Emphasis on education is a poor predictor of outcomes

IQ nurturists claim that blacks would be as smart as East Asians if they only placed the same value on an education.

General Social Survey interviewers presented a list of 13 characteristics to participants and asked: "Which three qualities listed on this card would you say are the most desirable for a child to have? b. Which one of these three is the most desirable of all? c. All of the qualities listed on this card may be desirable, but could you tell me which three you consider least important? d. And which of these three is least important of all?"

The qualities are: good manners; tries hard to succeed; honest; neat and clean; good sense and sound judgment; self-control; acts like a boy (or girl); gets along well with others; obeys parents well; is responsible; is considerate; is interested in how and why things happen; and is a good student.

On the question of "good student," answers were coded like this: least important (1); among the bottom three (2); not mentioned (3); among the top three (4); most important (5).  Here are the means by ethnic group:


Mean emphasis on education, N = 6,279

Asian Indian 3.25
Puerto Rican 2.93
West Indian 2.90
Chinese/Japanese 2.84
Black 2.75
Amerindian 2.77
Mexican 2.69
Polish 2.66
Italian 2.59
Russian 2.56
Jewish 2.55
Dutch 2.55
Swedish 2.54
Irish 2.53
English/Welsh 2.53
Norwegian 2.51
Scottish 2.50
German 2.49

You can see that the list has been ranked, and blacks are right next to East Asians (Chinese and Japanese Americans were combined to maximize sample size).

Attitudes just don't seem to predict much in terms of academic performance. Puerto Ricans, blacks, Amerindians, and Mexican Americans tend to do poorly even though they are on the top half of the list. The bottom half is made up of various white groups who generally do well. Ten groups score higher than Jewish Americans.

The country has been stressing the importance of getting an education to minorities for decades, and it looks like they buy the message. It looks like a bad attitude is not the problem. It looks like ability is.

(By the way, the difference between Germans and Asian Indians is one standard deviation--a big difference).

Jews are "religiocentric" but diverse

I see that the question of Jewish ethnocentrism has been raised again in HBD World, so I thought I would look at it from another angle with the MIDUS Study. Participants were asked: "How important do you think it is for people of your religion to marry people who are the same religion?" Answers ranged from "very" (4) to "not at all" (1). Here are the means by affiliation:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jews are between members of sects and denominations in the importance they place on marrying within the faith. The differences on the table are striking. For example, the gap between the means for Jews and Unitarians is 1.4 standard deviations--a huge difference.
 
I include the standard deviations as a measure of agreement within each group. Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) and Unitarians have two of the lowest numbers: this indicates that JWs have a comparatively high level of agreement that they should marry other JWs, while Unitarians agree that endogamy is unimportant. You can see that the SD for Jews is high, which indicates a broad diversity of opinion on the question. So Jews are comparatively "religiocentric" but not monolithic.

More on ethnocentrism

A reader in the last post on ethnocentrism rightly suggests that people might get confused by my analysis. It showed that, for whites, believing that your ethnicity is important to who you are is (weakly) associated with cooler feelings toward other groups.

The largest negative correlation is Jews toward whites which could be interpreted to mean that Jewish folks like whites less than other groups. That is incorrect: the negative correlation means that Jewish ethnocentrism predicts cooler outgroup feelings better than other ethnocentrisms. In other words, when it comes to disliking others, there is a sharper difference between ethnocentric and non-ethnoncentric Jews than their counterparts in other groups. The correlation says nothing about average levels of coolness. Here is the mean coolness score toward whites listed by one's ethnic group.


Mean coolness score toward whites

Filipino 3.53
Amerindian 3.49
Black 3.36
Chinese 3.21
Asian Indian 3.10
Scottish 2.90
Swedish 2.80
English/Welsh 2.78
Russian 2.77
Mexican 2.77
German 2.71
Irish 2.52
Puerto Rican 2.43
Polish 2.28
Jewish 2.28
Arabic 2.12

Asians, Amerindians, and blacks like whites the least. The difference between the Filipino and Jewish means, for example, is eight-tenths of a standard deviation--a big difference. But even Filipinos--the coolest group--have a pretty warm average. Respondents could give any answer between "very warm" (1) and "very cool" (9), so 3.5 is still pretty warm.

Ethnocentrism and feelings toward the outgroup

General Social Survey respondents were asked: "When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?"  The table shows the correlations between the answer to this question and the answer about the degree to which the respondents feel warmth toward a specified group. For example, the top correlation shows that the more a Jewish person feels that his ethnicity is important, the cooler he feels toward whites. 

I listed the correlations in descending order. The bottom one--.06--is the only one indicating a positive association: Mexican Americans who think their ethnicity is important are slightly more likely to feel warm toward whites. 

For most groups, ethnocentrism predicts (weakly) coolness toward the outgroup. This is true of all white groups. Black ethnocentrism, on the other hand, is unrelated to feelings toward whites and Mexican-Americans. 

With the noted exceptions, the correlations contradict my sociology professor who claimed that, as America becomes a truly multicultural country, it will be as warm and peaceful as diverse Switzerland.  

At first glance, it might seem like ethnocentricity among minorities doesn't lead to anti-outgroup feelings, and while the data indicate that might be true for blacks and Hispanics, the tendency among Jews is the strongest on the list.  

