Advantages of a breadwinner family

In the last post, I showed that close to 20 percent of white moms are married homemakers. Here's a graph of whites moms of all work statuses and marital statuses over the past four decades (N = 8,209). It's not a surprise that the breadwinner family took a nosedive in the 70s, but things have stabilized pretty much since 1990. If fact, you can see that the share of moms who work full-time has dropped a bit in this decade--it's less than 50 percent.

There is a good case to be made for the breadwinner family. There are married moms who have to work out of economic necessity, but "necessity" is often stretched to ridiculous proportions. I'm surrounded by families with $50,000 SUVs and huge homes that are a pain in the ass to clean and maintain.

In my home, we live modestly and take pride in the fact that we don't give damn what the neighbors think, and my wife gets to do whatever she wants. Her staying at home makes a large family much easier to pull off. Research says a woman will be happiest if she's doing what she wants to do.

If I were a mom, I would opt for homemaking because I could do all the things that are important to me; things that a job would make difficult. First, I could have a large family much more easily and thereby increase my chances of having one child who turned out not to be a disappointment (joking). Little kids are a lot of work, but once they're in school, I'd have plenty of time for reading and blogging--something I don't have much time for with a full-time job. You might respond that employment is so meaningful and rewarding and blah, blah, blah. If that's the case for you, great, we need dedicated people.

Some might think that being a professor is the kind of job that would be at the center of one's life. It may be for some. For me it's a paycheck. Ninety percent of the students hit the mental delete key after completing my final exam. The whole process is hardly worth the time. And if I want to have success publishing, I have to play the whore and give liberal editors what they're looking for. And committee work: oh my God, what a waste of time. Endless gasbaggery. At my institution, we spend 80% of our time trying to figure out how to make students with 95 IQs understand what guys with 140 IQs are talking about.

And I imagine that my job is much better than most. Do you women really want to push paper in some little gray cubicle just so you can keep up with the Joneses? All that stress and hassle? Many look at homemaking as servant work or something, but working women have to do all the stuff at home too, plus everything at work. How did women get conned into working so hard?

Housewifery is a bit like the life of an aristocrat. I mean, how did those folks live? They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You know, socializing, playing cards, and maybe a little charity work sprinkled in. Isn't that the old sterotype of a housewife? Myself, I'd use my time to read and write, but that's the point: you don't have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it. You choose how to spend your time.

And guys, do I have to convince you that there are benefits to having your wife stay home? Yes, your standard of living will drop some, but my wife saves a lot of money too by doing the things that other people have to pay to get done. I'll confess that it gives me an old-fashioned feeling of pride to be the breadwinner, and a wife feels more for a man that she depends on.

But let's cut to the chase. Do you really want your wife spending her day working under a guy who is probably more manly than you are? Bad idea, especially if you two are having problems. Over the years, I've known several unhappy wives at school who have given me inappropriate attention. Is it some mystery that when you put vulnerable women and authoritative men together, you sometimes get sex? (Don't get me wrong, I've always behaved myself.) I know housewives can be bad too, but exposure matters, and the world of housewives is typically other women and children. Just as I like it.

Which is more common: single moms or married homemakers? In the debate concerning sex, marriage and family, I'd like to avoid the extremes of folks who say on one side that the diversification of family life is to be celebrated and those on the other side who claim that traditional family life is dead and Armageddon looms. Big themes like this have to be addressed with data in pieces, so here's my first installment.

Using General Social Survey data (N = 1,872), I calculated the percentage of all white moms ages 20-45 in this decade who have a least one child who: 1) have never been married; or 2) are married homemakers. Which group do you think is larger? Out all of these moms, 11.4% are never-marrieds; 18.9% are married homemakers. When I was a undergraduate almost 20 years ago, I read that the number was close to 20%. It hasn't changed. The American family is becoming de-institutionalized: absent social pressures and economic incentives to conform to the traditional ideal, people are pursuing personal preferences. Behavior is now reflecting individual personalities more, so the future is likely to be a real mix of arrangements, but many people, like my wife who is a homemaker, will choose a traditional (and societally constructive) lifestyle because it suits them. Of course, I'd prefer to see a traditionalist revival, but I'm not that optimistic.

Trends in attitudes toward Affirmative Action for women

Males, N = 1,490

Females, N = 1,808

There is so much talk in HBD World over the battle of the sexes, I need to remember to weigh in with data where I can.

The General Social Survey posed the following question: "Some people say that because of past discrimination, women should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion of women is wrong because it discriminates against men. What about your opinion - are you for or against preferential hiring and promotion of women? Do you favor/oppose preference in hiring and promotion strongly or not strongly?"

The graphs show trends in the responses for white men and women. My first observation is that 23% of men in 2008 need to be bitch slapped for favoring discrimination against men. What the hell is wrong with you?

Second, while a majority of women are against gender preferences, the number favoring it is going up a bit. This is true for both sexes, which the exact wrong trend. The country has become gender neutral at the workplace. What is called for is less sex-conciousness, not more. Wanting to put a woman at the front of the line because she has a innie instead of an outie is a power grab, pure and simply. Justice plays no role in it whatsoever. It's a let's-stick-it-to-a-man-today mentality. This is a bad sign. People are increasingly buying into identity politics, and it's got to stop.

Trust and wealth are correlated: Recently, I used World Values Survey data to estimate the level of trust in countries in several regions of the world. But how close is the connection between trust and economic success? I calculated the correlation between the percent saying that people can be trusted and per capita GDP (taken from Nationmaster) across 82 countries. It's .45, and .51 if we omit Luxembourg (which is a real outlier on GDP).

It almost looks like a case of necessary but not sufficient. Several poor countries are trusting, but of the wealthy countries, only Singapore, Finland, and France are distrustful. And it could be that in some of these poor countries that are very different culturally from the West, there may be translation problems, or respondents might be giving socially acceptable answers.

One glorious bastard: "Inglorious Basterds" left me decidedly unimpressed save for one thing: Christoph Waltz. (I lie: Tarantino is a good dialogist, and the farmhouse scene was good). It's been downhill since "Pulp Fiction." Why the nerds over at IMDb currently rate it the 106th best movie ever, I'll never know. Oh yes I do--they're nerds.

You guys get to serve as the pal I turn to as I leave the theater and say, "That kinda sucked," because I see so many movies alone. Even "Julie and Julia" was too violent for my wife cuz Amy Adams had to bone a duck. Vive la difference!

Universalism for us, tribalism for them: There seems to be a subtle way in which whites folks think they are better than blacks. Most whites feel that tribalism is for losers. Blood-love is primitive, atavistic. But then they think there is something wrong with blacks when they aren't loyal to each other.

The recent example that comes to mind is Bill O'Reilly on his show berating Al Sharpton's defense of Michael Jackson as a black icon. Bill said, how can blacks admire Jackson when he chose a white man to be the father of his kids? The implication is that it was an act of race betrayal, and betrayal of this sort is beyond the pale for anyone to be considered a black hero. A good black has to be a tribalist, according to O'Reilly. He seems to be saying that race loyalty is just what blacks do, and good for them.

I imagine he doesn't see the problem, but he simultaneously believes, I'm sure, what I described before: as a general principle, tribalists are inferior people. It sounds like a form of "the soft racism of low expectations." Racial universalism is a standard only whites can rise to. "True, many blacks are tribalists, but what can you expect from them?"

More on trust: As a follow-up to the last post, I wondered about the level of trust in Asian and Muslim countries. Based on World Values Survey data, here are the percent who say that people can generally be trusted:


Percent who say you can trust people

World 29.6

Iran 65.3
Saudi Arabia 53.0
Indonesia 51.6
Iraq 47.6
Egypt 37.9
Pakistan 27.9
Morocco 23.5
Bangladesh 22.2
Azerbaijan 20.5
Turkey 12.6
Algeria 11.2

China 55.2
Japan 42.9
Taiwan 38.2
Vietnam 41.1
India 37.9
South Korea 32.1
Philippines 7.0

Muslim countries are all over the place--they are about as diverse as the whole sample of countries. Numbers like that in Iraq surprise me, given what Steve Sailer has written about how consanguinity in Muslim countries undermines trust beyond the family.

