NAMs and the Flynn effect: In the last post on the Flynn effect, I used GSS data to show that the mean Wordsum scores of people born in the United States of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent have risen over the past two decades. I list below the mean scores for a larger number of ethnic groups over the past four decades.


Mean Wordsum scores

Mexican
Seventies 4.17
Eighties 4.04
Nineties 5.11
This decade 5.53*

Black
Seventies 4.82
Eighties 4.91
Nineties 5.10
This decade 5.38*

Amerindian
1972-1989 3.68
1990-2008 4.47

English/Welsh
Seventies 6.70
Eighties 6.74
Nineties 7.00
This decade 6.95

German
Seventies 6.14
Eighties 6.22
Nineties 6.28
This decade 6.40

Irish
Seventies 6.47
Eighties 6.30
Nineties 6.49
This decade 6.59

Italian
Seventies 6.11
Eighties 6.08
Nineties 6.43
This decade 6.47

Polish
Seventies 6.28
Eighties 6.43
Nineties 6.47
This decade 6.23

Scottish
Seventies 7.08
Eighties 6.54
Nineties 6.77
This decade 7.03

Jewish
Seventies 7.42
Eighties 7.58
Nineties 7.32
This decade 7.47

* Significant change between first and last period, .05 level, two-tail test.


The American Indian sample size is very low after you remove blacks and whites who say their main ethnicity is Native American, so I had to limit the comparison to two periods. The difference between the two would very likely be statistically significant if the sample were larger.

There is a clear pattern here: none of the white groups have seen significant improvements since the early 1970s when the vocabulary test was first given, but all of the non-white groups have improved. I suggested before that fewer NAMs have good English language models, but the increased hours of television viewing might have helped compensate in the last couple of decades. Kids watch several hours of TV each day, and they often watch peers that they want to imitate. Characters on television usually speak well. (Of course, it doesn't help if they are speaking another language well). White kids often have good models anyway, so people on television with good vocabularies are redundant.

Anyway, that is one explanation, but others ideas to account for the pattern are appreciated.

(TV can't be THAT powerful, or generations wouldn't continue to have strong accents.)

Puerto Ricans: they earn like Mexicans, and vote like Jews... or Mexicans: According to GSS data, fewer than 20% of Mexican Americans voted for Reagan in 1980 when he carried 44 states. And this was long before the rise of strident close-the-border types. The high watermark for Republicans was Bush in 2000 when he got over 40% of the Hispanic vote. So we're told to pander so we can do badly instead of terribly. Right, Reagan fared so poorly because everyone knew he was a Mexican hater.

Americans with their eyes open realize that the Democratic Party is the natural home of Mex-Ams--just like it is for blacks. That doesn't mean we shouldn't court them or do outreach, but it makes no sense to pander with suicidal strategies like open borders.

When analyzing Hispanics, I usually focus on Mexican Americans because a great deal of illegal and legal immigration comes from Mexico. We choose the number that enter our country each year, and that choice deserves careful debate.

But let's broaden the discussion and get past the hype about other Hispanic groups as well. (In fact, I'm thinking we would do well not to use the terms "Hispanic" or "Latino." This a recent social and political construction that only hurts conservatives. Why do we want Mexican Americans to get offended when a Republican calls a Puerto Rican Supreme Court nominee a racist? It's an artifical category. Let's treat it as such.)

So--how do Puerto Ricans in the United States vote? They're Catholic and family-oriented, right? Natural conservatives, don't you think? GSS data:


Percent of Puerto Ricans voting Republican for President

2004 36.4
2000 28.6
1996 4.7
1992 25.7

The sample sizes get too small to go back any further, but you get the point. A whopping 5% of Puerto Ricans voted for Bob Dole. He did spent his whole campaign going on about how Captain Morgan is a homo. Yeah, I'm convinced if Rush would just shut the hell up, Puerto Ricans will forget about all the social programs that the Democrats are pushing. They just want people to talk pretty.

