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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.