More on European ancestry and IQ

As a follow-up to the last post, the Add Health Study has a measure of IQ based on a vocabulary test. I calculated mean IQs for two groups: people who, on the racial question, only marked black, and people who marked both black and white. The mean for full blacks is 90.3 (n = 1,464), and it's 98.0 for the mixed group (n = 82). The difference is statistically significant.  

European ancestry and IQ among blacks

In his book Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett makes a big deal out of the ancestry research to show that the black deficit in IQ is not due to genes. He argues that if genes explain the black-white IQ gap, then blacks with more white ancestry should be smarter, but then claims the research doesn't show that.

I've seen studies that contradict Nisbett, but allow me to weigh in with General Social Survey (GSS) data. The GSS records the race of respondents and also asks them from which country or part of the world did their ancestors come. Almost 90 percent of blacks answer either Africa; their ancestors are American Indian; or they are American only. But a small number give a European country, and the countries most often cited are England, Germany, Ireland, and France. I'm assuming that white ancestors are recent and/or prominent enough to motivate a black person to give this kind of answer.  

I calculated mean IQ for both types of blacks (N = 2,231). Those who say their ancestors originally came from Europe have a mean of 97.0, while those who give another answer have an average of 91.2. The difference is statistically significant.

UPDATE: I also found a question about listing one or more races that you consider yourself to be. Those who first mention black, but then list white as a second race have a mean IQ of 96.1. Problem is, it's only 11 respondents.

American leadership is not only stupid; it's gutless

General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked: "Some people say that because of past discrimination, blacks should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion of blacks is wrong because it discriminates against whites. What about your opinion?"

The yellow and green sections of the bars are those who oppose preferences, and you can see that by the late 1990s, a majority felt that way. 

Now, here's a question for you: what is the race of the people represented in the bar graph?  They're black! 

I'm sure you know that the vast majority of whites are against preferences, so that leads me to one final question: Why in the hell are we still doing it?

Affirmative action might have been started out by elite whites who wanted to speed up the progress of angry, impatient blacks, but it quickly became a way for important white people to show how non-racist they are. Any white guy who criticizes it or works to dismantle it will be seen as one of "those" kinds of people. You have to be a black guy--Ward Connerly--to feel like you can take on the issue. American leadership is not only stupid; it's gutless.     

More on discrimination

Here's another list of discrimination questions from the Midus Study asked of black respondents. The numbers indicate the percent who have never been victims. Keep in mind that this is a middle-aged sample, so many of these are folks were born in the 1950s or even earlier (the survey was conducted in 2004, and the mean age is 53.5). They have been around a long time. In spite of this, the vast majority have never been hassled by a police officer, for example. I thought this was a constant occurrence among blacks. 

Respondents were asked how many times they have been victims, but I didn't list the numbers because reports go up to 100 times (e.g., not hired 100 times).  But more on this tendency later.

The social construction of racism

Reader Linda Seebach wondered in the last post on the frequency of experiencing discrimination among blacks if there were some way to see if  "individuals' answers are consistently in one direction or another?"  This would assess the hypothesis that certain blacks tend to see racism all around in many forms, while others don't experience it in any of various possible ways, thus suggesting it is more in the mind of the victim than an objective reality.

In other words, if racist whites are all around, discrimination should tend to be experienced randomly by blacks. If racism, on the other hand, is found to be concentrated among a few victims, this suggests they are reading racism into events that others would interpret as benign.

Recall that most incidents that are labelled racist are ambiguous. Just look above at the list of questions that interviewers in the MIDUS Study asked respondents. If a waitress gives you bad service, it could be for many different reasons, only one of them being that she doesn't like members of your race. 

To test the competing hypotheses, I can calculate the correlations among the nine questions above. If the correlations are non-existent or low, this means that being a frequent victim of one type of mistreatment is unrelated to the frequency of another type. If, by contrast, the correlations are high, this suggests individuals tend to experience all types of mistreatment often, or none of them at all, which suggests it's much more about the victim and much less about others. 

It turns out that the correlations are overwhelmingly high. The average for all 36 correlations is .58, which means that a person's answer to one question predicts very strongly a similar answer to another question.

Another way to approach it is to calculate the alpha coefficient, which is a measure of the extent to which the questions tap an underlying factor, in this case the frequency of perceiving discrimination of all kinds. The coefficient is .92. This is a very high number and indicates that the questions are all tapping the same thing: a person's tendency to experience many interactions as racist. 

Many blacks are taught to see racists under every rock, so should we call the phenomenon we just observed in the data "the social construction of racism"?   

Frequency of discrimination

The MIDUS Study asked 149 blacks about the frequency of experiencing different types of discrimination. Here are the percentages:

You can see that a vast majority of blacks rarely or never experience the various forms of mistreatment. I thought racism was like a thick cloud that leaves no one untouched. If this were true, all blacks would give the same answer: "often" or at least "sometimes."

This looks like a case of some blacks interpreting everything in terms of racism, while others do not. You can see how supposed racist incidents are inherently ambiguous. Did the guy call you an idiot because you're black or because he thinks you're dumb? Notice how the interviewers did not ask, "How often are you called a racial slur?" This is an unambiguous incident, but it wasn't asked because it rarely happens. Researchers like to help blacks "find" racism.

In a later post, I'll look to see if we can use a person's characteristics to predict their perceiving racism. For example, I expect that suspiciousness will predict it.