The Flynn effect among Hispanics: I showed in a prior post that scores on the General Social Survey's vocabulary test (WORDSUM) have increased since the 70s among Mexican Americans. The nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court made me wonder if Puerto Ricans have had a similar increase.


Mean Wordsum score

Mexican Americans, N = 393
Seventies 4.17
Eighties 4.04
Nineties 5.11
This decade 5.53

Puerto Ricans, N = 102
Eighties 4.57
Nineties 5.28
This decade 5.12


I limited the sample to those born in the United States. The improvement for Mex-Ams in the past two decades over the seventies and eighties is significant at the .05 level. There were too few Puerto Ricans in the 70s to calculate a mean, but we also see an increase for them in the past two decades (not significant).

I'm not sure why the numbers have risen. I doubt that the schools are doing a better job. My guess would be more hours of watching TV. People always knock TV, but the children of uneducated parents will hear the best English from teachers and TV, and who listens to teachers? My daughter soaks up television and DVDs like a sponge. Many of her phrases are from kids' shows. This might also explain why blacks have higher Wordsum scores than Hispanics.

Anyway, this is some good news for people who worry about Hispanic assimilation.

Gay germ theory and city size at age 16: A reader in the comments section of my post on the residential distribution of adult homosexuals raised the claim by Gregory Cochran that a same-sex orientation is caused by some pathogen. In support of the idea, Cochran cited research finding that gay men raised in or near a city outnumber gay men raised in less populated by a margin three to one, or something like that.

Most people in the comments, including myself, assumed that the greater concentration of homosexuals in cities is due to migration, but let's look at where homosexuals are at age 16 (H/T to TGGP who reminded me of the variable).


Percent of the total sex-specific population at age 16, N = 18,012

Male homosexuals
Farm 2.3
Country/non-farm 2.8
Town (lt 50,000) 2.9
City (50,000-250,000) 3.5
Big city--suburb 3.3
City (gt 250,000) 3.8

Lesbians
Country/non-farm 1.5
Town (lt 50,000) 1.6
City (50,000-250,000) 1.9
Big city--suburb 2.0
City (gt 250,000) 2.3


Here we see that as a place is more populated, prevalance rates for both gay male adolescents and lesbian teenagers increase. Why we see this pattern here, but not for adult lesbians, as shown in the last post, I'm not sure. This is a larger and thus more precise sample. That might be the answer.

So, we see more gays and lesbians in cities even before they are old enough to migrate to them. How do we explain the pattern? Perhaps families with a tendency to have homosexual offspring are drawn to cities. Perhaps homosexuals from smaller towns are less willing to admit their orientation (although they are asked the question, not when they are 16, but later when they are adults). Or perhaps Cochran is right. Comments?

Has anyone else noticed this? This is just personal experience, but Hispanics seem more likely than members of other groups to be generous to the customer at the expense of the business. I can remember a number of times when Hispanic waiters would break the rules and give me free food or drinks--I thought it was just a clever way to try to get a bigger tip. But I've seen the same thing when there was no apparent benefit to the employee.

Just the other day I tried to buy a couple of items at 7-Eleven with a debit gift card. There wasn't enough money left on it, so the Hispanic girl just told me to take the food free. I pulled cash out of my wallet and gave it to her, which puzzled her a bit since she had just said I could take the stuff. Then today, I'm at the supermarket and order a pound of pasta salad. The guy weighs it, sticks the price label on the container, and then adds another scoop and says, "Here's a little extra." It's not a situation where I'm going to give him a tip or something; in fact, he's taking the risk of getting caught by the manager. It seems like there's a certain pleasure in siding with the customer against the employer.

