Is there a declining interest in science? Over at Steve Sailer's blog, there was a recent discussion about a loss of interest in science. I wondered if it were true of the population in general and mined some data from the 2006 science module of the General Social Survey. Respondents were asked if they would be interested in a TV program on the polar regions. I calculated the percentages who said they would be "very likely" to watch the show by age range:


Percent who are very likely to watch a TV science program

18-30 25.1
31-45 30.7
46-60 41.8
61+ 40.1

Now, I can't tell if these differences show a dropping in interest in science, an age effect (a tendency to like science more as one ages) or a cohort effect (something--like landing on the moon--impacted specific age cohorts). It's not due to more TV watching in general on the part of older people: only seniors watch (slightly) more TV than 18-30s.

If younger people are turning away from science, it's not for lack of studying it in school. Respondents were also asked if they took a physics class in high school:


Percent who took physics in high school

18-30 41.0
31-45 34.0
46-60 24.4
61+ 26.7

Science is difficult, technical, and dry. Traditionally a nerdy white guy thing, most of those types I see on campus now don't have the discipline for it.

Lazy Americans? The open borders crowd gleefully tell us how much immigrants inject energy into an otherwise lazy America. Well, I looked at data from the California Workforce Survey to see who does the most overtime. Respondents (N=868) were asked how often they worked more than 40 hours a week. Here are the percentages who said "usually" by racial/ethnic group:


Percent who usually work overtime

White 31.2
Black 22.4
American-born Hispanic 24.2
Immigrant Hispanic 26.2

Those fat, lazy white people might be fat, but they ain't lazy.

Long gun ownership on the decline

As a follow-up on the post about the decline of hunting, I generated these stacked bar charts showing trends in the household ownership of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. You can see that fewer people own either type of long gun which matches the dropping interest in hunting. The rate of handgun ownership, by contrast, seemed to grow very slightly until about a decade ago, probably in response to fear of crime, and may be slipping a bit more recently as crime rates have fallen. The NRA and all lovers of self-reliance must not be too happy about these trends.

One-third of very old blacks thinks the IQ race gap is genetic: As a follow-up to the last post, I wanted to look further into this very odd phenomenon of blacks who believe that their group does not learn as well because of inborn differences. I discovered that many elderly blacks (ages 70-90) believe this, especially if they were asked this question in the 1980s and were, therefore, born in the early part of the 20th century. The number for this group is 33 percent. Is the high number the result of experience and freedom from modern-day indoctrination, or were they indeed indoctrinated, only by the segregationist culture of their youth? I report, you decide.

Fewer Americans believe genes explain the race IQ gap

Whites

Blacks

Other races

I haven't taught for 30 years, but combining my time as student and teacher, it has been my impression in the classroom that people have grown less inclined to turn to genes as an explanation for behavior. This has seemed odd to me since scholarship has turned increasingly in that direction over the same period. The best scientists have been telling us one thing, while the classroom instructors, the media, and the public have been telling us something very different.

But this has all been my sense of the situation, so let's see what the data say. The General Social Survey has asked since 1977 if respondents agree that blacks are poorer and have worse jobs and housing because of an innate inability to learn. Over that time more than 20,000 Americans have answered that question, and the results for whites, blacks, and "others" are displayed above. The first year is 1977 and the last is 2006.

My hunch was correct. For whites, those agreeing dropped steadily from 27% in 1977 to 8% in 2006. Blacks have been asked this question only from 1985 on, and those agreeing fell from 18 to 12% over the period. Notice, how more blacks than whites look to genes now. The sample sizes are small for "others" but their numbers have fallen as well.

This suggests that public opinion does not follow science, at least in the short run. It follows instead the cultural and political trends of the time. There is something like a 50 year lag, and we've been under the dominance of the extreme environmental determinists for a long time now. Maybe before I'm dead the race realists will lead the culture, but I ain't putting any money on it.

Growing prissiness among American men? I looked at the General Social Survey to see if hunting is on the decline and if males hunters differ from other guys in IQ. Here are the numbers (total sample=11,659):


Percent of men who hunt
1977 34.1
1987 25.1
1996 27.8
2006 18.9


It sure is in decline. Is this a sign of a increasing prissiness among American men? Perhaps the couch is more comfortable and the Xbox safer and less work?


Mean IQ

Whites
Hunters 95.4
Non-hunters 100.8

Blacks
Hunters 86.6
Non-hunters 90.9

For both races, hunters are 4 or 5 points less intelligent. I don't imagine this was always the case: who hunted more than aristocrats? Is it a growing refinement of the right half of the bell curve? Once again, who was more refined than aristocrats? The American Male has morphed from Jim Bowie into David Bowie. (The singer got his name from the Alamo hero, by the way).

Approval for spanking is on the decline: Since 1986, the GSS has asked Americans if they feel that spanking is sometimes necessary. I looked the percent who said no:


Percent thinking that spanking is not necessary

1986 16.5
1996 27.1
2006 27.7

There was a jump in the late 80s, but it has leveled off in the past decade. This matches the trend I have witnessed in the classroom: more people seem to be uncomfortable with not only spanking, but also punishment in general. I could count on one hand the number of times I have spanked my kids, but no punishment? You gotta be crazy. No wonder we have so many poorly behaved kids.

Dumb people watch a lot of TV: I was pretty sure that brainiacs don't watch much TV, but it is blog policy to verify with hard data. The General Social Survey asked 14,233 Americans how many hours per day do they watch television. I calculated means for three levels of IQ by race:


Mean hours of TV per day by IQ

Whites
High IQ (126) 2.08
Medium IQ (98) 2.87
Low IQ (77) 3.24

Blacks
High IQ (126) 2.89
Medium IQ (98) 3.77
Low IQ (77) 4.06


It is true that IQ varies inversely with watching TV for both blacks and whites, but it interesting that blacks watch roughly an hour more than whites at the same IQ level. TV is a low-energy way to pass one's free time; whites might prefer more active pursuits. There aren't enough Mexican Americans to do the same analysis, but their overall mean is high at 3.48 hours per day.

Is IQ correlated with skin tone among blacks? The General Social Survey gave 437 blacks an IQ test (10 vocabulary words) and interviewers also recorded how dark their skin was from "very dark brown" to "very light brown." Here are the means:


Mean IQ by darkness of skin

Very dark brown 86.99
Dark brown 84.05
Medium brown 90.38
Light brown 92.77
Very light brown 90.99
All blacks 88.91

You might wonder why the mean is not 85 for all blacks--the black-white gap is not as large for verbal ability. Also--due to small samples, the only significant differences at the 95% level are medium and light over dark.

Dark and light browns are almost 9 points apart, a gap more than large enough to produce classes among blacks based on skin color. (Or the color-based classes produced the IQ gap?)

More than 1/3 of libs approve of sex among 14 year olds: The General Social Survey asked 16, 973 Americans about their political orientation and how they felt about 14-16 year olds having sex. Below you'll see the percentage who said it's not wrong or only sometimes wrong:


Percent who think sex among 14-16 year olds is not wrong

Extremely liberal 34.9
Liberal 22.4
Slightly liberal 15.6
Moderate 12.2
Slightly conservative 11.0
Conservative 6.5
Extremely conservative 7.7

What is wrong with you libs? Either you're total relativists--"bestiality isn't wrong if no one gets hurt"--or you make yourselves stupid by dropping all context: "well, nature has made these two 14 year olds capable of sex, and they do it in Timbuktu, so who are you to deny them their human rights?" The belief that every consensual act done by anyone at any time is peachy is dogmatic and is short on common sense.