Asian rape victims

I read somewhere that many Asian rape victims are attacked by black men, but I wanted to check it out for myself. 

I looked at the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) over the years 1992 through 2005 in order to maximize cases. Rape is rare (thank God), so I only found 11 cases of raped Asian (and Pacific Islander) women. Of the offenders, 5 were white, 4 were "other," and two were unknown. I'm assuming that most of the 4 "others" were Asians (Hispanics are a possibility as well); an Asian category is not available. None of the perps was black. The NCVS can't tell us if any of those whites are Hispanic since, according to the survey, Hispanics can be victims but not offenders. 

The numbers are just too small to tell us much. Victims were also asked about attempted rapes. Asian women reported one white, one black, and one "other" perpetrator.   

The stupidity of American elites

Of the dozen or so professors I've known who are Hispanic, all of them except one are objectively white. I looked at the General Social Survey: 60 percent of all Latinos with  four or more years of college classify themselves as white.

This exemplifies perfectly the stupidity of American elites. We push aside a more qualified white in order to give the position to a less qualified white.  

Ugly racism?

From David Frum's CNN piece:

Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans. 

Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, "Falling Behind or Moving Up?"

They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.

If these results continue to hold, the low skills of yesterday's illegal immigrant will negatively shape the U.S. work force into the 22nd century.

Long story short: illegal Mexicans are in the process of damaging the U.S. economy for the next 100 years plus.

Aren't those the words of an ugly racist, or at least an unpatriotic conservative?

"This is so tasty, we'd like an extra helping!"

In the journal Intelligence, Peter Hartmann and colleagues analyzed two American data sets and and found that: 1) there is a 0.8 standard deviation difference (that means large) between whites (W) and Hispanics (H) in general intelligence (g); and 2) correlations between g loadings and H-W differences for each subtest demonstrate that much of the difference in IQ is due to differences in g. According to Arthur Jensen's default hypothesis, group differences are assumed to be caused by the same factors as within-group differences, and we know individual variation in g is at least 50 percent heritable. 

Bottom line: the white-Hispanic intelligence gap is 80 percent as wide as the black-white gap (which is huge), and like the black-white gap, it ain't goin' anywhere quick. 

I get misty-eyed at the wisdom of our leaders. Upon seeing all the 1960s poverty and social turmoil in the black ghetto, they said to themselves, "This is so tasty, we'd like an extra helping!" 

Maybe the lying is congenital

Heather MacDonald does a great job of illustrating just how mendacious the media has been about Arizona's new immigration law. I learned the lesson years ago in grad school: liberals are gotdamn liars on racial issues. They simply cannot be trusted.

I showed in another post that liberals are much more likely than conservatives to cheat on their spouses. Maybe the lying is congenital.

Who wants to move here?

This table from Gallup is based on a sample of people around the world who say they would like to move to another country permanently.  The percentages indicate how many would choose the United States (and Canada as well).

America is most popular among people from Asia, and least popular among those from the Middle East and North Africa. Isn't it great when feelings are mutual?

I'm pleased to see that so many people are not choosing the United States. We need to do what we can to convince the world that this place is a hellhole so they'll move someplace else.

Gotta like that oxytocin

Fellow Betas, I think I may have discovered how it is that women developed stronger and deeper feelings for me over time, the opposite of how I expected it would work. From pages 70 and 71 of Why Women Have Sex:

Diane Witt, a researcher at Binghamton University, proposes that the release of oxytocin can be classically conditioned to the sight of certain people. Recall the Nobel Prize-winning Russian scientist Pavlov and his dogs. Dogs salivate when they are exposed to food--it plays an important role in the digestive process. Pavlov began ringing the bell every time he fed his dogs, and after a while the sound of the bell alone caused the dogs to salivate. The dogs had been classically conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell. Witt believes that, in a similar way, oxytocin can be classically conditioned to be released by the brain with exposure to certain partners. 

For example, a woman meets someone and on the first date she decides he doesn't match up to her ideal--Clint Eastwood--but he's still acceptable enough to date a few more times. Eventually she decides to have sex with him--and oxytocin is released, so she experiences that "oohhh so good" feeling. After having repeated sex, and oxytocin releases, with the same man, she forms a conditioned association. Pretty soon, just seeing the guy can cause her brain to release oxytocin--without even having sex. Suddenly "Mr. Acceptable Enough" becomes "Mr. Can't Live Without."  Some researchers believe that prolonged attachment with a given person actually causes chronically high levels of oxytocin and its close hormonal relative vasopressin, which could feasibly help maintain long-term relationship bonds between women and men.

 Problem is, you have to be acceptable in the first place.

You can choose to be an American first

After reading my last few posts, a skeptic might claim that I'm naive about race. I'm advocating that Americans of all colors put their Americanness first and their racial loyalty last. I've also argued that there is some truth to the idea that race is socially constructed.

Let's begin with the idea of socially constructed race. You haven't been reading this blog if you think I deny the biological reality of race. What I deny is that it must be at the center of how you define yourself. The phrase "You are born with your uniform on" is poetic, but misleading.

My brown eyes are a biological reality. Must I then define myself as a Brown and organize with the rest of the dark-eyed world against the Blue and  the Green?  Handedness is a biological reality. Should I march with my fellow left-handed brothers against our right-handed Oppressors? (I should contact our sinistral President. I hear he's got experience as an organizer). Baldness is basically genetic. Should Larry David and I form an army and drive the Hairy-Headed into the sea?