What is the distribution of homosexuals across city size? Using GSS data, here is what I found:


Percent of the total sex-specific population

Gay men
Rural/small town 2.1
Town 1.9
Small city 2.4
Medium-size city 3.0
Large city 4.3
Very large city 6.0

Lesbians
Rural/small town 1.4
Town 2.5
Small city 2.9
Medium-size city 2.5
Large city 3.1
Very large city 2.0


The larger the place of residence, the higher the percent of men who are gay. But for lesbians, there doesn't seem to be a pattern (except for a lower share in small towns). Of course, the numbers bounce around since we are making estimates for a small group of people.

So, assuming we are observing a real pattern here, why are there so many more gay men in large cities, but not lesbians? Are gay men more drawn to the cultural advantages of the big city? More job opportunities for the kinds of work they excel in? Do they experience more unfriendly treatment in small towns than lesbians, or are they less willing to admit their orientation in an interview if they live somewhere that is less populated? Is it harder to find partners in smaller towns, but lesbians don't care as much? Something else?

You gotta purdy mouth: I just watched Deliverance at Netflix. If you haven't seen it, you've got to. What a treat. I enjoyed it so much, I didn't even mind that they demonize hillbillies. Now, I need to read the book by 1966-68 Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress, James Dickey. (He plays the sheriff). I am usually bored by action movies, but not if they're intelligent like this one. And it's quite beautiful as well (except for the hillbillies, of course).

Good news: Using GSS data, I looked at the number of children for white women ages 40-49 averaged over the nineties, and then in this decade:


IQ Group/Mean kids this decade/Change over the past decade

High IQ--(1.82) up .23
Medium IQ--(2.07) up .08
Low IQ--(2.00) down .17

The high-IQ group (those scoring 8, 9, or 10 out of ten on a vocabulary test) averaged 1.82 kids this decade which is up .23 over the 1990s. The medium-IQ group (5 through 7 on the test) have had 2.07 kids, .08 higher than last decade. The low-IQ group (0 through 4 on the test) came down from 2.17 in the 1990s to 2.00 in this decade.

In other words, things have improved a lot in only 10 years. I know, I know that mean white IQ is not going up as a result, but I still like it.

Race differences in IQ: For those of you who don't have the time to read Rushton and Jensen's 50 page review of Nisbitt's Intelligence and How to Get It, I outline the points I found interesting below. It's funny how the research literature is this rich and advanced (compared to, say, educational research work in the area) but the typical mainstream position is that IQ research is way too crude and undeveloped to inform policy. One frickin' doll study helped decide Brown v. Board of Education, but a century of research by psychometricians shouldn't even give us pause.


1. World IQ is 90: East Asian cluster is 105, Europeans are 100, Inuit-Eskimos 91, SE Asians 87, Native Americans 87, Pacific Islanders 85, South Asians and North Africans 84, sub-Saharan Africans 67, Australian aborigines 62, and Kalahari Bushmen and Congo Pygmies 54.

2. Flynn effect: IQ has increased in the developed world in the last 50 years, and the black-white gap has narrowed a bit. The gain is not on g which is in large part genetic.

3. Research was cited suggesting that the IQ gap is larger than 15 points because a disproportionate number of low IQ blacks do not make it into samples.

4. Research shows that the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from black-white differences in regards to the g factor.

5. A test's g loading is the best predictor of biological measures of heritability coefficients determined from twin studies, inbreeding depression scores calculated in children of cousin-marriages, brain evoked potentials, brain pH levels, brain glucose metabolism, as well as nerve conduction velocity and reaction time measures. The correlations argue strongly for the biological, as opposed to the mere statistical reality of g.

6. Across 149 psychometric tests, the correlation between g-loading score and black-white difference is .62. This contradicts the culture-only theory.

7. Research indicates that there is no factor lowering IQs that is specific to blacks.

8. The correlation between several measures of reaction times and IQ is .6. Asians are faster than whites, and whites are faster than blacks. The differences are not due to motivation: while Asians and whites react faster, blacks move faster.