India is the trusting one among South Asian countries. The Phillipines is the exception in Southeast Asia, and East Asia is trusting.

NAMs don't trust: Hispanics and especially blacks tend to be suspicious people. According to the GSS, 40% of all Americans say that people can generally be trusted, but only 17% of blacks, 24% of Mex-Ams, and 16% of Puerto Ricans feel that way. Many of them are quick to think that someone is taking advantage of them; that someone is discriminating against them. Now, this could be due to their experience in America. Being dominated by another people could easily lead to distrust. Or it could be an ethnic trait.

The World Values Survey asked people all around the world the same question. Thirty percent of all respondents agreed that most people can be trusted. Here are the percentages who agreed in countries with high percentages of blacks or Hispanics:


Percent who say people can be trusted

Dominican Republic 26.4
Nigeria 22.1
South Africa 19.1
Zimbabwe 11.9
Tanzania 8.1
Uganda 7.6


Mexico 28.9
Chile 22.5
Argentina 20.3
Venezuela 14.8
El Salvador 14.6
Puerto Rico 12.4
Columbia 10.8
Peru 8.2

All black and Latino countries sampled have below-average numbers. Now, some might explain this lack of trust as the legacy of colonialism or a reaction to exploitative social conditions, but whatever the case, it seems to be a widespread, reliable characteristic. This does not bode well for long-term race relations in America. Trust is an essential ingredient for a thriving society.

Mex-Am incomes are rising but still way behind: One way to assess an immigrant group's progress in terms of assimilation is to look at trends in income. Readers are aware that I am most concerned about Mexican immigrant since the group is large, lacking in human capital, and concentrated in one region--the Southwest. I'm currently reading Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlan by UC Riverside professor Armando Navarro. It looks like another case of a white guy trying to prove he's not by adopting radical, idiotic positions. I've lived in the Southwest before but was under the mistaken belief that it belonged to the United States. These brown nationalist types have their ideology all worked out--the book is around 700 pages long--but the question is, will Mexican Americans have enough success in America to reject this kind of nonsense.

Using GSS data, let's look at mean family income in 1986 dollars across four decades. The sample doesn't capture any Warren Buffets, so I think we're okay using means:


Mean family income for Mexican Americans in 1986 dollars (N = 1,325)

Seventies 20,331
Eighties 19,512
Nineties 25,365
This decade 24,874

You might be thinking that the increase is due to larger households, but those have shrunk not grown for Mexican Americans over the past four decades. I see progress here, but let's compare these numbers to other immigrant groups:


Mean family income in 1986 dollars

Chinese Americans (N = 162)
Seventies 39,894
Eighties 41,772
Nineties 41,095
This decade 61,976

Filipino Americans (N = 171)
Seventies 31,909
Eighties 33,026
Nineties 32,300
This decade 42,593

Indian Americans (N = 145)
Seventies 38,105
Eighties 28,473
Nineties 39,072
This decade 45,661

So the good news is that Mex-Ams are improving, but the bad news is that they are lagging significantly behind other groups. The gap is not closing with other immigrants or whites (data not shown), and that's a problem.

The plot thickens: As a follow-up to the last post, I wanted to see if the risk of arrest varies by hair color. I found that people with red or salt and pepper hair had the highest rates of arrest when stopped. As I wrote before, 4.1% of the entire sample was arrested.


Percent with red hair who were arrested

Black 10.9
White Hispanic 10.9
White 6.7
All cases 8.0


Percent with salt and pepper hair arrested

Black 7.8
Black Hispanic 8.7
White Hispanic 9.1
White 7.8
All cases 8.0

When I saw the number for red-headed blacks, my first thought was Malcolm X. Then I remembered an analysis I did of GSS data which showed that Scottish Americans are angrier people than blacks. (The Irish, not so much). And I have no idea on folks with salt and pepper hair. It's most common among whites. You guys gotta help me out with an explanation.

I charge the NYPD with gingerism--prejudice against redheads.

Watch out for people with green eyes: In 2006, the NYPD recorded data on over 500,000 stops in order to estimate how much of a problem officers have with racial bias. Here are the percent of stops that resulted in an arrest:


Percent of stops resulting in an arrest

Asian/Pacific Islander 4.4
Black 4.0
American Indian 3.0
Black Hispanics 4.5
White Hispanics 4.3
Whites 4.8
Other 2.6

I see zero evidence here of bias against non-whites. This, in spite of the fact Hispanics and especially blacks are much more belligerent than other groups.

But the more interesting part. For every racial category with sufficient numbers, people with green eyes are significantly more likely to be arrested. The overall arrest rate is 4.1 percent, and here are the percent with green eyes who are arrested:


Percent of people with green eyes who are arrested

Black 7.3 (N = 820)
Black Hispanic 7.2 (N = 207)
White Hispanic 7.0 (N = 1,626)
White 7.4 (3,802)
All cases 7.1 (N = 6,787)

People with green eyes, regardless of race, are 1.7 times more likely to get hauled in. Does anyone have an explanation for this?

Skin tone and IQ among blacks: The General Social Survey recorded the skin tone of 495 black respondents from very light brown (1) to very dark brown (5). I calculated correlations between this measure and a number of variables:


Correlation with light skin tone

Wordsum .16
Years of education .17
Father's years of education .12
Mother's years of education .20
Spouse's years of education .13

All positive, but small. Then again, this is crude measure of genetic variation. Measurement error lowers the correlation. So I do take this as evidence that genes help explain the race-IQ link since whether the individual is light-skinned or dark, what white folks see is a black person. If whites determine black outcomes, there should be no correlation with skin tone.

I also wanted to see if blacks were lighter in the North as I had read before. Here are the means:


Mean lightness of skin

West North Central 3.00
East North Central 2.98
West South Central 2.83
Middle Atlantic 2.78
East South Central 2.73
Pacific 2.62
South Atlantic 2.55

Blacks in the mid-Atlantic region do not have a high average, but those from Ohio to North Dakota do.

What is racism? Recently, One Standard Deviation wrote about how human biodiversity doesn't accept any of the premises found in the following definitions of racism:


1(a): a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
1(b): a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2: a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3: hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.


I would like to go in another direction. Some words come to have strong emotions attached to them. "Racist" delivers the message that you are an illegitimate person. You are outside the bounds of respectability. You should be drummed out of polite society. It's the emotional equivalent of calling someone a criminal.

That being the case, it's my position that 1(a) and the first part of 1(b) are underhanded attempts by liberals to demonize ordinary people who see the evidence differently, and especially to marginalize hereditarian researchers. Believing the races are genetically different is a belief about facts, and an incorrect belief about the facts is not illegitimate. If I believed that phlogiston causes combustion, that makes me mistaken, not evil.

And frankly, I don't even see how a belief that one race is better than another is criminal either. If someone believes that blacks are the best race, I would ask myself how they come to that conclusion and how do we determine what is best, but it's only the contempt for other races or mistreatment correlated with, but not the same as, beliefs in superiority that are destructive and wrong. If you treat me fairly, what do I care if you think my race is not as accomplished as yours? So you have a goofy belief? So what.

And in 1(b) the belief that genes determine cultural achievement is made illegitimate. You're on outlaw if you think that way. I say nonsense. It's the same as before: it's not immoral to have a mistaken belief. And what if it turned out to be true? Then it would be criminal to believe true things, by that definition.