American Indians are the most anti-immigrant (that's the Indians with the feathers, by the way): Using General Social Survey data, I calculated a mean score for each ethnic group in America on a question if one agrees that immigrants' ideas and culture improve American society. Answers ranged from "strongly agree" (1) to "strongly disagree" (5) so a high mean indicates that the group is least likely to think that immigrants make things better.


Mean anti-immigration score

American Indian 2.76
German 2.65
Irish 2.63
Italian 2.62
Blacks 2.53

USA 2.50

English/Welsh 2.42
Mexican 2.23

The focus on immigration these days is from Mexico, so it is no surprise the poor minority groups see little benefit from having tens of thousands of low-skill immigrants come to the U.S. each year to compete with them for jobs. Black liberalism offsets this a bit; American Indians are not as liberal. White ethnics seem less likely to buy the hype as well. Ethnic solidarity seems to trump job competition for Mexican Americans.

Young people increasingly against abortion

The question of the values of young people interest me since they indicate the direction in which the country is moving. The General Social Survey has been asking Americans about their attitudes toward abortion since 1972. I generated these graphs to show the trends in views of women ages 18 to 30 (yearly samples range from 110 to 250). Men of the same age group show similar trends, but the the pattern is a bit stronger for females. What we see is a basically flat trend (if you smooth out the wrinkles) until the mid-90s. At this point, feeling that abortion should be permitted begins to drop. This pattern holds for all the reasons given for an abortion.

So why are young people shifting toward more conservative values on abortion? Are they reacting to the excesses of their parents? We see a big drop circa 2000--are some young folks rejecting Clintonian sleeziness? Are evangelicals making inroads among this demographic?

Paleos dread Giuliani in the White House because endless war means more dead soldiers. Compared to hundreds of thousands of embryos and fetuses killed in cold blood every year, a few thousand guys who volunteered to die for honor and glory is small potatoes. Insider Republicans have already pissed little people like me off over issues of the war and immigration. Abortion is a vote determinant for quite a few voters (my mom doesn't give a damn about anything else), and people like me and an increasing number of young people are going to stay home or find another party if candidates like Giuliani are foisted on us.

Jews and cheating the government: My wife reminded me that in an analysis I did some time ago on ethnic differences in attitudes toward cheating on taxes, Jews were the worst, but that I didn't include them in the last post on lying to get benefits. So I calculated the estimate for the 49 Jews in the GSS sample, and zero percent said that it is not wrong to do that. Perhaps the differing results can be attributed to taxes being of particular concern to this wealthy group, while obtaining government benefits is more relevant to poor people.

Attitudes toward cheating the government: Americans (2,032 of them) were asked by the General Social Survey if it is wrong to give the government false information in order to get benefits. I calculated the percent who said it is not wrong by ethnic group:

Blacks 16.2
Puerto Rican 13.7
Mexican 11.7
Polish 11.3
American Indian 6.1
Italian 6.0
German 5.6

USA 5.6

Irish 4.1
French 1.9
English/Welsh 1.7
Scottish 0.0

Americans of Western European descent are the most honest, while poor minorities (except for Amerindians) and Eastern Europeans are least honest.

And by now you must think I'm harping on this point, but as our largest immigrant group--Mexicans--continues to pour into the country, the number of people trying to cheat the system will increase.

The most amazing thing I have heard in some time: Today, the Dean--a man who has spent much of his career trying to fill the school's faculty vacancies with women and minorities--in a room of six women, two Hispanics, one black, and one white man, said that only a sick racist would believe that white men are the group most discriminated against. (He was referring to comments in class by students that we faculty need to put a stop to.)

Does getting arrested help or hurt your chances of getting laid? Is it really true that that girls are attracted to bad boys? The General Social Survey asked 168 men ages 18 to 30 if they were arrested in the past year, and they were also asked how many sex partners they had during the same time period. Here are the mean number of partners:


Mean number of sexual partners in the past year

Arrestees 3.04
Non-arrestees 1.67

No competition. The brutes flout the law and deflower the girls, and evidently the girls like it.

Stuck-up street people: An amusing thing happened to me today, and I wouldn't mention it except that something very similar happened just a fews days before.

Roughly 90% of the panhandlers that hit me up for money are black in a town that's maybe 15% African American. The rest are white--I cannot recall a Hispanic ever asking me for money. And we are not talking a small sample size. In many parts of town, I cannot get out of my car to fill up the tank without someone delivering some lame story why they need my loose change. And I usually give them the coins in my pocket just so they will just leave me alone.

The other day, a very experienced bum approached me, saying something incoherent about needing change to cash a check for $20 (I thought, "Huh? Are you serious with that?"). I reached in to draw out my normally abundant load of change, and discovered that I had one dime. I told him all I had was the ten cents, and handed it to him. Then the amusing part happened: he totally snubs me! He gave me a haughty look, turned away coldly, and made me feel like a dirty beggar!

Then, today, someone sent a girl over to me with a story about them needing gas money to make it home. So I reach in and hand her about 75 cents, and this 12 year old hustler gets a sour look on her face and marches away irritated--and forget about her saying thanks.

I'm thinking about starting a march where I hold up a poster that reads: "To all you panhandlers: I am a Man!"

Does Hispanic immigration help Republicans in unexpected ways? Republican "strategists" tell us that immigration from Latino countries is good since these people, under all their liberal voting, are natural conservatives who embrace hard work and family values. People like me who actually consult the data know better, but what about the idea that a greater Hispanic presence drives whites to the right?

California is a great place to test this hypothesis since the Latino population is high but varied. I examined data from the 2000-2001 California Workforce Survey, where white residents were asked their party affiliation as well as the percentage of their community that is Hispanic. The sample size was 211, so I split the group roughly by forming one group of those who said that the Latino presence was somewhere between 1 and 3 out of 10; the other group was 4 to 10 out of 10. In the low-Hispanic group, 21% of whites said they were Republicans; for the high-Hispanic group, the number was 30%. Not a huge difference, but noteworthy.

It is also surprising, given that wealthy people can most easily select themselves out of high-Hispanic (poor) areas, and since wealthy people are more likely to vote Republican, this should decrease the Republican presence in Hispanic communities.

I would not be surprised at all to see whites grow increasingly race conscious and turning to the Republicans to deliver pro-white policies, as the country diversifies. The recent defeat of immigration amnesty is probably a sign of this.

Fear-mongering feminists

Readers have expressed skepticism that feminists are pushing the idea that marriage is dangerous for women because of the high risk of wife battery. Here's a little visual evidence I found on the Internet.

Mexican-Americans are least likely to read newspapers: If people are going to be good citizens, they need to be well-informed, and reading the daily newspaper is a big help. So which ethnic groups read the paper the most? The General Social Survey asked 24,672 Americans how often do they read the paper, with answers ranging from never (5) to daily (1). I calculated the means for each ethnic groups with at least 100 respondents (unless noted), then I subtracted the estimate from 5 so that the highest numbers reflect the most frequent reading:


Mean newspaper reading score

Poles 3.40
Lithuanians 3.38 (78)
Austrians 3.36
Russians 3.35
Danes 3.35
English/Welsh 3.23
Japanese 3.21
French Canadians 3.2o
Scots 3.17
Finns 3.16
Yugoslavs 3.16
Norwegians 3.16
Czechs 3.19
Swiss 3.18
Swedes 3.11
Dutch 3.11
Germans 3.11
Irish 3.10
Italians 3.10

USA 3.03

Hungarians 3.01
Chinese 3.00
West Indians 2.98
French 2.97
Greeks 2.97
Arabs 2.95 (N=41)
Blacks 2.83
Spain 2.83
Portuguese 2.81 (N=68)
Asian Indians 2.76
American Indians 2.63
Puerto Ricans 2.59
Mexicans 2.41

Eastern and Northern Europeans read the most, while Southern Europeans, Arabs, Asian Indians (I'm surprised) and poor minorities read the least. And like with so many of my lists, Mexicans fall to the very bottom. But hey, white racism cripples their motivation, and who can afford 50 cents these days? (By the way, did the rapper 50 Cent get his name from his love of newspapers?)

