66

Christian   2.63
Protestant  2.61
Jewish   2.12

Of the groups large enough to include in the list (10 or more respondents), Buddhists and the unaffiliated have the highest globalist scores, while Jews are actually at the bottom of the list.  The gap between the highest and lowest groups is nine-tenths of a standard deviation.  That's a large difference.  According to GSS data, Jews are real patriots.


Saturday, September 21, 2019

Do Western populations place more value on self-sacrificing spousal love?

I'm currently reading the brand new book by Kevin MacDonald titled Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.  I don't always agree with him, but I'm interested in anyone with big balls and interesting ideas.

According to MacDonald, Western populations evolved to value self-sacrificing love in prospective mates in order to cement close family environments and paternal investment in harsh northern environments.  Since this is an element of a slow life-history strategy, East Asians should value this trait as well, while blacks should be shifted more toward short-term mating strategies.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked American respondents how much they agree with four statements about loving one's partner with a deep, devoted, self-sacrificing type of love.  I summed the answers to the four questions to create a scale (alpha coefficient = .83).  (It's funny: as I write this, I'm hearing these lyrics on YouTube: "I dried your tears of pain, babe, A million times for you, I'd sell my soul for you babe, For money to burn with you, I'd give you all, and have none, babe.")

Next, I calculated the mean score for ethnic/racial groups with at least 20 respondents (sample size = 1,040).  Here are the results:

Mean Love Score

Germans   13.98
Southern Europeans   13.77
American Indians  13.60
Mexicans   13.58
Italians  13.46
English/Welsh   13.38
Polish  13.38

Total Sample  13.37

Irish  13.32
Scottish  13.21
Scandinavians  13.08  
East Asians  12.34
Blacks   11.84

Americans of German descent and southern Europeans are at the top of the list, while East Asians and blacks are at the bottom.  The gap between Germans and blacks is seven-tenths of a standard deviation, a large difference.

Consistent with MacDonald's prediction, whites are in the top spot, and blacks are last.  He doesn't focus on East Asians, but he relies on life-history theory, and East Asians should fit the "slow" strategy of high family investment. 

The results seem somewhat cultural.  I noticed that not only southern Europeans but Latin Americans (many nationalities were too small to make the list) tend to score high.  This is consistent with the stereotype of the romantic Latin. 

Friday, September 20, 2019

Do young women now earn more than young men?

Stefan Molyneux retweeted today the claim that young single women now make more than young single men.  Is that true?

Using General Social Survey (GSS) data, I calculated median incomes for never-married men and women ages 18 to 29 without children who are working full-time.  The numbers shown below are the sex difference between medians, and I include all decades since the 1970s for comparison (sample size = 2,539).  The figures are in constant dollars.

Difference between median male and female incomes 
1970s    1,366
1980s    5,484
1990s       538
2000s    2,625
2010s    6,309

Young men have made more than young women in every decade for five decades, and the biggest gap has been this decade.

The gap is not due to some patriarchal conspiracy (Remind me guys, when and where is the next meeting?) to keep women down. Young men take jobs that make higher wages like construction, while young women are more likely to do something like childcare which doesn't pay crap.

More women are in college, too, so that will make them earn less in the short-term.

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Does agricultural history of racial groups predict self-discipline?

Let me show you a typical move by a liberal researcher (redundant).  Imagine you want to show that blacks face bias when applying for a job.  A liberal propagandist will simply cite a statistic that blacks get turned down more often than whites as proof of discrimination. 

The researcher knows that anyone with two brain cells will counter that, "There might be reasons other than bias that blacks are less likely to get the job. They might be less likely to have preferred qualifications like a college degree."

So the researcher does a statistical analysis that adjusts for education. When the racial effect persists, the analyst concludes that it is due to discrimination.  An obvious problem with this approach is that it is assumed that race is a measure of bias. You assume what you're trying to demonstrate.

Having said that, I'm going to do exactly what the progressives do, only with my own preferred theory.

I wrote recently how Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending theorize that groups that have deeper histories of agriculture will differ in personality traits. They argue that success at farming requires the ability to plan for the long-term and the discipline to carry out the plan. If you eat your seed grain, you will have nothing to plant in the spring.

Length of agricultural goes like this from longest to shortest: Middle Eastern, Chinese/Europe, sub-Saharan African, and Native American. So the level of planning and discipline--called "conscientiousness" by personality researchers--should follow the same pattern.  We don't have an adequate number of Middle Easterners in the General Social Survey sample, so let's include Jews to represent this group. We also add Hindus as another group with a long agricultural history.

The dependent variable in the regression model is years of education and the predictors include IQ plus dummies for all these ethnic groups.  The idea behind the model is that one's education is determined by his IQ and his level conscientiousness. Once we adjust for IQ, if the ethnic dummies are still significantly related to education, this reflects conscientiousness.  I chose blacks to be the reference group since they are a large group with a shorter (and more isolated) agricultural history, and so they should be toward the low end of conscientiousness.

Here are the results (sample size = 8,898):

Years of education (standardized OLS regression coefficients)
IQ   0.43***
Jewish   0.06****
East Asian  0.03***
Hindu   0.02
White  0.01
Hispanic   -0.02*
Native American   -0.07***
Other race  -0.02

The results are dominated by IQ.  It's a powerful predictor (contrary to what N.N. Taleb says. He would say IQ-like tests get you into the school, so it's circular, but the test doesn't finish your degree for you).  Jews and East Asians finish more years of education than what is predicted by their IQs. Hispanics and especially Native Americans complete less schooling than their IQ's predict.

Following my approach, the data suggest that Jews and East Asians have high levels of consciousness, while Native Americans and Hispanics (who are part Native American) are significantly less conscientious than blacks--the reference group.
 

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Does deportation of criminals have a eugenic impact on Hispanics?

Research indicates that the typical criminal has an IQ of around 90.  Since the mean IQ of Hispanics is in the same range, I wondered if the deportation of criminals is not eugenic for the Hispanic population.

Using General Social Survey (GSS) data, I estimated mean IQ for Hispanics who have ever been arrested and those who haven't.  I limited the sample to native-born Latinos since IQ tests in English are biased against people who don't speak English well (sample size = 92).

Arrestees have a mean IQ of 92.2.  For non-arrestees, the mean is 92.9--not much higher.

So it looks like removing criminal aliens does not raise Hispanic IQ.  On the other hand, removing them does help the US IQ which is around 97.  Also--removing criminals makes the Hispanic and US population less criminal. 

Are gun owners mentally ill?

  Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...