Who's comfortable with genetically modified foods?

The General Social Survey asked 900 people their view about eating foods that have been genetically modified (GM). Results are shown in the graphs. People with extreme political views are move likely to refuse to eat this kind of food, as are the less educated and less intelligent.

From what I have read, GM foods are perfectly safe. These findings surprise me a bit: My impression was that whiterpeople types and a lot of Europeans are opposed to this practice, and while there are a lot of extreme liberals who won't eat GM food according to the top graph, the overall pattern shows that smart, educated people tend to be more comfortable with it.

Religiosity vs. brand of Christianity: The General Social Survey asked white Christians about their brand of religion--fundamentalist, moderate, or liberal--their frequency of church attendance, and their choice of presidential candidate in 2004. Here are the results of voting for Bush regressed on the other two variables :


OLS unstandardized coefficients, N = 1,838

Liberal vs. fundamentalist -.098
Moderate vs. fundamentalist -.109
Frequency of church attendance .022
Constant 1.66

(all effects are statistically signficant at the .05 level, two-tail test)

So how are these numbers interpreted? Let's do it this way. The model can be used to predict the percentage who voted for Bush, given a set of characteristics. Here are four combinations:


Predicted percent voting for Bush

Fundamentalist, never attends 66.0
Fundemantalist, attends more than weekly 83.6
Liberal, never attends 56.3
Liberal, attends more than weekly 73.8

A fundamentalist Christian who never goes to church was less likely to vote for Bush than a liberal Christian who goes all the time.

There is much attention paid to the fundamentalist streak among Republicans, but less attention paid to the fact that many who vote Republican are moderate or liberal Christians who are serious about their religion. As is usually the case with religion, behavior is more important than status: whether you are fundamentalist are not is not as important as how devoted you are to your particular brand of Christianity.

Fundamentalists are a minority of Christian Republicans. To be precise, 62.2% of Christians who voted for Bush in 2004 were moderate or liberal believers.

Prepare yourselves for Obamamerica... and value the police like I do: This is a pretty good piece on the election polls. It shows that the variation among poll estimates is larger than in 2004, and the simple explanation for it is that pollsters have differing sampling methodologies based on assumptions about who is going to turn out to vote.

It looks like those who expect a really big turnout from folks likely to vote for Obama are generating a large Obama/McCain gap; those with more conservative methodologies show a somewhat tighter race.

All polls show Obama ahead, and if we go by the two polls that were closest in 2004 (at least those I am familiar with)--Investors Business Daily and Rasmussen--Obama is ahead by 4 or 8 points, respectively. The probability is very high that Obama will win. Go out and vote, anyway, all you Republicans, but you'd better start asking yourselves today how you need to change to win next time around.

Let me offer a first suggestion: return to the conservative view that people are inclined to be naughty and therefore need to be policed. Government stinks at most things, but it is pretty good at cracking heads with night sticks. And nobody needs the occasional crack on the head more than our economic elites.

Libertarian, schmibertarian. I, for one, am pro-police. The irony was intensely rich when I saw anarchist Bill Ayers on Fox News yesterday calling the frigging police to get protection from those oh so scary journalists. The guy who tried to kill NYC police officers. Truly rich.

Those Chicago cops should have cracked Billy Boy on the head.

Whites most likely to defend themselves with a gun: The National Crime Vimization Survey (1992-2005) asked 4,030 crime victims if they did anything to resist the attack. Only 1.1% fought back by threatening or attacking the offender with a gun. What is the racial breakdown of the resisters? 84% were white, 7% were black, 7% were Hispanic, and 2% were Asian. This is consistent with the white emphasis on self-reliance.

I'm considered a bigot because I want illegals who are often poor and uneducated deported out of the country. In this they are deprived only of a nicer place to live. Liberals consider themselves enlightened and compassionate because they encourage the poor and uneducated to deport their babies from the womb. In this the babies are deprived only of their lives.

Look into early voting folks--no lines, it's cool.

I proudly cast my vote today for Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan. He's such a stud, he can serve as his own vice-president. He sends the exact right message: abortion sucks, mass immigration blows, and American empire can bite me.

IQ and voting

Silly me--I forgot in my earlier analysis to include IQ as a predictor of voting. The above graph shows the percentages of people who voted in 2004 by IQ. Amazing--95.8% of the highest category voted. Even if a few smarties are lying, it's still impressive.

Also, you gotta love all those folks with IQs of 56 who voted.

I rarely get blog e-mails so I sometimes go for months without remembering to check for them. Now I see that a number of people sent me something, so I will try to get back to everyone soon. Sorry about that.

While I'm at it, you never know when the black hats are going to come and get me, and I might have to take down my blog in order to keep my job. If you send me an e-mail, I can keep a list and send out my data analyses in place of a blog.

3,200 professors have signed a pro-Ayers petition. And you wonder why I get so pissed off at liberals? I have to work with these idiots every day. The Steveosphere is one place that takes intelligence seriously, but my work environment reminds me on a daily basis that IQ ain't everything.

And this "Ayers is a leading education scholar" is nonsense. I knew of Ayers years ago, but as a terrorist, not a serious scholar. I've never run across his work on education or juvenile justice in anything I've ever read. That's probably because I stick to serious, quantitative research, not Marxist drivel.

(By the way, "education scholar" is an oxymoron.)

Likelihood of voting favors Republicans: I'm interested in how the likelihood of voting varies across groups. From highest to lowest, here are the percentages of Americans who voted for president in 2004, according to the Census:


Percent who voted in 2004

White males 65-74 73.9
White males 75+ 72.8
White females 65-74 71.0
White females 45-64 69.9
Black males 65-74 68.2

White males 45-64 67.4
White females 75+ 65.6
Black females 45-64 65.3
Black females 65-74 64.9
Black males 75+ 62.4

Black females 75+ 60.2
Black males 45-64 59.2
Black females 25-44 58.9
White females 25-44 56.9
White males 25-44 51.2

Black females 18-24 48.7
Black males 25-44 48.0
White females 18-24 45.5
White males 18-24 39.8
Black males 18-24 39.0


You can see that age is the biggest factor: the elderly are much more likely to vote. Race and gender are less important. More women vote at young ages, but more men do at older ages.

I estimated OLS coefficients where the dependent variable is voting in 2004, and a number of predictors are included (General Social Survey data):


Standardized OLS coefficients, N = 2,349

Education .28*
Church attendance .18*
Age .14*
Income .05*
Sex .03
Political orientation .02
Race .01

* p < 05, two-tail

The person who is most likely to vote: educated, frequent churchgoer, older, and higher income. These factors favor Republicans. Not so sure about the educated? Here are the percentages for 2004:

Voted for Bush in 2004

Less than high school 41.6
High school 49.7
Junior college 52.1
Bachelors 54.5
Grad 39.0

The pattern holds for the lowest four categories, with post-baccalaureates being the exception.

The ongoing race freakout: Pat Buchanan, as usual, gets it right. This time, on Powell's stab in the back. I never particularly liked the general, and he showed Sunday that he is a consummate, opportunistic politician like his buddy Obama. I think he is bored and looking for a job offer.

But the reason I post this is that I watched Sunday as some woman pundit on MSNBC told Pat that it was beneath him to suggest that race was a factor in Powell's decision. She almost passed out, his words were so shocking.

Here is Powell's answer to the race question posed by Brokaw:

"If I had only had that in mind, I could have done this six, eight, 10 months ago. I really have been going back and forth between somebody I have the highest respect and regard for, John McCain, and somebody I was getting to know, Barack Obama. And it was only in the last couple of months that I settled on this. And I can't deny that it will be a historic event for an African-American to become president. And should that happen, all Americans should be proud--not just African-Americans, but all Americans--that we have reached this point in our national history where such a thing could happen. It will also not only electrify our country, I think it'll electrify the world."

This is a roundabout way of saying that Powell can't deny that race is one factor. The black pundit, Juan Williams, said on Fox that of course race was a factor. It's simply a fact, but the woman's response shows the race hysteria among whites that I frequently complain about. This ongoing race freakout is a HUGE problem, and it destroys our ability to deal with so many problems.