I certainly don't believe we should pretend that race doesn't exist and doesn't explain anything--much of this blog marshals evidence against that--but I'm not sure it has to be at the center of who you are.

Irishness was important when the Irish first arrived. Now, not so much. Polishness was important when they were new. Now, not really. For most now, we're just white folks.

You might respond that ethnicity is flexible, but not race. Blacks and American Indians have been here for centuries, but race is still central to who they are. Well, for a long time it was unrealistic for a black man to minimize his blackness. When you are made a slave because of it, it's important whether you want it to be or not.

Liberals like to pretend the circumstances really haven't changed much, but they are responsible for much of the race-clinging, and the truth is that the importance of race for a black person is now a choice. You probably know blacks who are culturally pretty much like whites. I do, and I don't see why more blacks can't move in that direction. In prior posts, I could find no predictors of voting Republican among blacks, so it's not simply a function of something like IQ or social class.

The move to American first-hood should be easier for Hispanics and especially Asians. The problem is that the country doesn't shame them for their backward particularism. In fact, it encourages them. People need to be challenged: Are you a tribalist, or are you an American?

Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying we can make the correlates of race disappear. A person can't choose, for example, to have an IQ of 115 just because he wants one. I'm talking about how you define yourself. You can choose to be an American first. 


   

"We were here first"

In the immigration debate, a common argument made by Hispanics goes something like this: "We've been in this country for generations. We were here before you were."  

To borrow a term from our postmodernist friends, let's deconstruct that a bit. "We" clearly means Hispanics, or perhaps some narrower group like Mexicans. "You" refers to whites. The meaning of the argument is that the America is just a piece of land claimed by two racial groups--whites and Latinos--and Hispanics have dibs since they arrived first. 

Set aside the question of who showed up first. In this scenario, there is no United States of America and no American citizens. There are two racial groups fighting over land. This is the worldview of a thoroughgoing racialist. How is the logic of the argument different from the white nationalist who argues that North America belongs to the white race because it was developed by them?  

The outlook of a true American citizen is that only Americans can decide who can move here, and that decision should be based only on what is in the long-term interests of the nation. We Americans have all been here the same length of time--since the birth of the country. Arguments advancing the interests of one racial group against another are illegitimate to the citizen.       

This "we got here first" argument betrays the mind of a tribalist: "I am a cell in a racial body that is in conflict with the racial body of which you are a cell. I operate on this understanding, and so do you, white guy. Your kind believes the same way and always has. Nationhood and citizenship have nothing to do with it. We're not on the same team." 

Liberal delusions to the contrary, very few whites think like that. When whites criticize illegal immigration for its lawlessness and cost to the country, they mean just that.  Of course, "illegal immigration hurts me" is a common underlying sentiment, but "it hurts my race" is rare indeed. 

Whites, even savvy whites, let minorities pull this crap all the time. Activists start talking like brown Nazis, and whites think it's a perfectly legitimate argument. 

Critics are right when they claim that whites think they are superior to others, but they're  looking at the wrong attitudes. White superiority goes like this: Enlightened humans are not tribalists. Non-whites are naturally (and properly) tribalists. Therefore, non-whites are not enlightened humans like us. (The last step is usually not thought through, but it's the logical conclusion). White tribalists are especially low because, while such behavior is normal for people of color, it is beneath a white person. 

I'm not a supremacist because I think non-whites are equal to me and therefore should be held to the standards I impose on myself (non-tribalism). They are not inferiors like children who cannot reach the lofty heights where I reside. 

The only problem with my expectations of non-whites is that I look like Pollyanna in a pink dress.    

Begging us to become white racialists

Here's a compelling case made by Lawrence Auster that the reaction of organized Hispanics to the new immigration enforcement law in Arizona demonstrates that they are Latino racialists first and Americans second. These people are begging us 200 million white folks to become white racialists first and Americans second.

Good God Almighty

Good God Almighty, you can't read a single paper around here without there being some hysterical witch hunt surrounding it.

Read here about the controversy over Nyborg's paper that I described in the last post. 

It seems that the paper gave the ladies of the Arhus University Committee the vapors.  

The book burners never sleep.  

UPDATE: Here's an eloquent letter of support from Steven Pinker. And one by Henry Harpending.

Are men smarter than women?

According to the New York Times:

In a closely watched case, a sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday ruled 6-5 that a sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart could proceed as a class action for more than a million women. The suit is the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation’s history.

The evidence for discrimination that the plaintiffs offer is that while 65 percent of Walmart's hourly employees are women, only one-third of its managers are.

Let's pack it in and go home--I, for one, am convinced that Walmart places hatred of women above its desire to make a profit.

The Gods of Human Biodiversity must have been guiding my path today: I was in the middle of reading a research study on the male advantage in IQ when I heard about the lawsuit. 

For years I've assumed that men and women have the same average general intelligence. Why have I assumed this?  Because King Arthur Jensen told me so. In the g Factor. Now, I'm not so sure. 

In the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Danish researcher Helmuth Nyborg reviewed studies examining sex differences, and of the several methodological criteria set by Nyborg, only one study was adequate. Many of the criteria are technical, but the most compelling to me is that results depend a lot on the mix of subtests, some which favor males and some which favor females. The way around the problem is to maximize the number of subtests, which makes sense since general mental ability is supposed to penetrate a broad array of cognitive tasks.