9. Heritability is lowest early in life and rises to 60-80% by adulthood. Shared environment falls to 0% by adulthood. Adoption can raise the IQ of a child quite a bit, but g remains like that of the biological parents.

10. The model that best fits data from a sample of black and white twins is 50/50 genes and environment.

11. Non-hereditarians like Robert Sternberg get results like those reported by Lynn when they administer IQ tests to sub-Saharan Africans. Even after training kids how to solve problems like those on the test, means were under 80. Teaching to the test denudes the test of its g loading. Studies of Africans who have won math and science competitions put mean IQ at 100. African IQs predict academic and job performance as well as for non-Africans. With a white mean set at a mental age of 16, an African mean of 70 implies a mental age of 11. Eleven year olds are not retarded. (I babysat and had a paper route at age 10 and started driving and hunting when I was 13.)

12. In a MRI study, Posthuma et al. found heritabilities of 82 percent for whole-brain gray matter volume, 87 percent for whole-brain white matter volume, and 86 percent for IQ.

13. Smaller black brain sizes do not appear to be due to prenatal or perinatal conditions. In a study of fetuses, Schultz found that from the 9th week of intrauterine life, 165 Black fetuses averaged a smaller brain case than did 455 White fetuses. The difference became more prominent over the course of fetal development.

14. In meta-analyses of general population samples on the Progressive Matrices, Lynn and Irwing found no sex difference in IQ among children aged 6- to 14-years but a male advantage from 15-years through old age, with the male advantage by adulthood being equivalent to about 4.6 IQ points.

15. Winick et al. studied 141 Korean children malnourished-in-infancy and then adopted as infants by American families. They found that by 10 years of age the children exceeded the national average in IQ and achievement scores: A severely-malnourished group obtained a mean IQ of 102; a moderately-nourished group obtained a mean IQ of 106; and an adequately-nourished group obtained a mean IQ of 112.

16. Regression to the mean effects support hereditarian theory. The IQs of the siblings of blacks with 120 IQs is 100; for their white counterparts it is 110. It is the same on the low end: when blacks and whites are matched at an IQ of 70, black siblings average a 78; the white siblings, an 85. This helps to explain why Black children born to well-educated, affluent, parents have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to poorly-educated, impoverished parents.

Conservative, religious young women: Reader Whiskey claims that young, religious, and conservative women are as rare as hen's teeth. Using GSS data (N = 660), I looked at women ages 20-29 for the years 2000-2008. I found that 11% are both conservative (extremely, regular, and slightly) and attend church at least once a month. If we look at either/or, 37.9% of young women go to church at least monthly, and 24.9% of them are conservative.

Over the past 4 or 5 years, I've attended three different parishes. Each of them had the same situation: a sex ratio among people in their twenties of about 2-3 girls for each guy. The women would often talk about how it was hard to find a good, religious guy. One friendly, attractive girl I knew became a nun in her late twenties. I'm guessing that a decade of bad luck made her decide against marriage.

Lionel Ritchie: I'm watching Lionel Ritchie on the Tonight Show. I probably haven't seen him for twenty years, and he doesn't look a day older. Do black folks ever age? Liz Lemon was right on 30 Rock when she said that whites cannot tell the age of black people. Strange how many older blacks look so good, but have a low life expectancy.

Gay marriage and gender socialization: (From the comments of this post): As gay marriage becomes widely accepted, people will feel the need to stop believing that a child benefits from by being raised by a mom or a dad. For there to be no disadvantage with a child being raised by two moms, being raised by a dad cannot be considered important. For there to be no disadvantage with a child being raised by two dads, being raised by a mother cannot be considered important.

Even gay families worry about their child lacking a parent of one sex (e.g., lesbians wanting to find a father figure for the boy). In terms of gender socialization, being raised in a homosexual home is the same as being raised in a single-parent home. There's all sort of research documenting the problems that stem from growing up without a mother or a father; problems that are not simply the result of not having two adults present. Kids still fare poorly if they are raised by mom and grandma--two adults.