Do blacks drink less than other groups? Surveys usually indicate the whites and Hispanics drink more than blacks. This is sometimes used to argue that blacks also engage in less problem drinking. (A black student once berated me for suggesting that blacks are less likely than whites to be arrested for DUIs because they drive less: she said any idiot knows that blacks drink less). The General Social Survey can shed some light on this question. Respondents were asked what was the maximum number of drinks they had in one day over the past year. Here are the percentages at different levels (Caution: the sample size is only 41 for blacks and 36 for Hispanics):


Maximum drinks in one day in the past year--percent in each category

Hispanics
Doesn't drink 8.3
1-4 drinks 58.4
5 or more 33.3

Blacks
Doesn't drink 31.7
1-4 drinks 46.3
5 or more 22.0

Whites
Doesn't drink 18.0
1-4 drinks 65.4
5 or more 16.6

These data help clarify the issue: blacks are more likely to be teatotallers and heavy drinkers, with fewer who are moderate.

And the Inductivist does it again: while answering a question about another topic, he runs across numbers that make Hispanics look bad. Of the three groups, they have the most heavy drinkers and the fewest abstainers.

Self-righteous libs are the ones with underperforming hearts: Readers expressed interest about altruism by ethnic group and political views, so here are the percentages who donated blood in the past year:


Percent who gave blood in the past year

Vote in 2000
Bush 20.3
Gore 14.5

Ethnic group
Dutch 23.3
Norwegian 22.1
Mexican 21.0
Irish 19.4
English/Welsh 19.3
Scots 18.3
Italian 17.6

USA 17.5

German 17.0
American Indian 14.7
Puerto Ricans 13.3
Black 12.9
Swedish 12.1
Jewish 11.9
French 10.9
Poles 9.6

Let me begin with the less interesting first: Americans of northwestern European descent appear to be the most altruistic (with Swedes as an exception--the blood alcohol content is too high for donation, perhaps?). Since I am always running into data that make Mex-Ams look bad, they should get their props here. And blacks are low, as a reader suggested.

Now for the fun part: conservatives can't possibly donate a lot of blood because you have to have a heart to have blood, right? WRONG: those self-righteous libs are actually the ones with underperforming hearts.

Religion and donating blood: Some readers evidently didn't like my analysis on religion and soft-heartedness. In their view, the measure I used is problematic, and behavior, not self-characterization, is the important question. Well, the Inductivist is here to please, so I have calculated the percent who have donated blood in the past year at least once by religion (I limited analyses to religions with at least 30 survey respondents):


Percent who donated blood in the past year

Christian 19.7
Catholic 17.5
None 16.2
Protestant 15.6
Inter-denominational 12.9
Jewish 11.9

These numbers do not support the view that religion generates altruistic behavior since those without a religion are ranked third in a field of six. Again, I am surprised that Jews are at the bottom.

Of course, it's conventional wisdom in sociology (if it can be said to possess any wisdom) that affiliation is not particularly potent--it's commitment to a religion that matters. So does blood donation vary by attendance?


Percent who donated blood in the past year by frequency of church attendance

More than weekly 19.7
Weekly 19.0
Nearly every week 17.4
Two or three times/month 19.8
Once a month 20.1
Several times a year 16.7
Once a year 14.4
Less than once a year 15.9
Never 11.1

Those who attend, whatever the frequency, are not that far apart, but the irreligious are noticeably stingier with their blood.

The social skills of brainiacs: Intelligent people are thought to be socially inept, and while I would agree that the brainiest are rarely the social butterflies at a party, the General Social Survey supports the idea that individuals with high IQs are social in the sense that they discuss things with a broader network of people. Participants in the survey were asked how many different people do they regularly discuss important matters with. Here is the average by IQ:


Mean number of people with whom you discuss important matters by IQ

High IQ (126) 3.17
Medium (98) 2.33
Low (70) 1.68

Dumb people chat--an essential skill in casual social situations--while smart people discuss. They see small talk as a waste of time and fail to develop those skills, and their social lives suffer as a result.

Does Christianity make people soft-hearted? I often wonder how much influence religion really has on people. The General Social Survey asks people how well does the term soft-hearted describe them. Their answers range from "not well" (1) to "very well" (5). Here are the means by religion:


Mean soft-heartedness score

Inter-denominational 4.37
Protestant 4.23
Christian 4.16
Catholic 4.08
Jewish 3.95
None 3.91
Muslim 3.69
Buddhist 3.12

Clearly, Christians are the most compassionate. From knowing people, I would have guessed Jews.

Homosexuality and IQ: Looking at educational data in a post last year, I showed that men who report exclusively homosexual sex have above average years of schooling. I'm not sure why, but let's take a look at IQ data from the General Social Survey and look at a broader range of sexual orientations (I've limited the analysis to whites since sample sizes are too small for blacks):


Mean IQ

Gay men 104.8
Bisexual men 98.0
Straight men 100.0
Lesbians 102.2
Bisexual women 99.3
Straight women 101.3

First, gay men and lesbians have the highest numbers. In the earlier comments, someone made the reasonable speculation that smart people are simply more likely to admit they are homosexual. (Keep in mind they are simply asked about sexual behavior, not orientation). But shouldn't the numbers also be high for bisexuals as well? They are not. Perhaps smarter people also have the courage and decisiveness to make a clean break from heterosexual behavior? Or, are gay men and lesbians really smarter for someone unknown reason? They seem smart to me.

Hunger in America? Americans are so fat and rich, I assume that no one ever lacks food here. That's not exactly right. According to the General Social Survey, here are the percentages of those who have been unable to purchase food they needed sometime in the past year by sex and ethnicity:


Percent unable to buy food they needed (first men, then women in parentheses)

Blacks 6.9 (9.3)
Mexicans 7.1 (8.5)
American Indians 0.0 (12.3)
Germans 5.6 (5.5)
Scotts 2.4 (8.8)

USA 3.4 (5.6)

English/Welsh 2.4 (3.4)
Italians 0.0 (5.2)
Irish 2.9 (1.4)

For most groups, this hardship hits women more than men. Many of these women are single with dependent children. Few two-parent households are this poor. These are the fruits of feminists telling us that men are not essential to the household: women's natural abilities and Papa Government can do the job.

More on astrology: A reader suggested in the previous post that most of those nutty astrology people are women. Here's the breakdown, according to the General Social Survey:


Percent who think astrology is very, or sort of, scientific

Women 36.1
Men 27.8

And while we're at it:

Blacks 49.4
Whites 28.4

Wow, half of blacks. Moonbeam Obama Mamas is about right.