In my view, the only things worth passing judgment on are: 1) having ill will toward a race of people; and 2) favoring the unjust treatment of them. So all the haters of any race are racists in my book. Of course, the problem is that liberals see hatred in every conceivable thing, so even this more narrow definition is commonly abused. People hate when they say they hate. If you hate and deny it, you're like everyone else and accept that hatred is wrong. You just have a problem you need to fix. To wish ill will on others and to embrace it proudly is true racism.

Exploiting another race is also unacceptable. Slavery is bad; second-class citizenship is bad. Equality under the law is what every non-racist favors. Now all this is clear. What is less clear is that the desire for special treatment and double standards by minorities is racist. Favoring one thing for my race and another for yours is racist. Racial preferences for mine and racial discrimination for yours is racist. Favoring the interests of my race over the interests of yours is racist. That being the case, racism in America today is most concentrated among non-whites. Our current president is a high-profile example of a racist. He believes the law should favor blacks over whites in college admissions and jobs. This for us, that for you. Racist.

"If you want a punch in the face, call me Gerry": I took a look at Geraldo Rivera's book HisPanic. This is a guy who was a beret-wearing radical lawyer as a young man, who says that he has worn a mustache his whole adult life to proclaim his Hispanicity, and says he will punch you in the face if you call him Gerry. (To him, being called white is like being called a faggot).

His father was Puerto Rican, his mother was Jewish, but Geraldo aggressively identifies with his Puerto Rican side, probably because it is the least white of the two. He devotes page after page to celebrating the mass movement of Latinos into the country; he instructs us on how wonderful they are; he pooh poohs concerns about assimilation; and he vilifies the Malkinses, Buchanans, Tancredos, and Dobbses in the immigration debate.

He looks with great relish to one hundred years from now when there will be more Hispanics in the country than white people. It's obvious where Geraldo's heart and loyalties lie: with his Latin brethren. His primary concern in not what is in the long-term interests of America, but in promoting the interests of his co-ethnics. More stuff and more power for my brown homies and me.

Then, then, the bastard has the nerve to demonize the anti-illegal immigration movement by charging it with white racialism. He writes that we wouldn't give a damn if Northern Europeans were illegally pouring in through the Canadian border. I can't speak for others, but I will confess that while illegality does bother me, this blog shows that my main concern is the long-term well-being of the country. If illegals made the country a better place, I probably wouldn't get too worked up about it. Many of us on this side of the debate don't worry too much about Chinese immigrants, and last time I checked, they weren't white.

But it never occurs to the Mustached One to ask the question about what is best for the country. It's clear that, just as I love my little family of a few individuals, he loves his Family of hundreds of millions, and he wants us to provide a home for his illiterate uncles, his forever poor cousins, and his gangbanging nephews. You don't turn away relatives just because they're bad.

So we're back to the perennial double standard. Geraldo is a hero for standing up for his people; Jared Taylor is Satan in a Suit for defending his. And folks like me who condemn the brown juggernaut for what it's doing to America are called Nazis. The trip through Alice in Wonderland continues....

An open invitation: Since I've devoted so much time on this blog providing evidence that massive Hispanic immigration is not good for the country, I've wanted to take the other side, acknowledging that most social change has benefits as well as costs. The problem is that I keep coming up with pretty lame ideas. The only two important findings I've posted that are positive are that Hispanics work about as hard as the average American, and, while their mean IQ is significantly lower than whites, averages have been rising for Mexican Americans over the past couple decades.

Beyond that, my thoughts are kind of lame. For example, I've thought that more bodies means more economic and military power for America. Hispanics work and are willing to fight, so doesn't America benefit from increased size? But then I think that since these folks are not especially productive, more of them means more poverty and thus less economic might. Yes, they can fight, but aren't we too adventurous militarily already? I'm sure that more Hispanics mean more ethnic politics, which means more corruption and less government effectiveness. And more people means more traffic and pollution, and I hate all that urban stuff.

Then I think compared to Americans, Hispanic immigrants are slightly more Christian, so they will work against the trend away from Christianity. Now a Catholic church on every corner might benefit me when I'm traveling and looking for a place to attend mass, but are more Christians of Hispanic ethnicity going to improve the country? I don't see it. Plus, Christianity as practiced by minority folks seems to be very compatible with modern liberalism. Jesus just gets used to push for bigger government, anti-racism, and open borders.

Then I return to everyone else's lame arguments. I like Mexican food, and Hispanics will give you a glass of orange juice when you visit, while white folks will give you nothing.

Can anyone out there offer better arguments? And we know all the moralistic arguments like America is an immigrant nation and all that. I'm asking how America benefits. If no one can give me a good answer, then why the hell are we doing it?

More on IQ diversity among NAMs: Reader Jokah Macpherson pointed out in the post on IQ heterogeneity that it seems to be inversely correlated with IQ. This is no accident: the coefficient of variation (CV) divides the standard deviation by the mean, and it is appropriate when comparing populations with different means. If, however, we stick with the plain old standard deviation we get:


Wordsum standard deviation

Puerto Rican 2.48
American Indian 2.25
Mexican 2.05
Polish 2.01
Scottish 1.99
Spanish 1.98
English 1.97
French 1.95
Italian 1.95
Blacks 1.94
Irish 1.94
German 1.92
Russian 1.91
Norwegian 1.87
Dutch 1.86
Swedish 1.86
Danish 1.85
Czech 1.84
Jewish 1.83


There's some shuffling around here, but the most noticeable change to me is the drop of blacks from high to middle. The CV for blacks is so high because their mean IQ is so low. But for the most part the message is the same as the last post: NAMs (non-Asian minorities) are diverse in terms of intelligence. This time, my sociology professor was right: they're not all the same. It's the Jews who are all the same. (That's a joke, son.)

Major Intelligence Gene Tied to Myopia: A Review Jon L. Karlsson Institute of Genetics, Reykjavik, Iceland

Data are reviewed which clearly support the conclusion that axial myopia is an inherited condition following a recessive pattern of transmission. Nearsighted persons excel in terms of intelligence, several studies in developed countries having indicated a gain of 7 IQ points over the general population. It also appears that visually normal heterozygous carriers of one myopia gene enjoy brain enhancement, probably of a somewhat lower degree than occurs in homozygous myopes. It is concluded that the proposed myopia gene is primarily an intelligence factor (Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3-4, Spring-Summer 2009, pp 280-291).

Ethnicity and IQ heterogeneity: I was curious about IQ diversity among American ethnic groups. Selecting GSS groups with at least 100 respondents, I calculated the coefficient of variation, a normalized measure of dispersion, for Wordsum scores. Here are the numbers:


Coefficient of variation

Puerto Rican .491
Mexican .415
Black .381
Amerindian .359
Spain .338
Dutch .315
Polish .312
French .307
German .306
Italian .304
Irish .302
Scottish .294
English/Welsh .289
Czech .281
Swedish .280
Norwegian .280
Danish .270
Russian .264
Jewish .239

Racially mixed groups are the most IQ-diverse, and Scandinavians and Jews are the most homogeneous (many of those Russians are Jews).

With Mexican Americans especially, we should avoid talking about them like they are a monolithic group.

"He doesn't value me": Students sometimes mistake professors for therapists. A woman broke down after class the other day, telling me all her marital troubles. She told me that her husband of seven or eight years didn't value her.

This brought to mind my recent post suggesting that women are the more boring sex. I'm surprised no one commented that men are the more interesting sex to men. The way I see it, one big sex difference that poses a big challenge to relationships is that men find women to be absolutely fascinating sexually. But if a woman lacks sexual attraction, I suspect most men don't give the typical woman two thoughts.

I have always disliked this quality in myself, but I don't seem to be able to avoid psychologically placing a lower value on a woman if she is unattractive. Now, if she happens to be really funny or charming, that changes, but interesting personalities just seem much more common in men.