And mom and grandma at least have the advantage of a biological relationship to the child. Gay families have at least one non-biological parent. Research shows that non-biological parents are not as good as related parents.

The fact that stepfamilies are just about as bad for kids as single-parent families shows that "two grown-ups in the house" is not enough. A child seems to need his biological dad and his biological mom.

What kind of a woman should you marry? To continue the debate on marriage, let's look at the characteristics of married women who are least likely to get divorced. I focused on women ages 30 to 39 over the years 2000 to 2008. Using logistic regression analysis, I found that the following measures significantly reduce the risk of divorce:


Predictors (logistic regression coefficients)

White -.877
Years of education -.111
Frequency of church attendance -.112
Conservatism -.135

N = 799

All of these predictors are inversely related to divorce at the .05 alpha level. Speaking to the men, O my brothers, if you want to miminize the probability of a breakup, marry a woman who is white, educated, religious, and politically conservative. Mmmm, my kinda woman.

Audacious uses GSS data to show that the sex life of the average young woman is a far cry from Sex and the City. (Check out the comments too. Jason Malloy reports means and medians by sex, city size, and education.)

The social costs of gay marriage in MA (Maggie Gallagher) :

Five years after same-sex couples first began to enter legal marriages --recognized by court order -- in Massachusetts, what do voters in the Bay State think about gay marriage?

A new poll commissioned by my organization, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Massachusetts Family Institute indicates that voters remain sharply and surprisingly divided about gay marriage.

When asked, "Do you personally favor or oppose same-sex marriage generally?" 43 percent of Massachusetts voters favor same-sex marriage and 44 percent oppose it, with the remainder saying they don't know or choosing not to respond.

The telephone survey of 306 people taken March 30 to March 31, 2009, is representative of voters in Massachusetts and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percent...

I have argued that over time gay marriage will weaken support for the idea that marriage really matters because children need a mom and dad.

Massachusetts voters were also asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, "All things being equal, it is better for children to be raised by their married mother and father." Seventy-six percent of voters agreed (66 percent strongly) while 21 percent disagreed (13 percent strongly).

A similar question was asked in a 2004 poll of Massachusetts residents. In 2004, 84 percent of Massachusetts residents agreed (33 percent strongly) and 16 percent disagreed (2 percent strongly). Thus, in the five years since gay marriage became a reality in Massachusetts, support for the idea that the ideal is a married mother and father dropped from 84 percent to 76 percent. The proportion who disagreed strongly increased nearly sevenfold, from 2 percent in 2004 to 13 percent in 2009.

The NOM/MFI poll is also the first poll in the nation to attempt to measure the extent to which ordinary citizens feel free to oppose gay marriage in a state where gay marriage has been declared a constitutional right and is the law of the land. I know from personal conversations that at least some folks in Massachusetts are afraid to speak up for their views. But how widespread are these fears?

A surprisingly substantial minority of voters in this poll expressed fears that open opposition to gay marriage might result in retaliation or harassment of some kind.

For example, 36 percent of all Massachusetts voters agreed with the statement, "Some people I know personally would be reluctant to admit they oppose gay marriage because they would worry about the consequences for them or their children." (Twenty-four percent agreed strongly.)

A further 36 percent of voters who oppose gay marriage agreed with the statement, "If you speak out against gay marriage in Massachusetts you really have to watch your back because some people may try to hurt you." (Twenty-six percent agreed strongly.) Fifteen percent of voters who oppose gay marriage say they personally know someone who experienced harassment or intimidation because of their belief that marriage involves a man and a woman.

The NOM/MFI Massachusetts Marriage Poll thus documents a fairly significant level of apprehension among voters who oppose gay marriage about the consequences of speaking openly or acting on their belief that marriage means a husband and wife.

What difference has gay marriage made five years later? Support for the idea that children need a mom and dad has dropped, and a substantial minority of people believe it is risky to oppose gay marriage openly.