The study that meets all of his requirements is by Colom et al. (2002) which gives a male advantage of 3.6 points. He then goes on to describe the results of his study based on two Danish samples--one of children and one of adults--where 20 subtests were given. (That's a lot). The male advantage in g for the kids was 3.15. When the adult sample was added to increase statistical power, the male advantage rose to 6.90 points.

Nyborg was then able to closely predict the observed sex gap in general intelligence with the sex difference in brain size (men have bigger brains--one-third of a standard deviation larger). The bigger brains give men 15 percent more neurons.  

Now a few IQ points doesn't seem like a big deal, but that gets magnified at the high end. Based on his Danish data, for every woman with an IQ of 145 or higher, you will get eight men.

We shouldn't be the least bit surprised to see men dominate the higher ranks of a large organization. And that's not even counting higher natural levels of ambition, competitiveness, and dominance.  

Makes me wonder about the sex of the plaintiff's lawyers.     


UPDATE: Dennis Mangan explains how biological differences explain lower pay for women here.

Are beautiful people intelligent?

High status men mate with attractive women, producing bright, beautiful babies, right?

ADD Health interviewers were asked the following about the study participant: "How physically attractive is the respondent?" Answers ranged from "very unattractive " to "very attractive." For each race/sex group, I calculated the Pearson correlation between this measure and the student's vocabulary test score--a proxy for IQ.

Pearson correlation coefficient

Males
White .12*
Black .23*
Hispanic .22*
Amerindian .21*
Asian .18*

Females
White .04*
Black .11*
Hispanic .01
Amerindian .18*
Asian .07

*significant relationship

All of the correlations are in the predicted direction, but they are weak (or non-existent). They are stronger for males than for females--I'm not sure why.

The College Degree Gap: Young Women Outnumber Men at Every Level

The College Degree Gap: Young Women Outnumber Men at Every Level

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Candor on surveys

ADD Health interviewers were asked the following about the study participant: "How candid was the respondent?" Answers ranged from "very candid" (1) to "not candid" (4).  Here are means by race/ethnicity:

Mean evasiveness score (N = 6,477)

Males
White 1.64
Black 1.89*
Mexican 1.82*
Puerto Rican 1.93*
Cuban 1.80 
Amerindian 1.65
Asian 1.66

Females
White 1.55
Black 1.82*
Mexican 1.65
Puerto Rican 1.89* 
Cuban 1.85
Amerindian 1.55
Asian 1.61

*significantly higher than white counterpart


For both sexes, blacks and Puerto Ricans were significantly more evasive than whites. Mexican American males were also less candid than their white counterparts. The largest gap is between whites and Puerto Ricans. It turns out to be one-third of a standard deviation (sd) for males and four-tenths of an sd for females--moderate differences. 

The numbers are consistent with another study I described which found that, compared to whites, blacks and Hispanics score higher on lie scales when participating in surveys. It might simply be due to mistrust of authorities. These results suggest that the true racial gaps in undesirable behaviors like crime might be larger than survey data indicate.     

White culture

In his recent article, Pat Buchanan sees the Tea Party movement as an emerging tribe. He's buying the hype of the left that these protesters are anti-black racialists. As I showed in an earlier post, almost as many Hispanics support the Tea Party as whites. Are they white nationalists too? I suspect Buchanan wants liberals to be right because tribalism generates much more political power that individualism. 

Buchanan's piece was inspired by an article written in the New Yorker titled, "Beyond the Pale: Is White the New Black?" The author, Kalefa Sanneh, reviews a couple "whiteness studies" books and concludes that whiteness is emerging as a positive identity (historically it has meant "not non-white" and the consequences have been pernicious), and it might end up being relatively benign. 

I don't see it, but I've been trying to answer a question from the article that was posed to Glenn Beck by Katie Couric: "What is white culture?" Beck had said earlier on his show that, "This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture."  Beck didn't give an answer, but, having some idea how he thinks, he probably meant that limited, constitutional government is a white American phenomenon, and Obama is a black liberationist.

But the question got me wondering. If Buchanan and Sanneh are right, and people like me are turning into white folks, what is my culture? Your ideas would be helpful, but you'll admit it's a tough question. It's like pinning down a cloud. 

My first stab at it would be to focus on the highest aspects of culture, and to personify them with the best culture creators. Charles Murray does this systematically in Human Accomplishment. It would not have been a gross exaggeration to title the book White Accomplishment. (This is what you're going to get from us if you turn us into white people). Anyway, the short list would include Euler, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Lavoisier, Darwin, Aristotle, Plato, Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Watt, and Edison. Although some would disagree with me, I would add at least Jesus and St. Paul. (We needed to beef up the Jewish contribution to the list).

For the highest of white American culture, we could just pick the leading Americans from Murray's lists--Whitman and Edison, for example.    

Of course, these are the cultural leaders. Cultural followers come in all colors, so "white culture" like any culture is a limited concept. 

Skeptics might argue that there is very little in common between, say, Jesus and Edison; "white" is an artificial social construction. I would answer yes and no. I would answer that it is being constructed by liberals every day. "The white race is the cancer of human history" is a classic example. As Sanneh wrote, "The history of human culture is the history of forgeries that become genuine, categories that people make and cannot simply unmake."