Let's compromise on abortion: Readers of this blog know that I'm pro-life, but then again, so is Barack Obama. As recently as the last debate, he said that he's not for abortion--nobody is.

So, in the spirit of bipartisanship, let's work together find ways to reduce this problem. Let's do it this way: each side can offer up one idea, and we can next find out how effective the idea is.

You first. Expand public support of birth control for needy women, you say? Great, I'm all for the maximum use of contraceptives as a way to lower the abortion rate. So how effective is it? Well, using Guttmacher data for all 50 states, I calculated the correlation between the percent of needy women getting their birth control paid for by the state and the rate of abortion. It's -.22 (not statistically significant at the .05 level). Not very impressive, but hey, better than nothing (maybe).

Now my idea. Shrink, or at least do not increase, the number of counties around the country with abortion clinics. How much of a difference would this make? The correlation across all 50 states is .68. Much more impressive--it explains almost half of the variance--which is not surprising since it is a conservative idea, but let's not try to score points here. Let's hold hands on this one and do both ideas.

More on Native Alaskan crime: In an earlier post, I provided evidence that Native Alaskans are much more criminal than their white counterparts who, in turn, have crime rates somewhat higher than whites in the lower 48 states. American Indians (AIs), by contrast, are not arrested much more often than whites.

Some readers suggested that native Alaskans are not more criminally prone than AIs; rather, many crimes committed by AIs do not result in an arrest because the law is underenforced on reservations.

The General Social Survey asked thousands of Americans if they have ever been threatened or shot at with a gun. I define as American Indian those people who say their primary ethnicity is Indian and that their race is non-white (in order to eliminate whites who say their main ethnicity is AI). Here the percentages:


Percent having ever been threatened or shot at with a gun

American Indians 18.1
Whites 18.7
Blacks 25.2

I'm assuming that most attacks are intra-racial. (The white offense rate is probably lower since the National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that a substantial share of attacks on whites are perpetrated by blacks. This should not be the case with the more rural and segregated American Indians.) These numbers indicate that gun violence is not higher--or not much higher--among AIs than among whites. This pattern is consistent with arrest statistics.

So native Alaskans still look much more violent than Native Americans.

Here is a liberal exemplified. You remember Arthur Miller, the leftie playwright who wrote about the cruelties of the American way of life. Oh, how everyone loved him for his sensitivity.

Now I read this: "A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again."

Typical. All the sensitivity amounts to status manuevering.

Actually, it's pretty smart. He got into Marilyn's bed.

Michelle Malkin writes that, "After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama's rhetorical tap dance was 'almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,' the inevitable cries of 'bigotry' followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for 'Joe the Plumber racist.')"

This is why this former liberal can't stand liberals.

What happened in my office the other day: I am in the habit of telling my students that, on average, women are more prosocial than men. Look at any list of crime stats broken out by gender. Even prostitution arrests are 40% male, and how often do they arrest the Johns?

But maybe I'll stop telling them this after an incident the other day. Two students were in my office. One was a really nice guy with cerebal palsy. The other was a very attractive young woman who is recently divorced with young children. The three of us were swapping stories, and I learned that this woman gets no child support from her ex, but she loves to go out and get drunk--she appears to be making up for a youth lost to motherhood. She has no money, so she always insists that her friends pay.

You can probably see where this is headed. This girl starts flirting with the guy. He's eating it up and telling stories about what a tough guy he is--you know he hasn't been with a woman in years--and before you know it, she has given him her number, and they plan to go out with her friends the following night. Who do you suppose is going to pay for drinks?

Now I could couple this story with my recent observation that women love Obama--a man who sits in his peaceful way looking on the million babies aborted each year--or I could, of course, mention the Caylee Anthony case, but I'll just end by saying that I won't feel like praising women much in class next time.

Dumb people are sometimes right

In my view, the gut instinct which dumb people are more likely to rely on is sometimes right, while the analytical approach that smart folks have a habit of taking at times leads to mistakes. For example, the General Social Survey asked 901 Americans, "One of the bad effects of science is that it breaks down people's ideas of right and wrong."

The graph above shows that the percent agreeing with this statement tends to decline with increasing IQ, but I would argue that the statement is correct. Now, in terms of logic, science does not undermine morality: facts do not imply values. But the question is asking about cause and effect, not logic, and I think it is clear that science often works like an acid on established value systems.

The values of traditional religion, for example, do not have the status among the Western elites that they used to have, and this is due in part to the advance of science. I don't like to include cultural anthropology and sociology as sciences, but they share the epistemology of the hard sciences, and anyone who has taken even an introductory course in one of these subjects learns that values and norms are arbitrary. They are nothing more than social convention, and could easily be something else. These ideas come from the observed fact that cultures vary a lot.

Now, of course, you can argue that there is more to values than mere convention, but science will never argue that they are God-given, or that they have some transcendent, Platonic status. Science reduces values to a human level.

It looks like unintelligent people intuit this, while that understanding is drowned out in smarter folks as they deliberate over the question. Perhaps many smart people fail to appreciate the irrational nature of humans. Science doesn't corrode traditional ideas of right and wrong through logic: it does so through a psychological, irrational process.

For example, let's assume for a moment that heterosexual monogamy is right. Science has taught us that polygyny has been common among humans and is found among closely related species like gorillas. This knowledge might convince a person that monogamy is not right--it is just one way to organize human sexuality.

Logically, this makes no sense since the observed fact of polygyny does not imply that monogamy is either right, wrong, or neutral. Science doesn't deal in right or wrong, but it has an impact on our definitions of morality nevertheless. Smart people might not see this because they have these models of rational humans which are incorrect.

(It would be nice to see answers for people smarter than those shown in the graph. The people who are disagreeing with the statement in large numbers really aren't that smart, so it could be that they, by their answer, are simply saying that science is good because that's the respectable thing to say. And yeah, I might have just thrown out my earlier ideas. Get used to it: I do that all the time. I still like the idea of smart people using an incorrect model of rational humans, though.)

Female voters: Did anyone see tonight's debate on CNN that tracked the immediate reactions of men and women as the debate proceeded? It gave me a lot of insight into the minds of female voters. It is clear that they like positive plans and promises and happy talk in general. Numbers went way down when candidates went negative.

Without a doubt women prefer Obama, but why? I got the impression that women love coolness--a man who will absolutely not be ruffled. When it comes to a man, women like a rock. The Marlboro Man. That combined with a resonant baritone voice signals masculinity and leadership. McCain's emotionality, along with a nasal voice, is less attractive. The various arguments seemed much less important than these qualities. I'm not sure about this, but it seems like women, compared to men, base their votes more on one's likeability and the niceness of one's positions.

I assumed that women don't read this blog because they are less interested in politics and numbers, but they must be at least as turned off by its harshness.

The American animal: Have you ever noticed how the United States looks like an animal? Johnny Depp did say that America is like a big puppy. New England is the head, with Boston being the brains. Between all the media and politicians, New York City and DC are the two ends of a big mouth.

All those solid folks in the northern states form the straight backbone, and Midwestern region is where the nation's heart is found. The West Coast is the nation's buttocks with Las Vegas as the colon and Hollywood and San Pornando Valley the anus out of which the waste comes.

Florida and South Texas are the fore- and hind legs, and New Orleans is the sex organs.

A fine lookin' animal, if you ask me.

More on those nutty religious conservatives: Now that I have a few more free minutes, I can compare the risk of mental health among very religious, extremely conservative people and extreme liberals who never attend church. The mean days of mental illness reported per month for the former group is .47. For the latter group, it's 7.05.

That means that the rate is 15 times higher for irreligious liberals. Put differently, a typical godless liberal is mentally ill one week out of each month!

"The irreligious are all lunatics!" A reader by the pseudonym of Jewish Atheist claimed in a comment in the last post that the only people supporting McCain these days are racists and religious nuts. Let's set aside the fact that JA just impugned the motives of about 100 million people--boringly typical among lefties--and see if there is any empirical basis to his fact-free assertion about the craziness of really religious people.