And much of the problem is what people like to talk about, too. More often, men are fascinated with politics or sports or some hobby that involves speed, danger, and/or violence. Now, I could talk to Judith Harris Rich about kids all day long, but most women are not analytical about kids and family.

So back to my sobbing student--I suspect her husband thought she was fascinating when his mind was on having sex with her. Now that sex has gotten old, all he hears is blah, blah, blah when she starts talking about having a family, and his mind wanders to his Harley in the garage and how it needs a good polish.

Now, I imagine that you folks know all this stuff, but what is important here is, how do we resolve the problem? My answer is, acknowledge human biodiversity. Something our culture simply does not do well.

To you wives, as Tennessee Williams wrote, men were built to love and to hunt. Not to worship your soul. Don't put men at the center of how you feel about yourself. They love you, they want to be good husbands, but there are biological limits. Lower your expectations. That phrase is a wise one in many areas of life, but it sounds so un-American or something.

Flesh and spirit: Over at iSteve, we see that liberals continue to worship the Scandinavians and are mystified by their efficiency. More than once, Steve has made the emperor-has-no-clothes point that, duh, Scandinavians are so... Scandinavian. The funny thing is that we totally get his tautology. He's not saying that their institutional arrangements are efficient, or that they have the right culture, or that they act as they do because of historical circumstances. When you talk about identity, we automatically think biology.

Why do people get angry when HBD-ers claim that the racial IQ gap is part genetic, and not when others say that blacks are dumb because of bad schools? It's because we believe that we are our genes, but we are not our environment. At the genetic level, egalitarians tell us, we're all potential Einsteins. Our true selves are awesome, it's just the institutions are bad.

This is all very convenient for liberals, but I detect an inconsistency. When I was in student, profs kept assigning readings that argued that on the question of abortion, nurture trumps nature. The body doesn't matter; it's culture that defines who you are. Then I'd read about some exotic tribe that doesn't consider you human until you can speak. Much of social science sees human beings the same as religious folks do: minds or spirits residing in a house of flesh. But it adds a collectivist twist that all spirits are interconnected and the product of each other. So which is it? Is our core spirit or flesh? Come on now: flesh is the only serious answer. You can have flesh without spirit, but no spirit without flesh.

Okay, you say, but what about all the biologists who are pro-choice? My guess is this, and people should weigh in an tell me where I'm wrong. It's overkill to call it the Mengela Syndrome, but it does get at the phenomenon that familiarity and science breed callousness. I don't have data, but many doctors and nurses seem to favor things like abortion and physician-assisted suicide because the job requires one to objectify the patient. It's too hard to get your job done if every person you treat is as human as, say, your own child. You might respond that they see a lot of suffering and want to relieve it. Fair enough, but science in general encourages the objectification of humans. There is a tendency to see them as objects to be manipulated. As much as I respect science, it is one cold bastard.

(Also--science breeds secularism which breeds liberalism, and people often pick their views to match those of their political party.)

Dramatic declines in whiteness among Mexican Americans

American-born Mex-Ams N = 843

Mexican immigrants, N = 466


You can see in the two GSS graphs that the percent of Mexican Americans who say they are white has fallen precipitously over the past four decades. This is true of those born here and for immigrants. In the 70s, 100% of respondents said they were white; by this decade, only 43% of U.S.-born and a third of Mexican immigrants did.

Steve Sailer has written about how recent immigrants from Mexico are more Amerindian and less white. I'm sure this explains much of what we see in these graphs. But since Mexicans have large amounts of both European and Native American ancestry, I wonder how much of the change in racial identity we see is cultural.

Many of the students I see every day could easily describe themselves as white or "other" depending on their preference. All the Mex-Ams I knew in the seventies when I was a kid looked like Mexicans to me, but they saw themselves as white racially. If my suspicion is correct that more Mex-Ams are now rejecting a white identity, that is BAD news for people like me who worry about assimilation. This is on top of Steve's point about the changing biological composition of Mexican Americans.

To all the Oreos: This post is for all the non-white Americans who are criticized for being dark on the outside and white on the inside. Maybe you don't speak Spanish, or you think that calling women bitches and ho's is stupid? Maybe you enjoy school and are proud of your good grades? Perhaps you're ambitious, but your neighbors accuse you of thinking you're better than them?

You feel like you have no identity? All these other guys call each other bro, but you don't feel part of that? Well, you do have an identity, but you just don't know it. It's called an American. It may not be a perfect badge to wear, but you could do worse. Trust me.

What might surprise you is that you and I are in the same boat. Like you, I have no people but America. And yes, if you think about it, that makes you and me brothers. That's got to be a painful thought--you and Ron playing on the same team. We Americans may be different. We may disagree about a lot of things. You might get mad, and God knows I do, but we're brothers, and we're in this thing together.

Sex among the married

Whites

Blacks

Remember this scene from "Annie Hall"?


[Alvy and Annie are seeing their therapists at the same time on a split screen]

Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I'd say three times a week.


You hear all the time about how married couples have sex three times a week. I always thought that sounded a bit high because there is a woman involved. (In the case of "Annie Hall", three times a week sounds high with a man involved who looks like Woody Allen).

Based on more than 11,000 GSS cases, I generated the two graphs above. The top one--whites--shows that 2-3 times a week is modal for couples in their twenties, but "weekly" becomes modal by the time the couple is in their forties. and even when it's modal, it's still well under 50%. And even among twenty-somethings, there's a detectable number who have sex once a month or less.

You can see even more of those types among blacks (lower graph). But, on the other hand, 2-3 times a week is modal until married blacks are retirement age.

I also looked to see if men were giving different stories than women. For whites, the only difference was that elderly men are less willing to admit they never have sex. For blacks, more men of all ages report that they have sex four or more times a week and fewer admit to having sex once a month or less. This could be evidence for male cheating--the question asks about frequency of sex, but does not specify with one's spouse--or just exaggeration.

Owls might look smart, but night owls really are

Here's the conclusion from an interesting research article:

The Savanna–IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals, while general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values and preferences. An earlier study (Kanazawa, 2010) has shown that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be liberal and atheist, and more intelligent men (but not women) are more likely to value sexual exclusivity, than their less intelligent counterparts. In this paper, we have extended the Hypothesis to circadian rhythms.

While studies show that there is some genetic component to individuals’ circadian rhythms (Hur, 2007), heritability of these phenotypes is far from 1.0 and thus there is room for individual choices and decisions. Survey of ethnographies of traditional societies shows that routine nocturnal activities were probably rare in the ancestral environment and are thus evolutionarily novel. The Savanna–IQ Interaction Hypothesis therefore predicts that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be nocturnal than less intelligent individuals.

Our analysis of Add Health data supports the prediction derived from the Hypothesis. Net of age, sex, race, marital status, parental status, education, earnings, religion, whether one is currently a student and the number of hours worked per week, childhood IQ significantly increases nocturnal behavior in early adulthood. More intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be nocturnal adults who go to bed late and wake up late on both weekdays and weekends (Kanazawa, S., Perina, K. Why night owls are more intelligent. Personality and Individual Differences. 2009).

Black and Mexican-American men have higher verbal IQs than the women? Looking at GSS data, I see that the mean Wordsum score for Mexican Americans born here is 5.70 for men and 5.44 for women (N = 173). There is also a slight advantage for black men born in the country over black women (4.93 versus 4.86, N = 2,961). This reverses the sex pattern seen among whites (6.21 for men and 6.38 for women born in the U.S., N = 16,236). The differences are small (only the white gap is statistically significant) but, still, it's weird.

It's not due to education since Mex-Am and black women stay in school longer than their male counterparts. And it's not work. NAM women work more hours per week than white women, and the work gender gap (men of all three groups work more) is smaller among NAMs. What's the explanation? Just a fluke?


UPDATE: It looks like there is an explanation for blacks, anyway. Only 37% of the black sample is male. The GSS does not sample institutionalized or homeless people, and as the reader suggests, more low-IQ black men may refuse to participate in the survey.