The GSS vocabulary test

Via a reader at iSteve, it looks like this might be the vocabulary test used by the General Social Survey. (Someone please tell me if I'm wrong).

A. SPACE 1. school 2. noon 3. captain 4. room 5. board 6. don’t know

B. BROADEN 1. efface 2. make level 3. elapse 4. embroider 5. widen 6. don’t know

C. EMANATE 1. populate 2. free 3. prominent 4. rival 5. come 6. don’t know

D. EDIBLE 1. auspicious 2. eligible 3. fit to eat 4. sagacious 5. able to speak 6. don’t know

E. ANIMOSITY 1. hatred 2. animation 3. disobedience 4. diversity 5. friendship 6. don’t know

F. PACT 1. puissance 2. remonstrance 3. agreement 4. skillet 5. pressure 6. don’t know

G. CLOISTERED 1. miniature 2. bunched 3. arched 4. malady 5. secluded 6. don’t know

H. CAPRICE 1. value 2. a star 3. grimace 4. whim 5. inducement 6. don’t know

I. ACCUSTOM 1. disappoint 2. customary 3. encounter 4. get used to 5. business 6. don’t know

J. ALLUSION 1. reference 2. dream 3. eulogy 4. illusion 5. aria 6. don’t know


UPDATE: FYI, the mean score in 2008 was 6.29 for whites, 4.99 for blacks, and 5.56 for Hispanics born in this country.

Does IQ explain racial differences in violent crime?

Adolescents in the ADD Health Study were asked if they had intentionally injured someone in the past year. I estimated logistic regression models to see if: 1) non-Asian minorities (NAMs) were more likely to answer yes, and 2) are the racial/ethnic differences explained by lower IQs.

The coefficient for blacks is 0.34 (p = .001) and 0.24 for Hispanics (p = .013). The numbers indicate that members of both groups are more likely to have injured someone. When a measure of IQ is added to the equations (it's a vocab test), the results look like this: 

Logistic regression coefficients

Hispanic model (n = 6,150)
Hispanic 0.16
IQ -0.01*

Black model (n = 6,154)
Black 0.28*
IQ -0.01*

* p < .05, two-tailed test

When IQ is entered into the model the Hispanic effect disappears. In other words, lower IQs explain why Hispanics are more likely to be violent. On the other hand, entering IQ into the model for blacks reduces the relationship between being black and violent, but it does not eliminate it. According to ADD Health data, other factors are necessary to fully explain high levels of violence by blacks.

Religiosity and pregnancy

White female adolescents participating in the ADD Health Study were asked how often they attend church, and if they've ever been pregnant.

Percent ever pregnant (N = 657)

Never attends 16.5
Less than once a month 17.8
At least once a month but not weekly 10.6
Weekly or more 12.9

The differences are not statistically significant (meaning we're not sure that they're not an accident of the sample). These findings do not support the contention that religious girls are the ones who get pregnant.

Digit ratios among ten populations

As I described before, the ratio of the length of the index finger to the ring finger is thought to measure the balance of estrogen and testosterone an embryo/fetus is exposed to. Shorter relative index finger length indicates masculinization. The graph above is from page 19 in John Manning's Digit Ratio: A Pointer to Fertility, Behavior, and Health (2002, Rutgers University Press). It shows the means for males and females from ten different populations. The graph does not show the results for Lithuanians and Latvians who scored in the mid-90s. (They were not included since subjects' hands were measured differently). 

The trend looks curvilinear with "masculine" populations nearer to the equator or at high latitudes (Finns). The two black populations are masculine. Notice how the population differences are much larger than the sex differences. Jamaican women have more masculine ratios than most of the male European populations.

Political news dummies

Pew recently asked 1,003 adults 12 questions about political news information. Here are the percent who answered each correctly:

Let's look at the percent answering correctly two of the most "difficult" questions.

The political news dummies: women, blacks, young adults, folks with no more than a high-school degree, and Democrats. And the overall score:

Same pattern. You can add low-income folks to the list as well.

How about you can't vote without at least a passing grade?  I have low standards.

Black violence is linked to Latino immigration

From American Renaissance:

LSU Sociology Professor Edward Shihadeh and Ph.D. candidate Raymond Barranco have published a study titled “Latino Employment and Black Violence: The Unintended Consequence of U.S. Immigration Policy,” in the March 2010 issue of Social Forces, the field’s preeminent journal.

The study confirms that Latino immigration and dominance of low skill jobs have displaced blacks from low-skill labor markets, which in turn led to more violence in urban black communities. According to their analysis, this is traceable to U.S. immigration policies over the last several decades.

Before the United States/Mexico border was militarized, Latino immigration was a two-way trip; immigrants, mainly from Central America, moved to the United States temporarily to finance a project in their home country. But in response to U.S. public pressure, border security was intensified. Tall fences were built, cameras installed and the border was patrolled relentlessly by well-armed guards. As a result, Latino immigrants in the United States stopped returning home for fear that they could not repeat the trip. This increased the number of Latino workers in the United States competing for jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and construction. Blacks lost that competition in many cities, and where that occurred, murder rates went up.

“{snip} We do not advocate restricting the flow of Latino migrants in either direction. This is what triggered the flow of events in the first place. There is no reason to deprive this country of the rich contributions made by Latinos. Our study simply describes how immigration policy opened a new chapter in the history of the U.S. labor market and how that harmed black communities,” [said Shihadeh].