The General Social Survey asked 5,273 Americans about their church attendance as well as how many days of mental illness have they have experienced in the past 30 days. Here are the means:


Mean days of mental health problems last month

Never attends church 4.66
Less than once a year 4.22
Several times per year 3.66
Once a month 3.70
Two to three times a month 3.51
Nearly every week 3.10
Every week 2.69
More than once a week 3.53

People like JA have 1.7 times the mean number of mental illness days per month compared to a weekly churchgoers like myself. So, let me mirror JA's type of language with the one exception of actually basing it on data: "The irreligious are all lunatics!"

I expect a response back from JA saying something to the effect of, well, maybe religious people are healthier, but their POLICIES are sick!

(If JA wants to claim it's only conservative religious people who are nuts, I'd be happy to look at that as well.)

Brooks has "Whiterpeople disease": David Brooks, in his piece on Palin and the decline of Republicans, shows that he is a card-carrying member of the American Whiterpeople Association. His basic argument is that Republicans are becoming too populist and thus are losing the educated class.

Any successful party needs to attract the masses in order to win a majority of votes and a substantial number of wealthy and smart people to properly arm the party. A successful party has no choice but to have two faces.

Brooks is one of the first pundits I've read who is arguing that Republicanism does not appeal to elites. Wealthy people don't like the doctrine that lower taxes is good for society? And for those who feel they must justify their votes with something other than self- or class interest, since when is it a dumb argument that high taxes on small businesses in a recession will make things worse? Palin pushes this idea on a daily basis at rallies. Since when is it brilliant and not demogoguery to argue that fat cats need to be taxed more heavily, as Obama argues on a daily basis?

Brooks is not turned off these days by Republicans because they are now espousing dumb ideas, or because they are against being smart. He is a whiterperson who wants his vote to be associated with politicians who seem like they read Proust in their spare time. He shows that his status concerns are overwhelming his intelligence. Democrats are smarter. They have the two necessary faces: one that appeals to the Georgetown cocktail set, and one that appeals to ordinary people, especially poor, nonwhite ones.

You might counter that these two Democratic faces are more compatible with each other. After all, whiterpeople gain status by professing concern for the underprivileged. But the two faces that fit together for Republicans are based on no-nonsense smarts. Appealing to the middle class is not at all incomptable with appealing to talented people who have no patience for intellectually fashionable BS.

Democrats are smart to demonize cigar-smoking fat cats, and Republicans are smart to demonize cultural snobs.

Let me share my nightmare vision: The catastrophic diversity recession puts Obama in the White House, and it gets 60 Democrat Senators elected to Congress. A long list of liberal legislation is quickly passed. A cyclical recovery and a cheerleading media give Obama a second term. But before second term scandals tarnish his image, his charisma gets him assassinated. His reputation eventually surpasses that of Roosevelt, JFK, and MLK. Liberalism is so beloved, alternative ideas, like human biodiversity, are never more than marginal, and the U.S. goes down the shitter just like every country that is not in touch with reality.

Phyllis Schlafly reviews Dreams of My Father:

"With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a 'smaller and smaller coil of rage.' He lives with a 'nightmare vision' of black powerlessness.

"Obama says that the hate doesn't go away. 'It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people -- some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.'

"Obama's worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning 'someone else's history. Someone else's culture.'

"He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the 'landlocked center' of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of 'suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.'

"Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of 'aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries.' Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that 'we were always playing on the white man's court ... by the white man's rules....'

"Obama immersed himself in the writings of radical blacks: Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Obama's favorite became Malcolm X.

"Obama scarcely knew his father, yet he wrote: 'It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

"Obama described his happiness in going to Kenya: 'For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide.' He felt he 'belonged' and had come home. Apparently, the only other place he felt at home was in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago.

"Obama rejects racial integration because it is 'a one-way street' with blacks being 'assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.' Does he think America would be a better country if whites were assimilated into African culture?

"There is absolutely nothing in this book that expresses pride in or love of or appreciation of America. In 442 pages of introspection extending over his life as a teen, undergraduate and law student at prestigious institutions, community organizer and working adult, he doesn't say anything positive about American government, culture, society, freedom or opportunity.

"Obama's refusal to wear an American flag pin on his lapel sounded too trivial for a campaign issue. But since there is nothing in his book about respect for the flag, or the republic for which it stands, maybe the flag-pin flap does indicate his disdain for patriotism.

"In his autobiography, Obama accepts the view that 'black people have reason to hate.' His later book is called 'The Audacity of Hope,' but his autobiography, which he has never disavowed, should be titled 'The Audacity of Hate.'"


Obviously, I don't like Jeremiah Wright, but I do think he honestly communicates what he thinks. I believe him when he says that Barack is saying whatever he needs to say to get elected.

Age and race in the presidential race: Some folks don't think it's fair to focus on McCain's age--ageism they call they it. Even though I want Obama to lose, I think it's a reasonable concern. According to CDC stats, people in McCain's age group have death rates five times higher than those Obama's age.

But if it's legitimate to worry about troubling events correlated with age, why is it not legitimate to worry about risks associated with race? For example, the Uniform Crime Reports shows us that blacks are 3.4 times more likely than whites (with Hispanics added in) to commit the crime of embezzlement, even though they are under-represented among people in the position to be guilty of this crime. If it's okay to worry about a dead president, why isn't it okay to worry about a live, corrupt one?

Good point by Victor Davis Hanson:

"He [Obama] said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005" (New York Times, 10/3)

"Why in the world was Barack Obama still communicating on the phone or via email with Bill Ayers up until 2005 — when in 2001 Ayers gave widely publicized interviews claiming he had no regrets about the bombing, indeed regretted that he had not done enough, and did not necessarily have any remorse either about his Weathermen career?

"Ponder that: the possible next President of the United States, well after 9/11 and in the climate of hourly worry over terrorism here at home, was still friendly and communicating with an associate that had to abandon his book tour due to popular outcry, and was widely quoted as absolutely unrepentant about his terrorism. That is a damning indictment of his judgement — among other things — and it is no "smear" to raise the issue.

"Indeed, there is a disturbing pattern here. Obama's once-close radical Chicago associates are never jettisoned out of principle, but only at the 11th-hour when they became impediments to Obama's political career."

Camille Paglia never fails to stimulate:

"One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is 'dumb.' Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

"As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

"Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant."

The smart fraction among American ethnic groups: La Griffe du Lion has shown that per capita GDP is a function of the smart fraction: the percent of a population with a verbal IQ of 106 or higher. The vocabulary test of the General Social Survey can serve as a good measure of verbal IQ, and I'm interested in estimating the smart fraction of each ethnic group in the United States, especially those groups with currently high levels of immigration. Here is what I found (immigrants are excluded since they can't be expected to have the vocabularies that natives have):


The smart fraction

Russian 66.3
Chinese 57.2
Japanese 55.5
English/Welsh 55.3
East Indian 49.9

All Native-born Americans 42.5

Filipino 28.5
Puerto Rican 27.4
Blacks 20.8
Mexican 20.6

Once again, Mexican Americans fall to the bottom of the list. I'm surprised that Filipinos don't do better since their educational levels are quite good. If we want to become a wealthier society, and to the extent that immigrants match their native-born counterparts, we want to encourage the immigration of those who increase our smart fraction and discourage those who shrink it.

Three very nice paragraphs by the great Thomas Sowell:

"The story of Obama's political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot-- after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates' petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

"Despite his words today about 'change' and 'cleaning up the mess in Washington,' Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

"Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini."

Shut up with the attacks: I, for one, am fed up with all the personal attacks that we're now witnessing between McCain and Obama. The American people want to hear about the issues that matter to them. Like education. With all the insults, Obama has no chance to tell us that we shouldn't be devoting more money to improve kids' math and science skills. Obama's priorities while serving on the Woods Fund board were exactly right. Kids needs millions funneled into classrooms so they can spend their time learning how to overthrow the American goverment. Shut up with all the talk about what these men are like, and let's focus on their promises!