But this doesn't seem to explain Mexican-American men who make up as much of the Mex-Am sample as do white men the white sample--45.8% and 44.5%, respectively.

Wanting to take another look, I used ETHNIC instead of HISPANIC to identify Mexican Americans because ETHNIC has been asked many more years. Yielding a sample of 393 people born in the U.S., the male Wordsum mean is 5.07, and for females it is 4.82. (HISPANIC produces a much higher average than ETHNIC because Mex-Am scores have been on the rise for the past 20-30 years--thank God). The male advantage is still there for the larger sample, but again it fails to reach statistical significance.

American IQ in 2050: In terms of IQ, how will the United States look in 2050? I got population projections from the Census, then made simple assumptions about the mean IQs of racial groups: Asians 105, whites 100, Hispanics and Amerindians 90, and blacks 85. The mean IQ for 2050 is projected to be 95.5.

To get some context, which counties have IQs in the same range? Vietnam, Uruguay, Slovenia, Israel, Portugal, and Romania. Nice countries, but hardly world leaders.

UPDATE: One Standard Deviation has calculated a 2050 estimate as well, and puts the IQ mean at 96.2.

IQ, marriage, and fertility for men and women: Is it true that dumb guys and smart women are less likely to marry and have kids? And I don't mean each other--I mean at all. The idea is that women like a man who is a bit smarter than them. I generated GSS graphs based on over 3,000 of each sex, white and ages 40 to 60. This first graph is for men.

There are only 17 men who scored a zero on the vocabulary quiz, so if we ignore that category, low-IQ guys have a higher share of never-marrieds (shown in gold). When I say low IQ by the way, I'm talking 60s through about 80. Guys smarter than that but below average have high marriage rates. Notice how the percent single is high among the smartest categories.

The graph above is women. The percent unmarried rises with Wordsum scores for those who are above the average (which is roughly 6).

Back to the men, you can see in this graph that while unintelligent guys are more likely to be childless, so are the highly intelligent (once again, it might be a good idea to ignore the zero group). You might be tempted to conclude that those scoring a one might be more likely to have a lot of kids too, but the sample is too small to have any confidence in that.

The pattern here is pretty clear. Really smart women are more likely to be childless and less likely to have large family. The only eugenic trend seen in all these graphs is the larger share of dull men with no kids.

Sex and personality

I scanned pages 128 and 129 from Sex Differences in Antisocial Behavior by Terrie Moffitt et al. Over 900 males and females aged 18 completed the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), and the researchers correlated various dimensions of personality with a measure of antisocial behavior. As you can see for both sexes, a willingness to take advantage of others and cause them discomfort (Aggression) was most predictive of the list of measures. The sex differences in these predictors explain over 90% of the sex difference in antisociality. Keep in mind that research shows sizable heritabilities for many of these traits.

But I was most interested in two other items. First, see how traditional/conservative folks are less likely to be criminal. Second, look at the sex differences in personality. Let's list the differences from largest to smallest in terms of standard deviations:


Female advantage

Harm avoidance .72
Social closeness .43
Prone to over-react .41
Self-control .34
Traditionalism .21


Male advantage

Aggression .87
Suspicious/persecuted .32
Achievment .22


Women are more cautious, controlled social, sensitive, and in need of a predictable environment. Men are more willing to take advantage of others; they are more likely to feel mistreated; and they are more achievement-oriented.

These findings square with my perception of the sexes: Women are the good sex; men are the interesting sex. Women seem like social anchors, but most of the interesting people I know or read about are men. Some of them are good people, and some are bad.

We can see a similar pattern with the major races, but IQ is important as well as personality. Asians are a smart and good race, but since they have a feminine personality, they are less interesting. Blacks are the "male" race and are thus interesting, but whites are smart and less feminine than Asians, and so arguably have produced the greatest number of interesting people.

Race to the top of the pile of bullshit

Obama unveils four-billion-dollar education plan

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama launched a competition to improve US educational standards, a key part of his campaign promise to make the country's school system the best in the world.

The program, dubbed the "Race to the Top," will encourage US states to compete for 4.35 billion dollars in federal grants with the goal of encouraging them to improve school systems.

Obama said he was "issuing a challenge" to education professionals, state and local officials, even parents and students throughout the country to meet "a few key benchmarks for reform" to obtain the grants.

"If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools -- your state can win a Race to the Top grant." ...

Is "Race to the Top" meant to be a double entendre?

It is so difficult to read material about improving education because it is so hackneyed, and I have to live with it every day at work. When I hear a new round of enthusiasm about bringing up the left hand of the bell curve to match the right hand, I think of the study I read about in Straight Talk about Mental Tests in which it was found that the standard deviation among children raised in an Israeli kibbutz was 15 points. Are you getting the meaning of that? Children who were raised communally were no more similar to each other on IQ than if you picked two random children out of the general population. Something as radical as the kibbutz can't even reduce IQ inequality.

By the way, if you're short on cash and don't have access to academic journals, buy the old classics online--I like bookfinder.com for this kind of thing. You can get a beauty like Bias in Mental Testing for like a buck if you look. You might think that it's a waste of time to read old stuff, but trust me, Arthur Jensen 30 years ago is ten times better than any sociology research from 2009.

And tell friends and family about these kinds of facts. Over the years, I've talked to most of my relatives and friends, and unless they're hardcore liberal, white folks will accept this stuff. (I'm sure other non-whites will too.) Just recently I told my mom that the black mean IQ is around 85, and she about fell off her chair. She couldn't believe it was that low. It was hard for me to believe that a 63 year old woman had never heard that before, but I imagine the percentage of people who have is low.

Another study: Here's a more recent study showing no criminal justice system bias against blacks:

Although blacks are arrested disproportionately for most types of violent crimes, disagreement persists as to the extent to which official arrest data are indicative of differential offending behavior or selection bias on the part of law enforcement personnel Using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), we assess the effect of an offender's race on the probability of arrest for 335,619 incidents of forcible rape, robbery, and assault in 17 states during 1999. The baseline model for these comparisons is the equiprobability hypothesis that relative to violation frequency as reported by crime victims, the likelihood of arrest for white and black offenders is roughly equal. Multivariate logistic regression results show that the odds of arrest for white offenders is approximately 22% higher for robbery, 13% higher for aggravated assault, and 9% higher for simple assault than they are for black offenders. An offender's race plays no noteworthy role in the likelihood of arrest for the crime of forcible rape. These findings suggest that the disproportionately high arrest rate for black citizens is most likely attributable to differential involvement in reported crime rather than to racially biased law enforcement practices (Race and the Probability of Arrest, D'Alessio, Stewart J., and Stolzenberg, Lisa. Social Forces; Jun 2003, Vol. 81 Issue 4, p1381-1397).

Notice how this study was so well done, even the very liberal sociology journal Social Forces couldn't reject it. I have to give the journal credit for publishing something that contradicts a cherished belief. Look how I'm applauding a publication for managing to do what it is supposed to do.

Data on bias: I can anticipate the liberal whine about how my last post failed to understand that black anger at the criminal justice system is justified since it is so racially biased. Here is the abstract from one of the first of a long number of studies which show that that system is not perfect, but is basically not biased against blacks.