Liberals and cheating on taxes

Ah, Tax Day.

A recent survey by Pew revealed that 86 percent of conservatives agree that "not reporting all income on your taxes is morally wrong" compared to only 68 percent of liberals. 

Conservatives want lower taxes but feel they should pay what they owe. Liberals want you to pay more but don't stress about paying their own.   

I finally figured out why blacks folks won't go to protests that drum up images of American revolutionaries. Two words: Crispus Attucks.

Church attendance and sexual assault

White male adolescents in the ADD Health Study were asked: "Did you ever physically force someone to have sexual intercourse against her will?" Here are the percentages who answered "yes" listed by church attendance:

Percent of males having forced sex (N = 604)

Never attends 4.2
Less than once a month 2.3
Between monthly and less than weekly 3.5
Once a week or more 1.2

There are no significant differences here, but if that issue is ignored, guys who never attend church are 3 1/2 times more likely to report forced sex than those who go weekly or more often.

Girls were asked: "Were you ever physically forced to have sexual intercourse against your will?

Percent of females forced to have sex (N = 657)

Never attends 15.7
Less than once a month 11.3
Between monthly and less than weekly 11.9
Once a week or more 10.5

Once again, there are no significant differences, but the numbers suggest that, compared to girls who attend most frequently, those who never go are 1 1/2 times more likely to have been forced. Less restrictiveness on the part of the parents seems the most probable explanation.

Religious affiliation and sexual intercourse among white teens

White adolescent participants in the ADD Health Study were asked: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse? When we say sexual intercourse, we mean when a male inserts his penis into a female's vagina."

Here are the percentages who answered yes by religious affiliation (sample size = 4,180, mean age is 15.0):

Percent of teens who have had sex

No religion 47.1*
Pentecostal 42.0*
Baptist 40.6*
Methodist 33.7
Catholic 32.7
Disciples of Christ 31.6
Presbyterian 30.6
Lutheran 30.5
Episcopal 28.2
Jewish 27.8
Mormon 21.4

* significantly higher than Mormons


Those with no religion are most likely to report sexual intercourse.  Compared to Mormons, their rate is 2.2 times higher.

Sexual orientation and physical attractiveness

ADD Health interviewers rated the physical attractiveness of adolescent study participants and also asked them if they had ever been attracted to a member of the same sex. I'll categorize those who answered "no" as heterosexual, and those who answered "yes" as homosexual. Here are the means for physical attractiveness:

Physical attractiveness mean (N = 4,255, white sample)

Straight males 3.49
Gay males 3.44
Straight females 3.74
Lesbians 3.70

According to ADD Health data, homosexuals do not differ significantly from straights in terms of physical attractiveness. I had guessed that gay males would be more attractive, and lesbians less attractive.

Derbyshire on living with differences

Is that famous English common sense genetic, or what?  From John Derbyshire's recent talk to the Black Law Students Association at the University of Pennsylvania on the government's role in eliminating racial disparities: 

We are all, to various degrees, aware of our own individual strengths and limitations. Certainly I am aware of mine. For example: My wife is a keen ballroom dancer. Because I love my wife, I did my best to become a ballroom dancer myself. For two years — two blessed years, ladies and gentlemen — I went along twice a week with her to the local Arthur Murray studio to take instruction. At the end of it, I still had two left feet. The instruction I received was like water poured on to a sheet of glass.


Even at the things we are good at, most of us are not very good. I make my living by writing; yet I can name, in my own small personal acquaintance, a dozen people who are better writers than I am. That's not even to mention the Shakespeares and Tolstoys. Most of us are hopeless at most things, and mediocre at the rest.


And yet — look! We don't lose sleep over this. We don't sink into rage and frustration at our own individual differences, or agitate for politicians to put balm on our psychic wounds. We accept our individual shortcomings with remarkable equanimity, playing the cards we've been dealt as best we can. That is the attitude of a healthy human being. To do otherwise would, most of us I'm sure would agree, be un-healthy. How much more unhealthy, then, to fret and rage and agitate about mere statistical abstractions?

(H/T Steve Sailer--not unfamiliar with common sense, himself.)

Support for the Tea Party

In a recent Quinnipiac survey, people were asked the following question: "Suppose a Tea Party candidate were running in your district. If the 2010 election for the U.S. House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, or the Tea Party candidate in your district?"

The sample was of 1,907 registered voters nationwide.

Only three percent of blacks answered that they would vote for the Tea Party candidate. This in no way demonstrates that blacks are loyal to Obama and the Democratic Party; rather, it proves that boisterous Medicare recipients hate black people. It's textbook social science: if you want to know a group's attitudes, observe the attitudes of another group.

Evidently Hispanics hate blacks too since they basically match whites in support for the Tea Party (at least on a survey). Seventeen percent of whites said they would vote for the Tea Party candidate, but 15 percent of Hispanics said the same. Funny, but I somehow missed the media's coverage of that statistic. 

Racial differences in digit ratio

John Manning and colleagues have used the ratio of the length of the index to the ring finger (2D:4D) as a proxy measure of in utero exposure to relatively more estrogen and less testosterone. In other words, a long index finger compared to the ring finger is an indicator of "feminization" in the womb, and a comparatively short index is a sign of "masculinization."