Liberals think that astrology is scientific: Liberals enjoy a nice laugh at the anti-science of religious fundamentalists, but the 2006 General Social Survey shows us that they, more than anyone, believe that astrology is scientific. Here is the percentage breakdown:


Percent who believe astrology is very or sort of scientific

Extremely liberal 43.3
Liberal 32.2
Slightly liberal 31.4
Moderate 25.9
Slightly conservative 25.9
Conservative 26.1
Extremely conservative 25.0


Almost half of those who are very liberal believe astrology is good science. So why do we believe what they tell us about anything?

Next, what are the IQ differences?


Mean IQ by view on astrology

It's very scientific 90.1
It's sort of scientific 96.5
It's not scientific at all 101.2

These differences are large. If you're like me, you've heard endless jokes about the Bible-thumping, inbreeding, redneck Bush supporters, but how about those moonbeam Obama Mamas?

The sex partner-porn correlation: positive or negative?

Men

Women

Is erotica used the most when a guy has no other option, or do porn and partners go hand-in-hand (pardon the pun)? The two tables above summarize General Social Survey data on whether you have seen at least one x-rated movie in the past year (y-axis) and your number of sex partners over the same time period (x-axis--0,1,2,3,4,5-10,11-20,21-100 partners from left to right). Ages range from 18 to 30. For both sexes, celibates are the least likely to view porn, and the probability peaks (or climaxes, perhaps?) for those with 5-10 partners. Single, religious folks might abstain from porn as well as sex, but there is evidence here that people vary a great deal in their sex drives. Some people seem to need very little sexual pleasure, while others can't get enough.

Ignore your sociology professor who comments on blogs: A sociologist commented in an earlier post that married women are, on average, more likely to be depressed than unmarried women. I'm not sure if he means never-married women or all unmarried women of all types, but either way the General Social Survey says he's wrong. Here are the percent of women by marital status who felt depressed in the past 30 days, either some, a good bit of, most, or all of the time:


Percent of women feeling depressed

Married 26.6
Never married 33.2
Separated 58.9
Divorced 23.7
Widowed 45.0

Here we have another sociologist rattling off facts that make marriage look bad that are false. I can understand how a discipline could get wrong results because of study flaws, but isn't it funny how errors always somehow support the liberal/feminist view?

Are smart people clean or dirty? Haven't you seen both images, right? The squeaky clean George Will on the one hand, and the professor who looks like he slept in those clothes on the other. General Social Survey interviewers rated the cleanliness of houses along with asking a zillion questions, and here is the mean IQ for each rating:


Mean IQ

Whites
Very clean 101.6
Clean 99.5
So-so 96.9
Not very clean 92.5
Dirty 97.0

Blacks
Very clean 91.7
Clean 92.2
So-so 89.7
Not very clean 82.2
Dirty 82.6

For both races, smarter people tend to be cleaner. This is a bit of support that virtues tend to run together. Notice, however, that the mean IQ for whites jumps up a bit among the "dirty" so the stereotype of the brainy white slob is probably true for a minority of smart people.

More on IQ trends

Whites 18 to 40

Blacks 18 to 40

Whites 41+

Blacks 41+

In my earlier post on IQ trends, Steve Sailer asked if age had something to do with pattern. I don't have enough cases to do a fine-grain analysis, but I was able to split blacks and whites into under 41 and 41 and over. Looking at whites first, the prevalence of mid-level IQs grew over the past 35 years for both young and older groups at the expense of the low IQ category. The percent with high IQs (10 for 10 on the vocab test) dropped for both groups, but the younger group stayed consistenly below the older. (In fact, those 40 and under fell to zero in 2006--not perfectly accurate, I'm sure).

Black trends bounce around more due to small samples sizes. I think all we can conclude from them is that more blacks--both young and old--are in the mid-range compared to 35 years ago, and there seems to be noticeable improvement for both age groups in the past decade.

Untitled

In the movie "Knocked Up" we are shown a guy and girl who have unprotected sex. After they go their separate ways, the message "8 weeks later" is flashed and we are shown something that looks like the top picture. In the interest of accuracy, they are showing something that is actually a day or two old: the bottom photo is of a 8 week old embryo. Cute, idn't ee? (I'll cut the movie some slack--when the woman is first examined, the doctor indicates that the heart is beating.)

IQ trends

Whites

Blacks

Glancing at GSS data on IQ (based on a vocabulary test) it looked to me like scores, for both blacks and whites, have been moving away from the extremes over the past 35 years. A closer look shows that I was more or less right. The bottom two graphs above are from 1973 to 2006. The top graph shows that percent with a particular score--6 is modal. To smooth the trends, I merged those with low scores (0-5); those with average scores (6-9); and those with perfect 10s. (I decided on these categories based on what appeared to move together over time). On the graphs, 3 (or green) is for the high group, 2 (or blue) for the middle, and 1 (or red) for the low group.

For both races, the low IQ group has shrunk while the middle group has grown, but this upward movement for blacks appeared only after 1994. It is not clear if the prevalence of high IQ blacks has increased, but the number for whites has dropped from 9 to 4%.

Does it pay to playboy?

Men

Women

Continuing the theme of being misled on family matters, the Sexual Revolution spread the message that uninhibited sex is essential to psychological health and happiness. Men, of course, have been only too happy to embrace this idea, especially the playboy version of it. Monogamy and marriage are cages, right? Like the one bull said to the other as they looked down on a herd of cows: why run and grab one, when you can strut down and have them all?

Well, GSS data show us that this kind of attitude doesn't deliver. The bottom two charts display happiness by the number of sexual partners had in the past year. At the very left are celibates, then one partner, then two, etc. The last two categories are 5-10 partners and 11-20. (21-100 were left off due to insufficient cases). For both men and women, people with one parter are much more likely to be very happy than any other group. (I'll grant that the most promiscuous male group is as low on "not too happy" people as among the monogamous group, but the sample size is small, and the rest of the multiple-partner groups are higher). Contrary to what the sexual experts have been telling us, celibacy does not make men less happy than promiscuity, and celibate women have a higher percent in the "very happy" group than in any multiple-partner group.

Of course, much of the happiness reported by monogamous people is connected to the fact that they are married. The top chart shows that married folks are much happier than people in all other statuses, including the wild and free category of never-marrieds. Prison turns out to be a refuge.

Ignore your sociology professor

College girls are routinely instructed by social science professors that wife beating is a very common phenomenon, and when it comes to violence, the home is one of the most dangerous places for a woman. The not-so-subtle message is that a woman should think twice before getting married. The only problem with this advice is that, compared to the never-married, married females face only a fraction of the risk of being assaulted. According to the General Social Survey, 5 percent of never-married women were attacked in the past year. That's 5 times the risk that married women have. Marriage does not lead to violence; it protects against it. You know this if you follow common sense. You don't know this if you listen to your sociology professor.

As women move up in the workplace, the institution of marriage declines

High Job Prestige

Mid-level Job Prestige

Low Job Prestige

In the last post, I showed that marital decline has accompanied the movement of women into the workforce. What about occupational status? Feminists have told us for decades that increases in female job prestige will equalize men and women, and equality will improve the quality of relationships. The graph above (generated from GSS data for Americans 30 and over) shows marital status by job prestige--high, middle, and low prestige as we move from top to bottom. The green section of the bars indicate the percent divorced, and yellow is for separated. About 35% are the middle and high status women are separated, divorced, or never married, compared to 25% of low-prestige women. Once again, liberal social scientists have gotten it wrong: as women move up in the workplace, the institution of marriage declines.