Most contemporary sociological theories of crime predict that blacks will be overrepresented among arrestees in common law personal crimes. These theories differ, however, in the extent to which this overrepresentation is attributed to disproportionate involvement in criminal offenses vs. criminal justice system selection biases. Studies that have relied upon official data have generally supported the differential involvement hypothesis, whereas studies relying on self- report techniques generally have supported the differential selection hypothesis. National victimization survey data on victims' reports of racialcharacteristics of offenders are introduced as a third measurement technique in order to shed additional light on this controversy. These data for rape, robbery, and assault, are generally consistent with official data on arrestees and support the differential involvement hypothesis. Some evidence of differential selection for criminal justice processing is found; however, most ofthe racial disprportionality in arrest data is shown by victimization survey data to be attributable to the substantially greater involvement of blacks in the common law personal crimes of rape, robbery, and assault. These results suggest that traditional admonitions against using arrest data as an index of involvement in these crimes may be overly cautious. In fact, the results imply that more caution should attend the use of self-report data in this vein and that more attention should be given to sampling and instrument concerns in self-report techniques. As currently used, the method may not be adequate for assessing the correlates of serious illegal conduct. The results also suggest that research emphasis be placed on those theories, such as the subcultural and differential opportunity perspectives, which attempt to explain differential racial involvement in these common law personal crimes. (RACE AND INVOLVEMENT IN COMMON LAW PERSONAL CRIMES, MICHAEL J. HINDELANG, American Sociological Review 1978, Vol. 43 February: 93-109.)

For those who would like a translation from sociologese to English, Hindelang found that data from victims gathered by research interviewers matched arrest data; in other words, there was no targeting of blacks. The victim data did not match self-report data very well, however, indicating that blacks were underreporting their crimes. In a later study reported in Measuring Delinquency, Hindeling asked teens if they had ever been taken in by police, then checked law enforcement records to see if they were lying. All demographic groups were honest except black males.

By the way, did you notice that this guy is (actually was--he died young) a liberal? He suggests that we look at differential opportunity theories to explain why blacks are so violent. Since the system denies them equal opportunities, they get really angry and shoot at their neighbors. This guy was no conservative who went into this research with the goal of getting the system off the hook. The same can be said for most researchers who find no bias.

A teachable moment: President Obama tells us that the Professor Gates incident is a teachable moment. "Let's have a dialogue on race" is always code for another opportunity to lecture whites on how racist they are.

But it turns out that the present controversy is a perfect moment for blacks to learn something that white people get. Police work is dangerous. At any moment, an officer can be attacked. Dozens are killed each year by citizens, and many more are assaulted. Because of the inherent danger of the job, officers are trained to establish and maintain control in any police-citizen encounter.

Blacks are completely self-absorbed on this issue. They seem to imagine that when white officers approach white citizens, it is to invite them out for coffee and donuts. News flash: I've been stopped by cops 8 or 9 times and each time was treated in a cold, controlling, insensitive manner. But white first graders get it that law enforcement is to be treated with respect even if they are acting like jerks. If you think they've gone over the line, you give them what they want and then go down to the station to file a complaint. Blacks--even Harvard professors--seem too stupid to understand this basic fact. Out of concern for control and safety (and frankly respect too--something a black man should understand) police often arrest people because of their inappropriate demeanor.

Once again, even black men as smart as the President start foaming at the mouth when it comes to the police. Just two days ago, a black male student freaked out in class over the issue and would not shut up about it. He sleeps through most of the material, then grandstands when the topic turns to the criminal justice system.

Suckiologists II: This is how idiotic sociologists are. I was just reading in an undergraduate-level sociology textbook the reason why gay men are more promiscuous. (I was surprised that they conceded the fact). You see, men in general have a sex drive because society teaches them that men are sexual. Presumably, society instructs straight guys to have sex with a lot of women, while it teaches gay men to screw as many guys as possible. In an earlier section, the author also wrote that the sociobiological view that gender differences in sex drive are mostly biological in origin is simply propaganda intended to support a patriarchal society; in other words, to justify male privilege and to keep women in their place.

Do you pay to have your children subjected to this crap? Send them here; they can get crap for free. You've got to innoculate your kids against this nonsense before they get it in school. Nowadays, homeschooling of a certain sort is absolutely mandatory.


UPDATE: It just gets better and better. Now I read that homosexuality is caused by an abundance of physical affection from mom, and lesbianism from a lack of it. I guess a distant mom produces a masculine child regardless of sex. Why am I not surprised that no data is presented?

Rushton's general personality factor: Have you guys been following Rushton's latest work? He's conducted several studies suggesting that there is a general social ability factor, just like there is a general factor for mental ability.

From one of his studies:

The position to be presented here grows directly out of Darwin’s (1871) view that natural selection endowed modern humans with larger brains, increased levels of general and social intelligence, and a more ethical and prosocial personality than ‘‘primeval man and his ape-like progenitors” (p. 159). Darwin wrote of increased levels of human qualities such as ‘‘courage, sympathy, and faithfulness,” and a ‘‘need for approval by others,” with a concomitant decrease in the frequency of ‘‘selfish and contentious people” who ‘‘will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected” (p. 159). Darwin described how moral and inter-personal skills go hand in hand with the greater intelligence modern people possess.

Using structural equation modeling, he shows that personality traits are not orthogonal, and that a general factor can explain more than 50 percent of the variation in the lower-order traits.

To be really reductionist about it, people can be classifed into one of four categories: 1) smart-good; 2) smart-bad; 3) dumb-good; and 4) dumb-bad. And since intelligence and pro-social behavior are positively correlated, as Darwin suggested, there may be more people in categories 1 and 4 than in 2 or 3. This does seem consistent with a rough folk psychology. You could get even more reductionistic and say there are two categories: competent and incompetent, or something like that.

Rushton thinks of the general trait as "social efficiency." Another quote:

In a competitive world, there are always rewards (personal and professional) for more efficient persons—those who are more level-headed, agreeable, friendly, dependable, and open. We close by noting Tolstoy’s (1875/1918) famous opening in Anna Karenina, ‘‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps a similar principle applies to individuals: ‘‘All happy [or efficient] people resemble one another; each unhappy [inefficient] person is unhappy [inefficient] in his or her own way.”

East Asian IQ: Cavalli-Sforza hypothesized in The Great Human Diasporas that East Asians have high IQs scores because: 1) parents push their children more in academics; and 2) the children have to learn Chinese characters which boosts performance on IQ tests.

We can test the idea by comparing the IQs of East Asians in their own countries with children educated in an English-speaking country. We would expect Asian parents to encourage their kids in both kinds of countries, but we wouldn't expect Asian children to be mastering Chinese characters in English-speaking schools in Western countries.

According to the averages of several studies summarized by Richard Lynn in IQ and Global Inequality, people in China and Japan average IQs of 105; the mean is 106 in South Korea. The first study I found on Asian IQ was an Australian study (Justine Dandy and Ted Nettlebeck. Educational Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2002. The Relationship Between IQ, Homework,Aspirations and Academic Achievement for Chinese, Vietnamese and Anglo-Celtic Australian School Children.) Chinese Australians had a mean IQ between 108 and 109.

Now one would expect immigrants to have IQs higher than the average in their mother countries, but we would also expect to see regression toward the mean among their children. I don't see evidence here that failing to learn Chinese characters is hurting anyone.

Assortative mating and IQ: Assortative mating for IQ spreads out the range of IQs, producing more high-end individuals. Estimates in the 1970s indicated that the American level of assortative mating accounts for more than 50 percent of the population with IQs over 130, and 80 percent of the people with IQs beyond 145 (Jensen. 1981. Straight Talk about Mental Tests, p. 90).

Has assortative mating increased since that time? The GSS gives us a good measure of a respondent's IQ (WORDSUM); unfortunately, the best we can do for the spouse is educational level. I looked at people in their 30s. All correlations are based on samples of at least 1,000:


Correlation between IQ and spouse's education

1970s .47
1980s .39
1990s .37
This decade .30

At first glance, this looks terrible. We see a big drop in assortative mating over the past four decades. But upon closer inspection, I suspect the shrinking correlation is due to the declining validity of education as a measure of intelligence. Here are the correlations between Wordsum and respondent's level of education for people in their 30s for each of the past four decades:


Correlation between IQ and one's own educational level

1970s .59
1980s .54
1990s .48
This decade .38

Wow. Schooling used to be indicative of intelligence. The validity coefficient for this decade is low: one's educational level just doesn't mean much anymore. Evidently, the decline in the correlation between the spouses' IQs we are observing is due to educational level becoming a lousier and lousier proxy for intelligence. Perhaps real assortative mating hasn't changed much.