 It turns out that there are large ethnic differences in the 2D:4D ratio. Manning is quoted as saying that, "There’s more difference between a Pole and a Finn than a man and a woman." According to the results of one study, "The Oriental Han had the highest mean 2D:4D, followed by the Caucasian Berbers and Uygurs, with the lowest mean ratios found in the Afro-Caribbean Jamaicans." In plainer language, Hans were the most feminized and Jamaicans the most masculine. You can read about a long list of characteristics associated with digit ratio here.

You gotta love citing studies that have Robert Trivers as a co-author.

The Myths of Racial Profiling

The name MacDonald used to drum up an image of a pale-faced redhead in floppy shoes. Now I think of a curly-haired truth warrior:

The Myths of Racial Profiling

Race, ethnicity, and IQ according to ADD Health

The ADD Health Study gave teenagers a five minute vocabulary test and converted scores into a measure of IQ. (As a reader pointed out in an earlier post, vocabulary accurately captures general intelligence). Here are mean IQ scores for all kids who were born in the United States (non-Hispanic whites are set at 100, and the standard deviation is 15):

Jews are heads and shoulders above other groups. Jews and blacks, in fact, are 1 1/2 standard deviations apart--an enormous difference. Except for Koreans, all Asian groups score lower than whites, and Filipinos are toward the bottom of the list. All Hispanic groups have lower averages. Mexican Americans are nine points lower than whites.

No difference between white managers and liberals in warmth toward blacks

Liberals claim that blacks average lower incomes than whites because whites do the hiring, and all too many of them are racists. What we need, they say, is enlightened people (i.e., them) to do the hiring.

In the last post, I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to show that white police officers do not differ from other whites in their feelings toward blacks. Let's use the same question to see if there is a significant difference between white managers and white liberals. Respondents were asked,"In general, how warm or cool do you feel towards African Americans?" Answers ranged from "very warm" (1) to "very cool" (9). There were 232 managers and 266 liberals in the sample.

The mean score for managers is 3.55; for libs, it's 3.46. The difference is not statistically significant, meaning that we have little confidence that the difference in the estimates is anything more than noise. 

Are white cops racists?

Most blacks and many whites assume that white cops are racists.

The General Social Survey asked the following question: "In general, how warm or cool do you feel towards African Americans?" Answers ranged from "very warm" (1) to "very cool" (9). There were only 13 white officers in the sample (and 2,080 other whites). The mean for the police is 3.62, and it's 3.65 for all other whites. No significant difference.

White officers do not differ from other whites in their attitudes towards blacks.

More on the IQ regression to the mean

In the recent post on IQ regression to the mean, reader Levi Johnston asked if there were enough black respondents to calculate IQs for those with two highly educated parents, not one or two. The n for blacks drops from 47 to 16--a small sample, indeed--but the results are a mean of 109.6 for whites and 105.3 for blacks (the difference is not statistically significant). Compared to the earlier results, scores went up a couple points for whites but five points for blacks. The gap in standard deviation (sd) terms shrunk from around half to about three-tenths.

I should note that with the full sample of blacks and whites, the IQ gap based on the GSS vocabulary test in only about 10 points--not the usual 15. This is probably due to the fact that the test taps verbal IQ, a form of intelligence with a smaller racial gap. For the full sample, the black-white difference is only two-thirds of an sd--not the one sd difference that researchers usually observe when looking at general intelligence.

Traditionalism and family size

A traditionalism score was computed for white MIDUS Study participants based on the following items: endorses high moral standards; endorses religious values and institutions; expresses positive regard for parents; endorses strict child-rearing practices; values conventional propriety and a good reputation; opposes rebelliousness and unrestricted freedom of expression; condemns selfish disregard of others.

I divided the sample into low and high traditionalism groups and calculated the mean number of children for all ages 45 and over:


Mean number of children

Men
High traditionalism 2.93
Low traditionalism 2.39*
Difference: 0.54 children

Women

High traditionalism 2.88
Low traditionalism 2.58*
Difference: 0.30 children
 
* significantly lower than counterpart
 
Traditional white men average about one-half of a child more than their non-traditional counterparts. The gap is smaller for white women: 0.3 more kids. (All the means seem high. Respondents were asked to include step-children, adopted children, etc.) 
 
The heritability of traditionalism is estimated to be 60 percent.
 
The country might inch in a more traditional direction, if current trends are sustained (over a very, very long time). (I'm assuming the trend is the same among our growing population of Hispanics and Asians).

Regression to the mean with GSS data

Do black and white adult children of parents who attended graduate school have the same average IQs? Why shouldn't they? They had the same advantages that come from growing up in a home of highly educated parents.

Using GSS data, I calculated mean IQs (based on a vocabulary test) for blacks and whites whose mothers or fathers completed at least 17 years of schooling (20 years is the highest possible score).

Mean IQ (N = 546)

Has highly educated mother
White 107.0
Black 99.5*

Has highly educated father
White 107.6
Black 99.7*


* significantly lower than white counterpart

Even though these folks have equally educated parents, there is a gap between them that is roughly half of a standard deviation--a fairly large difference.

Our results fit just about perfectly a regression to the mean equation where heritability for IQ is set at 0.5; the mean IQ for educated parents is set at 115; and the means for the white and black populations are set at 100 and 85, respectively.