Female employment and marital decline

Feminists have been telling us for decades that one's power in a marriage depends on one's personal income, and that women need to be employed to create equality between spouses. This equality, in turn, will lead to more mutually satisfying relationships. The lower graph is the employment status for women ages 30-60 over the period 1972-2006. Full-time employment has grown from 30 to 55%, while being a housewife has plummeted from 55 to less than 20%. While more and more women have moved into the workforce, women's marital happiness has slipped a little over this period (shown in the previous post). The top graph shows that, instead of improving marriage, growth in female employment has paraleled a decline in marriage--more divorced and never-married people. As we saw in the last post, rational predictions about the family made by liberal experts turned out to be exactly wrong.

Easy divorce has not raised average marital happiness

Liberals told us in the 1960s that America needed no-fault divorce to allow unhappy people to split up. By making divorce easy, the average satisfaction of married people would rise as the unhappy ones joined the ranks of single people. Well, that seems perfectly rational, right, so California passed a no-fault divorce law in 1970--a trend which quickly spread to the rest of the country. GSS data from 1973-2006 shows us that their prediction was incorrect. The top graph is for married men, and the bottom is for women. For both groups, the percent who are very happily married has dropped about five percent points over the past 35 years. I plan to post several analyses on family matters over the next week or two, so I'll comment on this later.

Gay men have the most sex partners, right? Actually, they come in a distant third. Using General Social Survey data, I calculated the mean number of sex partners in the past year for people 18-30. (It's not precisely the mean since the highest estimates were assigned lower numbers--dumb, I know, but I didn't design the damn thing). Here are the results:


Mean number of sex partners in the past year

Bisexual men 4.50
Bisexual women 3.83
Gay men 2.54
Straight men 1.93
Lesbians 1.45
Straight women 1.43


By far, guys who swing both ways have the most partners, and I'm amazed that women of any stripe beat gay men. On the other hand, I'm not surpised to see lesbians (and straight women, of course) on the low end. Overall, the numbers might be lower than you would expect for young people. My thinking is that we get a distorted view of the frequency and prevalence of this kind of behavior from the media. Life isn't as wild as depicted on the screen.

If we look at those on the extreme end, the promiscuous gay man appears:


Percent with 11-100 sex partners last year

Gay men 9.3
Bisexual men 7.1
Bisexual women 2.9
Straight men 2.2
Straight women 0.3
Lesbians 0.0

Evidently, there is a small group of homosexual guys who conform to the stereotype of many, many partners, but this does not appear to be the norm. It's unheard of for a lesbian to act that way (showing once again that lesbians are not like gay men), and rare for a straight woman--the 0.3 percent might be prostitutes. Oh, come to think of it, some of those gay and bisexual men might do it for money too.

In this decade, the moral values of young people are not becoming more liberal

The values of young adults are interesting, especially since they give us a sense of the direction in which we are heading. In 2005, it looked to me like young Americans were developing more conservative moral attitudes. As you can see on the two graphs above, the second-to-last point is 2004, and there were big drops in favoring abortion for any reason and approving of homosexuality among those ages 18-30. Well, that year looks to be anomalous, because the numbers jumped back up in 2006, and are more consistent with overall trends. Support for abortion on demand has fallen from its peak in 1993 (49.3%) down to 37% in 2006, and a after a clear value shift in the 90s in favor of homosexuality, support has plateaued at about 43%. The speed at which Americans have reversed certain values is striking. The majority of young Americans went from believing that premarital sex was wrong to feeling it was right in the 5 years surrounding 1970 (graph not shown), and from 1988 to 1998, the percent thinking that nothing is wrong with homosexuality went from 16.0% to 44% among those ages 18 to 30.

A decline in gay men? In light of the findings reported in the last post, I wondered if there were any detectable decline in the prevalence of young homosexuals. To maximize the sample sizes, I compared two periods, with six surveys given in each period:


Percent of men that are gay, ages 18-30

1988-95: 2.6 (95% CI: 1.4-3.8)

1996-2006: 3.4 (95% CI: 2.4-4.6)


The estimates indicate an increase in the prevalence of homosexuality, but the confidence intervals overlap, so we can't be certain there is any real change. One would expect the growing acceptance of homosexuality to encourage the self-reporting that one is gay. Anyway, there is no evidence here for a decline.

Gay men are having significantly fewer children: A reader named Old Pete suggested in the previous post that greater homophobia could pressure gay men into getting married and having children predisposed to homosexuality, thus increasing their numbers. (This reminds me of the argument that anti-Semitism keeps the Jewish community from intermarrying and disappearing). I wondered if the opposite is happening now. Looking at the General Social Survey, I calculated the mean number of children for men 40 and over by sexual orientation and decade:


Mean number of children

1980s
Gay men 1.90
Straight men 2.65

1990s
Gay men .96
Straight men 2.38

2000s
Gay men .93
Straight men 2.17

The average number of kids has come down for both groups, but from the 80s to the 90s, it dropped dramatically for gay men. Things have levelled off in this decade, suggesting that for now gay men will average a little less than half the kids that straight men have.

Approval of homosexuality continues to climb

Now that the most recent year of the General Social survey is publicly available, let's look at the trend in attitudes toward homosexuality. I suspected that the gay marriage movement might be causing a backlash, but there's little evidence of that. Looking at the purple line, the percent saying that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality went up a little 2004-2006. Approval really starting growing in the early 90s, rose quickly, and has risen more slowly in this decade.

This trend evidently shows the power of the cultural elites. The AIDS epidemic--a deadly and expensive disease strongly associated with lifestyle--barely put a dent in attitudes in the 80s, but as soon as elites decided to ratchet up the pro-homosexual message, public opinion followed. I remember in a class in the early 90s--no one in a room full of liberals thought that America was ready for even civil unions.

One quarter of women believe the sun goes around the earth: As a follow-up to the analysis of ethnicity and belief about the sun revolving around the earth, let's look at gender. According to the General Social Survey, 24 percent of females but only 15 percent of males believe the earth is at the center. That's not double the number of men, but it's 60 percent more. And the difference can't be explained in terms of females not being given opportunities. This is the sort of information that is everywhere, and all people have heard the answer, but some people are more interested and spatial stuff is easier for some people. More often than not, those people are guys.

This reminds me of an old joke. A guy asks his buddy what kind of girlfriend he wants. The buddy answers that he wants to find a girl who is bad a math so he can convince her that 4 inches is really 8.

(Short) quote for the day: The only way I can get my wife to exercise is to suggest that she go shop at a very big mall. (Ron Guhname)

(Long) quote for the day: ...Our universe does seem singularly congenial as a home for intelligent life. L.J. Henderson's Fitness of the Environment extolled the remarkable life-enhancing properties of water, as well as pointing out the unique properties of the carbon atom, including the fact that carbon can bond with itself in a vastly larger number of combinations than any other atom. It is this wonderful property that makes complex organic chemistry possible.

Of course, these unique properties would have been little avail in fostering life, had it not been for the substantial abundance of oxygen and carbon. But since hydrogen and oxygen rank first and third, respectively, in cosmic abundance, water is guaranteed to be present throughout the universe, and carbon comes in fourth in order of cosmic abundance. If we were allowed to think of God in anthropomorphic terms, we would say, "Good planning!" Curiously enough, neither oxygen nor carbon emerged in the first three minutes of the Big Bang. At first glance, this might be labeled God's Goof. That's how the physicist George Gamow felt when he discovered the flaw in the nature of the light elements that prevented the heavier elements from forming. In the first minute of the Big Bang, energetic photons were transformed into protons, which fused into deuterium (nuclear particles of mass two), tritium (nuclear particles of mass three), and alpha particles (which would serve as mass-four nuclei of helium atoms). But there was no stable mass five, so at that point the fusion process stopped, well short of the twelve needed for carbon or the sixteen for oxygen...