Gender, sexual orientation, and forced sex: The National Crime Victimization asks tens of thousands of Americans each year if they have been the victim of crime. Among the many different types, both males and female are asked if they have been forced to have sex. I looked at the 1992-2005 sample that included 924 cases of forced sex. The percent distribution by sex of offender and victim looks like this:


Percent distribution

Male-on-female 80.5
Male-on-male 10.5
Female-on-male 3.6
Female-on-female 5.4

First, I don't know how men are forced to have sex as in sexual intercourse with women since I would think an erection shows cooperation. It sounds like a situation where a man could get excited by the woman and in the particular situation; he didn't want to do it for some reason, but was pressured into it or something like that. Or by "sex" the respondents mean something less than intercourse.

You can see both gender and sexual orientation at work here. Guys--straight and gay--are less than 50 percent of the population but commit over 90% of the sex crimes. No news there. Homosexual offenders commit more acts on male victims than straight females even though they are a tiny group. Lesbians attack half as many victims as gay men, but then again they are roughly half as prevalent as male homosexuals.

Of course I'm oversimplifying because there are people who commit same-sex assaults who say they are not homosexual. This fact has been observed in prison, but it is not expected to happen much in free society where straights have access to members of the opposite sex.

I'm sure someone will comment that sexual assault has nothing to do with sexual attraction, but we HBD-ers don't go for that PC nonsense.

Ricci and me: Sotomayor's hearing and the Ricci case has got me thinking about my own experience with testing. I thank God for tests. I come from a rural, working-class family. My parents are high school graduates. My dad is a retired maintenance man. I didn't know many college graduates growing up. No connections of any sort.

We often hear about how a special teacher makes all the difference in the life of a kid from a humble origin. My teachers were fine, but I am not where I am today because of their special efforts. I don't know--some kids might have a Mr. Smith or a Ms. Thompson to thank, but I owe everything to Mr. SAT and Ms. GRE. The SAT got me into a good university with a full-tuition scholarship. My GRE was certainly the reason why I got a teaching assistantship and a tuition waiver in grad school.

Sotomayor will say that tests cannot measure the cultural assets that one brings to the table. And I say bullshit. We're equal there, lady. Your Puerto Rican experience gives you a fresh angle on things. My experience as a rural, working-class kid of a particular region and religion, with a particular personality gives me a unique perspective. So what. We all see things from a unique place, so no one has an advantage there. Aptitude tests predict better than anything we know whether a person will succeed or fail, so unlike skin color, testing tells us something valuable.

Testing has been a way to make social class barriers more porous--a pretty progressive idea. Liberals have turned their backs on working-class white guys like Ricci and me. So we turn our backs on them.

Where victims of domestic homicide are killed tells us a lot about the battle of the sexes. In the 1950s when Marvin Wolfgang did his classic study, women killed their husbands in the kitchen. It happened there because women actually cooked back then. Now, it's moved to the living room. The typical male victim is found with a beer can in one hand, the remote in the other, with a look of, "Hell no, I'm not going to fix that now," on his face. A female victim, in contrast, is usually found in the bedroom. Her last words were, "I have a headache again, dear... Why are you picking up that lamp?"

Race and violence II: Here are racial coefficients seen in the last post with all of the controls removed except for sex:


Carrying a gun to school in past year

Male 1.17*
Hispanic .39*
Black -.01
Amerindian .60*
Asian -13


Pulling a knife or gun on someone in the past year

Male 1.16*
Hispanic .69*
Black 1.01*
Amerindian .62*
Asian -.03


Armed robbery in the past year

Male .92*
Hispanic .61*
Black .53*
Amerindian .50*
Asian -.93*


Seriously injured someone in the past year

Male 1.07*
Hispanic .34*
Black .41*
Amerindian .47*
Asian -.37*


The biggest difference is that Amerindians become significantly more violent than whites when we remove controls. Including such factors as bad grades, repeated grades, suspensions, trouble with teachers, etc., elminated the association between race and violence for Amerindians but didn't affect the other groups much. Based on Cochran and Harpending's argument, I would expect more violence from Indians since the lack of a long history of agriculture should make them less submissive.

My other main point is to compare the racial effects with the sex effect. The estimates show that the gender violence gap is larger than the racial gap. But I am setting a high standard here: serious violence is basically a male thing. Something like 90% of inmates are guys.

This proves feminist theory to be correct. Men use society's institutions to keep women in their place. The criminal justice system, like every other institution, is just a male tool to enslave women. The law criminalizes female behavior. Hold it--that doesn't work....

Race and violence: When you use arrest statistics as evidence for racial differences in crime, liberals claim that police data cannot be trusted because they're out to get blacks. Next, when you use victim-reported data collected by Bureau of Justice Statistics interviewers (NCVS) to identify the race off the offender, liberals will claim that white victims hate blacks so much, they will lie about the perp's race to the interviewer. They hate blacks more than they hate the person who actually victimized them.

So, we patiently move to the next step and look at what self-report data have to tell us. I looked at The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health where adolescents were asked about their violent activities. Going more in-depth than I usually do, I estimated a logistic regression model with 22 predictors, including four dummies: Hispanic, black, Amerindian and Asian. Whites, then, are the comparison category. All models are based on well over 6,000 kids. Here are the racial coefficients for four different types of violent crime:


Carrying a gun to school in past year

Hispanic .43*
Black -.03
Amerindian .37
Asian .04


Pulling a knife or gun on someone in the past year

Hispanic .50*
Black .97*
Amerindian .24
Asian .03


Armed robbery in the past year

Hispanic .47*
Black .38*
Amerindian .08
Asian -.90*


Seriously injured someone in the past year

Hispanic .39*
Black .32*
Amerindian .19
Asian -.28

*p < .05, one-tail

Hispanics are more likely to be violent than whites for all types of behavior. Blacks are too, except for carrying a weapon to school. Amerindians do not differ significantly from whites. Asians are the same, except they are less likely than whites to commit a robbery. Keep in mind that I tried to eliminate the racial effects with many controls, but race proves to be powerful in this analysis. So, blacks admitted committing more of these crimes, even though delinquency research by Travis Hirschi and Michael Hindelang--two leading criminologists--has shown that black males underreport their criminal activities to interviewers.

Let me guess: whites hate blacks so much, they convince them that they have committed crimes that they didn't actually do.

And I won't mention anything more about Hispanics--I sound like a broken record.

Lott on affirmative action and crime: I ran across an interesting study by John Lott (DOES A HELPING HAND PUT OTHERS AT RISK?: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, POLICE DEPARTMENTS, AND CRIME. By: Lott Jr., John R., Economic Inquiry, Apr2000, Vol. 38, Issue 2). Here is the conclusion:

A massive experiment has been conducted with law enforcement during the last couple of decades, with more minority and women officers being hired. But does increasing the number of minority and women police officers raise effectiveness by drawing on new untapped abilities, or are standards lowered too far in order to hire large numbers of minorities and women? I have argued here that the effect depends on the type of crime. The evidence for rape is mixed, with most results implying essentially no difference between male and female officers, though some estimates indicate that the actual changes in the composition of police departments helped reduce the number of rapes. However, for all other crimes, more black officers are associated with more crime, not less. But it would be a serious mistake not to realize that this simple relationship is masking that the new rules reduce the quality of new hires from other groups.

This does not say that there are not large potential benefits from minority police officers, but only that the new rules under which new officers have been hired have costs that outweigh the benefits.