Summer! Teachers this time of year have a way of disappearing, so if I don't post for a few days, I'm probably at the beach.

This and that

I got a chance to take a closer look at the research article Jason Malloy linked to to support the claim that the majority of cases of wife-initiated divorce are not due to husbands behaving badly. (Thanks to him for digging it up).

The problem is that people are asked what was caused the divorce, but they are not asked to whom they are referring. For example, a woman says that infidelity was the cause, but we don't know if she or her husband was the guilty party. Some of them seem more mutual, like "grew apart", but others are simply unclear. You can see all spontaneously mentioned causes in the table. (Notice how there isn't a single case of, "He turned into a wuss." Maybe it was put in "other.")

The authors do report the following correlations--wife respondent/infidelity .11, wife respondent/alcohol and drugs .13, husband repondent/communication .12, wife respondent/abuse .19, and husband respondent/don't know .24--but all this tells us is that one gender is slightly more likely than the other to report that specific cause. But once again, who did the bad thing is not specified, so we can't draw conclusions about about what percent of women-initiated divorces are caused by the husband's behavior. (You might also say that we can't decide this because women are not divided into initiators and non-initiators, but the other study used in this context shows that answers given by both groups of women generally do not differ significantly).

This leaves the 60% figure a shaky one, but let's see where it takes us. Current estimates put the lifetime probability of a marriage breaking up at just under 50%. According to the study I just mentioned, 69.5% of divorce cases are woman-initiated or the couple have made the decision mutually. If we mulitply .60 by .50 by .695, we get .209. So if you get married, there is a 21% chance that you're wife will leave you or the two of you will decide together to split up when you didn't do anything obviously wrong. Some readers are terrified by the prospect. The Spartans at Thermopylae had nothing on these guys. But I've got something from the study though that helps.

The researchers found that family-oriented people as well as those who place a lower value on self-realization are significantly less likely to initiate a divorce. The authors characterize these folks as "traditional." The take home message here is, lower the risk of divorce by marrying a traditional woman and by being a traditional man--just like several commenters and I have written.

Family trends and happiness

Our country's shift toward expressive individualism and away from role orientation may have led to the decline of the American family and society, but that is offset by the fact that people are much happier these days, right?

Um, no. The graph shows reported happiness between the years 1972 and 2008. There hasn't been any change. The same is true for women as well as for men. We've taken a wrecking ball to the family, and what have we gotten for it? Zilch.

Abortion: With Obama speaking at Notre Dame's graduation today, a word on abortion is apropos. A typical Democratic talking point is that nobody is pro-abortion. Liberals want fewer abortions, too.

But that raises a question. If an embryo/fetus is not a human being, and abortion is just a simple surgery, why shouldn't we encourage it? An abortion by definition was a pregnancy that was not wanted. A unwanted child is an undesirable situation and likely to impose a cost on society. Shouldn't we do everything we can to help a women get an abortion? In addition to maximizing access and moral support, shouldn't we pay for it, and perhaps even pay her a stipend so as to reduce the cost to taxpayers in the long run? How about a campaign of public announcements showing women that abortions are good? Shouldn't we convince a pregnant woman who doesn't desire a child but who also doesn't want an abortion because of moral reservations that she is wrong? Shouldn't we punish mom for the cost she is inflicting on the taxpayer? Perhaps she should pay a fine if she has the child.

Infidelity: Readers critical of marriage have focused on women being at fault for divorce. Let's take a second and look at infidelity, a common reason for divorce. I looked GSS data for the years 2000-2008 in order to get a large enough sample size (N = 10,871). The question is whether you have ever cheated on a spouse. For women, it's 11.1%, and it 16.6% for men. So men are 1.5 times more likely to have cheated. The helpless men among my readers will no doubt claim that guys can't be blamed because they are programmed to spread their seed around.

Worried that if you get married, she'll eventually leave you? The answer is simple: don't be a dick.