Help me with a quote: Some readers don't get my post on the "alpha male with a vagina" although it seems perfectly plain to me. I'll give a dollar to anyone who can give me the Churchill quote about how the critics on the sidelines are little pip squeaks--the great man is the one in the center of the battle. It won't help anyone understand any better, but I like it anyway.

UPDATE (Thanks to scrutineer): “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt

Married conservatives are happier than married liberals

In my previous post, a reader named Jewish Atheist claims that conservatives have lower divorce rates than liberals due to the fact that conservatives stay in unhappy marriages because their religions say they shouldn't get a divorce. He asserts this with no evidence, so let me help him out.

The chart above shows how happy people are with their marriage by political orientation. If JA is right, unhappy marriages among conservatives should be more common than among liberals (who supposedly break up if they are dissatisfied). It turns out that just the opposite is true: conservaties have happier marriages. To be precise, 62.4% of liberals are very happily married, while 67.9% of conservatives are (shown in red).

Jewish Atheist, being the logically consistent commenter that he is, will retort that the religions of conservatives will insist they always tell the truth, which means the happiness gap with liberals is actually even larger since conservatives will not give the socially desirable answer of being happy when they really aren't like irreligious liberals will sometimes do. Uhm, oops, I guess that doesn't work out for him.

Actually do something to smack Obama and Reverend Wright: In condemning Republicans who run Jeremiah Wright ads, John McCain revealed that not being called a racist is more important to him than the election. Why the topic would be off-limits is absolutely beyond me.

After many months of opposing McCain's candidacy, I'm going eat some humble pie and urge readers to donate to Freedom's Defense Fund, a 527 which has been airing ads on Rezko, Ayers, and, most importantly, Wright. (If you know of a better 527 or better ads, please post a comment). For a 44 dollar donation, they send you a free copy of Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi.

What motivated my change was simple: reading USA Today, I was reminded that Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89 in December, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. That has a way of bringing clarity to one's mind.

Another wacky idea from the Inductivist: Bill O'Reilly rants all the time about how NBC has lost all professionalism in its support for liberal ideology. That got me wondering if Saturday Night Live's plan to air fresh political parodies every Thursday night (the night with the largest TV audience) during prime-time slots until the election is motivated only by profit, or if NBC wants to influence the election by using Tina Fey to drive home the argument that Palin is not up to being the vice-president.

Who to turn to for advice: smart liberals or smart conservatives?

If you're a young person looking for direction, we all know it makes sense to ask a smart person, but does it make sense to seek out an intelligent liberal or conservative? An excellent measure or whether people have their act together or not is whether they can make their marriage work. It's a huge challenge as anyone who has been married knows. Not everyone has the wisdom to figure out how to keep it together.

I looked at the marital status of the smartest people (WORDSUM=9,10) over 30, using General Social Survey data. It is summarized in the above graph. With the exception of extreme conservatives, divorce decreases as one moves in a conservative direction (shown in green).

And this underestimates the success of conservatives since liberals are much less likely to have ever been married and thus are not at risk for divorce. Among all who have gotten married, 33.0% of liberals and only 10.8% of conservatives have gotten divorced or separated.

Liberal IQ does not translate into successful institutions. Conservative intelligence does.

The alpha male with a vagina: Allow me some vent therapy. I really do try once in a while to visit liberal blogs because I figure you can always learn from the other side, but I confess that the past 8 years have made it increasingly difficult. There are only so many ways that commenters can do a variation on the theme that Bush is a moron. Now with Palin on the scene, this could potentially go on forever.

Look--nobody respects the importance of IQ more than I do. Many years after the fact, I am still mortified that I never ran across the term "g factor" in all the undergraduate psych courses I took. Something so huge was totally ignored by instructors and textbook writers. It was a damn crime.

Having said that, I have never felt comfortable making fun of a national politicians' intelligence. Here I sit in my underwear, playing around with numbers and occasionally spouting off when visiting other blogs, and I--ME, MYSELF--am going to laugh at the world's power brokers? When I read the predictable comments at a liberal blog, the vision that comes to mind is a huddle of beta chimps all laughing because the alpha makes funny noises as he copulates with all the females.

And now I witness the same ridicule by male blog commenters about Sarah Palin--a gotdamn woman. Palin's got more testosterone in her little finger than that whole troupe of chimpanzees.

Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment, and I'll be the first. I couldn't be elected mayor of Wasilla if my life depended on it. How far have I actually risen in the halls of power? I've served on a condo association board, and that was because they were hard up for help.

My little theory is that every guy who shoots hits mouth off on the Internet secretly wishes he were in Bush's shoes or Sarah's pumps. All this talk is a longing for power, and I, for one, can do no more than bloviate. This ridicule gives one a false sense of superiority over someone who is your superior by leaps and bounds. We are the little men; they are the giants. A five year old can see that.

In each of us is that chimp wanting to run the show and to get all the girl chimps, but only that rare few has what it takes.

Yes, I criticize and disagree with and dislike politicians, but do I fool myself into thinking that I have something they don't and so, in a sense, am greater than them. I'm much too honest for that.

I rode in an elevator with Senator Moynihan one time in DC. I was absolutely speechless, and felt like I was in the presence of a God, and not because he was smart. And I don't even like Democrats.

Which immigrant groups shift us toward a more educated society? The General Social Survey asked immigrants to America about their highest degree. I looked at the percent over age 25 who answered bachelors degree or higher:


Percent with bachelors degree or higher

East Indian 74.3
Chinese 71.1
Arab 60.6
Japanese 51.2
Swedish 50.0
Filipino 49.2
Russian 48.7
English 45.3
French 45.2
Polish 33.7
African 32.8

Native-born Americans 23.2

Italian 9.9
Puerto Rican 7.9
Mexican 5.4

All groups are higher than native-born Americans except for Italians (this might surprise you) and Hispanics (which shouldn't surprise you if you read this blog). Mexicans immigrants are the largest of the immigrant groups and yet produce very few college graduates. We should welcome the handful and discourage the rest.

Some people think this low number is a temporary thing: Each new generation will do much better than its parents, they claim. While it is true that some of the children of these Mexican immigrants will finish college, a large number will at most finish high school.

I looked to see how far the children of Hispanic fathers with 4-year degrees go in school. It turns out that 42.2% of them at most finish high school. That is compared to 30% of the children of whites with a bachelors and 39.0% of blacks. In other words, Latinos who have finished college are more likely than their black counterparts to have children who grow the lower class. And if educated Hispanic immigrants produce this many low achieving kids, what about all those with only a few years of school?

Seventy-nine percent of Hispanic respondents have a father who finished high school or less (40.6% and 38.4%). Of those with a father who dropped out, 20.5% didn't finish high school themselves, and 56.0% did not go to college. The corresponding numbers for people with fathers who competed high school are 5.1% and 55.6%.

Put simply, very few Hispanic immigrants go to college, and it only improves a bit for their descendants. Let's face it: Latinos can be characterized as a working-class population with a few upwardly mobile folks on the one hand, and an underclass on the other. It is unlikely to change substantially, and constant swamping by new immigrants only exacerbates the situation.

Americans and Hispanic communities themselves have been ironically blessed by the economic downturn: as USA Today tells us, fewer illegals are now coming. Maybe I'll vote for the candidate who will deepen and extend the recession as long as possible!

Are all news photographers in the tank for Obama?

Obama announced he was running for president 20 months ago, and in all that time I have never seen a bad news photo of him. (The one above is just the latest). Is he just really photogenic, or are all news photographers in the tank for him?

Boy how things change: Anticipating the vice-presidential debate tonight, I found myself longing for the old days when Cheney kicked Lieberman's ass in 2000. After watching that, I told my friends that I wished that he, rather than Bush, were at the top of the ticket. Needless to say, my opinion of Cheney is not what it used to be, and I do not wish that the vice-presidential candidate were running for president this time around.