So why do we observe different findings for minority and female officers? At least part of the difference appears to arise from how the hiring rules have been altered for the two groups. Physical strength tests involve norming, whereas written tests have been altered so as to produce equal pass rates across different groups. Norming
may allow lower-quality applicants in the protected category, but it at least does not lower the quality of all new recruits. The results suggest that if affirmative action is to be practiced, norming is the less costly way to go.

This raises a question that economists have thus far ignored: why are different types of affirmative action used in different settings? Why does academia use norming for admissions but police forces choose to alter the testing?

Changes in the composition of police departments have been accompanied by changes in the organization of police departments. Some of these changes--such as an increasing movement away from single-officer patrol units--is likely due to the presence of more female officers with less physical strength. Women officers are more likely to be assaulted than men, though their overall probability of death on the job is the same. Some preliminary evidence indicates that white women officers are more likely to shoot civilians and that black male officers are the least likely. The evidence is not consistent with the hypothesis that black officers are more effective at dealing with crime in predominately black areas. Instead, surprisingly, the results suggest that it is the most heavily black communities that are the most at risk from the increased crime produced by affirmative action policies.

Other recent research confirms the basic finding in this paper. While Donohue and Levitt [1998] examine the issue of how nonwhite and white officers impact crime by members of their own group and by the other group, taking their sensitivity estimates of "crime rates to racial composition of the police force" and instead asking what happens to the total crime rate when a white officer is replaced by a nonwhite officer implies a large increase in violent crime in eight of their ten specifications. While they claim that nonwhite officers relatively reduce white crime and white officers relatively reduce nonwhite crime, the perverse effect that they find of nonwhite officers on nonwhite crime dominates in eight of their ten violent crime specifications.

As a warning for anyone doing future research: the evidence suggests that a great deal of caution needs to be exercised in aggregating different racial and/or gender groups. Not all nonwhite racial groups are the same, and not all men and women in a particular group are the same. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians do not have the same impact on crime. Many differences between men and women on crime also disappear once different racial groups are subdivided by sex. The different results obtained from aggregated and disaggregated classifications strongly suggest that the most disaggregated classifications should be used whenever possible.

This article was initially motivated by the Supreme Court's recent rulings on affirmative action. Prior to consent decrees, the "best" police officers might not always have been hired, but the imposition of consent decrees appears to have increased crime, and the longer the decree was in effect the greater was the increase in crime. The hiring of minority officers thus does not appear to meet the difficult strict scrutiny standard set forth by the Supreme Court. There may be strong moral arguments for affirmative action, but crime reduction is not one of them. The results do suggest that if preferential hiring is to be practiced, changing testing standards is much more costly than norming.

Dumb people are more likely to have place burglarized: GSS respondents were asked if they had been victims of a burglary in the past year.


Percent who have been burglarized

High IQ 5.1
Medium IQ 6.2
Low IQ 7.1


Yes, this is a little too simple because low IQ people live closer to burglars, while smart people probably have more to steal, etc. etc. But it's a start, and it makes sense that intelligent people can better anticipate problems and thus are more likely to take precautions like home security systems, guard dogs, careful selection of residence, etc. Nerd alert: I look at the neighborhood data before choosing a new place to live. What sensible person doesn't?

Are smart Jewish women having fewer kids? I looked at GSS data to see if high-IQ Jewish women are having fewer children than less intelligent Jews. Here are the mean number of children for women ages 40 and over for two time periods.


Mean number of children


1970s-1980s

High IQ 2.03
Low IQ 1.97


1990s-2000s

High IQ 1.88
Low IQ 2.10

The total fertility rate has slipped a bit among smart Jewish women, while it is now a bit higher for less intelligent woman. So the trend over the past four decades has been slightly dysgenic.


UPDATE: To focus on recent trends, we need a much narrower age range--let's look at women ages 40-59. This reduces our N quite a bit, but these are the tradeoffs.


Mean number of children--Jewish women ages 40-59


1970s-1980s

High IQ 2.24
Low IQ 2.44


1990s-2000s

High IQ 1.42
Low IQ 2.42


The picture that emerges when we remove older cohorts from the analysis is much more dramatic. These numbers show a much sharper dysgenic trend. The total fertility rate for smart Jewish women has dropped significantly over the past four decades, while the rate for dull women has held steady.

The mean IQ of American Jews will decline if this continues over enough generations.

America: My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing; land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring!

My native country, thee, land of the noble free, thy name I love; I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills; my heart with rapture thrills, like that above.

Let music swell the breeze, and ring from all the trees sweet freedom's song; let mortal tongues awake; let all that breathe partake; let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong.

Our fathers' God, to thee, author of liberty, to thee we sing; long may our land be bright with freedom's holy light; protect us by thy might, great God, our King.

~Samuel F. Smith, 1808-1895

4th of July stuff: Rasmussen asked some interesting Independence Day-related questions:

As America prepares to celebrate its 233rd birthday this weekend, 82% of American adults say that if given the choice of living anywhere in the world, they would still choose to live in the United States.

I've got my criticisms of the country, and certainly there are parts of America where I wouldn't want to live, but there is no place I'd rather be. Yet.

Most Americans (54%) also believe the United States is a nation of liberty and justice for all, as the Pledge of Allegiance states, up three points from last year. Forty percent (40%) do not believe this is true.

Slightly more men than women believe America is a nation of liberty and justice for all. About the same percentage of African-Americans (55%) and whites (54%) agree on the question.

Now that is just plain cool. Blacks might express criticism on specific issues, but give them a generalization like "land of liberty and justice" which gets at one's gut feeling and they're just as positive as whites. Awesome. (Maybe there is some optimism in there because of Obama, too). I wish they had data on Hispanics. I imagine their numbers would be high too.

Fifty percent (50%) of Americans believe hate is growing in America following the murders of a doctor who performed late-term abortions, a military recruiter and a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Thirty-five percent (35%) disagree.

Hold on. With each passing year, the country becomes more diverse, so hate should be on the decline and love on the rise. Differences bring us together, people. I'll like you best if you're nothing like me.

This is a good moment to push patriotism. With all the differentiating going on, we need some commonality to draw us together. We're all Americans, and that should mean something. Jamie Foxx claimed that a certain talented singer who recently died was one of theirs, but the truth is, for good or bad, he was one of ours.

Only 31% now believe the United States will be the most powerful nation in the world by the end of the 21st century.

We will certainly end up in the dustbin of history if we continue to delude ourselves with blank slatism. Science, not wishful thinking, is the answer, man.

Amerindians vs. Americans of English descent: In the 10,000 Year Explosion, Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that centuries of agricultural life selected for self-denial, selfishness, and industriousness. Groups like American Indians that do not have long histories of farming should have fewer people with these traits. Let's take a first stab using the GSS to see if the idea is supported.

With so much financial aid and such low academic standards, pretty much anyone who is not really slow can not only graduate high school, but can get years of education beyond that. Nowadays, the real question seems to be, do you have the patience to sit through more years of boring classes before you start making money. The mean years of education for Amerindians ages 30-49 measured in this decade is 11.7. Let's take Americans of English or Welsh background as the comparison group: the GSS sample for this group is large, and the English have practiced farming a long time. Their mean is 14.4 years.

For selfishness, let's use the question of whether you've given any money to a homeless person in the past year. For Amerindians it's 68%, and for the English/Welsh it's 33%. Selfish bastards.

For industriousness, let's use employment status for men ages 30-49. Measured as unemployed, laid-off, or not working temporarily, 11.4% of Amerindians are in the category, compared to 6.9% of men of English/Welsh ancestry. Three for three.

Let me know if you can think of other GSS measures.

UPDATE: I was concerned that the education measure tapped IQ much more than a future orientation, so I looked only at people in the middle range of IQ. I had to merge the last three decades to get enough cases, but the mean years of education for these Amerindians is 11.8; for the English/Welsh group, it's 14.2.