...But far from being a design flaw in our universe, the absence of mass five seems essential to our existence. The lack of a stable mass five means that the element-building in the stars takes place as a two-step process: first, hydrogen is converted to helium, in the hot nuclear cauldrons at the cores of the stars; and then, once helium is abundant, it is built up into heavier atoms, in a second process. Because helium has a mass of four units, the fusion of two or three or four helium nuclei results in atoms of mass eight or twelve (carbon) or sixteen (oxygen), thus skipping over the unstable mass five. This second process requires a much higher temperature in the stellar interiors, one that is not reached until much of the hydrogen fuel has been exhausted--in the case of a star like the sun, only after about ten billion years. This guarantees a long, steady lifetime for sunlike stars. It is of course this tedious process that provides the stable solar environment in which the evolutionary biological sequences can work themselves out.

If mass five was not absent, that could not happen. Suppose that mass five were stable. Then, in the opening minutes of the universe, characterized by the overwhelming abundance of protons (each with a mass of one unit), atom-building could have taken place as mass increased by steps of one, right up the nuclear ladder toward iron. This would have left no special abundance of carbon (mass twelve) or oxygen (mass sixteen) , two essential building blocks of life...What at first glance appeared to be God's mistake turn out to be one of the Creator's most ingenious triumphs. (pp. 52-56 in God's Universe by Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy and History of Science, Harvard University).

Immigrants from all over the world beat Americans of Mexican ancestry in an English vocabulary contest: Using General Social Survey data, I list below the mean IQs for ethnic groups born in the United States, and in parentheses I list mean intelligence for immigrants (legal and illegal). I limited my analysis to categories having at least 20 cases, so some estimates are missing:


Mean IQ for native-born Americans (immigrants in parentheses)

Jewish 109.7 (95.1)
Lithuanian 106.9
Austrian 106.5 (90.4)
Russian 106.5 (91.0)
Chinese 105.7 (86.3)
English 103.9 (112.5)
Danish 103.7
Scottish 103.4 (102.1)
Hungarian 103.2
Yugoslav 103.1
Norwegian 102.7
Swiss 102.6
Swedish 102.2
Japanese 102.2
Czech 101.7
Finnish 101.4
Greek 101.3
Irish 101.1 (103.6)
Polish 101.1 (95.5)
Italian 100.9 (90.6)
French 100.1 (103.1)
German 100.0 (98.9)

USA 99.3 (92.1)

Portuguese 98.8
Filipino (95.8)
Indian (95.6)
French Canadian 99.1 (93.5)
Dutch 97.2
Spain 96.8 (95.3)
Arabic (95.1)
American Indian 92.7
African 91.6 (90.0)
Puerto Rican 91.1 (81.6)
Mexican 90.3 (83.3)

First, readers may wonder why native-born blacks don't have IQs closer to 85. This measure of IQ is based on a ten question vocabulary test, and the black-white is not as large for verbal ability. This kind of test does not validly measure the IQ of immigrants whose first langauge is not English, but it can serve as an indicator of the ease with which immigrants can assimilate into American society.

Among native-born whites, IQ tends to rise to the north, with a number of exceptions. The IQs of countries like Russia are boosted by the Jewish component, but even without Jews, the number are still quite high. Japanese and especially Chinese are high, but there are not enough native-born Filipinos to estimate their mean. Other mixed or non-white groups are at the bottom. Both Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans born here have lower scores than blacks, probably due to all the Spanish being spoken in their environments.

As for potential assimilation and success in American society, Europeans from English-speaking countries are at the top, but Europeans in general have vocabularies well beyond that of Americans of Mexican ancestry. In fact, immigrants from just about every country beat Mexican Americans in an English vocabulary contest.

Indian Americans are least supportive of free speech; Mexicans are 2nd worst: A reader named "hicsto" claims that free speech is a male, northwestern European (MNWE) phenomenon; Jews don't support it as much; and as the influence of MNWEs declines, so will the freedom to speak freely. What do the data tell us (about the American context, anyway)? General Social Survey respondents (all Americans) were asked if a person who believed blacks were inferior should be allowed to speak in public. This is the percent of men by ethnic background who said yes (groups with at least 50 respondents are included with two noted exceptions):


Percent in favor of allowing someone speaking in public about black inferiority

Japanese 82.5 (N=28)
Swedes 78.9
Hungarians 77.8
Scots 74.3
English/Welsh 74.2
Filipinos 72.5 (N=40)
Irish 72.3
Poles 71.0
Danes 70.5
French 70.3
Jews 69.8
Germans 69.8
Norwegians 69.3
Czechs 68.3

USA 67.5

French Canadians 67.2
Austrians 67.2
Italians 66.5
Russians 62.7
Spain 60.8
Chinese 60.0
Dutch 59.1
Blacks 58.8
American Indians 59.5
Puerto Ricans 58.5
Mexicans 49.1
Indians 46.1

Support for free speech among whites may be higher as we move north and west, but the pattern is not perfect. Jews are in the top half of the table, and clearly are not less supportive than other whites. Among non-whites, East Asians are split with Japanese and Filipinos toward the top and Chinese in the bottom half. Other non-whites congregate at the bottom, with the very large immigration group of Mexicans bringing anti-free speech values with them. One's attitude toward free speech is a good indicator of assimilation to mainstream American values, and Mexicans are almost ten percentage points behind blacks on a question about black inferiority!

An invitation to haters: Bill O'Reilly brought a representative from freerepublic.com on to his show the other night to chastise him for not being sufficiently vigilant in banning haters from the website. This was obviously a response to liberals accusing O'Reilly of only pointing out hate sites on the Left, and an attempt to show others that he is not a hater from the Right because he identifies and condemns the real conservative haters.

I have been banned for comments at several websites: liberal and white nationalist websites, and freerepublic.com itself for committing the crime of citing statistics. (I cited UCR data showing that social class does not explain the link between race and street crime. I didn't even say a word about why that would be). Don't worry, Bill, if what you want is to shut down speech you don't agree with (data, in my case)--Free Republic is doing a hell of a job.

So, since I believe in the First Amendment and know what it is like to be treated like an animal--muzzles are for dogs--I offer this invitation to all the so-called haters out there: please come and express yourself at this little blog. I make a solemn vow that, as long as you do not make a call for violence, I will never censor you.

Come all you racists, you homophobes, you Communists. Come all you atheists, you bigots, you anti-Christs. Come all you misogynists, you Bush-haters, you anarchists. Come all you cop-haters, you white-haters, you Bolsheviks.

Come and get that craziness off your chest, and what may sound like hate to some will sound like poetry to me because it's free. And who knows--some of that craziness may actually turn out to be true.

Whoo-ee! Only a geek like me would be this jazzed about the 2006 General Social Survey data now being available online! Let's make the first dip into the data a fun one: which ethnic group in the United States is still stuck in the 15th century and thinks that the sun revolves around the earth? I'll limit the analysis to those groups with at least 50 respondents:


Percent who think the sun goes around the earth

American Indians 33.8
Blacks 24.5
Mexicans 24.1
Italians 21.8
Germans 21.8

USA 19.2

Irish 16.2
English/Welsh 12.6
Scots 4.0

An Indian might be good for helping you track game, but don't ask him for answers to the astronomy exam. And Galileo in his grave would rotate on his axis if he could see his paisanos numbers. And damn those Scots are smart. Makes me want to exaggerate the share of my ancestry.