Will the "Bradley effect" help McCain? According to Realclearpolitics.com's poll of polls, Obama is now up about 5 percent points over McCain. At a moment like this, Republicans might be hoping that the "Bradley effect" is in operation; that a sizeable number of so-called bigoted whites are saying they plan to vote for Barack when they really intend to vote for the white guy. Data from Realpolitics compared with the recent AP-Yahoo News poll indicate that there is no such effect at work.

The AP survey was conducted between August 27th and September 5th, and is unique in that telephone interviewers direct respondents to the Internet or to loaned equipment so that answers are private. People might be unwilling to admit to others that they plan to vote for a white candidate over a black one (I'm skeptical about that) but why lie to a computer?

According to the results, Obama was up 4 to 5 points during that period of time. I looked at the other nine national polls that were taken during that period (data provided by Realclearpolitics), and I calculated a simple average which turned out to be a 5.1 point advantage for Barack. Respondents are telling telephone interviewers the same thing that they are telling the computer, so there is no dishonesty. There is some evidence from other races that whites might change their minds last minute, and that late deciders might break for McCain, but there is little reason to expect that current polls are off by much.

One factor that might benefit Obama is that surveys sometimes under-sample cellphone users. This is a younger group, and consequently is more likely to vote for Barack.

More Hispanics means more alcoholics: In America, drunken bums bring up the image of a white or a black man, at least it does in my mind. This might have something to do with the fact that in my town, I get hit up constantly for money at gas stations from mostly blacks and a few whites.

This blog has shown that many stereotypes are rooted in fact, but not all of them. Centers for Disease Control data show that the image of the black drunk is false. It should be replaced with the image of the Mexican borracho.

I calculated the average number of people who died from alcoholic liver disease per 100,000 total population for the years 1999-2001 for all U.S. counties with more than 250,000 people. (I averaged over three years since these are rare events). Next, I calculated the Pearson correlations between this variable and percent Hispanic, percent black, and 14 other variables:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/alcoholism .40**
percent black/alcoholism -.09

**p < .01, two-tailed test


More Hispanics means more alcoholics, but not so for blacks. Of the 16 independent variables only the percent unemployed was more strongly related to the rate of death due to alcoholism (.41).

I'm not sure exactly why, but Hispanic alcoholism is more hidden than for blacks or whites. Families must keep members off the streets. We don't see it on our streets as much, and this explains the lack of a stereotype.

Let's leave those immigration doors wide open: everyone loves a drunk!

More on crime among Native Alaskans: In the lower 48 states, American Indians are not known for high rates of crime. The Uniform Crime Report tells us that AIs are slightly more than 1 percent of all arrests for serious crimes, which is close to matching their share of the U.S. population (1.0%). They only seem to have a noticeable problem with family violence and alcohol-related crimes.

Not so with Alaska natives. Using arrest data, I calculated how their rate of serious crime compares with white Alaskans. I've listed the ratios here:


Ratio of Alaskan native crime rates to whites

Murder 4.3
Rape 5.7
Robbery 3.4
Aggravated assault 3.7
Burglary 3.4

These are huge differences--similar in magnitude to black-white differences. It's typical though how crime in Alaska is portrayed as a white problem. Those hell-raising rednecks (which I'm sure are actually lily white up there).

So how do we explain the propensity to act violently, especially in light of the fact that American Indians are similar to whites? Have these descendants of hunters not lost their fierce ways yet? Did the White Man kill off many of the aggressive males down here?

The media didn't mention that the Alaskan barbarians are Indians: CNN continues the media pattern of making Alaska look like a state of Neanderthals with their story of how high the rape rate is in the state and how Wasila did not pay for rape kits while Palin was mayor. I've browsed data on Alaska's rate of alcoholism and murder--they're unexceptional. Just now, I looked at the 2006 rape rate. CNN neglected to mention that 45% of the rapes are committed by American Indians, even though they are only 15% of Alaska's population.

Question: Am I crazy, or is some of the Sarah Palin Derangement Syndrome a Jewish thing? Watch this clip of Sandra Bernhard. I began to suspect this when I heard Michael Savage, a right-winger if there ever was one, flip his nut when Palin was selected. He was screaming to the skies (of course, he always does that) that McCain must tell Palin to bow out.

I mean, it's understandable if some Jewish folks fear small towners since they are not famous for their tolerance. (I'm reminded of Blazing Saddles where Mel Brooks calls these kinds of people "morons.") As long as they're in their little villages, no problem, but put one a step from the White House and "Holy Shit!" But I don't know why people worry so much. Not all country bumpkins are the same. I'm no historian, but I don't recall a long list of American frontier pogroms. If anything, Sarah will nuke Iran to save Israel.

What percent of whites are likely to vote for Obama because he's black? Since last Friday, I've been reading and watching all the hand-wringing that the media is doing over the AP-Yahoo News poll finding that Obama might lose the race because of racist whites. They're already setting up the explanation, in the event that the Democrats lose: we lost because of evil whites. The language is much magnified over what you read in the initial report that concludes that Obama is disadvantged by 6 percentage points.

The researchers pushed respondents into characterizing blacks, and now the media is flipping out over the fact that 22% of white Democrats think that blacks are complainers. I interpret this, not as an indication of hatred, but a sign that only one-fifth of white Democrats pay attention to what blacks are actually like. Most of the characterizations are positive: 25% of dopey Dems stereotype blacks as being school smart. Generalizations only make sense in comparison to something, and I presume that people use themselves as the reference group, so one-quarter of white liberals think blacks are smarter than whites.

But I digress. How many times have we heard the media conclude that America is still a racist society? This is not news--it's ancient and boring. What is fascinating is that this survey actually asked whites, "Does the fact that if elected, Barack Obama would be the first black president of the United States make you more likely to vote for him, less likely to vote for him, or does it not affect your vote either way?" Even better, they first called respondents on the phone and then had them answer questions online. This gets rid of the problem of giving PC answers to the interviewers.

So what percent of whites are voting for Obama because he is black? Six percent. Combine that with the media cheering for him, and the fact that more blacks will make the effort to vote--Obama is in fine shape.

The media is panting over the parts of this poll that they like, but you'll never see them so anxious to report evidence that Obama might in some ways have an advantage, and that some whites are so generous. Imagine a black person voting for McCain because he is concerned about the welfare of whites. No, no, we mustn't give whites any credit. And this, in spite of the fact that Obama himself said on 60 Minutes yesterday that some whites are probably voting for him to make history.

Percent Hispanic predicts poverty better than percent black: I'm putting together Census data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000 as of 2000. Allow me to list some interesting findings. First, it turns out that percent Hispanic is positively correlated with a measure of income inequality (GINI index). And the correlation becomes stronger with percent black added in:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/inequality .39
percent black/inequality .34
percent poor minority/inequality .58

Liberals are so concerned about inequality, they created an entire discipline--sociology--devoted to its study. Somehow in their thousands of studies, sociologists failed to report that mass Latino immigration is growing our inequality problem, and immigration restrictions will make America more equal.

Next let's look at the percent poor:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/poverty .56
percent black/poverty .36
percent black-Hispanic/poverty .74


Blacks are the stereotypically poor group, yet a Hispanic presence predicts poverty even better. I don't recall the researchers telling us that a key approach to fighting poverty in America is to shut the door on Latino immigration.

Finally, let's look at the unemployment rate.


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/unemployment .57
percent black/unemployment .07
percent poor minority/unemployment .53


Once again, unemployment brings to mind young blacks hanging on the steet corner, yet the percent of the county that is black does not predict the unemployment rate. (This is the only correlation in this post that is not statistically significant at the .05 level). Having lots of Latinos around, however, is a good sign that many people are without jobs. (Perhaps some of the unemployed are native-born people who have lost jobs to immigrants).

This, of course, contradicts the liberal claim that the American economy would come to a dead halt without the heroic labors of Latino immigrants. And would I sound repetitive if I mentioned that our beloved professors have not pushed reduced immigration from the south as an important way to reduce unemployment?

Michelle Obama asked voters today not to vote for someone based on her looks. Evidently, she is laying the groundwork for her own political career.