Ingmar Bergman, RIP: In honor of Bergman's death, I watched The Seventh Seal again tonight. It's theme of death seemed fitting. I watched and admired most of his movies in my 20s, but have not seen any in many years. With all my additional experience and development into a pro-religion conservative, I had planned to mount an attack on the film, but now the desire is not there. The Seventh Seal is simply a masterpiece. The tragedy, terror, and beauty of life and death; the ache for meaning and God; seeing only emptiness. But look beyond the textbook stuff: this movie, of all movies, is often funny and light and hopeful. And it shows Biblical verse as the poetry that it is.

So thank you Mr. Bergman for making life a little more interesting, and I for one hope that someone more pleasant than a man in a black cloak was waiting for you.

Question: Can you name a female serial killer who murdered people because it gave her sexual pleasure? I just watched the movie "Mr. Brooks" where a man kills because he gets off on it, and he later learns that his daughter has inherited the same disorder. While I'm glad to see Hollywood showing the importance of genes for behavior (my students NEVER raise genes as a possible cause of crime), I couldn't buy the idea of a girl as a lust killer. I'll admit I'm no expert, but the few female serial killers we know of kill for money, or in the case of Aileen Wuornos, perhaps revenge as well.

Evidently, serial killers reveal the sex differences of normal people. Men are motivated by sex, and women are motivated by money and status. Men get status in order to get laid (Bill Clinton is a classic case) while women use sex to get status. I'm not absolutely sure this is true, but I say it in the hope that it will offend someone.

It's hard to believe two bordering countries could be so different: I promised to look at the World Values Survey to see in which ways Mexico is a distinctive country, and to compare its profile with that of the United States. Following the same method as I did with the U.S., I list below those questions where Mexicans ranked in the top 3 or bottom three among samples of countries. More than 300 questions were asked:


Top 3

Believes life has no meaning
Would take political action by occupying a building or factory
Proud of country's scientific achievements
Country is run by a few big interests


Bottom 3

Currently married
Partner shares moral, social, political attitudes
Trusts TV newscasters
Trusts government
Claiming govenment benefits one is not entitled to is never justified
Avoiding fare on public transportation is never justified
Cheating on taxes is never justified
Buying stolen goods is never justified
Taking someone's car for a joyride is never justified
Using marijuana or hashish is never justified
Keeping money you found is never justified
Accepting a bribe is never justified
Failing to report hitting someone's car is never justified
Threatening workers who will not join a strike is never justified
Assassinations are never justified
Throwing litter in public is never justified
Drinking and driving is never justified


Okay, let's create a profile from this.


Profile of Mexico according to the World Values Survey

Nihilistic
Willing to take violent political action (e.g, occupying buildings, assassinations)
Believes country is run by a few big interests
Weak on marriage
Heterogamous
Distrusts government
Embraces corrupt, dishonest, reckless, and criminal behavior
Accepts littering

I don't know about you, but I'm not impressed. According to the World Values Survey, the United States and Mexico do not share a single distinctive value. In fact, they are polar opposites in at least two respects: Americans trust government, and husbands and wives are very similar to each other.

As Mexican immigrants continue to pour into the country, there is every reason to believe that America is going to become more corrupt, more antisocial, dirtier, more nihilistic, more politically extreme, and contrary to what the rosy Republicans tell us, Americans will have weaker, not stronger families.

How close is the connection between lesbianism and feminism? You guys know how much I like to evaluate stereotypes. I looked at the GSS, and the only question with enough lesbian respondents is if you are in favor of abortion for any reason. Here is the breakdown:


Percent in favor of abortion on demand

Straight women 45.1
Bisexual women 73.5
Lesbians 57.6

So bisexuals have the highest number, probably because they are trendy types and actually have a chance of getting accidentally impregnated. (From a purely practical point of view, you'd expect straights to be most in favor of abortion on demand since they have the babies--this issue goes beyond practical considerations to the desire for a symbol of female autonomy). Anyway, while the lesbian estimate is high, about 40% of lesbians would not pass the basic litmus test for being feminist.

Race, Class, Crime IV: A reader asked about the relationship between race/family structure interaction and being arrested. Maybe the simplest way to look at how the impact of family structure varies by race is to list the percent ever arrested by the relevant combinations:


Percent ever arrested

Mother-only black males 32.4
Mother-only white males 23.4
Two-parent black males 24.9
Two-parent white males 17.0

Mother-only black females 11.1
Mother-only white females 5.7
Two-parent black females 4.4
Two-parent white females 3.7

Notice how white men from single parent families fare better than black men from two-parent homes. Research shows the same pattern for poverty: a famous study by Marvin Wolfgang showed that middle-income blacks were more criminal than low-income whites.

Not surprisingly, growing up in a two-parent home does help everyone, and according to these data, it helps black girls the most. Maybe dad is able to keep her away from bad boys (girls often become delinquent through the influence of boys).

Race, Class, and Crime III: One possibility not considered in the previous two posts is that the correlation between race and crime is eliminated when family structure is controlled. I recoded the variable on family arrangements at age 16 to 1 for living with both parents and zero for everything else. Here are the multivariate results:


Logistic regression coefficients (t-statistic in parentheses)

Black .43 (3.29)
Mother's educ .00 (.15)
IQ -.02 (-.84)
Male 1.62 (15.25)
Age -.03 (-8.64)
Living with mom and dad at 16, -.48 (-4.28)

Number of valid cases 4,782

Family structure is related to being arrested, but it reduces the race-crime link only a little bit, according to GSS data.

Race, class, and crime II: Readers have wondered what the link between race and crime (discussed below) would be if additional factors were controlled. Someone mentioned using mother's education for social class, and another asked about IQ. Myself, I was concerned that age might change the results, so here are the logistic coefficients for race and several controls, with ever having been arrested as the dependent variable:


Logistic regression coefficient (t-statistic in parentheses)

Black .53 (4.17)
Mother's education .01 (.39)
IQ -.02 (-1.00)
Male 1.62 (15.36)
Age -.03 (-8.98)

Number of valid cases 4,831

As a rule of thumb, the t-statistic needs to be at least 2 for the relationship to be considered statistically significant. All thrown in together, neither mother's education or IQ exert an significant net effect on arrest. Using the t-value as an indicator of the magnitude of the relationships, the impact of race is not as strong as sex or age. But keep in mind something I wrote in the comments section of the previous post: there is research comparing self-reports with police reports that suggests that black males underreport being arrested. Evidently, they don't trust interviewers.

Does social class explain the race-crime link? I'm getting tired of these so-called experts who say that the relationship between race and street crime is explained by social class as if that has ever been demonstrated by research. It hasn't. I'm quite familiar with the data and the impact of race, especially on violence, is much stronger than class. The amazing dilemma is that very few studies have examined this question directly. Everyone repeats the mantra, but no one bothers to actually check it out. Well, the General Social Survey has a way of calling bullshit on all the squishy talk.

Using logistic regression, I examined data on 7,477 black and white Americans. The dependent variable is whether you have been arrested or not. When race alone is included in the model, its coefficient is .432, and it is significant at the .001 level. If conventional wisdom is correct, this coefficient should be reduced to zero when parents' class is included. I used father's completed years of school as a measure of this. When it is included in the model along with race, its coefficient is -.026 (significant at the .01 level). (Do not compare the coefficients since the measures are in different metrics, but trust me, race is more powerful).

So does race drop to zero with class thrown in? Absolutely not--in fact, it increases to .461. Class explains nothing.

Americanness according to the World Values Survey: Readers and I listed in an earlier post those values that we thought of as elements of "Americanness," but what do the data tell us? I looked at responses of representative samples of people from countries all around the globe to more than 300 hundred questions from the World Values Survey. Sample sizes range from around a dozen to about 50 countries, and I included the question in the list below if America ranked in either the top 3 or the bottom 3:


Top 3

Belongs to a religious organization
Belongs to an educational, cultural, art, or music organization
Belongs to an organization that does youth work
Belongs to a women's group
Does voluntary work for a religious organization
Does voluntary work for educational, cultural, art, or music organization
Does unpaid work for an environmental group
Does voluntary work for a group that does youth work
Does voluntary work for a women's group
Does voluntary work for organization concerned with health
Does voluntary work out of compassion for those in need
Does voluntary work to give something back

Felt proud in the past few weeks because of a compliment about behavior
Feel like you have control over how your life turns out
People are poor out of laziness and lack of will power
Proud of work
I work because I have to; I wouldn't if I didn't have to
The owners should run the business or appoint managers
If boss and I disagree, I should follow the boss

Believes in the soul
Believes in the devil
Believes in hell
Believes there is a personal God
Partner shares religious, moral, social, and sexual attitudes
Faithfulness is important for a successful marriage
It is important that children learn religious faith at home

Personal freedom is more important than equality
Has confidence in the political system
Proud of my country because of scientific achievements
Proud of country
Trusts neighboring countries


Bottom 3

Does voluntary work because of extra time and wanted to do something worthwhile
Does volunteer work to meet people

Doesn't want Jews for neighbors

When jobs are scarce, people should be forced to retire
When jobs are scare, preference should be given to own nationality over immigrants

A child need both a mother and a father
A woman needs a child to be fulfilled

Government ownership of business and industry should be increased
The state should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for
Success is a matter of luck and connections
If an unjust law were passed, I could do nothing about it



Okay, let's attempt a description of what makes the U.S. distinctive in terms values. Americans value volunteer work, and they do it out of compassion and because they want to return the favor done for them.

Americans feels thay have control over their lives, and they can change things. If someone is poor, it's his own fault.

Americans are very proud of their work, but strangely wouldn't do it if they didn't need to make a living. They believe in top-down business organization.

They identify with a religion, they are theists, and they believe religion is important for children.

The country is feminist.

Americans are very proud of their country; they believe in personal freedom over equality; they have faith in the political system; and they trust neighboring countries. They are tolerant and pro-immigration. They are anti-socialist.

Let's reduce that to a list like the one before:


Americanness based on the World Values Survey

belief in volunteerism
belief in free will
hierarchical at work
religious
feminist
homogamous
patriotic
freedom-loving
trusting
tolerant
anti-socialist

Keep in mind that, according to these data, the United States is somewhere in the middle on more than 80% of the questions asked. These questions cover just about anything you can think of on politics/government, religion, family, work--all the stuff sociologists are interested in.

The next step is to see if immigrants to the U.S. are likely to change these values. Any guesses which country I'll look at next?

Cowshit, YES! When you think about it, isn't it funny that so many people these days want their tomatoes grown in cowshit? When I was a boy, I used to drive a John Deere with a manure spreader on the back, up and down the fields that belonged to my cow milker boss. That spreader would throw the stuff everywhere, and I got a kick out of telling people that I threw cowshit for a living (kind of like a politician, come to think of it).

I can see the protesters with their signs: "Chemicals, NO! Cowshit, YES!"

"Americanness": On July 5th, Peter Beinhart and Jonah Goldberg debated immigration on their "What's Your Problem" web TV show, but I was interested in their raising the question of what is "Americanness." This seems to me to be a very important topic that people are starting to talking more about. Off the top of my head, I'd say a values list would include the following:

freedom (minimum limitations)
individualism
self-reliance
practicality
technology
work ethic
competition
materialism
religiosity
can-doism
optimism
self-determination
belief in progress
belief in enlightened self-interest
cultural egalitarianism
tolerance
nuclear over extended family

I'm focusing more on cultural than political values. Other ideas? Am I wrong on any of these? If I can get a list together, I can look at the data to see if the values are currently held, and I can look to see what kinds of immigrants support such values, and which do not.

One part of America I don't love: In the past I could say that I love my country, but I can no longer do that. The best I can say is that I love parts of it. Let me give an example why.

I watched a documentary yesterday called "Gay Sex in the 70s." It recounted with graphic footage how homosexuals after Stonewall and before AIDS first hit in 1981 had sex like bonobo chimps, without the discretion. Now I get disgusted when I hear wild tales of casual heterosexual sex, but add to that a type of sex that makes your stomach turn, and add to that that guys are doing it in massive orgies in very public places (like Central Park or on an abandoned pier) and I must confess there are parts of America that I loathe. Someone in the documentary said this kind of sex has not been witnessed in the Western world since the days of Rome, and I'm not pleased that it was America that brought it back.

Now gay sex alone is just gross to me, but when it is combined with libertinism, irresponsibility, obsessiveness, audacity, and radical politics, I'm looking to join a group that advocates that homosexuals be banished to some island. And I don't mean Manhattan. I mean some place that is not America, because I don't want to be associated with it. One fortunate thing that has come out of the tragic AIDS epidemic is that gay men have been forced to grow up. They're less obnoxious now than in the 70s.

Thirty percent of really liberal people have a history of mental illness: The 4th makes me think of politics, and politics makes me think of liberals, and it occurs to me that I haven't taken a jab at them in months. Using General Social Survey data, I did a cross-tabulation of political orientation and a history of mental illness. Here are the results:


Percent having had a mental illness

Extremely liberal 30.0
Liberal 11.5
Slightly liberal 12.1
Moderate 4.7
Slightly conservative 7.8
Conservative 5.6
Extremely conservative 5.1

Hmmm. I seem to vaguely recall a whole body of scholarship claiming that conservatism is a symptom of mental illness. It looks like the "liberalism is a mental disorder" rants by Michael Savage are closer to the truth.

Liberal scholars neglected the obvious way to see if there was a connection between political orientation and mental problems: ask people their political orientation and ask them if they have had a mental problem.

One possible link is being neurotic: I can see the Woody Allen type on the couch, riddled with a long list of insecurities, anxieties, and feelings of guilt. Government serves as Dominatrix, pleasing masochistic tendencies through high taxation, affirmative action, and the like. Maybe mentally ill people just want their SSI checks increased. Whatever the case, psychiatric disorders are common among really liberal people.

But let me anticipate comments by liberals passing through: only liberals are sufficiently self-aware to admit they are sick.

Atheists are the most faithful to their spouses? In a number of previous posts, I showed that atheists and confident believers have the best behavior, while the uncertain fare the worst. (There have been one or two exceptions.) Cheating on your spouse shows the same pattern. The numbers below are the percent of married people who cheated on their partner in the past year, according to General Social Survey data:


Percent cheating on spouse in past year by belief in God:

Do not believe 2.5
No way to find out 4.0
Some higher power 3.6
Sometimes believe 4.0
Believes but has doubts 3.9
Knows 3.1

Keep in mind that these differences are small, but these results conform to the emerging picture that people with confident beliefs, whatever they are, act in more constructive ways. Data from the GSS are demonstrating that atheists, as a group, are not maladjusted like religious folks believe.