Palin power: I'm probably wrong, but it's fun anyway to throw out wacky ideas. I cannot figure out why, according to realclearpolitics.com's poll of polls, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are toss up states! These non-Republican states are split, even though the economy is in the crapper? If I recall correctly, they were clearly leaning for Obama before the conventions, so what has happened? Call me crazy, but I wonder if folks up there are responding to two things: 1) Palin is a gun nut, and 2) she has a Fargo accent.

Obama, the racial healer: In this piece in the Wall Street journal, Rush Limbaugh shows that the quotes of him put in Obama ads were actually parodies, not the hate speech they have been portrayed as. (Not to mention that tying McCain to Limbaugh is a joke). Obama is trying to stir up anti-white anger among Hispanic voters, and we're supposed to believe that racial healing is in his DNA.

In the spirit of tit-for-tat, will we see a McCain ad showing Obama's minister of 20 years--where there's actually a meaningful relationship--stirring up anti-white sentiment among black parishioners? Or perhaps Obama himself choosing as his career to politically organize blacks as blacks at the expense of whites and other groups? I ain't holding my breath.

"White trash voters": With Sarah Palin on the ticket, lots of good-hearted folks are saying things like Republicans are the white trash party. Let's set aside the racial slur, and define this group as whites with the lowest status jobs. Here's how whites voted in 2004:

Percent of whites voting for Bush in 2004 by job status

Low 50.3
Low-medium 57.9
Medium 63.0
Medium-high 58.9
High 54.1

"White trash" folks are the least likely of all whites to vote Republican. The GOP is a white, middle class party, if anything. The Democratic party is a Black, Hispanic, Jewish, immigrant, whiterpeople party, and poor whites are split.

Charles Adams: While watching Charles Adams, the son of the great American Founding Father, drink himself to death in the HBO mini-series John Adams (it's great--I recommend seeing it) I wondered if this was a tendency among the sons of great men.

The General Social Survey asked 1,479 men about their father's occupation, and if they sometimes drink too much. I compared the group with fathers in the highest one percent of occupational prestige with everyone else:


Percent who drink too much

Men with very prestigious fathers 70.6
All other men 43.6


There is a clear difference here. Now it might be that these guys from elite families just party more or are more willing to report their excesses, but I wonder if some of it reflects the difficulty in having every advantage but not measuring up to such a successful father.

If I'm right, this phenomenon shows the destructive nature of knee-jerk blank slatism. Junior was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so why isn't he matching or even surpassing the old man's achievements?

Someone with even a basic understanding of reality knows that, using Adam's family as an example, his children were unlikely to match their father's accomplishments because they would likely regress toward the mean.

These sons need to be told that their fathers are freaks--why would you expect lightning to strike twice? No one should expect you to be a carbon copy of Poppy, and if they do, they are ignorant people with harmful beliefs.

But it makes me compassionate to believe that people have tremendous potential, and that only disadvantage holds them down, says the liberal. No, it does not make you compassionate. It destroys lives.

How to get help fast: My bank has you sign in and wait on a couch if you need to sit down with someone to discuss something. I had just finished a large iced coffee, and was really revved up. I was so wired, I couldn't sit down but just paced back and forth. I'm sure it also helped to be a man, and a masculine-looking man at that.

In a matter of seconds, the woman at the desk asked if I needed help. I said that I had signed in and was just waiting to see her, and returned to my pacing. I swear they put something in my coffee. Not a minute later, a woman came out of her big office and asked me if I needed help. I asked her my question, and she explained everything. I was on my way in less than five minutes, and the poor folks in front of me in line were still sitting there.

Randall Kennedy on (the) race: Randall Kennedy writes that if Obama loses--whatever the reason--he will have "feelings of dejection, anger and resentment." If someone as reasonable as Kennedy is going to be mad, how is the average street-corner black man going to feel? If there is a perception that the election was stolen or lost because of racist white voters, I recommend that you white folks don't do any driving through black neighborhoods on November 5th.

Does the South have a culture of violence? Many writers haved claimed that the South is more likely than other regions to turn to violence to deal with perceived problems, but I haven't seen much systematic data to back it up, expect for higher rates of violence.

The General Social Survey asked 7,697 men if they would approve of someone hitting a stranger who was drunk and bumped into the man and his wife. Here are the percent who answered yes by region of the country:


Percent of men who are pro-violence

New England 5.2
Middle Atlantic 6.6
East North Central 7.2
West North Central 7.3
South Atlantic 11.2
East South Central 14.7
West South Central 11.4
Mountain 8.8
Pacific 6.5


Clearly, most men don't think a quick resort to violence is right, but there are a few especially in the South. Now, who knows the causal connection between attitudes, behaviors, and other related variables, but we can say that the South, especially the East South Central division (TN, KY, MS, AL) has more violent, pro-violent, and low IQ people than other regions.

Let's see how well violent attitudes match patterns of actual violence:


Percent who are pro-violent

Men 10.0
Women 7.6

Whites 8.6
Blacks 7.8
Others 12.1

Chinese 15.6
English/Welsh 8.3
German 7.4
Irish 8.0
Italian 4.7
Japanese 16.2
Mexican 11.1
Dutch 12.0
Polish 5.4
Puerto Rican 9.3
American Indian 10.4
Arab 21.7

Ages 61+ in 1972 18.1
Ages 18-30 in 1994 4.0

Overall, these estimates are not consistent with patterns of violent behavior. Chinese and Japanese Americans, for example, are on the high end with respect to values, but are on the low end of actually assaulting someone. Perhaps we're not validly measuring attitudes, but there is little reason here to think that behavior matches values.

I included the last two estimates to show that pro-violent attitudes are more common among older people surveyed in earlier years. The GSS hasn't asked the question in this decade, but the 70s through the first half of the 90s show decreasing support for violence.

The World Cultural Map

In case you folks haven't seen this, here's a very interesting world cultural map based on the World Values Survey:

"This map reflects the fact that a large number of basic values are closely correlated; they can be depicted in just major two dimensions of cross-cultural variation.

"The World Values Surveys were designed to provide a comprehensive measurement of all major areas of human concern, from religion to politics to economic and social life and two dimensions dominate the picture: (1) Traditional/ Secular-rational and (2) Survival/Self-expression values. These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators-and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations.

"The Traditional/Secular-rational values dimension reflects the contrast between societies in which religion is very important and those in which it is not. A wide range of other orientations are closely linked with this dimension. Societies near the traditional pole emphasize the importance of parent-child ties and deference to authority, along with absolute standards and traditional family values, and reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride, and a nationalistic outlook. Societies with secular-rational values have the opposite preferences on all of these topics.

"The second major dimension of cross-cultural variation is linked with the transition from industrial society to post-industrial societies-which brings a polarization between Survival and Self-expression values. The unprecedented wealth that has accumulated in advanced societies during the past generation means that an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival for granted. Thus, priorities have shifted from an overwhelming emphasis on economic and physical security toward an increasing emphasis on subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of life....

"A central component of this emerging dimension involves the polarization between Materialist and Postmaterialist values, reflecting a cultural shift that is emerging among generations who have grown up taking survival for granted. Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance of diversity and rising demands for participation in decision making in economic and political life. These values also reflect mass polarization over tolerance of outgroups, including foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality. The shift from survival values to self-expression values also includes a shift in child-rearing values, from emphasis on hard work toward emphasis on imagination and tolerance as important values to teach a child. And it goes with a rising sense of subjective well-being that is conducive to an atmosphere of tolerance, trust and political moderation. Finally, societies that rank high on self-expression values also tend to rank high on interpersonal trust.

"This produces a culture of trust and tolerance, in which people place a relatively high value on individual freedom and self-expression, and have activist political orientations. These are precisely the attributes that the political culture literature defines as crucial to democracy."


Where do you fall on the map? I might not sound like it, but I'm a moderate on the traditional/secular axis, but I'm more of a worrier than most Western Europeans, and feel we can't afford the luxury of very much self-expression when disaster might be right around the corner.

Full of it(self) media: I don't make a habit of linking Charles Krauthammer, but he nailed it this time. He was one of the first people to use the term "Bush Doctrine", and he shows that it has four meanings, the most recent being Bush's desire to spread democracy to the four corners of the earth.

I watched Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin, and it made me think of the old pattern of sneering liberals who assume conservatives are stupid, and then turn out to be wrong on just about everything they believe. And the media wonders why we loathe them.

Typical liberal hypocrisy: Bob Herbert of the New York Times, always a giggle to read, calls Sarah Palin "dimwitted." It puts the silliest grin on my face to see flaming liberals suddenly convert to a belief in native intelligence. Perhaps Bob thinks that IQ is genetically determined for white trailer trash, but is a racist mismeasure of black intelligence.

Allow me to speak in the voice of a lefty who actually believes his ideology: "We should very well oppose Palin on account of her right-wing views, but this talk of lack of intelligence is silly. All people are capable of being vice-president or president. It's just a matter of proper training. Sarah clearly does not know enough now, but an intense term at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government will turn anyone into a policy genius. Expertise might take many years to develop at a run-of-the-mill university, but this is Harvard, people. She would be ready when sworn in on January 20th."

Gender? Nah: Everybody's buzzing about how Palin's popularity is driven by the gender effect. I'm skeptical. Reading USA Today yesterday (don't get confused) I noticed that, according to their poll, 9% more men after both conventions said they plan to vote McCain than before them. For women, it was only 3% more.

If it's not gender, that leaves the populist, reformist, and right-wing appeal. I don't think most women really give a damn about the sisterhood.

Small towns: Time's Joe Klein writes that Palin has exploited America's myth of the frontier and the small town. According to Joe, this is pure nostalgia. America of the past 50 years has suffered the same kinds of defeats the South did from 1965 through the Civil Rights Era, so we yearn for the innocent days of Little House on the Prairie.

Realism, by contrast, lies in the urbane figure of Barack Obama. He is the 21st century.

In my view, this is the liberal fantasy of the Black Man. Modern urban life produces Obamas--thank God for it.

But let's get real. More often the big city gives us the black hustler. The absent black father. The black predator. Looking at the General Social Survey, 32.1% of black males in cities of at least 500,000 admitted to having been arrested, at least once. The corresponding number in towns under 25,000 is 23%. Arrest is a pretty good indicator of a dim future, so for every two guys that go down in towns like Wasilla, Alaska, three go down in the Big City.

Allow me an anecdote to illustrate my view that small towns produce less dysfunction, especially for blacks. My best friend when I was a kid was Henry, one of the only black boys in our small town. There was zero black subculture. Henry grew up in a close-knit white world, and there was no place to go if he didn't like it. And I don't think it was an accident that he turned out to be such a great guy. He got excellent grades in school. He never got into trouble. Henry was an incredible athlete. He graduated from a nearby university and ended up earning his MA. Last I heard, he is a working as a... okay, I think it's something like a community organizer, but we can live with that.

For all the injustices they suffered, black families showed much less dysfunction before achieving legal equality, and some of this, I think, was due to the fact that many blacks hadn't moved to the city yet, and small town life is good for people. There's more informal social control, an absence of deviant subcultures, and blacks especially seem to thrive in this kind of environment.

I might sound like a social engineer here, but at least I'm not pretending that all groups of people react to a given environment in the same way.

Klein seems pleased to see this old way life fading into the sunset, but we need more, not fewer small towns.

To Luis (a Hispanic reader):

You have given me a good opportunity to say a word about the fact that many of my posts document the problems we see in the Hispanic community.

Let me say first of all that I'm surprised that such a sensitive reader as yourself did not complain about my many posts that reflect negatively on blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. One of themes I stress here is that, in contrast to past immigrant groups, the ethnocentrism of Hispanics does not seem to be fading, and all too many are not entering the cultural mainstream. You respond by standing up for your Latino brothers.

You suggest that I change jobs so I don't have to be around Hispanics, and if I'm understanding you correctly, I shouldn't hide the views presented on this blog from my students.

You can't be serious. If I talked in class like I write on this blog, I would be terminated in short order, no questions asked. It doesn't matter in the least that most of what I post is analysis of data. I push it as far as I can in class, but I'm no martyr: I've got hungry kids to feed.

This blog gives me the chance to publish all the things I can't otherwise. If we lived in a society that welcomed hard talk on issues like immigration, the Inductivist would be unnecessary. Our society generates so much race hysteria, you assume that because some white dude documents Hispanic social problems, he must hate Latinos and does not want to be around them.

I wrote in an earlier post that 98% of my interactions with Hispanics have been positive. I've known many fine folks: I attend mass with Latinos every week. The complaints I have about Latino students, I have for students in general: as a group, they don't give a damn. They're indifferent and incurious.

The difference between me and most people is that I take statistics very seriously. And, in contrast to messages from the mainstream media and punditry, Hispanics do not have the same numbers as Middle Class America. Their stats are troubling and do not bode well for their long-term assimilation.

But you asks, what's my point? Isn't that obvious? Blacks are a low-income group. Their population reduces the Middle Class nature of America. The same can be said of American Indians and Hispanic citizens. The fact is that all these folks are part of our society. We have to make the best of a challenging situation.

By contrast, Hispanic immigration is not an inevitability. It's a choice. Since I value an America dominated by middle class families, I document the low-income nature of the Hispanic community in order to make the argument that mass immigration from Latin America is moving us toward a divided society with a large low-income population at the bottom and a small number of elites on top, with fewer middle class folks in between.

One reason why America has been such a good country is because it has been a heavily middle class country. I want to keep it that way. Immigrants that are allowed to come to this country should be the type to raise that middle, not expand the bottom.

America's slide into the muck of liberalism is another concern of mine. One of the most important issues to me is abortion, and every year the country has hundreds of thousands of new Hispanic immigrants who are likely to turn their backs on their religious beliefs and vote for pro-choice Democratic candidates. Latino immigration is tilting the country left, and it doesn't have to happen.

At work and in social situations, our PC culture forces me to walk on egg shells. For me, a blog is a great place to let loose--sensitivities be damned. Face to face, my comments could easily lead to violence, but in this forum, you're able to see in stark terms how some people really think. Most whites are not like me because their thinking on these issues never goes beyond the superficial, so don't take me as an indicator of what your neighbor is really like. Almost all these folks are people with the best of intentions and good will. I'm the same way, only I'm mad.

And you detect my anger--it's not hard to. I'm not sure if I'm very good at self-analysis, but let's give it a stab. I was more or less apolitical growing up, although I was raised in a conservative home. Later, college turned me liberal. I thought of myself as a good guy because my main concern when voting was the welfare black Americans.

After a few years, out of belief that one can learn from all sides, I started to read conservatives. It surprised me how good some of their ideas were, but I remained unmoved. Then I started to read about all the anti-white animus that so many blacks felt. And I started to get pissed off.

Here, when it came to politics, I was more concerned about them than my own family. I was even willing to have my own children and other relatives stand aside so blacks could take their jobs and college spots--and the response I got was that I was an incurable hater and the cancer of humanity.

Basically, I've been pissed off about the whole PC racket ever since. If people get pushed too far, this is what you get. By nature, I have good will toward everyone, but when I start analyzing data and thinking about issues, I will admit that it makes me angry, and I see no reason to feel bad about that.

Gotta love them damn Mormons: Which U.S. county with a population over 250,000 had the lowest percent voting for Kerry in 2004? Maybe some place in, I dunno know, Texas? Wrong. Only 14% (!) of voters in Utah County, Utah voted Democrat. Provo and Orem are the main cities there--this is where Brigham Young University is located. Mormons of all classes reject liberalism hook, line, and sinker. God love 'em.

More on my county data: I'm collecting data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000.

Which of these counties would you guess has the most poverty? Perhaps Hinds, Mississippi (Jackson) which has the highest concentration of blacks--65.2%? Wrong--the poorest county is Hidalgo, TX. Almost one-third of the residents (31.7%) fall under the poverty line. What could explain all that poverty, even more poverty than the Bronx (25.4%)? Could it be that 89.4% of Hidalgans are Hispanic?

Conspiracy theory: I see that, according to the USA Today/Gallup poll, McCain is now up by 10 points. I suspect that there is a genius Republican plot going on. It's so good, Rove must be behind it. The GOP must have planted people in the media and the blogosphere and ordered them to obsess about how Palin is Alaskan trailer trash. It is brilliant: nothing is going to convince Reagan Democrats to vote Republican better than telling them that someone they identify with is low-class. It's "clinging to guns" all over again. I am truly impressed.

Liberalism doesn't stop unwanted pregnancies, but it sure as hell kills a LOT of fetuses: Democrats tell us that the answer to reducing abortions among teens is not to make them illegal; rather, we need to support and expand the programs which address the factors that lead to abortion. In other words, we need to put Democrats in charge of the problem.

So, is there empirical support for this idea? Using Guttmacher and County and City Book data, I calculated the correlation between voting Democrat in 2004 and abortion rates among white girls ages 15-19 across the 32 states for which data are available. While I was at it I also looked at pregnancy rates (for white girls 15-19) and white IQ rates (Audacious' data):


Pearson correlation coefficients, N = 32

percent Democrat--abortion rate .64
percent Democrat--pregnancy rate -.15
pregnancy rate--abortion rate .11
IQ--pregnancy rate, -.65
IQ--abortion .14
IQ--percent Democrat .22

If you want to reduce abortions, the LAST thing you want to do is trust Democrats to do it--the positive correlation between the two is large.

And it's those idiot Red States that have all the white teen pregnancies, right? You know, the abstinence-type approach and all the Bible thumpers are total failures, compared to the scientific liberal strategy. Hardly--the correlation is trivial in size (-.15).

And the idea that (Republican) states that have all the pregnancies will consequently have all the abortions falls apart here as well--the correlation once again is insignificant (.11).

So, in other words, liberalism doesn't stop unwanted pregnancies, but it sure as hell kills a LOT of fetuses.

While I'm at it, I wanted to look at white IQ. My analysis supports the idea that smart states are able to avoid unwanted pregnancies (r = -.65) making them not have higher abortion rates (r = .14).

Finally, the positive association between being a Democrat state and having a high white mean IQ is small (.22).

Two howlers I heard on the talk shows: 1) Did you know that Hispanics who, last I heard, are going to vote more than 2 to 1 for Obama, are SWING voters (I thought "swing" meant that they can tip majority either way, but what do I know); and 2) the liberal mentality concerning Obama was revealed when Donna Brazile said on CNN that Jesus was a community organizer.

Starr County, Texas: America's future: I’m in the process of putting together a U.S. county-level data set, and I ran across the most Hispanic county I’ve ever seen. Starr county, on the U.S-Mexico border in southern Texas, is 97.4% Hispanic. Looking at the county website, Starr looks like a nice enough place.

But there’s two little problems. The Census says that 90.7% speak Spanish at home. Sounds something like Mexico to me. And only 6.9% of Starr’s residents have a bachelor’s degree. I don’t know the number, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mexico’s graduation rate is in the same ballpark.

And the rate isn’t so low because this is a county of a few dozen ranchers. As of 2007, the county had 62,000 residents. That’s bigger than the semi-rural county I grew up in, which by the way has a graduation rate of 24.9%.

Starr's population grew 15.2% from 2000 to 2006. Welcome to the future.

Question: My last post got me thinking. If I'm not mistaken, women who get an abortion most often abort their first child, but research tells us that the oldest, on average, is the smartest. So, are we killing our most capable? (Not that it would be a good thing to kill our less capable). (A related post by Sailer here.)

Everybody's a sociologist when it comes to teen marriage: Let me follow-up on my last post with a comment on today's article in the NYT on teenage pregnancy. They took news of Palin's daughter's pregnancy as an opprtunity to remind readers how teenagers, especially girls, are doomed if they get married and have babies when they're teenagers.

What has happened to Bristol is not the best way to go, but let's use our brains for a second. First, early marriage was widespread 20 years before the divorce explosion of 1965-75. Most divorces take place in the first few years of marriage. If I get time, maybe I can look at this more closely, but I'm guessing that the divorce rate among those who married at 18 in 1950 was lower than those of people marrying at 30 nowadays. There isn't something inherent in early marriage that is conducive to divorce and failure.

Second, so many of these studies on negative outcomes assume that those who have babies as teens are in all important ways the same as those who don't. I haven't seen these studies typically control for things like IQ, talent, farsightedness, self-contol, industriousness, persistence, etc. I have read studies that have indicated that teens who have babies would have turned out poor even if they hadn't gotten pregnant.

To use a personal example, as I did in the last post. My brother got a girl pregnant when both of them were 16. He and the girl were excellent students, but their strict religious upbringing led them to have sex without confronting head-on what they were doing and what needed to be done to prevent pregnancy. (Plus, my bro was unhappy at home and irrationally thought a pregnancy might be a way out).

So the girl got pregnant. Most kids in their shoes would have gotten an abortion, but our type of people is a tad uncomfortable with slaughtering children, especially our own. Our parents and her parents pushed for adoption, but my brother and the girl told them all to go pound sand. They got married in our church 5 months before the baby was born.

Fast forward two decades. My brother has almost finished his MBA, he is the regional director over a number of large assisted-living facilities, and he makes probably three times what I make. His wife got her B.A. and was a very popular local TV news anchor for several years. Double careers were a little too much for them, so she scaled back her career a bit.

They have four beautiful children, and the oldest (the one conceived out of wedlock) has earned a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to a university where the average ACT is close to 30. He is majoring in math, and his college GPA is just about perfect.

Now, of course the sociologists would have predicted disaster for my brother and his wife. So why was the prediction wrong? Because sociologists, along with America's elites, believe that you are the product of your circumstances. If you get zapped with a baby at 17, you're done for. My bro and his wife made it because they are industrious, talented, relentless people. They would have been successful without the early marriage; they were successful with it.

If a sociologist says so, you know he can't be completely right.

Embarassing Red State fertility: I'll return to data analysis tout de suite, but all this fascination with Sarah Palin and Red State fertility makes me want to confess something.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but my family, as David Letterman said of Palin's, could do a Jerry Springer show. It's embarassing, but my parents have 15 grandchildren, and I'm afraid we are probably not finished. You'll be shocked, but I have 20 cousins on my father's side and 25 on my mother's. I am unable to count the total number of children they have had, but relatives seem to average 3 or 4 kids.

We can't seem to get a handle on our baby making, so I'm sorry to say that we'll have to leave the very highest ranks of society to you Blue Staters. I do have siblings and cousins who are doctors, attorneys and business executives, and we do have kids who ace their exams--so I guess we've got something there--but as a group, we're pretty ordinary.

We're going to have to turn to you folks to save an overcrowded planet by limiting family size. Somebody's gotta run things and do the right thing. But hey don't pat yourself on the back too much for your sacrifice, because everyone looks up to you. Your name will be remembered. Nobody ever admired my ordinary clan of a couple hundred people.

So you just keep up the heroic choices, and my relatives, unfortunately, will keep on doing what they have always done.

Question: Are any of you guys like me? Every time I see a clip of Sarah Palin shooting a gun, I get tingly all over.

Reacting to Obama, Chris Matthews reported a thrill up his leg. My response to Palin has been slightly different.

A visit from an African priest: A visiting priest from sub-Saharan Africa celeberated our mass yesterday, and he really left an impression on me. I'm not very good at describing this type of thing, but he had a powerful kind of dignity. I'm not sure if it was his resonant baritone voice, his large physique and black-as-coal skin, his humble demeanor, the priestly robes, or something less tangible.

He was educated in a Catholic school, along with the 40,000 other kids taught there since it was established in the early 70s. I'm not sure what the net impact of Christianity is on Africa, but it does seem to be educating a lot of kids. It certainly seems to have helped this priest.